Earlier today, I saw something on another forum I frequent that makes me question the wisdom of giving moderators banning power. Our moderating staff here is of unquestionably higher quality, but the counterpoint deserves to be discussed. This is what I saw:
1) A user posted a link to an external site that apparently went through a link-referral site that's full of malware.
2) Another user posted the actual link without the referrer.
3) One of the mods pushed back, snarkily replied to say that link referrers were allowed, and deleted the post with the actual link
4) The second user got snarky as well and reposted the actual link
This went back and forth for a bit with posts going up, getting deleted, and so forth, until the thread was closed. Looking at their post histories, the moderator had just been elevated, and from what I can tell, before today the other user seemed to be a member in good standing. The moderator openly said "If I had the power to ban you I would," and accused the poster of simply being there to disrupt the community.
Thankfully we're not desperate enough for moderators to elevate someone with that kind of attitude to our mod staff. Since I joined here I've only seen a few cases where an instant ban would've been appropriate, and all of them involved genuine trolls. I don't want our already hardworking mods to have to spend a lot of time editing or deleting posts, but honestly, better that than run the risk of someone's bad day getting to them and just clicking the button because they can. (What I call "Goderator Syndrome.")
Again, I'm not saying I think anyone here would actually do that, but that's based on what everyone can do now. One thing real life has taught me is that even a little bit of power can change a person, and I think banning power is no different.