[cogman10]

Wikipedia is one of the only places I know that seems to have gotten this pretty much perfect.

I think the thing that ultimately made wikipedia work is that moderation actions are done pretty publicly with a heavy focus on citing sources. The problem a lot of these OG Web 2.0 sites have is many of them have focused on keeping moderation discussion and decisions as private as possible.

That, I think, is where SO failed. Someone can mark something as a dup and that's basically the end of discussion. I think that's also where sites like Reddit really struggle. A power tripping mod can destroy a community pretty quickly and they can hide their tracks by deleting comments of criticism.

It's one thing I think HN actually gets pretty right. It's a much smaller userbase, which helps, but also the mods here are both well known and they post the reasons for their actions. There's still some opacity, but the fact that mod decisions are mostly public seems to have worked well here.