No wonder the staff turnover is super high. Only a few people are actually getting money, and they barely interact with the forum. Why would you stick around? Do you really want to be the public face while the decision makers are making money but can't be bothered to participate?
I feel mad for all those staff members doing all this bullshit for free. Why are you putting up with all this drama?
Cerium got people like B-Dubs, Nep, and Slayvern out there working for free while he sits back collecting all the ad revenue. I mean, has Cerium ever popped back up since he handed the day-to-day duties to B-Dubs? The only difference between how Cerium and Evilore (before GAF imploded) run things is that Cerium hasn't shown having thin-skin.
At the same time, it's pretty much the norm across most of the internet even when the owner of the board / chat / etc is generating revenue from it or the site.
Before even going into that, I think ERA could probably implement policies and board mechanics to dramatically improve moderation.
As it stands, it feels like they regressed on the basic stuff. Can't even make an announcement for new forum functionalities as innocuous as tags or bear having the slightest amount of feedback about it.
The word salad they use for bans feels like they confusingly understood they needed more impartial and impersonal moderation than GAF but they only adopted the most shallow, performative way to do it without understanding it. I was gonna say "without putting the work in" but simpler, lighter, clearer and fairer moderation would actually be a lot less work than what they are doing now.
Having so many moderators always struck me as weird compared to all I saw and experienced elsewhere. Ex-mod speaking of straight up hallucinations is a couple of notch higher than the usual drama and whining of forum rent-a-cops. Getting such a drastic turnover is definitely not normal.
