Longtime /r/Seattle poster here. I'll do my best at an unbiased answer, although I'm admittedly biased.

There's been a lot of complaints for more than a year about the moderation in /r/seattle. Most of them center around rule #6, which says quite vaguely "we're a community, not a bulletin board". That rule is the reason given for removing everything from spam posts like "hey my band is in Seattle and we're playing a show at such-and-such, everyone come out and see!" to posts that don't seem to break any rules of redditquette and would fit in fine on any other sub. There's also a separate rule against spam that could be used to delete the former post. So the perception is that "rule #6" is just a way for the mods to remove anything they don't like, regardless of what the community thought of it in terms of upvotes and downvotes.

Since these posts just get deleted, they tend to go down the memory hole and it's difficult to come up with concrete examples. For one example of a post that I think got needlessly removed - like in most big cities, in Seattle there's a debate over regulation of AirBnb and similar services. About a month ago, someone who hosts AirBnbs in Seattle got an email from AirBnb corporate HQ, asking all of their hosts in Seattle to email the city council asking them to "protect home-sharing". That AirBnb host posted that link to reddit. This started a debate about the pros and cons of AirBnb, which got upvoted, attracting more users, and so on. To me, that's exactly how reddit should work.

The post got removed pretty quickly, despite the upvotes and the lively yet civil discussion. I personally appreciated the post because it gave me a reminder that I should email the city council and tell them my opinion about regulation of AirBnb, which I wouldn't have had if not for that reddit post. Stuff like that is exactly why I visit Reddit - "news before it happens" as the frontpage used to say.

About once a month someone would start a meta-thread where the moderation came up for debate. There was an interesting pattern I noticed - a lot of the regular posters seemed opposed to the moderation and thought it was heavy-handed. There were people defending the moderation, but in almost every case if you looked at their accounts, they were brand new. In some cases just a few hours old. They also tended to use similar language, and reference events that happened years ago in /r/seattle drama. In one case an hours-old account referred to the mod team as "we". I thought that was a little strange.

In one of the meta-threads about moderation, I wrote a long post with a bunch of links and screenshots, detailing the links between all these brand-new accounts and mentioning how suspicious it was that so many brand-new accounts showed up to defend the moderators. My post got removed, with "doxxing" as the explanation. To be clear, there was no personal information of any kind in my post.

If you want to call it a witch-hunt instead of doxxing, then sure, maybe. But sometimes in a witch-hunt there's an actual witch. The main mod of one of the largest city-specific subreddits is breaking reddit rules by using alternate/sockpuppet accounts to attack his critics. I thought that was something worth posting and letting the rest of the community know about.

Then yesterday we had another meta-thread, except this one was a doozy. It linked to evidence that the head mod of /r/seattle was abusing mod powers for financial gain. It's a long screenshot but everyone should read it. The tl;dr is that someone commented in /r/Seattle advertising their property management business could help someone get set up as an AirBnb host. Normally that would get removed as spam, but in this case it showed up as an explicitly "approved submitter", approved by the controversial mod in question. Then in a private mod-only subreddit, that same mod admits the property management user is actually him, posting under an alt account. Then using his mod account to approve his other account so it wouldn't be subject to spam removal.

That also made me put 2 and 2 together about the removal of the Airbnb post I mentioned previously - the mod has a side business helping Airbnb, so there's a reason why he'd want to remove /r/Seattle posts critical of Airbnb. That's a pretty clear conflict of interest.

The thread with that info got around 700 upvotes in a couple of hours and apparently reached /r/all...before it was locked and deleted.

As a result of that thread, I got banned (for mentioning the evidence I had previously gathered that the mod in question attacks critics using sockpuppet accounts). Several other users were apparently banned, and also "muted" (meaning they can't modmail /r/seattle) for asking why they were banned.

One of the mods who had joined the mod team recently and who legitimately seemed to be trying to improve things got banned and removed from the moderators. He did a mini-AMA here.

As far as I know, where it stands now is that the admins are reviewing things, because they're the only ones (besides the founder of /r/seattle, who's apparently very inactive) who can remove the mod in question. If the allegations are true they're a pretty big breach of redditquette:

Do not...Take moderation positions in a community where your profession, employment, or biases could pose a direct conflict of interest to the neutral and user driven nature of reddit.