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If that's what they were going for they'd either get too frustrated by now and just start banning people, or just throw in the towel. The amount of "witchiness" sure isn't decreasing, and they don't seem all that upset with it.
I get some of your frustrations, but people you're upset with fall well within normal (as in: not setting out to manipulate anyone) human behavior, and conduct themselves better than 99% of the Internet.
Nah, I've seen this kind of thing before. Community sentiment keeps drifting, part of the mod clique goes fully adversarial. Eventually there's some big drama flareup, a mod purge aided by someone with admin permissions, and a crackdown based on "reinterpreting" an existing rule.
It starts with a few mods seeing the community itself as a problem to be solved, and that's where Amadan first tripped my reddit mod alarm.
The broad sneering at large sections of the community, the snarky, sarcastic mod notes right out of 2016 reddit. You can see the same old story unfolding.
Yes, I've seen it too, but splitting off from /r/ssc and then Reddit itself is hell of a way to do it.
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