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I didn't say there's no correlation, just that I was unsure of how to characterize it (as I was involved in a lot of other conversations in other subthreads at the time). And I will say now that there probably is a correlation, just that I don't think "disagreeable" is the right word to describe it. "Intellectually autonomous", "prone to questioning authority", "less vulnerable to pure peer pressure", etc. I think are all better phrases to describe the trait I'm talking about. And yes intelligent people are more likely to illustrate those traits, because why wouldn't they be? Again, it is the less intelligent who are more prone to listening and obeying, because they have less of an ability to internally formulate their own alternative ideas and behavioral schemes anyway.
It's also just a matter of the basic bell curve. There's no reason to think that on any given venue like this that the moderators are going to be the most intelligent people around, because some research has actually shown that management ability does not linearly correlate with intelligence but in fact drops off after around an IQ of 120 or so, because you as you get more intelligent than that you lose your ability to easily relate and communicate to people with lower IQs. So inevitably more intelligent people than the mods are going to show up (which isn't to say that everyone opposing the mods is automatically smarter than them), and why wouldn't they question them if they're literally smarter?
Not at all. First of all, driving other users away means absolutely nothing inherently and is often a good thing (quality over quantity any day IMO). 100 quality posters (whether they drive other people beyond them away or not) who are capable of generating new ideas and posts is far better than 50,000 posters who are not. (And indeed a community with the first configuration could be quite a livelier than one with the second, as the 100 posters are capable of driving the conversation forward, whereas the community with the 50,000 posters may just straight up die if none of them are even capable of generating any content for the others to respond to unoriginally.) Or if you want to talk about something like Reddit, it's still far superior to 5 million people who are only capable of generating and responding to fake Jerry Springer-esque personal stories, bot-posted AI slop and endless reposts, cheap political bait, etc. The people who want to manipulate them ensure there's plenty of new activity, but most of it sucks.
Other than that, I don't see what would possibly be bad about confrontation. What is the essence of discourse if not the confrontation of ideas and claims?
Personally I think it's the top 5% of those who insist on an adherence to imaginary standards who cause the problems and reduce the discourse quality (which is not to necessarily say quantity, but quality is obviously superior).
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