The thing that bothers me is the number of people on the r/steam announcement commenting that the mods are doing this to hold on to power and have sold out to the admins. Speaking as someone who has previously run a community (though a much, much smaller one) there is a lot of hard work and effort that goes on behind the scenes to make sure that these kinds of internet spaces stay clean and healthy. It’s easy to say “Look at the power-tripping mods”, and yes those do exist, but to pretend that every mod is like that sells short the people who sacrifice of themselves for the betterment of the community. A lot of metaphorical and occasionally literal blood, sweat, and tears go into managing an online social space, which I can attest to. Does that excuse poor mod behavior? Never! However, we shouldn’t cut off our own nose to spite our face. I just hope that we can stop fighting ourselves and direct our collective vitriol at the real perpetrators; spez and his cronies.
Basically. I think there are certain cultural aspects of Russian society that are stuck over a century in the past. Unless those things get brought closer to the present, their society won’t change; we’ll see this whole thing play out again in the future. The average Russian citizen needs to see that the West doesn’t want to destroy them, that life can be better than what they currently experience, and that the world doesn’t need to be as harsh and demanding as the believe it ought to be. That’s a tall order though, so there’s no telling if that can happen in the near-future.