Forum Moderation Debate

Moderation shouldn't be hired out. The community should provide the moderation.

Who moderates the moderators?Afraid that can't ever work.

you’re posting in a heavily moderated forum. HN too works, because a heavy hand forces good behavior.

If it wasn't for the moderation, it'd be a swamp of terrible just like the forums of old.

.. partly due to lack of effective moderation tools.

You need a meta outlet. Deleting threads about moderation won't wash: a site won't allow itself to be secretly moderated, especially in ways it doesn't agree with. Every single online community learns this; every one benefits from the meta outlet they create.

Why does an upvote/downvote community need moderators? Isn't the whole point of letting users upvote and downvote content to avoid having moderator overlords?

You're describing something like Slashdot's moderation system, and we all know how well that worked out.

Which does not work well. At the time the item is posted, there are mismoderations. For example, one person can mod a post as off-topic because they don't like the narrative. You're not allowed to bring up such moderation right away. By the time you are allowed to, the momentum is gone. Effectively the post got silenced.Discussions are more mature here anyway.Although Tweakers used to have a moderation system akin to Slashdot back then funny comments (or "funny") commen

I'd love them to take moderation seriously, but it couldn't scale and there's no natural "partitions" between communities of interest with different norms, so you can't delegate it to users. They've only just managed to deal with the most high profile example of "brigading".