Criticism =/= trolling
Gardening =/= censorship
This reads like a boilerplate reply you would email to a random idiot who complained about their post being deleted, not an actual answer to questions about deleting honest criticism and anything even mentioning the b-word. It's also not a response to the PR ramifications of these sorts of activities. Please stop acting like your moderation behavior is normal or like people who respond to it are crazy for not agreeing with it.
And as always: Telling people there are plenty of other places they can go is childish and petulant.
not an actual answer to questions about deleting honest criticism and anything even mentioning the b-word.
It's all there in the link?
Please stop acting like your moderation behavior is normal...
Have you never posted to Hacker News? To a well-curated subreddit? To 4chan? To Wikipedia?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.