Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
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That’s where the protest is. The bare minimum.
Agree agree agree. Mod away, but let garbage, dupes, and low effort stuff gradually fill up the sub. See how the userbase reacts to neglectful moderation.
I think the blackouts worked well enough. You can’t go to 100% protest mode without raising awareness of the issue first. The blackouts accomplished that. There were many threads where people where people hadn’t heard of the problem before the blackouts happened.
Also you don’t want to come off as the unreasonable ones in this sort of thing. You want everyone to see the Reddit leadership as the unreasonable party.
Many activist movements have hurt themselves by going completely ballistic without most people knowing what’s going on. Demanding EVERYTHING CHANGE NOW OR ELSE!!! Which results in most people thinking it’s just a bunch of crazy people and ignoring them.
So it’s correct to escalate this over a course of weeks. I mean it’s very unlikely no matter what anyone does Reddit isn’t going to back down. But if mods went to DEFCON 1 on the first day, Reddit just bans the “crazy mods” and most people just think “well that was weird that a bunch of mods went nuts at the same time, oh well back to the memes.”
The end game was always going to be to migrate to another site. Sure there was a small possibility that the Reddit leadership would change, but that’s a very slim possibility. But you gotta get caught trying, you have to exhaust all other possibilities before you can convince people to take the step to migrate elsewhere.
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If the /r/IamA thing was the first thing that was tried would the reaction be the same as it is now? You’d have hundred of comments in that thread asking “what’s going on?” rather than in all of the blackout threads.
Reddit is a silly place. The John Oliver type fuckery is exactly the kind of thing that I liked about Reddit. People just being a little silly.
And the blackouts were just a pause. A warning shot. Meant to get a reaction from Reddit execs in an attempt to to still achieve a positive outcome. Sure it was messy, but what do you expect? There isn’t actually a single hive mind on reddit that can write an eloquent well reasoned essay that would sway the hearts of the reddit execs. They only think in terms of money, not words.
The IamA thing isn’t something that’s going to be effective. Read the comment the mods posted. They say clearly it’s not going to change anyone’s minds at Reddit. My guess is they didn’t do a black out in an attempt to act as a mediator. The IamA mods would have the best relationship with the reddit execs given the sub’s high profile status. Maybe they could convince them? But they didn’t.
Look at the timing of it. At midnight July 1, third party apps had to disconnect from Reddit. 8am the next morning, IamA makes their post.
This isn’t IamA mods making the big critical blow that’s going to force the Reddit execs to change their ways. This wasn’t an ultimatum, this is the mods of IamA giving up. They tried to find a resolution, but the deadline passed. Nothing left to do but say “fuck it, we don’t get paid for this shit anyway”
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I knew the protests weren’t gonna do anything the moment they gave it a time limit at the very beginning. Shit like that makes it seem like they wanted the protest to fail
Well this is the bare minimum because if Reddit wants to have direct control over subreddits they ought to pay moderators. The fact they will still moderate is still a concession that i think they should rethink. Literally if Reddit wants control over communities let them deal with all the hassle of moderation. Sometimes stuff end and it does not need to be a gracious end.
Copy and paste mirror
[Mod Post] The Future of IAmA : IAmA
To our users, AMA guests, and friends,
You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit’s poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.
This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.
Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:
Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.
Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.
The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.
We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.
Amazing how little has changed, really.
So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won’t yield to the pressure of a protest. They’ve told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.
So, moving forward, we’re going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we’ll recruit people to replace them as needed.
However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:
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Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.
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Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).
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Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
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Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
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Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
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Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
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Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts
Moving forward, we’ll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn’t mean we’re allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you’ll need to pay more attention.
Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
Thanks for the ride everyone, it’s been fun.
Sincerely,
The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)
thank you for posting this, it annoys me to no end the amount of “omg this happened now on reddit” posts that link to the source on reddit. Like that defeats the purpose of leaving the platform if I’m forced to go back anyway and give them traffic. Make a mirror, stop giving the site more traffic lol
Yep, it’s still clingy with the direct links and the constant posts, so many saying “Reddit is DEAD to me!”… yet they keep on talking non-stop about Reddit.
So why are you here talking about it?
Yeah theres no point in mods making a community a special place when reddit is going out of their way to shit on the mods and users.
It’s pretty insane the amount of work they did for free. I never even thought about the effort that went into a sub like that. Good for them
Wow the mods were really working hard to make IAMA a special place. Hope the drop in quality becomes clear …
Thank you I really didn’t want to open Reddit today.
Thank you for posting this. I still have RIF installed and refuse to download the reddit app, so I can’t see the original post. Appreciate it.
refuse to download the reddit app, so I can’t see the original post
Rumor has it, Reddit has a website.
idk about others but, I left that site because I don’t agree with their policies, I would much rather have a mirror then give the site more traffic.
Sure, but why grace the dumpster fire with traffic, when you also can just copy the relevant parts here?
Sounds like a lot of work to see something on a site I don’t want to be on.
Do you want to hate read or not???
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let’s start an AMA community here on this instance
Maybe I’m already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?
It’s dead to me.
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
I would imagine everyone subscribed to !reddit does.
Problem is that I’m browsing the All filter until I find the right communities for me, so people like me inadvertently see these unwanted Reddit topic posts too 😕
It’s always a good idea to take a look at the community label to understand the context though
I agree but on the other hand the schadenfreude is delicious
I wish I could have some less of it, at the moment though 90% of the posts on the fediverse are Reddit this, and Reddit that.
Post some other stuff please.
Please look at the community you are in right now :)
Be the change you want to see
It’s like seeking drama about your Ex when you find out they’re dating an uglier person
This is what makes Lemmy a better platform IMO, it’s far more community oriented and far less revenue/profit oriented. “You’re a mod who wants to get paid? Yeah join the club, we’re losing money on server costs.”
Yeah the unfortunate reality is that irl the system we live in still stucks. But as you said that’s precisely what makes the people willing to put all this together, in spite of the difficulties, so special. It’s like an anti profit motive lol.
The people who coordinated celebrity AMAs did it for free…? That disgusting sisyphian labour was done for free? That might have been the most important work any mod team did from the perspective of Reddit’s PR. How could Reddit be that ungrateful? They had it all
Yeah, I can’t fathom why people work for a for-profit company as volunteers, especially in time-consuming and high-profile jobs like this.
That’s because the official Reddit stance was that the communities themselves belonged to the moderators so it wasn’t that you were doing with for Reddit, they were just providing you with a tool to build a community.
Of course that was clearly a lie, and as soon as moderators exercised their own power by protesting, with the support of their communities, Reddit was like “jk never mind, actually we own the communities and you’re disposable”.
I really don’t understand why anyone would volunteer for a corporation for free, that doesn’t pay you, doesn’t care about you, and will drop you like hot garbage if it benefits them. There was a myth of ownership over the subreddits, but that myth is gone.
Kind of like the reddit Sekrit Santa shutting down. It was huge, really hard to run, and the volunteers all agreed to stop.
I vaguely remember reading at the time a lot of users went there only for the exchanges and didn’t use any other part of reddit.
I was surprised they didn’t participate in the blackout, but at least it’s better late than never.
This is the perfect change. Admin can’t kick you out, all the high value is gone.
I wonder how long before we start seeing some plausible but fake AMAs
IAMA Reddit CEO with a micro penis AMA
I was skeptical at first, but the intimate knowledge of his micropenis convinced me.
🍿🍿🍿 … How can you not love this?
Truly masterful.
Reddit fired Victoria because they didn’t want to spend any cash on this kind of thing.
They fired Victoria because they were trying to aggressively monetize IAmAs in ways that were going to fuck community interests, and Victoria pushed back. Think Rampart, except companies can pay to ensure that it doesn’t become a PR fiasco, so it’s guaranteed astroturf.
Reddit has been classy ever since.
Which makes no sense, because the high-profile AMAs she made happen certainly broadened reddit’s public appeal by quite a bit.
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All mods of reddit should refuse to do it for free.
Tricky question. But yeah, if you’re modding a channel just for the sake of being a mod and you do it for free. You’re a sucker.
I help moderate a small discord channel, Maybe I’m a sucker too. But I help so our outfit can have a place to hang out outside of the game, share ideas and plan events.
I bet some reddit mods feel the same way.
Your hard work is rewarded with a home for your community. Sounds very worthwhile if you ask me. That’s very different from work that gets rewarded by lining the pockets of shareholders.
Also the prospect of profit would just pull in the wrong kinds of people.
Tbh moderation is one of those things AI might be able to do pretty well, at least sometime down the line.
What’s the point, just move out of reddit already and let it die
Delete all the content you donated and never log in again.
I wish there was a way to quickly delete all your content. I could just delete my account, but I don’t my comments and posts to still be around and orphaned.
Request a GDPR takeout from reddit, wait for them to deliver, and then use a tool like Redact that can use that data to delete everything.
wait for them to deliver
Nearly 20 days later and I’m still waiting
Me too.
unfortunately all of the work this team has done made this a big enough draw to justify paid professional mods. Anything that draws millions of views and engagement can be taken over by reddit. I doubt a single tear is being shed over full control being handed over to a paid reddit employee
The problem is that the people that have done it for years has a bunch of experience a new team doesn’t have. It will most likely take years for the subreddit to run as well as it has been.
I think the fact that reddit has never paid moderators in the past shows that they fear setting such a precedent. IAmA has always been a big draw for users and celebrities, yet they never put an employee in charge of it.
Once they start paying one set of moderators, other mods might start to expect something in return for their labor. This especially won’t look good to investors who might otherwise like the business model of paying nobody for moderation.
The used to have an in house employee that was paid to write up the answers. I forget their name and handle though. But that was axed years ago in favour of the free moderators doing the job.
The cost of person hours is huge though. Whatever the “wage” they would consider for mods would essentially be volunteer slave labour.
I think you may be referring to the admin that used to coordinate the AmAs, Victoria Taylor.
They shot themselves in the foot back then, and apparently they haven’t changed in their decision making.
Yes her!
“Reddit in chaos” haha. Sometimes things are so relative.
Oh yeah, they’ve done so poorly since then… You can almost go a whole day without running into an AMA.
