It's important, but so is community building. Most communities function best when there's some degree of moderation. For example, people would prefer that the speech in their bird watching community is limited and trolls are kept out. Putting up with abrasive behavior in your community isn't brave, it's just masochistic.
It is true that some communities on Reddit weren't possible because they were not permitted to allow some of the content they were allowing.
You can make the community building tools so much more powerful too!
If people want to make a bird community and ban all pro-hawk posters, that's perfectly fine. The issue's are around the secrecy in administration.
How about adding the following:
- Removing shadowbans
- Allow users to see all deleted comments if they opt in
- Allow users to see all banned accounts/reasons they got banned.
Imagine a page for each subreddit which includes a list of banned/removed comments. It would be quite telling on the moderation if that list was mostly non-spam disagreements.
How about including an internet "Bill of Rights" for free speech, illogical arguments, etc to try and help guide the flow of discussion, similar to how /pol/ has this in their rules - https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1493993226750.jpg
Nothing in there would be regulating them, just more transparency so users can see who gets banned and whether or not they want to view deleted comments.
I'd probably turn off deleted comments in a r/games subreddit but would 100% have them on for a political subreddit for example.
It is true that some communities on Reddit weren't possible because they were not permitted to allow some of the content they were allowing.