You seem to think mods actually do stuff. All mod actions are harmful. If the community is not flagging stuff in the first place, taking acts is a shit mod every time. The job is to be a janitor. There are no people doing any of these things you are talking about at the level of mods. Admin, yes, mods, no. It is this type of misrepresentation of the task that is a primary problem that is addressed here. Anyone that believes themselves important or micromanaging is missing the point of social media. Such adversarial stupidity is what drives away real people. One demented self obsessed fuckwit in one obscure community is more than enough to drive most people away from an entire platform. When they make any genuine post or comments that result in abusive mod actions. Those drive people away. Every comment and post made in good faith is valid. I reject all authoritarianism. A citizen has a right to all information, a right to skepticism, a right to error, and a right to protest in all nonviolent forms aka the right to offend. They have no right to infringe upon the rights of others.

For instance, I do not like how you respond. Itemized attack is not being a good neighbor. If you were a neighbor IRL I would probably avoid you. As a mod, I will not address it, but that very well may be the difference of interaction that pushes someone away from participation, and if removing your comment produced another genuinely kind neighbor that is pleasant and positive, fuck yeah I am all for them doing so. Purge every interaction that leaves one feeling negative afterwards. That is a fundamental human right, just as much as it is to live with the consequences.

In game theory and the prisoner's dilemma, every negative action makes everyone worse off. I do not go looking to fight or take action. I will respond adequately when required, but every action taken brings everyone down because negative feedback cannot produce positive outcomes. It is always attenuation.

Often the best communities are the ones with inactive mods.

This mechanism will deanonymize negative people naturally when their sadistic narcissism is no longer confined to passive aggressive comments and voting and instead emerges from replies removed from their posts.

So if an OP doesn't remove racist comments from other posters is that because OP is racist or is that because OP doesn't log in often and therefore isn't there for their junior mod responsibilities.

The edge case of OP abuses of this behavior then become evident between individual users.

If abusive OP removes otherwise fine comments, how will other users see OP is doing this abusively?

When anyone is a bad OP, it gives the commenting user the chance to see it directly and block the OP, effectively culling the bad OP from the platform

What prevents bad OP from just registering again under another username when they are on enough individual block lists sidestepping every individual user's block of them?

The user that had their comments removed would flag the OP if they feel like mod attention is needed for abuses.

So the regular mods would then have to review every removed comment by OP and then decide if OP was justified? And this would happen for every post with dozens or hundreds of OPs? I can't imagine how regular mods would keep up with that.

Lastly, it is distributed moderating which is about as on-platform of a policy as is possible for the fediverse.

If I'm running a Lemmy community, I don't want want rando posters deciding what content is allowed there. Maybe something an individual OP thinks is off topic (and delete a comment), I, as the community mod, would deem entirely appropriate.

OP’s participation in moderating their own posts increases the resolution and depth of cultural norms and ethics because there will be reputational social consequences.

There are troll posters that don't care about social consequences and will simply create a new account to continue doing their trolling if their current troll account is blocked. There are a number of fairly famous trolls on Lemmy that do this i.e. UniversalMonk or whatever their current troll account is called.

While letting OP remove comments to their posts would quickly show me who to block, if one of my comments was removed with the note "Removed by OP" I'd immediately block that user. If they don't want to hear from me, I don't want to hear from them. However, that would not relieve mods of reviewing comments, if that's the intent.

Yes, misunderstanding. I mean the OP would only have control of removal of comments on their individual post with no banning or broader context intended or implied.

The edge case of OP abuses of this behavior then become evident between individual users. This mechanism will deanonymize negative people naturally when their sadistic narcissism is no longer confined to passive aggressive comments and voting and instead emerges from replies removed from their posts. When anyone is a bad OP, it gives the commenting user the chance to see it directly and block the OP, effectively culling the bad OP from the platform through ever isolated interactions with fewer and fewer people instead of anonymizing their bad behavior in comment replies and voting. The user that had their comments removed would flag the OP if they feel like mod attention is needed for abuses.

Just the existence of the option to remove someone's comment is likely enough to lessen the feelings of negativity felt by those that post.

Lastly, it is distributed moderating which is about as on-platform of a policy as is possible for the fediverse. In an abstract sense, the OP's participation in moderating their own posts increases the resolution and depth of cultural norms and ethics because there will be reputational social consequences.

The only element I would add is a minimum amount of participation and account stability with a couple of flags at the community moderation and admin levels that disable the feature when needed.

Again, it is just the power of removing comment replies on the OP's original posts.

I'm not sure I'm completely understanding your suggestion.

So why not delegate the actual role of content removal to the OP?

...and...

If some OP is being silly, flag it for the mod to review.

Does this mean you're proposing not to eliminate the current mod structure/mechanisms, but to make OP essentially a "junior mod"? As in, OP would have the power to ban users or delete comments of others replying to their post, but if enough others felt the OP was being too aggressive, they would escalate to the regular mod that would strip OP of their "junior mod" powers?

Enabling the OP allows all users to decide who to interact with based upon actions of individuals posting instead of being victims of anonymous and random third party mods.

I'm not seeing how this solves the "inept handling of flags, and sadistic narcissists". If anything it would make it worse because each OP becomes and unvetted mod. As an example: if they are racist, they let other racist comments stand and delete/ban users that oppose racism.

If you don’t like someone’s comment, just remove it.

How is that not a huge risk of abuse of OP? If each OP is a mod for their post, where is the standard for posting rules? It would be entirely subjective based on each OP. In one post you might be able to criticize the a government but an another post that OP may believe that criticism of government is not allowed and ban/delete other posters.

I care about getting real people to post niche content and engage openly far more than anyone else present, especially the toxic pedantism and reasons people get discouraged.

I'm not a mod, but my guess is that the far more toxic aspects are mostly invisible to us because mods filter that stuff out already. Every now and then I look at the modlog on a popular community and see absolutely bizarre stuff some toxic posters post. Removing the current mod structure and replacing it with what I'm understanding your suggest is means all of that garbage comes through because that would now be the responsibility of each OP for their post with junior mod powers.

Am I misunderstanding part of your suggestion?