This is mostly based on what I've seen personally, and hearsay around the community, perhaps PG would like to weigh in?
Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.
Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.
These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.
>Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?
Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.
Also, I sort of got the impression that only founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.
ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.
Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.
Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.
These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.