It's not about democracy or ideology at all. If we have the ability to design a better place for people to share ideas and discuss what's on their mind, we ought to make it as good as we can. One of the strengths of Reddit's "subreddit stewardship design" is how it allows the site to scale while still having people take ownership of each subreddit, allowing them to give it a more personal touch and better able to respond to specific community needs.

One of the weaknesses of this is how, at least on some subs, mods are able to censor discussion largely unnoticed, without being held accountable to the community. See r/declineintocensorship, r/watchredditdie, and r/yallcantbehave for several examples of egotistical mods overextending their role with no real benefit to the community.

I can't help but think that there's a way to hold mods more accountable to their communities. For example, if the modded comment wasn't spam, it could say "this post was removed for breaking rule x which states y. Click here to see the comment," with the mod's username attached.

I would also like to see statistics on removed posts, where a subreddit gets some sort of penalty for censoring too much, such as not appearing on /r/all, or becoming downweighted in some way.