I thought that might occur. He pretty consistently defended me in those aformentioned mod debates and seemed like the next most exposed branch waiting to be pruned.
What really was the moderations end game in all of this? Cut out anyone that didn't fall in line? Cut out anyone with not concrete enough skeletons that they could be controlled? To move gaf into all out political purification mode? I know none of them saw the sudden backlash against Evilore coming. They probably thought they'd be rolling pretty or something with their experiment for years to come.
Don't think of it as some master plan but as a particularly nasty negative feedback loop. Politics is the most obvious example, but really this happened across a wide variety of topics: conservatives are a minority -> they are ostracized or picked on disproportionately by moderators -> many conservatives leave -> the remaining conservatives feel hugely outnumbered and isolated, so many of those start to leave, too -> the last few dredges of conservatism live on in fear of expressing their views because no one will support them and they might get banned.
It wasn't a plan, exactly, because that's a slow moving process that isn't controlled by any single individual. It's just a negative feedback loop that you have to consciously guard against, because the natural human inclination (not just for mods) is to show preference and bias for your personal views. In my opinion, the moderator team as a whole did not sufficiently protect against this eventuality. If you're asking what I think would have eventually happened, the forum would have crystallized entirely in its current liberal-politics-PCGaming-Sony form, as all dissenters were gradually jettisoned, and soldiered on for years in that form, without much potential for future growth.
