- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemdro.id
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:
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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 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.
Do you want to hate read or not???
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?
shit bro no way, really?
Oh man, I’m not going back to Reddit, but it would almost be worth it to watch all the fake celebrity trolls do AMAs.
Thank you I really didn’t want to open Reddit today.
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Maybe I’m already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?
It’s dead to me.
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
Switch to All and then sort by New Comments. You’ll it’s like All->New and you’ll get a lot of interesting stuff.
Some people like to watch the fire go out.
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’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.
Is there a way to block a community from feed? Not for this case, just trying to figure out how lemmy works while app i was using gets adapted.
It’s like seeking drama about your Ex when you find out they’re dating an uglier person
🍿🍿🍿 … How can you not love this?
Truly masterful.
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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
I know it sounded stupid in hindsight, but hey at least it got the ball rolling on asking the question if reddit was really worth going back to after all this blew over (of course, we know the answer to that already)
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.
“has all the funds they need to hire people”
r/IAmA is really coming full circle
That is an understatement. I’m a former mod of r/iama (u/Brownboy13) and I was signing on to handle a high profile ama when Victoria messaged that she wouldn’t be able to help us as she was let go without notice. Admin didn’t even bother informing the guest that the employee handholding them through the process would no longer be available. We were caught entirely off guard and I don’t think /r/iama has ever been the same. There was a level of trust the /u/chooter would be in the same room as a guest or at least on a call and make sure it was them answering and not pr teams. It’s been like fucking pr junket since then.
This was the start of my disillusionment with reddit, and it seems to have been finalized with this last shitshow of a decision.
Wow, hard to grasp that was 8 years ago?!
I was never a user of IAMA, but I clearly remember how shitty reddit behaved in that situation.
I did delete my account later, and only lurked through links to my favorite subs for a few years. Now I have deleted my links too.
Reddit has devolved steadily for to many years, time to cut the cord completely.
tbh I had totally forgotten about the Victoria situation. In retrospect, maybe I am dumber than I realized for being surprised at some of the recent Reddit decisions.
IDK, I started using reddit 15 years ago. Maybe you had to contrast it to what it was back then to see it clearly.
For instance it was open Source, which they abandoned about 10 years ago.
Reddiquette was a thing that was actually observed, and you were reminded of if you broke it. Have you even heard of it?
e/The_Doonald could never have existed if reddiquette had been observed. Pau who worked to prevent such things were fired in 2014.
The new layout is pandering to bling and short attention span, a repeat of mistakes made by Digg, that hurt more valuable content, and increase the amount of comments that are nothing more than noise without value.
Cofounder Alexis Ohanian was instrumental in the firing of Victoria, which till this day has no reasonable explanation why she was fired.
There are few real values left at reddit, but fortunately they exist here. ;)
Good answer!
Now we should protect these values so that they will stay on the platform for always.
Thank you and yes.
A good start for that is to not forget the Lemmy code of conduct:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
Lemmy.world takes it a bit further and borrows from Mastodon. (Linked from the front page.)
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16-year Reddit account here. There was definitely a different atmosphere in the earlier days. The community aspect felt stronger.
They also hired exclusively from the community, and were part of it. All the early admins, myself included, came from reddit. The idea of an admin with a 1 karma account was absurd
I agree, and the difference is huge. As you say, there was much more community about it. Not because it was smaller IMO, it was plenty big when I started using it. But the users were different, and it wasn’t as toxic as it became later.
Definitely. Somewhere along the way, it was also missed that downvotes were intended to be for content that were off-topic or not constructive to the conversation rather than something one merely disagreed with. I’ve found much of my moderating had become about reminding people to keep it civil.
More mainstream appeal and younger users joining doesn’t really help with the quality of the discussion. IIRC when I created an account at reddit in 2011, the active users is still under 50 mils compared to 500 mils. Eternal September is a very real thing.
Would you be interested in running a new version of iAMA on Lemmy?
No, thank you. I’m done with putting in volunteer effort for these kinds of things. I transitioned to mostly lurking on reddit, and I’m likely to remain that way here as well. Modding requires too much of a time and effort commitment for something that I’ll have nothing to show for depending on the whim of others.
Completely understandable. Thanks for the mod work you previously did. It’s a shame reddit happily took your good will, time and effort only to basically kick you in the nuts as reward.
I can be the first guest. I have many leather bound books and drive a Dodge Stratus.
Victoria is still very much missed
Who was she?
She was a Reddit employee that ran the larger AMAs, often acting as the transcriptionist for the person. Reddit fired her because she refused to to run them as paid advertisements, feeling that the spirit of an AMA was about being asked anything, not just paid promotions.
The change was so evident, even for someone like me who (used to) not keep up with reddit drama and inner workings. AMAs used to be so fun, they’d always end up on the front page. I can’t remember the last one (other than Rick Astley’s) that wasn’t a bore
Reddit had a paid employee to facilitate AMAs
Victoria was the original “moderator” of AMAs and they shit-canned her for corporate politics. She was amazing with the celebs and the community. You know, the more you look back the more you realize Reddit’s management has always been shit. I’m not going back. I’d rather be low-key here where we aren’t seeing corporate politics at play - yet (hopefully never)
remember when spez tried to throw victoria under the fucking bus? pepperidge farm remembers
r/IAmA is really coming full circle
Status: Chooted
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.
Reddit didn’t really use to feel like a for-profit platform. We always knew there was corporate somewhere far away in the background but otherwise the communities and mods were making the entire website.
We now know how foolish that was of course.
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.
Classic bait and switch
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.
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I wonder how long before we start seeing some plausible but fake AMAs
IAMA Reddit CEO with a micro penis AMA
Hi, longtime fan here, is it a warm comforting feeling or more of a gross sticky and ashamed feeling when you pee on your own testicles?
It’s kind of like syrupy pancakes. At first, it’s awesome. Later though it’s just a sticky mess and I wish I’d gotten waffles instead.
A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap.
I was skeptical at first, but the intimate knowledge of his micropenis convinced me.
You made a misleading title. They basically won’t be seeking out celebrities or those high value activities, and will just let the sub take its course while doing very basic modding.
Hope they come to lemmy.
I know the answer, but I couldn’t ask “why fucking bother?” any harder.
This is a great move. In the spirt of malicious compliance. Doing everything a moderator is expected and none of the added value stuff that makes ama’s valuable
I can’t imagine the effort it must take to mod a sub like IAmA where you have daily posts with thousands of comments. They do it all for free and Spez insults them for it.
I agree, everyone should insult them for doing it for free.
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.
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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.
Yeah, this is what happens when you stop listening to people who prop up your organization.
Man the hits just keep in coming.
I hope more big subs follow suit. But part of me knows many won’t.
Some of us are still figuring things out, including a likely lemmy migration. Just need to work out some performance optimizations for the instance.
This is what makes Lemmy amazing. “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.
