Replying to Opinion Poll: Moderation

Caveat: this isn't a vote or anything, and the response isn't necessarily going to change the way we moderate the forums. I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this.

Looking at deleting threads, I'm wondering if it might be better to start drawing a stricter line. We've always had these complaints about how the general discourse has gotten so much worse as time has passed on here, and a lot of that seems to be because SG and NSG are sort of like the Craigslist of opinion: there's so much useless trash that sorting through it to find good threads represents a pretty heroic effort.

So I'm wondering if people like it that way, ie, you can post whatever you want and we'll basically leave it up there, aside from the odd thing that gets removed, or if you'd like to see the green names use their discretion to remove things we think are pointless or stupid. Technically that's our policy anyway (surprise!) but often it's hard to know where to draw the line as to excessive censorship. Pointless hate? Delete. Blatant stupidity? Tough to say sometimes.

Basically it comes down to this question: Are people liking the freer market of posting whatever anyone wants, or do you want us to try to clean up the trash a little (which will probably make for a better quality forum but which entails deferring to the staff's judgment about what should stay and what should go)?