Throughout the forums entire, and I do mean entire, history, people have always complained about nearly every mod. After a while, it just simply became white noise to me, because I was so used to hearing the moderation sucks and nobody can do their job and everything is wrong, that when there was a legit bad mod, I'd just assume people were exaggerating once again and crying wolf.
Well maybe it shouldn't have become white noise. You've become "house blind"--you need to step back and look at what kind of community you've got. Sure, a lot of people will rebel against any and all authority. But you did have some shitty mods from the beginning. Dude, I was there for Rainbow Blight and fucking Al. From the very beginning you seem to have a "set it and forget it" goal with managing SA. When shit goes bad, you step in, make some wacky zany posts, engage with the forums, then you appoint a new administration and delegate out everything while you write comedy, make electronic music, go grocery shopping, raise your kids, or whatever.
Time and time again we had "new management" in the forum of Rainbow and her gang, Zach Parsons and Fistgrrl, Fragmaster, Ozma, Ralp, and now Zen Death Robot. These guys run the place with little to sometimes zero input from you (once I recall Ozma bitching she couldn't get in contact with you at all). They appoint other admins, who in turn appoint other mods, and set the tone. And often the tone is shitty. Arbitrary bannings, cults of personality inside subforums, bannings for politics and capitalization, etc. Every time we doxxed one of your mods and admins, we laid out WHY we did it. And we never doxxed the ones that were good. We presented all the horrible shit they did to wreck YOUR community. Take out the lurid stuff we threw out there about their personal lives and there was always a solid case as to why they were shitty mods. I know we're a "NO CLICK ZONE, SORRY" but I'd be more than happy to post some TLDR highlights here.
My tiny 2500 person forum takes up a few hours of my day every day, and I have a full time job that's way more than 40 hours a week. SA is your livelihood. Managing it and shepherding the community should be at least a 40 hour a week job for you. Ofc it's too big for one person to get a handle on, but you should overall know what's going on, put good people in charge, closely monitor them and be responsive. You should be posting and active and set the tone.
You're still making stupid amounts of cash from new users, if the numbers are correct that we can see, plus reregs and titles and shit--it would make some Gen Y on a Pateron jealous. But it won't last forever if you don't do something to stop the forums from dying. You have a huge legacy--a lot of sites on the internet wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you including places like 4 chan and probably here. I'd say a lot of what you see on Reddit and other places owes a debt to SA. And there's good news--there's way stupider stuff now online to mock than in 2000. More than ever. Of course, you'd have to have the balls to hurt some feels to do so.
Yeah, I've been wanting to for years now, but the creative spark I originally had back around 1999 is very difficult for me to find. Plus I have a wife, three kids, four dogs, and an ex-wife, so I don't really have the freedom of waking up at 2:00 AM and writing because a certain idea popped into my head. It's very frustrating.
At least you want to try. But instead of wracking your brain to churn out funny articles, why not just post on your own forums and try to encourage the kind of talent and humor that the users themselves had in the past? That isn't a 2AM kind of thing.
By the way, you do realize that if I said any of this to you in QCS, I'd be dogpiled by sycophants and an admin who regged 10 years after me would put a target on my back?
