Comment by notatoad

From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.