It's the mods/admins that are the problem. I can't even say that over there because if I do, they'd ban me. It's against the rules to criticize leadership, and the only people who do express opinions about it are doing their best to suck up and prevent getting the purge next. The speed with which they can unperson a poster over there and then force the mob to join in with the denouncement is a particularly Maoist China like aspect as well.

What I'm actually impressed by is how closely it models real world despotic regimes with zero stakes. In particular, they follow the standard pattern. Set up a society that is generally principled and has the mandate of its people. Find an adversary who is attacking your group constantly. At ChapoChat, this was initially some Discord drama (the Kerryposting) but that subsided. Then they started to get raided every now and then by users from cumtown and elsewhere posting transphobic copypasta. Much better as a big bad. So they identified transphobia as the main enemy to their site, despite it almost entirely occuring from new accounts (meaning that the REAL enemy to their site was raiding and their refusal to do IP/browser based bans or shut down registration most of the time). So they did a few things to fight it, such as mandating pronouns, which was divisive, even among trans users. Doesn't matter. Due to the fight against the Adversary, we must all band together and trust the party. To make sure users had to police even their thoughts, they started purging users who downvoted the threads they thought were good. Their current attitude is that downvotes are removed and wrongthink is not punished democratically, but rather by admin bans. I've seen bans for "debatebroism", for "criticizing religion", and for "wrecker shit". I've seen people banned for asking for mod/admin elections as "trying to start a color revolution". It doesn't matter if you've been a beloved member of the community for years. You get no warning, no appeal, and no path to right any wrongs you are accused of.

Want to see it? Go here and filter to only banned from site or community. Here's a screenshot one of the recent purges.

So now they've reached the end stage: Absolute power to set right and wrong wielded by a few people at the top, integrated spectacle of experts, secrecy, and unanswerable lies, and a userbase who is terrified to say anything about it. They are also wondering right now why their userbase is dwindling so fast. Some of their mods, especially TC69, seem to legitimately suffer from personality disorders (narcissism, cluster B, etc.) and do things like get drunk and go on ban tears. She has cowed previously good mods like Beatnik by threatening him to "self-crit" constantly, otherwise he'll be purged like all of the other leadership the current mods purged to consolidate power over their pocket sized kingdom. Now she's taken away his adminship because of a sexual harassment scandal that she most likely manufactured herself just to purge the last cis man from the admin ranks.