As soon as I read about this I thought it was a terrible idea, but other than the instance they chose, and the fact that they didn’t bother consulting the community (which are bad in their own right) I didn’t really have enough information, but since their mod team have started responding to people, it has become clear that it is not a community I want to participate in.

Beyond minimising and dismissing the legitimate concerns people have, and being very territorial over a community they had seemingly often left for someone else to mod for them, reading through the comments on one of the announcement posts, I found an example of the kind of “over modding” they disagreed with, and I recognised it as a comment that was removed from a post I had made. At the time I was very glad it, and several like it were removed, and was quite surprised a few days later to see them restored, and was really confused and disappointed. I took it as an orange, almost red flag, which along with a previous unrelated orange/red flag made me take a slight step back from the community.

Now reading Ada’s side of the story, it all makes a lot more sense - my guess is she had originally removed the comments (she had come on to the post to say she was intervening), and the 196 team then swept through and restored a whole chunk of them back when they finally got around to modding themselves.

I’m almost glad this happened, because now I know who restored those comments, and whose modding to be wary of.

Bottom line - these are not the mods for me, and since an alternative has already been opened on blahaj, this is a non issue, screw 'em. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

E: They have now made a non-apology post, in which they confirm my suspicion/conclusion that it was in fact the comments removed from the post I had made (because Ada prioritised marginalised people’s voices and needs, over those of the self-proclaimed “allies” who came to tell us what bad marginalised people we are for “alienating” them by also prioritising ourselves and our needs) that caused this move.

Classy.

This

We understand that a lot of respect and trust was lost, and we expect it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of time before we can earn it back, but we would be grateful if y’all gave us that chance.

and

Having another team take over splits the community. The more fragmentation there is, the less longevity and volume of community each skew will have.

Did give me a good laugh though. I’d say in case they hadn’t noticed, the community has already moved on, but I suspect that it is precisely because the community has moved on that they even bothered to make that post and pretend like they’ve learned something from this.