A post may receive a hundred replies and host a fat and exciting conversation tree, but if one moderator doesn't like it then it may be locked or deleted. Is that immoral?

Nope. It's a risk you take if you refuse to abide by a communities guidelines as outlined in the sidebar.

Breaking the guidelines of a community you're posting in is the immoral act, not the removal of those comments.

Taken as it is with no context, I would agree with you. However, based on what others have revealed about your removed posts, and your own comments in this thread, I'm concluding that whichever mod removed your post was merely the first one that happened to see it, it was going to happen regardless.

Immoral, no. Undesirable, sometimes. In your case, completely warranted.

You ever think that when these things only happen to you, that maybe YOU are the problem?

I've been seeing your posts for weeks, and most of the time it's just nonsense. Like a teenager discovering philosophy for the first time.

And if anyone disagrees with your "mind blowing revelation" you just tell them that they are wrong. That's not conversation, that's competition. You're only here to win a game that nobody else wants to play.

No, moderating forums is not immoral.

By participating in a moderated forum, you have traded your ability to post whatever you want in exchange of everyone else being bound by the same restriction.

If you don't like it, you can go post in some unmoderated forum. If you can't find one without spam or low quality posts, them's the breaks kid if you want the wild west you get the wild west.

No. No one is actually harmed.

no

I've had posts deleted, submissions removed. Nothing to get hurt about. Even if I didn't think it was a big deal, someone did.

It's like someone getting angry at me for yelling,"Fuck!!" I get ready to get all 1A self-righteous on the person, then look around. My wrath of freedom of expression dies before it's heard because I remembered I was at my kid's wedding. Sometimes the asshole is me.

Judging by previous arguments we had in the general purpose communities when people complained about that exact thing, and I looked up the history, it was more often than not completely warranted and the person wouldn't listen.

I think individuals with behaviour peculiarity and normal communities just don't mix well.

Gonna ignore all context for the purposes of answering / contributing to a discussion of a kinda valid underlying question:

There is a disconnect between moderation and membership in an ostensibly democratic social media structure. How could that gap be bridged?

The way I see it, this is basically the representation vs delegation debate, though here it is arguable whether there is even representation. From this perspective, you can draw on a couple of hundred years of theory and practice to arrive at potential structures.

For example, you could have a system where members of a community mark themselves as willing to moderate it, and all members select a willing delegate essentially their ‘moderating power’ to. Mods are then selected by number of delegations, which would be a fluid process because users can redistribute their ‘votes’ at any time. This would make mods immediately answerable to the members.

To make the system less vulnerable to hijacking you would probably need some kind of delay in there so that you wouldn’t suddenly get a mass influx of new users delegating to the same mods to take over the community, and there would likely need to be other measures in place as well. But it would certainly be a neat experiment!

(Just to note, I am not saying the current moderation model is necessarily bad, just figured it would be interesting to consider alternative approaches and have a look at what possible problems there might be in both the current model and any such alternatives.)

A moderator removed the most popular post that I've ever made.

That being said, after my initial reaction I definitely understand why. I have to give credit to them as well, because they actually let it get plenty of discussion before closing it down, and for good reason. They could've been much more strict and disciplinary if they had wanted to. I think their decision was well thought out and appropriately executed. I did want for an explanation, sure, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that they didn't give one.

The discussion surrounding the subject ended up being mostly negative on both sides and was kind of devolving instead of going the other way in a more positive direction. Being able to mitigate this type of negative interaction is important for fostering a good atmosphere and I'm glad that's important in a place like this.

Depends on the community. There are some SERIOUSLY biased mods here.

Permanently Deleted

Sounds like Reddit to me. That's why I left that dumpster fire.

I would say yes

Is that immoral?

I'm not sure about immoral, but I'd rather call it unwise. Very unwise.

It is a very bad habit that lemmy has copied from redit (and from some other social media, to be fair). And it's high time to find a better way.

I think that people are, as a rule, small and obedient creatures. They like to be told what to do. Shortsighted and small-minded. And, in packs, vicious yapping beasts.