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.