One of the most recent losses to the WordPress community is bluesix, a former r/Wordpress mod, and arguably one of the most altruistic members of the community:
Worth noting that this was entirely the fault of the /r/wordpress users though, not Matt. The users threw wild accusations and conspiracy theories at the moderators and apparently threats in PM. The level of madness in the sub really reached embarrassing levels.
The mods never behaved as if they were on "matts payroll" or anything of the like. They had a pinned megathread at the top of the front page, they opened up the sub in the past few days to allow any posts even outside megathreads. They also redirected for a period all posts to r/wpdrama, giving free promotion to that sub.
Whether you agree with the megathread-only policy or not, they never behaved as if they were doing anything but trying to keep the sub clean and not totally overridden by Matt controversy posts which is normal on Reddit.
Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility.
Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a different language.
- the creator of the subreddit still seemed completely pro-Matt and also friendly with him
That said, bluesix seemed like a very helpful mod, so, still not great to see them delete their account. And also, some users are for sure in it just for the blood.
The obvious move on moderation side would've been to allow big news around that "drama" to have their own threads, to remove duplicates and have random opinion tweets, blog posts & influencer's thoughts in the megathread / a pinned comment on each of the "big news'" threads.
This is what most mods who wouldn't want to suppress the topic but keep the sub somewhat clean would've done. For some reason, that wasn't even up for discussion.
It was either a "we go on strike and stop moderating" (which ended quickly when it didn't result in the chaos they anticipated), megathread or complete ban of the topic for them.
And we will have to agree to disagree I guess.
Here's how I would summarize some parts of it:
- The moderators didn't want to completely censor or remove good faith threads, they just wanted to contain it within megathreads. this is normal on reddit. I disagreed with this and thought it would be better to have some threads on front page but limit the number.
- The mods didn't make an attempt to censor r/wpdrama from being talked about, they redirected users to it
- The users were fundamentally angry and accusatory from the get go which made it even more difficult to come up with solutions
- This is not how I remember old reddit nor the old internet. Back then we would have a civil disucssion with the mods about what things should be allowed or not allowed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5fn36/uhhh_wha...