Just my 2 cents but having started posting here as a result of the Empire fallout and being treated suprising fair by both Kiwi and Rude (due to the time having spent a bunch of time cyber arguing with the group) I think both of them and what they had for a vision (keeping cyber fighting confined here vs attacks everywhere) was a great job well done. Yes I understand everybody helped by posting and people like Danialson almost singlehandly kept coming back for more when most people woould have tired and quit but really it was a great job they did being semi fair for everyone.
the problem is you could make the argument that hedge and max_rep are why the G&O is popular.
board activity is self-perpetuating. if i head out for 20 minutes, come back and refresh the page and a board has new posts, i'll take a look in there and see what's up. i started posting in the V (or the Y, whatever it was back then) when the "squad" was basically mars/adonis/sarcasm before show/MOS/groink/etc joined up. then i took a break for a few months and started posting again down here before i had any clue who "kiwiol" was. hell at the time i couldn't stand the whole group, but after a while i came around.
consider the Z. no mod, and no one starts threads in there. it's just a dump for really, really pointless threads. yet it gets a small amount of activity. why? because people follow the threads they were posting in earlier. that's where the V's success comes in. it became the dumping ground for all of the flaming/squad-ish threads and people followed them down here, then next thing you know they're just starting in here.
ask yourself this: what did kiwi actually do in his mod capacity? he didn't edit threads, he wasn't able to move threads INTO the V, and he rarely deleted stuff (until lately). all he really did was sticky/unsticky shit. any promotion or activity he put in the V had nothing to do with being a mod, he could have easily done that as a poster. and to that extent he didn't do fuck all more than any of the other guys.
the moderating down here may have been "fair", but that had zip zero to do with its popularity.