The essential problem is that with the (spectacular) deletion of the Forbidden Post, LessWrong turned into the sort of place where posts get disappeared. Those are not good places to be on the Internet. They are places where honesty is devalued and statements of fact must be reviewed for their political nature.

Like Airedale, I don't have that impression - my impression is that 1) Censorship by website's owner doesn't have the moral problems associated with censorship by governments (or corporations), and 2) in online communities, dictatorship can work quite well, as long as the dictator isn't a complete dick.

I've seen quite functional communities where the moderators would delete posts without warning if they were too stupid, offensive, repetitive or immoral (such as bragging about vandalizing wikipedia).

So personally, I don't see a need for "restoring trust". Of course, as your post attests, my experience doesn't seem to generalize to other posters.