Leadership is not the essential purpose of moderation. The purpose is to raise the tone of the debate and make the community adhere to norms. If the active membership is pretty good at adhering to norms, and you just need to take out occasional trash, shadowy moderation works fine. LW has a dedicated core with extremely strong norms, and I suspect that even if Eliezer went into a coma for the next year and the site was completely unmoderated that wouldn't change.
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: