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Comment by thr0w555 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I mean the remaining mod is on matt payroll and there is a conflict of interest which cause the subreddit not to trust the mods

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.

That's not true.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition...

And they did apologize for it, I think.

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.

Probably slightly biased summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wor...

Yes, I'm sure some reddit users went too far in DMs (it's reddit...), but ultimately,

- the moderators of the subreddit clearly wanted to suppress that topic.

- one (the remaining one) works for Matt, and thinks the whole thing is a nothingburger (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/...)

- 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.

What part is not true?

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 users had wild accusations and conspiracy theories (https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g4ahoq/is_that_...)

- 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.

The mods could have literally done nothing and the majority of users (as proven by the unofficial poll) would have approved. The mods didn’t know how to moderate without being little dictators. Once they realized this they gave up and ran away.

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