>>14978396For decades now, to be a moderator in a wrestling forum or website or subreddit meant having an enormous level of knowledge about non-WWE programming. You see the same thing in Music forums (underground music), Movie forums (non-Hollywood films), etc. It's the nature of the beast. Wrestling Smarks saw their small window come and go with TNA bringing in Hogan/Bischoff and imploding. Then Tony Khan represented the second coming, and once the AEW owner with access to billions of dollars made it clear he's not going anywhere, the Smark moderators cashed in all their chips and went All In on AEW. They spent the better part of 2019-2022 absolutely destroying, mass-banning and censoring thousands/tens of thousands of users who dared to criticize AEW and "undermine" it's ability to succeed. Smark Mods saw any attacks on AEW as an attack directly on themselves and their livelihoods, and the result was a mass-silencing of criticism.
Some people may feel like AEW gets shit on too much in 2024, but you have to understand that the backlash was all organic. Disliking YouTube videos. Negative comments about AEW getting 5-10x more likes than positive comments. In the places where anti-AEW sentiment couldn't be controlled, couldn't be censored and silenced, that's where it grew the most. And now, to this day, if you look around at the most anti-AEW places on the internet (YouTube, here), they're places where Tony Khan and his Smark Army can't buy the censorship or the silencing of the critics.
This is poetic justice and the backlash isn't over and will never so much as slow down unless and until Tony Khan himself makes it clear how much he DESPISES censorship of AEW criticism, until Tony calls for the mass-unbanning/unblocking of AEW critics across social media, and until Tony makes it clear that silencers and censors have no place in Wrestling moving forward. The Smarks are never going to get a fucking clue on their own, so they deserve all this smoke.
