I was in the stands. I watched it live.
I stopped watching wrestling after that.
The basic events are summarized here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerpoke_of_Doom
But the gist is this:
The creative team at WCW added a second multiple hour long broadcast to their schedule in 1998, at that point they were doing somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours of live, unscripted television every week. They were out of ideas.
In the meantime, they had given complete creative control, or at least veto power, to Terry Gene Bollea, better known as “Hulk” Hogan. (I've written about my thoughts on the hulkster: https://ajroach42.com/heroes-dead-and-otherwise/ I won't revisit them here.)
Those two things taken together led to the situation described in the above article. A match that had been hyped for months didn't happen, and instead another perhaps equally exciting match was going to happen, and then ... nope, ha ha, you all suck and you're dumb for liking this.
While that was happening, one of the announcers said to the TV audience that something more exciting was happening on the rival program, and ... well, the ratings speak for themselves. "over half a million viewers switched channels from Nitro on TNT to Raw is War on the USA Network"