Don't Feed the Head Mod
September had come, and the weather was finally starting to cool.
"Mmm..."
I pulled an orange juice from the fridge, drank, and turned my phone on in the same motion.
Then...
"Hmm. It's been a while. Maybe I should write a post."
Lately—filling in on night broadcasts, studying video editing, all the rest of it—I hadn't been keeping up with the community. With my duties as head moderator, that is.
Not that I'd done nothing at all. Whenever I had a spare moment, I'd lurked.
"I did the bare minimum. That counts."
I'd checked in often enough to make sure nothing strange was going up, so as head mod I'd done the least that could be asked of me. Anyway, I tapped the compose tab and started writing.
"Nice."
It wasn't a title of truly elite bait quality, but it was interesting enough to pull a few eyes. Pleased with myself, I switched the phone off for a moment, certain the comment notifications would start ringing any minute.
But.
"...?"
What?
No comment notifications. Something was off. Even the most exhausted bait, waved around like that, always dragged out at least one person to tell you to cut the bullshit—and yet there was nothing. Sensing something wrong, I opened the community app at once, and understood immediately why the notification had never come.
"You're telling me nobody commented...?"
It made no sense at all. So I looked into it, and this was the state of the Internet Broadcasting Gallery.
"What the hell... Don't Feed the Head Mod?"
What was that even supposed to mean. I flinched, startled, and tapped the post.
And then...
"What is this even..."
I couldn't make sense of it. The post itself made my head spin before I'd even finished it. I hadn't cared about the gallery lately? A lie. A complete lie. If I didn't care about the gallery, I wouldn't have shut down the religion bait circulating through the Internet Broadcasting Gallery this morning. Truly—I'd moved with quick, practiced hands and swept it away before the regulars could get themselves stained by one of the three great taboos of community life.
In other words.
It was a frame job. It really was. Some rotten regular had written a vicious post for no reason but to smear the head moderator. I wrote a rebuttal on the spot.
I packed every last drop of my indignation into it.
But...
"No way..."
Even then, no comments. One minute. Two.
"..."
Nobody was commenting on my post. Even the view count was tragic.
"Seriously...?"
An absurd situation—not a single comment on a post by me, the head mod. I was just about to write another when—
Ding—!
"Oh?"
I went straight in at the sound of the notification.
But.
"..."
I was speechless. Dumbfounded, on top of that. Really. They were actually freezing the head mod out like this?
"..."
Something had gone wrong. Was this even real? I hadn't done a single thing wrong, and everyone was just going to ignore me?
"...Ha."
I couldn't believe it. And there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Not right now.
Think. The head moderator was one person—me—and facing me were the thousands, the tens of thousands, who used this gallery. A fight I could never win alone. I could be the head mod running the entire Internet Broadcasting Gallery and it wouldn't matter. Impossible was impossible. It was a numbers game from the start. What was I supposed to do by myself?
In other words.
"...What do I do."
At this rate they'd ignore me for days on end. And I could already guess why they were enjoying it. Head Mod's pissed we're ignoring them. This is fun, isn't it? Post from here, and every word would just be me dancing on their strings.
So...
"I have to flip the board."
The absolute majority had turned enemy. If I wanted to ignore the headcount and overturn the board from here...
"A bribe."
Yeah. Dead simple, and still the right answer. I got the gift vouchers ready on the spot and wrote a post.
I posted that, and wrote the next one immediately.
Namely...
And up it went.
Then—
"Exaaactly."
I'd known it would go this way. Scatter a single hamburger voucher and they came running, unable to help themselves.
Not everyone, of course.
"Ha."
Unbelievable. An Internet Broadcasting Gallery labor union? Please. I knew the whole thing was WWE—scripted theater, beginning to end—and I still couldn't believe it. Even so, I showed mercy, and left one comment on the post.
"Called it."
So they wanted to run the full WWE, did they. I grinned and checked the hamburger vouchers I had left.
"About three, I guess..."
Just enough. Not so many it'd look like I was trying. That confirmed, I swept my eyes over the whole gallery.
And there it was.
"Good, good."
The mood was drifting my way. Left like this, the Internet Broadcasting Gallery would slip back under my influence all on its own.
But.
"...Yeah. Of course it wasn't gonna be easy."
Fitting, for someone who'd seized the gallery with a single post—the craft was no joke. I read the thing through, carefully.
"...The prose on this, though. Actually unreal."
If I'm honest, had that post beaten me, I might have admitted it and handed over the head mod seat myself. But... they'd overlooked something.
Namely, that the people who lived in this gallery were not, as a rule, overflowing with loyalty.
The gallery reacted exactly as I'd predicted, right to the end. Smile, of course—the one with an actual username—didn't give up that easily.
They held out to the very end.
But.
"...Pfft!"
I saw the reply and couldn't keep the laugh down.
"Yeah. This is the Internet Broadcasting Gallery. This is a community."
Right. This was what a community was supposed to be. And so the WWE ended as my win.
After that, I picked out the three regulars who'd written the finest posts in the whole show.
But...
"When the hell did the assistant mod write this."
While I'd had my eyes locked on Smile, the assistant mod had put up a post that was genuinely unreal.
Namely...
To a genuinely creepy degree, the assistant mod had captured my entire history of activity and uploaded every last screenshot. The second I saw it, I wrote a comment and demanded answers.
"Hm."
An excellent assistant mod. And so hamburger vouchers went out to two people, the assistant mod included, and peace returned to the gallery.
And the very instant that peace was won...
Diiing—!!
"...Impeccable timing."
A stream notification rang through. I grinned, closed the community, and headed for the streaming site, Frolik.