You'd be surprised how little comment deletion there is outside of Ask Metafilter (where all comments have to answer the damn question). Pretty much the only comments deleted from the main site are personal attacks. There's an active backchannel for discussing such things where almost nothing is deleted.<p>They take great pains to avoid banning people (excepting spammers, who get their signup fee refunded!), though sometimes they dole out timeouts. The community policing means that the shitty users tend to disable their own accounts.<p>pg takes the opposite approach, applying a single assholish technical approach to all problems: hellbanning for everyone!