I was always impressed with your stamina when you were here. I know I couldn't have handled the social pressure of doing what you were doing in a public venue.
Seconded. I work in tech, but I've never done community manager jobs. In one of my earlier jobs, I made the mistake of looking at user reviews unfiltered.
Let me tell you, it's
completely different when you work for the company that's bearing the brunt of all the "joy" the internet offers. You start to feel personally responsible for every bad experience users have, no matter how trivial or dumb. It whips you into this insane frenzy of self-loathing and desire to read more and more, to know everything anyone has ever disliked about your product.
Nonwithstanding that, I ultimately still had the option to stop reading. And - eventually - I did. I had to. I don't have the patience or the fortitude. But I'm well aware that other teams in my company don't have that option. It's their job to drink from the sewage hose. To wade through the criticisms and the bile for stuff that can actually be turned into bug reports. To polish the one or two diamonds in it, as gifts to the other teams when morale flags.
Community managers, user support, and all those kinds of people, ARE SAINTS. If Allan and Conal say it's become impossible to deal with the forums, I believe them. A selfish part of me is hoping there's some way of making it work by picking community mods, but I understand where they're coming from.