Trippin' Through Time

“murdered by words” posts

I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.

Here's some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.

Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.

As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.

A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create "Clever Comebacks" as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn't work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn't remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn't want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.

As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That's when things really started going downhill. They'd delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They'd refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept "accidentally" breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn't.

I eventually went hands-off because I couldn't stop them and couldn't deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn't hold the line on the blackout.

So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.

On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they're now showing up on Lemmy.