It's extremely difficult to find out what decisions moderators are making when it comes to deleted answers: either your answer is deleted (which is hopefully rare among upstanding members of this community), or you have to repeatedly check the same question and notice that an answer has been deleted, and not know whether the decision was a moderator's.
I understand most moderators are undoubtedly attempting to apply community standards evenly. But to do so perfectly consistently is not possible: moderators make mistakes, perhaps usually benign ones. But I'm concerned about subconsciously holding conclusions they disagree with to a higher standard--it's a cognitive shortcut inherent to our biology. Anyone who doesn't see this as one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the platform should probably not be moderating for this particular community in the first place.
The problem is, there is no way for the community at large to evaluate the behavior of moderators (i.e. to see deleted answers). And one can hardly ask a moderator to objectively evaluate their own work or even that of their peers.
Reasonable, debatably conforming, but unpopular content is possibly some of the most important to preserve in a skeptics community.
And even if moderators were 99% objectively correct, there seems to be an intrinsic "deletion" bias—if e.g. 99 moderators thought something met community standards and one didn't, presumably the last would simply delete it, without that decision is automatically reviewed by the 99 (surely they're too busy anyway). And there's no formal appeal—flagging a decision might be reviewed by the same moderator, or perhaps 1 other, who might simply be pressured or predisposed to support the decision of their peer. The system is already rigged against Jeff Atwood's idea that the "ideal moderator does as little as possible". I can't even express my entire question without it being censored.
And of course elected moderators are variously respectable members of the community—but the community largely has no idea what decisions they're ultimately making. Most decisions are doubtless mundane, but surely there are impeachable offenses. And when elections come, I'd frankly rather review their most controversial decisions than a statement about why they think they're great.
Everyone loves to stress how special the skeptics community is. But shouldn't this community, above all others, have some real guarantees regarding moderation?