I think ultimately someone needs to do the job of moderation, and in as much as we want to allow for something like an archipelago of cultures, the LW moderation team really can’t do all the moderation necessary to make such things possible.
Note that there are a bunch of restrictions on author moderation:
The threshold for getting the ability to moderate frontpage posts is quite high (2,000 karma)
The /moderation page allows you to find any deleted comments, or users banned from other’s posts
We watch author moderation quite closely and would both change the rules, and limit the ability of an individual to moderate their posts if they abuse it
In general, I am not a huge fan of calling all deletion censorship. You are always welcome to make a new top-level post or shortform with your critique or comments. The general thing to avoid is to not always force everyone into the same room, so to speak.
I do think an alternative is for the LW team to do a lot more moderation, and more opinionated moderation, but I think this is overall worse (both because it’s a huge amount of work, and because it centralizes the risk so that if we end up messing up or being really dumb about something, then now a perspective gets fully excluded from the site, instead of just some well-defined subset of it). I don’t think at least currently voting alone does enough to make for functional discussion spaces.
I think ultimately someone needs to do the job of moderation, and in as much as we want to allow for something like an archipelago of cultures, the LW moderation team really can’t do all the moderation necessary to make such things possible.
Note that there are a bunch of restrictions on author moderation:
The threshold for getting the ability to moderate frontpage posts is quite high (2,000 karma)
The /moderation page allows you to find any deleted comments, or users banned from other’s posts
We watch author moderation quite closely and would both change the rules, and limit the ability of an individual to moderate their posts if they abuse it
In general, I am not a huge fan of calling all deletion censorship. You are always welcome to make a new top-level post or shortform with your critique or comments. The general thing to avoid is to not always force everyone into the same room, so to speak.
I do think an alternative is for the LW team to do a lot more moderation, and more opinionated moderation, but I think this is overall worse (both because it’s a huge amount of work, and because it centralizes the risk so that if we end up messing up or being really dumb about something, then now a perspective gets fully excluded from the site, instead of just some well-defined subset of it). I don’t think at least currently voting alone does enough to make for functional discussion spaces.