Most of you here probably don't know my handle or haven't interacted with me personally since I've taken a back seat for a while now. I was the very first moderator here and I'm very proud of that fact and what I've accomplished in my earlier years. This post is being done off the top of my head so forgive the absence of any links or accurate dates.
I can remember the exact summer 2013 where I finished packing and was literally about to head out the door when I got the email that Blender.SE was had left Area51 and was entering private beta. I was beyond excited since I was an avid user of the software so I cancelled my entire summer, created an account and began churning out answers. Not accounting for StackExchange employees I was the 8th user to sign up. Today we have almost 69k (nice) users at the time of this writing.
I was eager to contribute and racked up points quickly (back then it was extremely fun to watch your reputation grow) and got to 4k points where I unlocked some moderator privileges, later on I applied to be a community mod and then was eventually promoted to a full time moderator voted in by the community some years later.
We have 4 (2?) moderators now at the time of writing but I have worked alongside 4 separate others in the past. I also take great pride in knowing that I was instrumental in deciding the approach the community took on how to tighten our scope regarding questions and exercising my privileges to keep the site clean, promote it whenever and wherever I could including getting the creator of Blender to join and organizing several events in the past with notable famous artists in the community. There's a lot more I could drone on about but similar to others I have dedicated a significant amount of my somewhat younger years on this site (I was 19 when I joined).
Now enough of the history. If you care or know what has been happening in the past few months regarding SE you should understand why people are leaving. I won't repeat it or speak on it but if you're interested you can poke around. I'll just say that at the end of the day people just want to ask a question and get an answer and be on their way, nothing more. Anything else is a distraction and waste of my time and others.
To see how SE now treats their "valued" employees and people who have volunteered years of their life for pretty much nothing in return is discouraging to say the least. Therefore as of today I wrap up my involvement with StackExchange completely. I will no longer participate on any of the sites and will not be replying to any messages going forward. This is not me being vengeful, I'm literally just tired, in general... a break is needed.
Cheers and I wish the best for this community, will not forget the friends I've made along the way.
Quick facts
- 8th user to join
- I've asked 0 questions
- First user to unlock moderator privileges, first community moderator, longest serving moderator
- — Some more I can't remember off the top of my head. :)