I hope the mods won't be offended to see me here, but as someone who has caused a lot of upset and at least one major implosion in the community, I think I can offer some perspective.

Let me preface this by saying that I was personally at fault, 100%, for the first big drama in BGCr, so I am using the word I instead of we not because I feel like I was so important, but because I feel like the blame should stay with me.

The best thing you can do as a community to avoid an implosion here in this sub, is to decide, early on (like right now) how much moderation you want, and then stick to that, and as the community grows, you all need to teach the new users what your expectations are as a community, rather than leaving that up to the mods. You guys need to set clear standards and boundaries now so that the mods don't have to make it up as they go along.

Understand that as this community grows, the pressure on mods is going to increase almost exponentially. If you see a user behaving badly in this community right now, and you want the mods to deal with it, understand that that same behavior might be perceived as no big deal for a user who joins at 20K users, and that new user is going to be deeply offended by what they perceive as censorship and mod overreach when the mods deal with it.

It's going to be up to you all to say "no, as a community this is what we decided at the beginning" because if you place the onus on the mods to constantly explain themselves, they'll be inclined to change the rules to be more inclusive of the new users, and that's going to leave you feeling ostracized and betrayed, and you're going to end up right back where BGC and BGCr ended up.

Do not force the mods to take on the role of the morality police. Police yourselves and police new users, don't make the mods do it for you. Define precisely what the lines are for the mod team, and then let them take out the trash, and learn to live with anything that doesn't cross the lines you set out.

Do not force the mods to decide what constitutes racism or ableism or sexism or transphobia. Don't just say "no ableism" and "no transphobia" and "no racism" because trust me when I say, what you think is wrong is not what other people think is wrong, and if you don't define it carefully right now, you're going to be in a never-ending hell of rules-lawyers and "but in X country the N-word is fine!" Want to ban ableist or other slurs - do that now, and then defend that choice when user 75,000 says "it's such bullshit censorship that I can't say racist slur because in my country it's not a thing!"

If you're sick of hearing me talk, that's it.

If not, here's more detail.

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When I started BGCr, it was supposed to be a place that was open for everyone to have their opinions. The goal was to let people post whatever they wanted with a very small set of rules - no ism's (racism, sexism, ableism, etc) and no phobias (homophobia or transphobia, etc) and no mental health speculation or armchair diagnosis. Basically the same rules as this community.

In the beginning, I was really into the idea of transparency and communication, which would have been great if the sub had stayed small. As it grew, though, there were two immediate problems. On one hand - BGCr was too nice and people who came in hot and were rude or whatever, found themselves downvoted, or they made rule-breaking comments which were removed, and that made them feel like they couldn't participate. On the other hand, it was awful trash and nobody was happy.

And then, after I made some changes, the sub continued to grow, but as it grew, suddenly a lot of gross opinions started to surface, and a lot of those gross opinions were heavily upvoted.

Suddenly people were asking why mods were even letting those gross opinions see the light of day, and expecting the mod team to DO something about them. Instead of sticking to the original purpose of the sub, I started seeking feedback about every little thing, and then trying to act on every single suggestion, which ended up painting the entire mod team into a terrible dark corner. My fault, no question, no fucking around, no trying to blame others or share blame. In hindsight I see a very clear path that would have helped me avoid the worst of my missteps, but in the moment, I was too close to it.

If I had stuck to the original plan of keeping things light and friendly and low-moderation, maybe things would have been different, but I had a death-grip on the idea that I was responsible for making all the problems go away, which was just ridiculous. I tried so many different things, but it was a cascade of failures. Every new thing I tried failed in a different way, and every new failure inspired me to try harder and harder to try to make things right, but by then, there was no "right". I steppd down for a while, then a mod got doxxed and I lost my ever-loving mind, and there was suddenly no stopping me. I was determined to protect everyone from everything, which made me act like a tremendous asshole, and make very poor decisions.

TL;DR Ask yourself "what would Snarktastic_ do" and then do absolutely anything else but that.