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.

  • DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    140
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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:

    1. Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.

    2. 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).

    3. Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.

    4. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.

    5. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.

    6. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.

    7. 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)

    • Pika@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      58
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

      • niktemadur@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Stealth_Bummer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • DudePluto@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

    • brave@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wow the mods were really working hard to make IAMA a special place. Hope the drop in quality becomes clear …

    • jballs@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Zak@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        31
        ·
        1 year ago

        refuse to download the reddit app, so I can’t see the original post

        Rumor has it, Reddit has a website.

        • impulse@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          Sure, but why grace the dumpster fire with traffic, when you also can just copy the relevant parts here?

        • Pika@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          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”

    • Strangian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

      • kwot@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        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)

    • OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Netrunner@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    92
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    Maybe I’m already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?

    It’s dead to me.

    • Nelots@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

      I would imagine everyone subscribed to !reddit does.

      • MerliSYD@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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 😕

        • fidodo@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s always a good idea to take a look at the community label to understand the context though

        • Nelots@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          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.

      • Anoril@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • Maor @lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    78
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

    • wmrch@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

      • fidodo@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • faebudo@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • AzPsycho@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    50
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Apenas um Gaucho @lemmy.eco.br
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    41
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.”

    • Robaque@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Thteven@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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?

      • jballs@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        I was skeptical at first, but the intimate knowledge of his micropenis convinced me.

    • Brownboy13@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      46
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • kobra@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            17
            ·
            1 year ago

            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. ;)

        • Brownboy13@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          32
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • ThrowawayOnLemmy@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

        • another_busted_robot@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          26
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • DudePluto@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            1 year ago

            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

        • grizzledgrizzly@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          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)

  • atempuser23@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

    • LanyrdSkynrd@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • b_n@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          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.

          • jerkface@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Oh yeah, they’ve done so poorly since then… You can almost go a whole day without running into an AMA.

      • zealtheseal@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        Plus, requiring Reddit to hire a bunch of new employees would be a very effective and expensive form of protest :)

      • ungoogleable@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m sure they don’t want to pay anybody, but I don’t think they need to worry about precedent. They can easily say some subs are strategicly important to the business and get support while others aren’t. Like other platforms have “partner” status that they only offer to some users not all.

    • Wowbagger@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Your hard work is rewarded with a home for your community. Sounds very worthwhile if you all me. That’s very different from work that gets rewarded by lining the pockets of shareholders.

          • howrar@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Or so they thought until the Reddit admins told them they actually don’t have any authority over their community and can’t run it the way the community wants.

        • Robaque@feddit.it
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

      • Strangian@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think all forms of free voluntary moderation make you a sucker. I think the only suckers are the ones who do whats basically a full time job for free.

  • Jarvis2323@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 year ago

    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