@Wei Dai deleted my reply and a few others to his recent shortform about why he is considering leaving LessWrong. My own reply was the top upvoted / agree-voted reply at time of deletion. I got an automated DM with the full content of the deleted comment, reproduced below (it is also in the moderation logs).

My guess is that he removed these comments as an object-level demonstration / rebuttal to my points about the abuse of mod powers being unlikely. If that's the case, I think it's a little cheeky, but basically fair game. (I haven't communicated with Wei or the mods, so I may be guessing incorrectly about what's going on, but either way, from my perspective, I don't begrudge the deletion or view it as a particularly hostile action given the context / circumstances.)

I don't think the deletion actually demonstrates that my points are wrong though:

• I suspect that my original reply already got a lot of views from the people who care to follow this topic, possibly the actual majority of views it was ever going to get if it had not been deleted.^[1]
• I don't think Wei (or even other folks who are much more heavy-handed / favoring of moderation in general, e.g. Duncan Sabien or Nate Soares) would have silently deleted a comment with the same level of hostility / criticialness as my comment had, on any topic other than moderation itself. And if they did do so, people would notice and call attention to it / react appropriately.

Either way, lots of people will now see this shortform. The full history will be disconnected and harder to find for anyone viewing Wei's shortform in the future, but IMO this is a pretty minor thing compared to all the other reasons people might or might not see or engage with any particular post or reply.

Also for the record, my general views on moderation are that I directionally agree with @habryka on most points, except that I think moderation is somewhat lower stakes than most people on either / all sides make it out to be. Moderation is not that hard to work around even in extreme circumstances (e.g. if I want to know what Said Achmiz thinks of something, I know where to find him), and there are lots of other things that warp peoples' attention and views much more than moderation. I also believe there are some real benefits and upsides of having moderation tools available and using them on occasion, though personally I'm not as interested in defending or litigating this point as many others seem to be. This is the first time I have ever been subject to a moderation action, and I have never used mod tools on LW myself.

Original version of the deleted comment:

More specifically, I can foresee that in the future I'll be banned by more authors, and then I'll have to make a choice of remaining on the site and potentially misleading people (who could reasonably update positively on some post that is of high interest to me by the absence of my criticism on it, without knowing that I've been banned by its author), 

The whole disjunction seems pretty unlikely to me.

• I think it's unlikely you'd actually be banned. Reason: base rates. You've been on LW for 17 years, and been banned once (?), briefly (?)
• I think it's unlikely that your inability to comment directly on a particular post would actually make your criticism less visible. Your posts and comments are highly visible in general, and any drama or controversy (especially moderation controversy) tends to attract more eyeballs, not less.
• I think it's unlikely that any onlookers would make incorrect updates due to a commenting ban. Onlookers are pretty bad at updating correctly on long back-and-forth arguments in general, primarily due to lack of attention span and intellectual laziness (more). Controversy and censorship tends to nudge people to think harder and spend more effort to make up their own mind.

In general, explicit moderation and censorship can have a big distortionary effect on individual and group epistemics. But I think on LW and most other parts of the present-day internet, other factors (attention span, groupthink, deference, format / medium, algorithmic bubbles, etc.) have a much bigger impact than moderation, especially the kind of individual / grassroots moderation that LW permits.

1. ^{^}

   My vague impression / recollection from past mod comments is that most content on LW gets almost all of its views while it is visible on the frontpage, and views drop off quite sharply after that. Wei's shortform had already fallen off the default unfurled shortform section at time of deletion. Mods can probably chime in with analytics data to confirm or deny.