Ian had this very particular vision for the future of the site, in terms of culture and personality, and became increasingly overt in his pursuit of that vision (heavy hands,
ctopus, so on). And that rubbed people wrong. And when people confronted him on it he seemed to never know when to back down, which was a hilarious and perfect force multiplier for trolling. Also he was making a huge effort to monetize the site and started to super-care about SEO and people were like seriously? Youre going to ban someone for 3 days for bumping an old thread because it might impact your SEO and youll make $17 this month instead of $17.10?
But ultimately what really sank the ship was when we found out he was trying to sell Boris on some porn site forum. Apparently that was why he wanted to smooth out the rough edges so to speak, so he could appeal to a larger number of new posters (his theory, not ours), which would translate into a better market price.
And aint nobody got time for that. Id say within a month of someone digging up the post he made, easily 90% of the daily posters walked away, and the remaining posters went from making 5 posts a day to like 3 posts a week.