I’m hereby announcing my resignation as a moderator of PrivacyGuides. Over the past couple months, dngray has repeatedly been interfering with my job as a moderator (most of these cases were never public), making it unnecessarily energy-intensive and time-consuming for me, beyond what I can afford to spend on this as volunteer work. Moderation is an extremely tough job to do right in and of itself, it’s very easy to burn out, and it can only work when the rest of the team is supportive and constructive, including in their criticism.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case with dngray, who has been increasingly meddling with moderation decisions without bothering to understand the “why” - something that, I might add, quite a few other community members have done over the years (for which I’m thankful!). There are other factors at play here, too; he has repeatedly shown CoC-violating behaviour himself, both in public and private rooms. He’s added Tommi as a moderator without discussing it with any other team members, despite concerns that I’d expressed earlier about potentially disruptive behaviour. Several more such unilateral changes have occurred over the months. This total lack of communication is a real problem - it makes my job much harder.

I’ve repeatedly attempted to resolve these issues in private over the past several months, but unfortunately this has not resulted in any change; dngray simply refuses to accept that he is ever doing anything wrong at all, no matter the concerns or points that are brought up. Other team members do not seem to have the energy or desire to engage with the issue either - I won’t speculate about the reasons for that beyond commenting that the internal team discussions have not been going well for some time now, but the end result is that I see no way to resolve this matter internally anymore.

To put it bluntly: dngray is making my job as a moderator unsustainable. When a high-ranking team member not only repeatedly violates the CoC and is not open to changing that, and shows zero appreciation for or recognition of the significant amount of work that I’ve been putting into keeping this community healthy for the past several years, but also actively interferes with that work and constantly violates my boundaries despite asking them to stop doing so… it becomes impossible for me to continue doing this work. I have my own mental health and energy levels to think about, and I cannot afford to spend twice as much energy on it just because a single team member cannot behave respectfully.

I wish the best of luck to the remaining mods, and as before, I’m always happy to give advice if somebody gets stuck. I’ll probably stick around, at least as long as the community doesn’t fall apart again. But I will not be moderating the PG community anymore. It feels like ‘abandoning’ the community to me, and I fucking hate it, but I simply cannot afford to keep doing this under these working conditions. I have to put my own health first.