From what I've seen, incredibly stringent moderation creates the illusion of a high-quality community more than anything else. For example, a while ago Something Awful forum member's boyfriend posted something claiming that she'd been raped by another forum member, and the admin at the time decided to handle it by permanently banning everyone involved including the alleged victim. You wouldn't have seen any criticism of this on the forums at the time because doing so was a bannable offence; I'm not sure most people who used the forums even knew it happened. There were rumours that some of the moderators were blackmailing women on the forums for nude pics earlier on, but again they didn't make it onto the forums themselves.