As a former administrator of a top 100 sub, I’ve seen the absolute unhinged mod power tripping. My a large margin, mods were at least an equal threat to a community as the bad actors in the community.

For this reason, I’ve been a major proponent of a model where groups of users can generate and curate thier OWN collaboratively maintained ban lists, and users can with full visibility OPT IN to different filters.

As well, I think being able to “opt in” to users to see mod removed comments, or “opt out” of a mods comment removals would be cool. I think removed comments remain in the modlog and could be re-injected into what users see given appropriate “opt in” configuration.

Having a decentralized mechanism to manage and opt in to such lists would provide a way to combat power tripping at a grassroots level, as well as allowing broad filtering to let people choose thier experience.

This is all entirely predicated on it being:

A) with full auditable transparency

B) a clear opt-in mechanic

Hard disagreements between curators can easily be handled by forking the lists.

Long story short, I really like the idea of managed content suppression (and ideally un-supression) lists curated by regular users available in an opt-in manner because they act as a counterbalance mechanic to the outsized power that mods hold an INEVITABLY abuse.

But it’s so fucking far from ethical to try and just sneak one in. I genuinely can not understand how much contempt for the agency of other human beings one must have to be able to rationalize such a thing.