Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from [email protected] , it’s still in [email protected] )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
Are there bad moderators on LW? Do you have examples? I feel like they’re maybe a little stretched thin on trying to keep up with things, and so sometimes make snap decisions, but lemmy.ml is the only place I’ve actually seen moderation that I would describe as deliberately bad.