I didn't actually kill anything, no.

Over the years, I have repeatedly had the experience that I join some forum and it grows dramatically while I am there. After I leave, it collapses in upon itself and becomes a shadow of its former self.

It felt to me like they grew dramatically because of me and they collapsed dramatically because I left. I considered calling this blog: Confessions of a Forum Killer.

I joined TAGMAX and at some point the owner put out a call for volunteers. She wanted to turn a voluntarily health and welfare organization into a tax deductible official charity.

I volunteered to be a moderator for TAGMAX and it's just one of several related email lists. I don't recall if she immediately made me a member of every list or if that came after she asked me to take on the role of lead moderator and I accepted. 

I was the moderator of TAGMAX just a few days when traffic began to ramp up dramatically. It was extremely clear there was a cause and effect relationship. This wasn't "coincidence."

That was my first online forum and the owner saw something special in me, that I had more to offer than the other moderators, and that was based on some years experience running lists and she had some extremely painful experiences in the process. 

My second forum was Cyburbia. I accidentally ended up a low level moderator with moderation powers limited to the sub I inadvertently founded when I asked the owner to review my college assignment and give me feedback on my imaginary pretend proposal and he apologized for not being able to make me moderator that same day or something. 

Most other Cyburbia mods had global mod powers. I was deathly ill and doped to the gills and they wanted to limit the damage I could do, so I only had mod powers for my sub.

I was a homemaker and part-time college student, not a professional planner. Most mods there were professional planners.

Dan Tasman, the owner of Cyburbia, complained endlessly about a few things, one of which was lack of international membership. The vast majority of active participants were American or Canadian. 

I felt I could fix that. In fact, I began working on that before I was a moderator at all, while still trying to prove I'm not an ill-mannered troglodyte incapable of behaving because of the terrible first impression I made.

I was there just six months and didn't yet have any mod powers when membership began to skyrocket, especially international membership. I had set a goal of killing a site-specific meme and had accomplished that and I felt absolutely certain this largely caused this dramatic change.

In both cases, I left for a time and went back later and they were shadows of their former selves. There were other forums where I never had mod powers, though in one I was offered ownership and declined, and they also saw improved traffic etc. while I was there and collapsed after I left.

First impressions are powerful shapers of opinion and my early experiences with TAGMAX and Cyburbia inclined me to feel SUPER important and powerful. It was a psychological and emotional burden because I felt guilty about these forums doing poorly in the aftermath of my departure, I felt it was MY FAULT! I somehow KILLED them!

And I didn't know how I killed them and I felt like a dangerous person with an evil super power I couldn't control. It took me a long, long time to come up with other ways of viewing what had happened.  

One of the things I came up with is that it's kind of like I was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a person who was dying and when I stopped, they weren't able to breathe on their own. 

I breathed life temporarily into something already in trouble. That not me killing it because I stopped when I couldn't keep doing it. 

Cyburbia was a social outlet for the owner, Dan Tasman, someone who double majored in Computer Science and Urban Planning, two very different subjects, both very intellectually demanding. He didn't really have friends or a social life and didn't really need Cyburbia to make money. 

He finally monetized it some but in a fashion that most likely harmed the forum overall. I've thought a lot about forums and how you make them successful and how you define success and whether it's best to do it as a charity or a business or a hobby.

I don't know The Answer in part because I think The Answer depends on who is creating it and what their goals are. 

I declined ownership of Autism-Mercury when it was offered to me. One of the spin-off lists from TAGMAX that I joined I also declined to set up or be a mod. I said "I'll join if someone else wants to run it. But I'm not running it."

I didn't like having what felt like an evil superpower for accidentally killing lists by simply  leaving when I got fed up with them and how they treated me. I didn't like feeling like I became the heart of the list and my departure was like cutting its heart out.

Autism-Mercury collapsed anyway after I stopped participating. One of the spin-off lists from TAGMAX quietly got killed after my confrontation with someone, a story told previously on this site.

Metafilter and Hacker News don't seem to have collapsed to any degree because of my departure. Or perhaps I don't really know because I stopped reading and them not having pulled the plug doesn't really prove there's been no impact. 

I feel like Reddit isn't actually healthy either. I never really got traction there, so I don't feel like the blackouts and protests and what not have anything to do with me.

I really just set out to say that "It's kind of like if you stop giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to someone dying and then stopping and learning that no amount of that makes them able to breathe on their own and they die when you stop. That's not the same thing as killing someone."

I don't have a point other than perhaps "Don't piss all over someone who is the heart of your forum. If they leave, it dies."

Maybe online forums need to go the way of the dinosaur. People mostly can't be good to each other in person. No amount of saying "Remember the human." somehow improves the vile nature of most of the human race when helping them connect via internet.