>>3
I feel moderation/censorship is an overrated concern. Part of the problem of imageboards is insufficient good moderation.
But with sites like 4chan and 8ch you get locked into a problem: who wants to moderate sites like that? Power hungry people with poor senses of humor and ego problems, and site creators who'll soon be disillusioned. These people will delete good posts while making bad ones themselves.
Like Plato's philosopher king, in an ideal world we would have moderators who will delete unfunny shitposting while leaving up amusing things. In boards intended for serious discussion, they would punish people who resorted to lazy arguments without any humor to them. (Because as we can see with many 4chan boards, when you don't do this you end up with boards where any legitimate logical argument will be beaten down by people who can't actually refute the point and resort to replying memetically, and where the illusion of consensus is far more powerful than any other force.)
I've never thanked mods in posting for deleting things, but I have defended their heavy-handed behaviour in the past when going after a certain avatarfag. This avatarfag would (as many are wont to do) contribute very little except attempts to draw attention to themselves and feed their own ego, then complain greatly if they were deleted. When they made complaints they were being unfairly picked on, I made a pedantic point of finding every technical rule violation I could to draw attention to just what the rules actually were. (Amusingly with the notionally incompatible dual-goals of drawing attention to just how absurd the rules can be and using them as a justification to remove a problem poster.)
A big part of the value of anonymous boards is that what you say matters more than who is saying it, but since it's possible to manufacture consensus on a board one can introduce elements of judging the speaker instead of what is spoken to otherwise fine arguments. Worse still is that the few people who realize that consensus-manufacturing is a thing are usually those who advocate adding IDs to threads. (Not so much a problem on 4-ch because posting takes so long your ID will change anyway, but a miserable compromise of anonymity that fixes nothing on 4chan and 8ch.)