Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit. It's so refreshing to come to HN and see (community- and mod-powered) moderation done right
For example, the mods of r/askhistorians are so strict that in most threads the majority of the comments are deleted. But they apply the rules consistently, and keep the sub tightly focused on questions answered by professional historians, in detail, with sources. If you have a historical question you'd like answered, it's an amazing resource.
I remember seeing posts there talking about how Ancient Sparta was never exceptional and actually lost most battles. As someone who has read all the primary source material on the Spartans...thats total crap.
So eventually mods kill comments not because they particularly dislike them but because they can't be bothered with dealing with the inevitable shit to come.
And also some mods think it's their job to delete stuff that was self-moderated by downvotes anyway which is just silly in the first place.
But if that happened, powermods wouldn't be a thing.
>The people who do it don't have to care about your free speech
No, but I don't have to care about the bog swamp of discourse you moderate just because "we have 1 million subs". Well great, everyone is angry and nuance is talked down. I don't want that to be the place.
But if keeping your mod power is more important than, well, moderating your community, you reap what you sow.
No, the actual administrators (the ones that work there are). They're the ones that can actually ban entire subreddits and entire users. I had my account permanently suspended for upvoting vaccine hesitancy. That wasn't done by a reddit moderator.