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)
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.
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.
(Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans :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.
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.
(Despite what people may think of Google here or there, at least all of my projects have had good shutdown plans :P)