Moderator is relatively unheard of because it was created by one person as a 20% project, became popular internally, but less so externally. I ended up owning it for most of its life (it was a team of 3 people at one point)<p>Externally, we mainly used it for civics related stuff, though it saw some serious popularity in niche areas (like people using it to do youtube videos + questions), and was, in fact, in the accelerating growth phase when it was deprecated years ago, and we essentially cut off new external usage.<p>Because of how it was being used, despite being deprecated, it was kept running for many years to make sure people could find or build alternatives.<p>(Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans :P)
Google used this internally to manage questions at their all-hands meetings, letting the audience upvote good questions and avoid unimportant questions. Are there any other good solutions?<p>It's a real problem at conferences: many of the "questions" asked during the Q&A at public meetings are a waste of time, a chance to show off [1].<p>I found an example of Yik Yak used for this purpose [2]<p>[1] <a href="http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-and-a/" rel="nofollow">http://vooza.com/videos/conference-q-and-a/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-future-of-conference-qa-and-the-future-is-yik-yak.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.theconglomerate.org/2015/03/i-have-seen-the-futur...</a>
I have seen it only once. It was used for Obama's election campaign and they reached me with Google moderator. As it usually is, they did not even care, am I American citizen or not. Default country, what can I say.
Here's a list of services Google has shut down: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discont...</a>