The culture of PWOT, which infected the Workshop, is both why I abandoned my first Cracked account and why I never pitched an article under my new one.
But Wong isn't closing the forum because the culture is toxic, he is closing it because he has become a one-man moderation team and doesn't have the time.
It's too bad. I am under the impression that a big factor in the site's decline into clickbait was that it got clicks, initially. But given how circlejerky their clickbait was and given how often they begged for new writers, I wonder: had they either fostered a less hostile atmosphere in PWOT or put the Workshop on a separate forum, could they have avoided or at least delayed the site's decline.
Also, ETA this out-of-context quote:
David Wong wrote:7. "But this is the last non-terrible forum on the internet! The rest are full of trolls and Nazis!"
That's just not true at all.
ETAA: They are looking for a new forum to join. I am torn between hoping we get a new influx of people, and fearing that we get a large number of people who bring PWOT's culture with them.