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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[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:
Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.
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).
Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
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.
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.
Sounds like a lot of work to see something on a site I don’t want to be on.
🍿🍿🍿 … How can you not love this?
Maybe I’m already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?
It’s dead to me.
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.
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 😕
I’m sure a lot of people are in the same boat as you as well. I know I am. I just meant to point out that a decent number of people do care considering how many people are subbed to !reddit.
I’ll admit I’m at least somewhat interested though, else I would have kept scrolling.
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.
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”
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
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.
reddit was/is not really a for profit corporation as they burn money every day. So they paid for the platform people could use to build their communities and people were willing to do it for free. Now reddit wants to make money and sell all those communities to the fancy new LLM companies.
I think in the early days volunteer moderators were necessary because you wouldn’t want a paid employee dictating the content and direction of a community sub that was created by users. That’s what made reddit special back then. Now that it has a high user volume it’s taken on a life of its own and the company feels they can move forward without those volunteers. I think it’s a mistake but time will tell.
