The incorrect assumption there is that it's my own interpersonal issues that stood in the way of goodness in the first place. While I won't defend them as a good thing (sometimes they do have their benefits, but sometimes they don't) the community's failure has to do with the way it was organized, not my personal issues per se.

The problem was this. /r/writing wasn't very good, so I wanted to make another sub. So I did. But that community became very much ensnared in its own dislike and intolerance of people who were not good enough, far beyond my own dislike and intolerance. This was because the community was defined in a negative way (i.e. "not /r/writing"). So I tried something new.

I based the community around an automated system that encouraged good feedback and regular productivity. This worked, but had the side effect of only encouraging better-than-average feedback (or feedback that was wrong but "sounded good") and attracted people who were mostly interested in the raw production of writing, not any actual improvement. So instead of getting a lot of angry people, we instead got a lot of people who drafted and published at insane speeds, but mostly published rubbish.

That's not to say I don't have respect or interest in people who create or publish the equivalent of junk food for readers, but having a community almost entirely made up of them caused its own problems. Instead of dislike for others, there was dislike for people who took writing a bit more slowly or (dare I say it) throughtfully. And instead of intolerance, there was a mechanism that pushed others away (the communal assumption that wordcount was all that mattered, and that doing things like reading classic literature or writing a more literary piece was a waste of time).

On balance, a lot of the moderation I would do day-to-day was to try to offset the bias of the community I'd made. When it was more hateful, I tried to be more humorous and even (I know some people won't believe it) encouraging; when it was more about becoming a Literature Machine, I would try and challenge the conversation more often. I was also, as others have noted, a pretty big jerk. And while that could be seen as a problem, it still was not the underlying problem of the community at any time in my own view.

Even if you argue that view is somehow warped, I'm still interested in creating something that has a good mix of writing discussion that doesn't boil down to "fuck people who write in coffeeshops" or "buy my erotica." Achieving this requires me to rethink the structure of the community, not my personal, as you say, issues. While they may end up being a problem in the future that needs fixing, they're certainly not the problem that led me into the issues I'm talking about here.