> SO and Wikipedia basically spell out their actions and reasoning
You're able to appeal on SO as well. It's interesting to think about a situation where moderation decisions would be more in 'the background', as you say (like Reddit/HN), and whether this takes away from the perceived 'elitism' some moderation practices are accused of.
In my experience on the above sites, and as a (small) community manager, it absolutely plays into it. A lot of people just instinctively respond negatively to displays of authority.
On the other hand, I think it's an important aspect of a community/platform if the goal of that platform is to be transparent and open, which I think is an important aspect of SO and Wikipedia, and I hope more platforms would adopt that view. I think whatever "elitist" perception such platforms have to suffer is well worth having high-quality, open platforms.
(I will say that no platforms are perfect of course, including SO or Wikipedia; there's plenty of criticisms to go around about specific policies and decisions. See: TFA :P)
This is an insightful observation, and a problem we struggled with for years on Stack Overflow: if you keep moderation quiet and anonymous, there's a lot less criticism, seemingly less hurt feelings... But also very little correction. The Star Chamber works great until corruption sets in; finding a good balance between secrecy and transparency is a challenge.
For years, moderators signed their names to messages like the one cited in the article. After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail... That particular bit of transparency was eliminated - the cost was too high for the limited benefit. OTOH, it used to be very difficult to find your own deleted posts but that has slowly gotten better (including visibility into who deleted them) - turns out the benefit there was substantial (identifying wrongly-deleted posts & curbing over-enthusiastic curators), while harassment has been mostly limited to occasional grousing.
> After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail
This is why I'll never use my real name casually on the Internet, and why the idea of widespread identity verification on the Internet scares the crap out of me.
You're able to appeal on SO as well. It's interesting to think about a situation where moderation decisions would be more in 'the background', as you say (like Reddit/HN), and whether this takes away from the perceived 'elitism' some moderation practices are accused of.