Where moderation steps in

OTOH, it's a fairly small and long-standing community here in the LWN comment threads. I suspect the vast majority of us are well aware of what a "Gentlemen, ladies, time to stop." style LWN-mod-comment means and does not mean.

And the breadth of injury that may result from a few misunderstanding appears to be very very limited and not worrying about.

Finally, LWN's resources are very limited - however much we may think there is some better system of moderation that LWN could apply, there is also the question of whether working towards that is in any way worth the effort and cost. And the marginal benefits may be tiny compared to the high cost in precious LWN editor time.

The system currently largely works. If the LWN editors see easy ways to improve it, sure, great. However, I see no great pressure for them to spend any significant amount of their precious time on that either. I'd rather see them doing the stuff we value them for - producing the excellent content of the site.