Enough. The inevitable has come

11 years have passed since I signed up on Code Review. More than 14 years since I've signed up on Stack Overflow.

I've... seen things. Learned things. Some of those things, I'm glad I saw and learned. A lot of things actually. People I helped and people who helped me. Some of those memories I'll cherish for a long time to come.

Other things, I could've gone without. Especially after I picked up my diamond in '21. In hindsight, perhaps that was a cursed chalice. I just wanted to help this site grow into the place I thought it could be, but in hindsight that was never possible to begin with for a surprisingly large and increasing number of reasons.

While most of the local community's regulars behaved exemplary, there were some rotten elements. Over the years, we've dealt with some of them. Putting a number on them is pointless since a spam wave created over a thousand problematic accounts just in a few days alone. Taking out elements that disrupt the community is a necessary evil. Others were out of reach for various reasons or simply a matter of time till they become a nuisance again. Protecting the community against them is a necessary but thankless job and my biggest regret is I didn't take out some of the real scum fast enough.

Most of you, I'll happily shake hands with any time any place. I've met great people here and unfortunately even outlived one of our best members ever. Others, I wish I could forget. The Stack Exchange Company (or whatever they call themselves these days, it changes every couple of years) is something I've repeatedly put more trust in than warranted. Some of the staff members did a good job despite what I might think of the company itself, others... Let's move on. After the strike in '23, I really wanted the situation to be better. But the damage was done and people were leaving. Look at questions per day for any site in the data explorer and you'll see the strike wasn't even the turning point. It just made the already existing problem worse. Yet I and many others persisted and I thank you all for the time and effort you put in this place.

Eventually though, the bad outweighed the good. I have to accept this place will degrade instead of becoming the shiny beacon of knowledge I had hoped for it to become. And while I long thought I'd go down with the ship, where the band continues to play till the very end, it turns out the end of my patience has been reached and my trust violated too severely. More and more people have left this place and I ask myself why I stay around. The glory days of '16 to '18 will never come back.

I do not want to become an inactive moderator. Either I moderate or I don't, ghosting people (or even a whole community) is against my principles. If I can't last long enough to go down with the ship, it's time for me to wave off. This decision has not been made lightly, in hindsight I'm surprised it took this long. I'm stubborn, but not stubborn enough to keep doing this. You need a thick skin to do this, but it has been the abuse from the people I expected it the least from that took the biggest toll in the end. Today, I resign as a Code Review moderator.

There is a lot more I could say but won't. The past few years have been challenging for me in ways that most (or all) of you don't need to concern yourself with. I've done what I could to protect the community and repeatedly ran into the limit of what I could deal with. This is not how I wanted this to end, but for me this is the last available road.

I'm done, and I'm sorry.