| > Why is strong moderation part of a healthy online community Membership criterion is central to maintaining the competency level of the members. And competency on the topic (along with intellectual honesty) is the single most, perhaps only, important component to a useful discussion: It would be insanely destructive for the New England Journal of Medicine to publish every single thing it ever received with equal weight in massive weekly tomes. Moderation acts as competency monitoring to a degree. The problem with literal membership is that it precludes autodidacts, people new to the field and people who can't be bothered with a complicated process for joining. Thus unrestricted membership with moderation. And indeed on reddit, the highest quality subreddit, /r/science, is the one most aggressively moderated For fact based, purpose driven venues, if you believe you were censored because of your opinion, you should not have posted an opinion in the first place. That's certainly how it works in the workplace which is how some people need to use the web. There can be unlimited venues where partially informed people post their opinions, maybe we can call them "healthy" or not. But some people want to work on problems that actually do require knowledge and should not have to have their discussions constantly vandalized. A "functional" venue one might say. |
Although IMHO their extreme stance on moderation is not always a good thing. For example, they have an unwritten (at least, the last time I checked) policy of nuking entire threads where there are some poor comments, even if this also results in deleting many useful comments later in the same thread.
The first time I contributed substantially to a discussion in /r/science, on a subject where I did have something resembling an expert opinion to offer, my entire contribution (which took several hours to write across a handful of comments, with carefully backed sources etc.) was summarily deleted without warning. I queried this with the mods, and they explained the policy about nuking entire threads. Given the nature of some of the early comments around that thread, I couldn't disagree with the assessment that they were not a constructive contribution. However, I also immediately filed the whole sub in the same dustbin as SO and have made no further attempts to contribute, for much the same reasons.