Yesterday I was just too shocked to connect the dots of that sad story. After a good night sleep and with the help of some archair psychology, I came up with a story that made sense. Whether it has anything to do with reality, that is of course a completely different question.
- Criticisms like the one you quoted have probably held a lot of weight. As any adolescent knows, the opinion of one's pairs is all that counts, however dumb and ill-informed they may be. So it made perfect sense for Dawkins to ask Josh how he could implement a severe control over his forum's content.
- I am a software developer, and one thing I can tell you is that while we are willing to invest a lot of effort into our own software, tuning or integrating a third-party product is a very frustrating thing to do. So from Josh's point of view, it was the perfect occasion to take the hand on the whole site - although I agree with everybody that it is crappily designed.
- Dawkins probably instructed Josh that he didn't want to lose anything of his gigantic user base in the process. That is pretty clear in that hallucinating part of the message the mods received :
Please do not attempt to inflame the users, start any petitions, or "relocate" groups of users to a separate forum.
But I think RD made a big mistake here. The way to do that is to take extreme care in writing by himself a message that would thank the staff for their terrific job, tell them that they would be a part of the new forum, explain why things were done that way, explain how things would work in the future. Then he would have to answer some of the questions and criticisms in an general way, with an understanding but firm tone. Not an easy task. But he handed that whole task to Josh who did it in the most stupid way possible, and without the legitimacy of being the boss.
- It was very soon clear to Josh that he screwed it. He could have apologized and said "I screwed it". But he chose the less honorable way out, which was an easier thing to do in the short run, but a very dumb thing to do in the long run. Now with the forum being dead, Josh being rightly flamed by everyone, and one month to wait before they put their new thingy in place, they have pretty much lost everything, and we have lost a lot too.
While the overall strategy is understandable, RD and JT have displayed an incredibly low consideration of other people. Now it is a question of which is the bigger between their ethics and their ego. Josh's update from today on RDF doesn't make me optimistic about the winner of that titanic battle.
