I've seen this article posted here multiple times, and every time a few people seem to misunderstand the conclusion of this article. As far as I can tell, Yudkowsky's point is not that online communities need strong moderators. His main conclusion is that people should make judicious use of downvotes.

> But that was not a karma system, actually.

> Here—you must trust yourselves.

> You have the downvote. Use it or USENET.

In old BBS systems, a handful of moderators were given the task of sorting out good posts from bad posts. We might say that those were the days of benevolent dictators. But of course, this raises the question of how people can trust those dictators to be benevolent all the time. In most cases, moderators do act in the best interest of the community, but sometimes they go on power trips, and when they do, it makes everyone question whether it was a good idea to give all those powers to moderators in the first place. That's exactly what happens in real-world politics, too, whenever you give a lot of power to a person or institution.

Nowadays, virtually every Internet community allows users to vote on everything. One might say that this is more "democratic" than relying on moderators alone to sort out good posts from bad posts, because now everyone participates in the task of moderation. This can also be more efficient, because really bad posts will often be downvoted into oblivion even before a mod has had a chance to look at it. But like any real-world democracy, a voting system has its limits. There will have to be mechanisms to prevent circlejerks, and communities will still need moderators to carry out certain tasks. The difficult question, as usual, is how to design a fair, effective, and transparent division of labor between participatory democracy (upvotes/downvotes) and top-down administration (mods).

Whenever mods in a subreddit come up with plans to clean up what they perceive to be a mess, there are always people who argue that such measures are unnecessary because people can just downvote what they don't want to see in that subreddit. But you can't rely on either method alone. Strong moderation will be futile if people keep upvoting pun threads in a science subreddit. Downvoting will have limited efficacy in the absence of a mechanism to kick out the most egregious offenders.

Fortunately, some kind of balance between the two extremes is what most subreddits eventually settle with. An efficient democracy is neither fully managed by elites nor completely dependent on every shift of public opinion. It's all about checks and balances. Moderators need to be kept accountable to ordinary users who can call out when they see a power trip. Ordinary users need to be kept accountable, too, by means of a fair and consistent enforcement of forum rules.

None of this, of course, invalidates Yudkowsky's arguments.

> Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness ... waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks ... is waiting far too late.

Science can never reach absolute certainty, right? Only hypotheses that have yet to be falsified. But the lack of absolute certainty does not, and should not, prevent people from making judgments on the basis of the best available evidence. You can act even if you're not certain -- as long as you leave the door open to correcting yourself once you have access to better evidence.