I don't need to. For example, it it possible to cite examples of "bad faith" moderation? There's nothing to cite. It's an ephemeral action. There is no access to who downvoted the comment & why the comment was downvoted.
> You appear to be going on feeling. I'm an intuitive thinker and subject to that myself. When I've collected data, I often realise that I was wrong. So, three possibilities present themselves:
In this case, there is no data to collect. I also check my intuitions with data. I have also told others that they were wrong (period, end of story) only to realize later that they had some great points & were even right.
> You have a perceptual bias that makes moderation stick out more to you when it is on unorthodox positions
I often comment when my position is unorthodox as it's a motivation to express points that have not been expressed in the discussion. I will also add additional information in a reply. I think both tendencies fall within the HN guidelines & contribute to the value of the discussion...whether acknowledged or not.
> I read it, though I don't feel like I've benefited at all.
Not everyone is going to agree with all of your positions. If you only value those who agree with you or somehow contribute to your beliefs, I'm afraid you are handicapped in the pursuit of truth. I find value in your comment & took the effort to respond...This site has a guideline of "intellectual curiosity". Taking a pre-determined closed stance does not really follow that guideline.
> Unorthodox opinions may be correlated with negative tendencies such as lack of factual foundation or inflammatory tone, and are moderated for those reasons
Let's say someone exhibits these negative tendencies. If the moderator must justify the downvote/flag action in the public record, the original author will receive feedback on their lack of factual foundation or inflammatory tone & adjust their posts accordingly. Right now, there is only non-obvious negative feedback...unless someone who downvotes/flags posts a comment explaining the reason, which I observe to be rare.
There is also a double standard. Many orthodox opinions are upvoted without any factual foundation & have an inflammatory tone. I suppose my assertion could be tested with sentiment analysis & score. Are there any open source projects to perform such a test? How could the software developer code what is orthodox or unorthodox? I'm challenged in creating a system as to how to verify the claim with data. Public justification of the downvote/flag would help immensely.
I have to note that this is a weakness of a Positivisist philosophical position. What is easy to quantify is "more real" & what is difficult to quantify is "less real". What is easy to quantify can be cherry-picked to support a pre-conceived position. It's too easy to game the perception of reality. It's too easy to deny the existence of a phenomena when there are no handles to measure the phenomena. Conversely it's also easy to create a conspiracy theory about it. There is no practical way to verify or invalidate the claim in quantifiable terms, so one can only use logical/rational discourse, adopt heuristics, & express subjective perception.