I only heard about this in a recent thread, but I wanted to share my opinion because, honestly? The only thing I feel from this is relief.
I appreciate the effort he put in, but I can’t say I liked the guy. From my point of view: Many of his administrative decisions seemed to be of the “agree with me or get banned” sort, and he too often contributed to exactly the sort of fights and personal attacks and derails he was suppose to be controlling (which usually lead to a straight wipe of the comments section, since there isn’t much chance of recovery once the mod is right there in the mud with the idiots). I don’t know if this was a limitation of the system, but I also found his moderation far from transparent - I’d get seemingly inoffensive posts deleted for no reason, as far as I could tell, and I was never sure where the line was other than “don’t piss him off”. As such, even this understanding could well be wrong, because often times there was no explanation for why things would disappear or moderator action was taken. He was also an aggressive and dismissive arguer (though most such comments were removed not long after, along with huge swathes of other comments), and seemed fond of personal attacks - neither of which were traits that I think suit a moderator well.
But he was far from the worst mod I’ve come across, and being a mod myself it’s hard to stay neutral AND stay on top of things AND still be an active participatory force in the community without stressing yourself out to no end. Dealing with trolls is a frustrating experience even on less well-trafficked sites. For his flaws, he’s only human, doing in many ways a thankless job, and I appreciate the time he took to do that.
