Dude, you totally stole my answer… (except I was going to quote the original, so you actually did better than I would have)
More seriously, I think that a lot of the criticism is Confirmation Bias – we don’t notice most of the time, when the mods do their job well and quietly; we do when there are problems.
Or to give another example – in football, baseball, soccer… the best-refereed games are the one where not only do you not remember the refs’ (umpires’) names, you hardly remember they were even there.
I had to say “like” but then I’m comparing it with several other boards where, at best, the moderating could only be described as childish to borderline sociopathic.
Of the four with which I’m most familiar by far the most debased, as far as moderating (and a few other reasons) is concerned, would probably be SA and yet, for some weird reason, it appears to be the biggest and most popular.
I don’t mind the moderators, but I can’t stand the people that spend the first 2 lines with comments to the mods as to why they put a post in a specific forum and ‘feel free to move’. They aren’t idiots, I’m sure they can figure it out by now…
I selected “I dislike it,” because I think the rules could stand some relaxing: i.e., I’m interpreting “the moderation” to mean “the moderation policies,” not “how those policies are enacted.” The moderators themselves seem to be pretty good about applying the rules consistently and not abusing their power, generally speaking. At least some of them seem amenable to changing their minds and/or retracting things when someone demonstrates that the mod in question was mistaken, which is always a good sign.
I dislike like it. Too many times I’ve seen a poster reply to someone with the same level of sass as the original poster, but the quoter gets smacked down.
The Pit is really just a joke. It’s like having a corner of an Olde English library where you’re allowed to say tallywhacker. It’s so stuffy and rigid and basically a flame forum imagined by the 700 club.