… On Saturday, the r/IAmA moderators announced that they will no longer perform these duties:
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 The subreddit, which has 22.5 million subscribers as of this writing, will still exist, but its moderators contend that most of what makes it special will be undermined.
“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,” the moderators said.
The mods will also continue to do bare minimum tasks like keeping spam out and rule enforcement, they said. Like many other Reddit moderators Ars has spoken to, some will step away from their duties, and they’ll reportedly be replaced “as needed.” …
Ahh, the correct way to protest. They’re doing enough that /u/ModCodeOfConduct has no way to attack them, but not doing anything to produce usable content from the sub anymore. AMA’s are dead.
I’m surprised it took them this long to give up, after Reddit fired the dedicated employee that handled AMA’s beautifully. That instantly told them what Reddit thought of them: an exploitable resource.
I’ve seen another subreddit using a similar approach, r/linguistics. They simply added two new rules:
- All posts should be links to academic linguistics articles.
- All questions should go into the weekly Q&A thread.
They’re fairly reasonable from a distance - it’s a science sub so focus on academic articles is understandable, and there’s a place to ask questions. Well… except that most content of the subreddit was rather complex questions that sparked discussion, that simply does not fit within the Q&A thread. Here’s the effect of those two new rules:
- Jun/11 - 13 non-mod posts across the day, so 13 posts/day. Fairly typical activity.
- from Jun/23 to Jul/3 - 4 non-mod posts across seven days, so 0.6 posts/day
Even the c/linguistics comm that I moderate here in Lemmy is more active than that, with 1/1000 (yup) of the members.
I love that. Decreasing the overall number of posts also decreases the number of places ads can appear in that sub, and the number of eyeballs available to see the ads, since no one is going to spend as long on a less-active sub as they would on an active one.
Every time I read such stories I’m baffled by the completely weird way Reddit approached the API situation.
They could have monetized the platform in all kind of ways, but chose to take this route.
Right? I would have gladly paid a monthly fee if I was able to continue using the app of my choice and not view ads, and I’m guessing plenty others would have done so.
Reddit truly gets ZERO positive press at the moment. For weeks now.
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