I'm a former IC ZZL/P Mod = AMA

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SnoopRob said:
The simple answer is that it was too big of a headache to allow to continue and hurting the core business of IC, which is school-specific sports reporting based in paid premium subscriptions.

The paid sports boards, especially the football board, are much more conservative than the ZZL and ZZLP. We routinely had issues where VIP members from the sports boards come over to the ZZLP, posted a bit, got really pissed off at what was said to them, and started crying to the site PTB. It got even worse when they broke IC and ZZLP rules and the moderators got invovled. Inevitably, it turned into a "Do you know how long I've been a member here!?! If I can't post what i want where I want on IC then I'll cancel my membership!"

IC's PTB were happiest when the ZZL and ZZLP essentially did nothing that rose to their attention and it was just a niche portion of the site that didn't create any problems. Over the last 8 years those days became less and less and the amount of ZZLP issues being raised to the level of the PTB were greatly increasing, as were folks either cancelling or threatening to cancel their VIP memberships over ZZLP issues.

It became too much for the PTB to deal with and was no longer worth the headache, so they killed the ZZLP and instituted the "no politics" rule across the site.
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This is basically exactly what I suspected (not that it was that hard to figure out). As I said back on the old ZZL when they made the announcement:

"My guess is that the PTB looked ahead at the next few months and foresaw an escalating temperature that would require more and more moderator attention (and more and more complaints from the TTPers who chose to venture over here and got banned and/or made fun of) and decided to just pull the plug."

Sherman clearly never wanted the off-topic boards to be anything other than a meaningless distraction. When they started requiring a ton of moderator attention (some issues that probably even got escalated to him) he was probably sitting there going "why am I spending any time/money at all on this part of the site that doesn't (directly) generate revenue?" And of course it's his site, so he can do whatever he wants.
 
SnoopRob said:
Maybe a little.

I will say that I don't think we got every moderating decision right. Heck, as a mod team we didn't agree on every decision.

But I think we, as a bunch of volunteers, gave it our best shot and tried to balance things between competing parties as best we could.

But I won't deny that there might have been other ways to do things that might have been, if not more successful, at least differently successful.
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Internet forum moderator is definitely among the most thankless jobs out there. Pretty close to "college sports referee."
 
WBroylesH said:
I'm not a paid subscriber, so perhaps my presence means less. But I am a pair of eyeballs who saw the ads and (sometimes) was persuaded by them.

I haven't been on IC since they shut ZZLP down. I'll probably go back once basketball gets rolling, but I don't know that for sure. If the threads on here are good I might just read/post on here.

I think the IC people ought to know that, while they may be preserving their subscriber base, they're going to lose ad revenue.
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Again, I don't think the free boards are a real driver of profit in any significant sense.

There are 247 boards that don't even have free boards, it's VIP or nothing.

The main attraction of the free boards are as an on-ramp to VIP subscriptions. Folks come and join the free boards for the discussion, hear about premie info that is available on another part of the site, and some eventually subscribe. I believe that is the value of the free boards.
 
WBroylesH said:
I'm not a paid subscriber, so perhaps my presence means less. But I am a pair of eyeballs who saw the ads and (sometimes) was persuaded by them.

I haven't been on IC since they shut ZZLP down. I'll probably go back once basketball gets rolling, but I don't know that for sure. If the threads on here are good I might just read/post on here.

I think the IC people ought to know that, while they may be preserving their subscriber base, they're going to lose ad revenue.
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Agree entirely. I was on the cusp of plunking down the $$$ for a premium membership. Never gonna happen now.
 
SnoopRob said:
The simple answer is that it was too big of a headache to allow to continue and hurting the core business of IC, which is school-specific sports reporting based in paid premium subscriptions.

The paid sports boards, especially the football board, are much more conservative than the ZZL and ZZLP. We routinely had issues where VIP members from the sports boards come over to the ZZLP, posted a bit, got really pissed off at what was said to them, and started crying to the site PTB. It got even worse when they broke IC and ZZLP rules and the moderators got invovled. Inevitably, it turned into a "Do you know how long I've been a member here!?! If I can't post what i want where I want on IC then I'll cancel my membership!"

IC's PTB were happiest when the ZZL and ZZLP essentially did nothing that rose to their attention and it was just a niche portion of the site that didn't create any problems. Over the last 8 years those days became less and less and the amount of ZZLP issues being raised to the level of the PTB were greatly increasing, as were folks either cancelling or threatening to cancel their VIP memberships over ZZLP issues.

It became too much for the PTB to deal with and was no longer worth the headache, so they killed the ZZLP and instituted the "no politics" rule across the site.
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Do you think things would have been better if they hadn't split the board? I pretty much left then so I didn't see what happened.
 
CallMeTyler said:
what’s your thoughts on the IC platform as a business model? Think it will hold up for another 10 years? Personally I think it’s fading as college sports continue to evolve into something different, but curious on your take.
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I think any business model that relies on "insider knowledge" will have issues in the age of social media. There's just no way to keep that knowledge at all a secret for more than 20 seconds when it only takes a couple of folks to tweet it out to undo all the work.

The sites that make it (for any real length of time in the future) will be the ones who have built great communities that keep folks coming back not just for the info but also for the sense of belonging. I think IC has done that fairly well and so they should have some success.

The hard part is that sites like IC (and all of 247 and rivals and On3 and whomever else) is that without the lure of "insider knowledge", it's hard to get folks to join to begin with. From what I can tell, the IC userbase is aging and there aren't a lot of youngsters left. The subscription model can work as long as you've got living, breathing subscribers to pay the tab, but I imagine that it's tough when you aren't getting a lot of youngsters to join the site.

Note: I was never given access to any subscriber data for IC, so these are just my thoughts.
 
A numbskull named meatyheeljr popped up on the ZZL last week to shitpost and it had me wondering what happened to the original meatyheel. Seems like he hasn’t posted since shortly after the board split. I can’t remember if he got permabanned or disappeared after making some outrageous claim about how successful he was.
 
finesse said:
Do you think things would have been better if they hadn't split the board? I pretty much left then so I didn't see what happened.
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I think the board split was an idea born out of a trying to figure out a solution for a difficult problem.

Note: I became a mod the same day that board split occurred, so I wasn't in the board split discussion very deeply.

The normal ebb and flow of political discussion was that it would obviously gain in numbers/strength/craziness in the months leading up to an elections, peak right around election day, and then subside in the weeks afterward once the outcomes were known. Presidential election years brought more folks and posts than off-cycle elections, as you might imagine.

After the 2016 elections, there was no real letdown. The political craziness just wasn't going away as it normally did. And it was very much spilling over to non-political threads even if those threads weren't being turned political.

(I can't remember the posters involved, but I specifically remember a disagreement on a basketball stealth thread (after the election but before I was a mod) that got absolutely bonkers when 2 posters who disagreed politically disagreed on something related to basketball and just completely went at it. It was clear that their political disagreement was driving the bball argument. Temp bans were handed out and it was crazy.)

The board split was a way of trying to protect the non-political discussion from swamping all other discussion. If more time had been given to let the political disagreements die down, might a unified off-topic board been saved? Maybe. But the ZZLP was always swimming in fights and those disagreements spilled over on the ZZL, so I imagine they'd have spilled over on a unified off-topic board.

In the long run, the split obviously harmed the ZZL, but I'm not sure there was a way to know that would happen when the split occurred.
 
BlooVooDoo said:
A numbskull named meatyheeljr popped up on the ZZL last week to shitpost and it had me wondering what happened to the original meatyheel. Seems like he hasn’t posted since shortly after the board split. I can’t remember if he got permabanned or disappeared after making some outrageous claim about how successful he was.
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I can't check bans any more, but I'm pretty sure meaty got a permaban way back in the day.
 
CallMeTyler said:
Give us some examples. We read this all the time and I’ve yet to see anything substantiated by those doing the complaining.
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I mean I gave an example. I don't want to mess up snoop's ask me anything, but you can take a look at what I wrote earlier about how we treat certain bigoted comments differently than others. I'm not sure why that's not an example.
 
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