I badmouth AnswerBag all the time, and with good reason. Haha. However, what you describe with mods, even there I didn’t see it. The problem there was cliques made of normal members who ganged up on others. But even one big AB hero was banned for being a dipshit, although nobody thought it ever possible.
I’m tempted to name names, (nobody that moved over here from there, dun worry) but that isn’t my point. Answerbag was strict with its guidelines and not as forgiving as Fluther. I think on places like those, people often mistake the head on approach of moderation duty to bias. Everyone who gets modded always thinks they didn’t deserve it, after all.
I used to think this about Fluther though. I got pissed that my crap questions got pulled while other, non newb members asked bullshit and it was never pulled. But someone told me that it may just be that no mod got to it yet. (as I had found out later, other questions I thought equaled to mine when it came to fuckery were indeed pulled)
So on this place, while I may have thought that the moderation was biased, I haven’t been modded enough, nor was I ever warned of anything about my behaviour here, for any of my past convictions to have any credit.
I’m not saying that what you’re saying is bullshit. I’m just saying that I personally have never seen it, but then again, I’ve only been active on two Q&A sites.
What you describe, I’ve actually seen very abundant on forums and message boards. Now some of those places and their mods may be very biased. They’re always smaller communities (besides GameFAQ’s and their super ninja mods) and can get away with it.
I would know, forums and shit were my thing for years, and I myself moderated quite a few, and was an administrator for one of them. Now this may be a bit different from Q&A sites, but I as a staff member on forums or message boards acted quite often in the ways you describe in your question details. I was often really quite fucking biased.
I admit this fully.
But bigger places like Q&A sites need to have more professional staff if they wanna survive. Again, not saying it hasn’t happened, I just haven’t seen it. But then yeah, just two Q&A sites for me…also, Yahoo Answers. Lawlz.