Steve was a serious moderator and more. The story of the end of his tenure there and the demise of Netslaves as quoted above is based on an embarrassingly self-serving account by the founders of Netslaves. The real story is more sordid and interesting, and since I was there at the time I’ll tell it (there’s a tl;dr at the end for those who want the short version).
As background, at the time Gilliard was made moderator the two founders were increasingly disengaged from the site. Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin were two nice, well-meaning guys who stumbled into running a fairly popular niche content and community site about the shady and exploitative side of the dotcom industry. However, neither of them were equipped to manage a business of any sort – they were exactly the kind of hapless dilettante founders that their own site regularly mocked. Furthermore, at this point they were dispirited and losing interest. F-ckedcompany, an unmoderated cesspool site covering the same subject matter, was getting a lot more attention in the media. A Netslaves book deal hadn’t worked out as they’d hoped.
They became absentee publishers, abdicating responsibility for operating the site to Pat “Splat” Neeman, the developer of the site’s custom PHP-based BBS system and the sysadmin, and to Steve Gilliard, the site’s head writer and effective editor-in-chief and, now, the moderator. In their post-mortem for the site, Lessard and Baldwin would later disingenuously claim the decision to make Gilliard moderator was “ill-advised” and led to the site’s downfall. In fact, the no-tolerance policy @codinghorror posted above was completely authored from scratch and enforced by Steve, who truly loved the site that was the main platform for his muckraking writing and for the community discussion about the articles.
That moderation was sorely needed at this stage. While f-ckedcompany was getting the press, Netslaves’ userbase was small but growing. Like clockwork, the bad actors started arriving to ruin things. Worse, in an effort to compete with F-ckedcompany, Baldwin and Lessard poached what they considered to be “erudite” commenters from the site. Two of them in particular were a toxic yin-and-yang whose battles constantly sucked the air out of discussions: Cheopys and Uncle_Meat (both middle-aged white men, natch).
Cheopys would probably be an obnoxious BernieBro today. He was a leftier-than-thou early Microsoft engineer with what most regulars agreed was a sketchy/creepy personal life. He was fairly erudite, and he’d argue fiercly, often in bad faith, against the smallest hint of conservatism in any comment. He always made things personal.
As big a jerk as Cheopys was, his nemesis Uncle_Meat (AKA Lauren Bandler of Wisconsin) ranks as one of the worst trollies I’ve encountered on the Internet. He’s right up there in my personal hall of shame with the automated genocide-denier known as Zumabot, Spamford Wallace, deranged momma’s boy religious fanatic and stalker Dennis Markuze (who once threatened to track me down and cut my head off), and the now-banned white supremacist tr0ll Max_Blancke/Arch_Stanton from this site.
U_M was at the base of things your standard-issue Libertarian tr0ll: the Randroid talking points and smug tone and the delusional self-image and nasty privilege-blind undertone he displayed were as tired and played-out 15+ years ago as they are now. The tactics were also the same old bad-faith “de-rail and distract” ones we still see from Libertarians here today who think they’re doing something new and clever.
What set him apart was his obsessiveness, his sense of entitlement that he be heard and taken seriously on every subject. This is a guy who, to give one example, was busy tr0lling Netslaves (and probably other BBS’s) 15 minutes before the scheduled start of his mother-law’s funeral (in pre-smartphone days, mind you). He really disliked the Netslaves’ implied criticism of capitalism, and seems to have made tr0lling the site a special project.
So in reality, no-one on the Netslaves BBS was sorry to see either of these two dickheads banned when Gilliard finally had enough and froze their accounts. Certainly no-one left because they were banned – celebration was the response. However, probably because one or both of them complained to Baldwin and Lessard, suddenly the founders got re-involved and questioned Gilliard’s judgment despite being completely uninvolved in witnessing the tr0lls’ BBS antics. Gilliard, never one to suffer fools gladly, made his exit.
Baldwin and Lessard disappear again, and now the site is being run and technically moderated by “Splat”, with some lesser writers providing content. Gilliard’s departure was disappointing, but most of the BBS regulars who loved the site hung on in the hopes that things would stabilise and improve. They did not.
First, as we later discovered, at some point after his ban U_M offered “Splat” a Web design contract for one or more of his penny-ante seasonal businesses (which we suspected were a family inheritance – so much for John Galt of Wisconsin). Second, soon after “Splat” took over as de facto moderator, guess whose account was unfrozen (no extra points for guessing whose account wasn’t unfrozen). Yes, this was a tr0ll so obsessive that he paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get un-banned on an Internet forum so he could continue his mayhem.
Even being unaware of the bribe, the community was outraged at U_M’s return and let the founders know. As a sop, they appointed two regular users as moderators; as usual they made a terrible decision. The new mods were a husband-and-wife team known by their handles of the Packratts, an anarkiddie/crustpunk couple who reminded me of Bad-Luck Schleprock from the Flintstones cartoon.
As U_M intensified his driving trollies, every request to the mods from the community to do something – anything – was met with the equivalent of “our hands are tied by Splat, and anyway the world is a terrible and dark place so why try to make things better? Woe is us!” (this was also their approach to life in general). Then more Libertarian tr0lls, probably invited by U-M, started appearing and the “Nazi bar” problem took hold.
So Netslaves became unusable for good-faith members, and that’s when we all agreed in a private group e-mail exchange that it was time to leave en masse on a set date to make a point. Baldwin and Lessard took the exodus as their cue to shut down the site, probably with great relief that they weren’t in over their heads anymore.
By that time Gilliard had started up his own content/community site, The News Blog, and most of us ended up there and stayed until his untimely death. Gilliard was one of the best writers and most diligent and relentless journalists I’ve encountered on the Internet. His work influenced people like the founder of Daily Kos and his site spawned other bloggers like Driftglass. He was a self-described “fighting liberal”, the bane of conservatives, bigots, smug celebrities, and corporate exploiters – so much so that the location of his grave is a secret to this day. He was taken from us way too soon, and I still think of him years later.
I really see BoingBoing as the type of community Steve would have liked to foster: hard but fair moderation; a BBS system that supports the mods; a publisher who involves himself actively in the larger site; and users that truly care about not only keeping the site as good as it is but making it even better. That’s why this site is the latest one where I’ve set up my commenter’s tent, and I thank you all for making it such a welcoming and pleasant oasis in a wilderness of unmoderated cesspools and social media networks.
tl;dr: Netslaves didn’t die because Gilliard bounced two well-known arseholes from the digital bar, but because of (in reverse order of culpability): useless successor moderators; absentee publishers; a greedy and corrupt sysadmin granted too much power; and above all an extremely toxic and destructive Libertarian tr0ll.
