Site team really needs to compartmentalise community management and PR from development from moderation.

The combining of all areas creates a mentally draining and emotionally exhausting environment for the entire group. You need a very specific type of attitude to deal with it day in and day out. Those working development should be kept away from it. High turnover in team members having to handle that should also be expected.

This definitely hits the nail on the head.

I come to this website (like the sub before it) to basically just shitpost, read shitposts, maybe occasionally learn something or teach some people something. I see an obvious drama thread that triggers the red flag in my head, maybe I'll read some of it out of Bile Fascination for shits and giggles and eye rolls, but I'll almost never engage with it. If I even click on it at all.

This is really the kind of attitude you have to have when approaching this bullshit on the internet. Yeah, I have some deeply held opinions on these topics, and frankly, they've so far mostly gone against the grain of the authorities/majority opinion here at least in broad strokes. But I also know just how fruitless and unnecessarily stressful and emotionally taxing it is to engage deeply with online arguments like these. After years of taking yelling at people on the internet way too fucking seriously, I know when to just keep my mouth shut and walk the fuck away. It's not that important.

When I was a terminally online lib in my early Reddit years, a frequent user of /r/SubredditDrama among others, going way way way too fucking deep into the anti-GamerGate rabbit hole, that level of time and emotional investment into petty online argumentation led me to a very dark place when Trump won in 2016. My response to that (aside from deep depression, identity crisis, and an escalation of my alcoholism) was to almost immediately cut myself off from all political and meta-internet communities, basically everything except sports. Eventually I suffered a second identity crisis and came out at the end as a communist, diving back into the online world as a result, but I knew then from experience how deeply toxic and self-harming it is to become addicted to meta-internet drama. It's equivalent to turning self-medication into self-harm.

Remain detached, at arms length, from this kind of shit. It's not worth it, and considering this community past and present already attracts emotionally unstable personalities becoming addicted to that is almost literally making suicide a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stepping back and bricking up a barrier of ironic detachment is, in this case, a lot healthier than binding yourself intimately to these topics.