>>5806IMO, that take misses the forest for the trees. And your take doesn't really reflect at least what I thought at the time. The modocracy represented for the first time a leftypol that wasn't "ruled" by a single person. We had our issues with space (the pyongyang incident), but he was mostly absent. When dollars became the owner of leftypol, I saw that a step backwards. Besides, dollars wasn't really an active mod. In fact, he went missing for months at a time.
The migration for me was obvious because the people who were putting the effort and the actual painful work of cleaning up the site (remember we had a shit ton of spam, the great poljack wars, thai government DDOS, technical problems exacerbated by space, etc.). The choice between a leftypol governed with internal democracy with a large team, and a dedicated team that lost sleep to keep the site running and clean, that were putting proposals forward regarding user feedback (matrix rooms, publishing voting, making new boards, making the /gulag/ board, the constitution, etc), basically that actually gave a shit, vs the mod that was absent for months and suddenly took over the site with the express intent of establishing his style of moderation, with very little experience in modding for the past couple of years, with little coding experience, with very few old mods backing him up, etc.
First of all, we were somewhat prepared for a migration, and as long as ALL mods agreed, space would have been forced to yield because he is online like 1 day a month, so moderating the site would not be feasible. We would migrate and be done with it. The problem was that dollars was given the site and the split was created. We tried to reason with him, but he was steadfast in his desire to rule leftypol as his personal fiefdom.
This is where we had to choose between letting the leftypol community be split, where a large portion was in the hands of dollars, and hope that his little experience moderating was enough and his personal politics were compatible with the rest of the board, or ending the split. As "stewards" of the community it was basically our responsibility to use the powers we had to end the split and finalize the migration. And that's what we did. There was no way to ask the community if they agreed to these conditions, because if we revealed it, that would mean dollars would've found out and we would lose the ability to do it. And because we had a mole on our team, a very small group conspired to do it behind the entire mod teams back, hoping only that history would absolve them.
Personally, I think that lamenting posts that were deleted is missing the forest for the trees. Threads get cycled every few days, and our posts basically get recycled. The actions taken that day were extremely important to end the migration and unify the community. I think comrades should be ready to sacrifice their shitposts for the greater good of unifying the community. It's a small price to pay.
So in conclusion, it wasn't an "us mod team" vs an "us community", it was an "us community, except you're in the position to actually do something about it, will you take up this task or cross your arms?". And to be clear, when this happened, I was on a month long break and was thinking of never ending the break and quitting modding for good. It was cut short because of the split bullshit. Never an "us mod team" always a "us community and how can I make it a place people enjoy posting, including myself" which is why I became a mod in the first place.
tl;dr, don't fall for this anti-social anti-janny bullshit. At least not all jannies are in it for clout, or in it for power or whatever. Some of us are there because we like the community and we want to see it continue and flourish. We're not political geniuses, we're just jackoffs like any other here.