> And you're trying to deflect from the problems by once again reducing a person's behaviour to simple labels that justify any actions to stop "bad people".

The surface area someone has with a random internet message board is usually very limited. They post shit, and thus others there think of them as shitty. Pretty simple.

That they have some deeper inner life is irrelevant in the context. We're not their parents. We're not their therapist. We're not their social worker. If they can't behave themselves, then they shouldn't be allowed to ruin the space for others who can behave.

> so that everyone can see that justice is being done and mod power is not being abused.

Please, we're talking about volunteers on internet message boards here, not judges passing judgment over someone's right to basic freedom. The only power I have is to stop someone from posting in a subreddit -- and even that's not really accurate, since creating a new account is fairly trivial.

I can make further posting in a particular subreddit less convenient for them. That's it.

> What would a poster whose comment I and a few others have interpreted to be bigoted have to do to convince you they're not a bigot?

All labels, all words are subjective somewhere, somehow. To belabor this point is mere pedantry. Of course our judgments and rules are subjective, that's true for all judgments and all rules throughout all history, so why bring it up?

> Few if any mods are going to do such detective work (due to time, patience, whatever), nor would many even entertain a conversation with a person that was banned for such reasons.

It's never come up for people banned for bigotry; they're usually unceasingly hostile. We have unbanned a few people who were more general assholes (e.g. flaming) and came back later, based on exactly what I suggested. They apologized for being aggressive and insulting previously, we checked their post history, they seemed to be productive posters, so we unbanned them.

This doesn't involve very much work, actually, partially because it doesn't come up very often, and partially because skimming through someone's post history to see whether they're generally earnest/helpful doesn't take very long.

> And as the set of mods changes over time, and the interpretation of policies changes over time, and with no transparency of community checking of mod power, they end up banning people for ever more specific infractions, with no real appeals process, thus creating the perfect echo chambers.

> Every mod and mod system starts out with good intentions, but particularly with communities covering divisive issues, this is where naive moderation inevitably ends up. I don't think examples of unjust moderation are in short supply.

I agree that issues of mod transparency and power abuse are an issue. Certainly you can find plenty examples of terrible mods around.

Nevertheless, we're almost invariably talking about volunteers here. Holding them to a standard comparable to real life legal procedures is ridiculous. Ain't nobody got time for that.

For at least more popular subs, which applies to one of the ones I mod, I've come to the conclusion that truly fixing the situation is essentially infeasible. The total amount of content and activity outstrips what a volunteer team can handle in a good, consistent way; the best you can aim for is "passable, most of the time", imo. (And just increasing the number of moderators linearly causes too many coordination problems)