>>83535
Tbh it happens in most volunteer leadership cliques on community websites. Once you've seen the inside of enough you realize it's human nature working, and it's very rare for community sites to have internal checks and balances for this.
Constantly moderating the community sets off the "us vs them" group think, and combined with developing personal relationships with each other, volunteers start to reinforce their shared views amongst themselves and then enforce them onto the community with slack given.
Three additional problems are also present in virtually every community site leadership:
--> One is the volunteers (or mods, etc) who cause drama by banning or deleting when their ego is offended or targeting certain posters. These are usually the types you see collecting positions of power, moderating way too many sections of the website, and often holding position on multiple websites. They're usually toxic to the website, but very good at ingratiating themselves deep into any clique and high into the ranks. They only show their bad side to the community and those in leadership who are critical of them.
--> The second problem is basically most people's willingness to help their friends. It's what people do, and it corrupts by again reinforcing an us vs them group think as well as bypassing common policy.
--> The third are the busybodies who feel if they're doing nothing, they're not doing their job. These types are how moderation turns into interference. They are unintentionally the worst and most toxic type, and they're unfortunately very common on 8chan's boards simply because of the nature of the boards. Someone makes a board, it's their baby, and so they feel the need to micromanage. And it hasn't helped that 8chan has so many autists (I use that term lovingly in this case), who are prone to OCDing the crap out of their board ownership by coming up with nit-pick excuses to warn and ban users.
In theory, free board ownership solves everything right? But this only works perfectly in the theory of an unlimited userbase to tap for new boards along with all boards being equally advertised. What's stopping it from working itself out right now is: 1) Anons mainly only collect Anons for new boards, not social network contacts, because this isn't a typical social network. 2) People flock to what's popular and advertised, and on 8chan you're either on the top bar or the top of the board list, or you're probably going to stagnate.
The only solution is a massive campaign to drive traffic to 8chan, and not just poltard or Gamergate traffic but any imageboarder and even Plebbits, and a hard look at how placement affects board populations (like store shelves, placement is everything). These would self correct anything other than the top boards, which probably need stricter controls on mods because they are the core and flagship of 8chan, and users are unlikely to be able to compete with them by making a new board. Even if 8chan grew 5x the population, if /b/, /v/, /pol/ and whatever else went to shit, it would lead to way more users leaving than trying to compete with those core boards. Administrators should be watchful of volunteers on core boards and treat them as globals.
Tbh, the core boards should have been global and there from the start, answerable to administration and global policies. A lot of the whining is coming because the same "first come first serve" that was changed from the board claim system is also an inherent problem of not assigning the core boards to 8chan itself. First come first serve on core boards means it's luck of the dice if one of 8chan's core boards is successful or not, and that has implications for the entire website..