I have never before been on a moderated site. I have seen praises for past times at MF when it was moderated, years before I joined. These past few weeks I dug deep in MF in the look for the content I was afraid was going to disappear. I saw ten years ago mentions of posts deleted, especially related to SheFights, and of users being afraid that their posts might be affected.

My impression was that very little moderation actually happened, but I noticed occasions where it was needed. Some interesting topics were started and abruptly stopped because people started putting commercial messages completely unrelated to the topics.

So I would say that in practice this site is very reasonable in the use of moderation but ineffective in the way it promotes it.

Why not use the low hanging fruit, and say completely uncontroversial things like that no users who want to put ads for their products rather to contribute to the topics will be allowed, and that no personal attacks will be permitted. This is a good enough start and nobody will disagree with that. As far as going after opinions probably you can trust the community to do its job. If it does not, maybe those ideas are not so shocking after all.

Let me add another and for me better argument for the site. It is administration. Here I can use my preferred name, Komodo. I cannot do it at Max Fisch, because I lost the email associated with it, and there is no administrator to talk to about eliminating the old association and creating a new one.