You could tell in the last year that Evilore resented what the site had become.. but letting people like Besada and Bish pilot the ship meant it was going to crash hard anyhow.
It's strange I liked Gaf because it was heavily modded, but I also completely disagreed with how unfairly it was modded. Let's be honest, there was about what 20 posters who stirred shit up daily and never seemed to get a perm that if they did would have made the whole site better.
There's not coming back from this though... Tyler rightfully made a lot of enemies in the industry and the internet net through the years... and it's funny as hell the thing that brings him down is the same shit that he would have banned someone for in an instant.
I did like GAF being highly moderated (it's not like I want to post somewhere like voat), but the problem is over what moderation is supposed to achieve. It's pretty clear, certainly post-gamergate, the objective of moderators (perhaps some more than others) was to not break up fights, keep them civil and on topic, or make it somewhere you can speak your mind (insert the websites mission statement here). It was actively trying to prune people who they believed were racist, sexist, etc. That may sound like a good thing on paper, but when you become that proactive, you end up just creating an atmosphere which more about outing people as bad than one which doesn't have people doing bad things.
Threads full of hostile people were essentially created and kept open just to bring the worse out of people so they can be banned. Users, the 20 posters you mentioned, became symbiotic to this process to the point it felt like they were a half-step between user and mod and they drove any conversation that concerned them. They could still be banned, but only after losing their temper and doing something "traditionally" wrong (telling someone "fuck you"), whereas anyone who said something the wrong way or said something commonly naive enough to be considered a "dog whistle" was gone. At the end, it became so toxic this patrol of hall monitors would become upset when other posters would ignore drama within a thread and talk about videogames (see the final The Last Night/Tim Soret thread). There's also a pretty clear record of differences in punishment. If GAF really wanted certain opinions gone, it only had to transparently list and expand what discussion or arguments were not allowed, but the rules were extremely vague and bannings inconsistent and confusing.
The more narrowly utopian the ideal community became in their minds (perhaps necessitated as they observed the internet/real world becoming more divisive and mean), the more this became the primary function of the forum itself, losing all of its developer connections and a great swath of its best content creators being permanently banned or chased off (people who could go years without being banned in this hyper-critical community, but still be deemed not perfect enough to considered redeemable). At the end, NeoGAF as an open community and a popular news source became the secondary objective to a social project. It was obvious Evilore saw and regretted this by the end, but he couldn't overcome his distant laziness that enabled it the first place. While everyone has good reason to abandon Evilore, it also does illustrate my point that NeoGAF didn't fail as a gaming website, it collapsed under its own ideological pressures.
Doesn't exactly bode well for nuGAF.
