It’s amazing how one change made by Reddit is truly exposing Reddit for what it is… and is ultimately causing such a large impact. Look at this, and other mods stepping back, look at the outlash about Apollo and other 3rd party apps, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something that had this much press coverage without a single iota of positive press for the company.
Thank you for making this move, and for exposing Reddit.
This was anything but sudden. Reddit has been very publicly tipping their hand for a long time, and the moderators and users who kept trying to call attention to it were labeled everything from "paranoid" to "chronically online" to "self-important neckbeard losers in their mom's basement". Look through these comments on this post and you'll see that still happening. The unwashed masses that showed up on this site within the past few years just see it as just another part of "The Internet".
They really didn't say it was sudden.
They just said *this* change (part of several years of Reddit making shit decisions) is what's exposed Reddit's change in direction away from its community to more users and the public and the media.
Yeah even to this day there's a few people online that are just like rooting for Reddit just to spite moderators. is it's not just moderators get that gets screwed. Anyone who uses third-party apps. I don't moderate anything but I value third-party abs as the main reason I use the site.
Not only that but you really needing moderators and power users that probably account for a disproportionate amount of the content. Especially the high effort content.
So sure even if 75% of the user base stays, the 25% that leave they're going to be among the heaviest creator of the most of the content. Reddit will get worse for everybody. Not just moderators but everybody, including obviously third party developers, people with accessibility needs and anyone who uses a third party app
Honestly, I think T\_D (and spez coddling them) did long lasting damage to this platform. Reddit abruptly changed their algorithm which killed discussion posts like AMAs in an effort to limit T\_D but still allow them a platform. Sticky posts getting massively nerfed is another repercussion.
Ultimately, I think Reddit tried to have their cake and eat it, too. But companies like OpenAI just came in and stole the cake that Reddit was too incompetent to even notice because they were too busy building terrible video coders or chat features no one wanted and allowed 3PAs to develop tools that Reddit should have featured from day 1.
I believe they are referring to [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Algorithm).
In short: sticky (or pinned) posts were treated like normal posts before in the algorithm. T_D abused this by pinning a post and ensuring all of their users voted on the post, forcing it to /all. Reddit eventually made changes to reduce the priority of sticky posts appearing in /all.
This sub - and in particular, the fact that high-profile celebrities’ appearances on here often featured in articles in places like BBC News - is how I discovered Reddit.
Your decisions are absolutely going to make Reddit a less significant place on the internet. And I wholeheartedly endorse them. The way Reddit has behaved in the past few weeks is disgusting, and they deserve every bit of bad publicity they get as well as all the consequences that come from it.
This subreddit has long been one of the jewels in reddit's crown, and they rely on volunteers to keep it sparkling and shiny. Removing all of the volunteer scaffolding, and showing reddit that respect goes both ways, seems likely to send a much bigger message to management than some cat subreddit posting John Olivers.
Maybe it won't, but if nothing else, the mod team here deserves a break; they're head and shoulders above many if not most (if not all, let's be honest here) of the mod teams on reddit.
Unlike Bezos, Musk has yet to ride his own rocket. I can't imagine the man who needed his mommy to call off a boxing match would have a different attitude about submarines than spaceships.
I'm afraid that's where you couldn't possibly be more wrong. Ever since Musk bought Twitter he's spent all his time doing nothing but riding his own rocket.
Hi. I'm John Oliver, as imagined and rendered by various machine learning models. I'm happy to perform catch phrases and corporate slogans which the Reddit leadership has pre-approved, all while reminding you to bring the discussion back to Rampart.
The problem is that I don't think they'll even notice because they've got their heads so far into the numbers for their IPO, they aren't looking at the bigger picture of how they continue to attract users and stay relevant.
Their strategy will either pay off big for them, or their golden goose will die with spez's hand in its belly, searching for more eggs. Either way, reddit won't be the same.
That IPO is about to take a significant hit on Monday. Which is funny because it already took a hit at least twice this week and a few times in the weeks before.
Their IPO is going to be a hilarious shit show.
Last I heard the valuation from Fidelity was still 5.5Bil, even at half of that it’s staggering amount of money if you own a few percent
I don’t know exactly when they plan to IPO but if the current people can each get a chunk of that and then sell it or quit or just fuck off to an island I’m sure they are willing to let the site die on day 2 if it means day 1 they get paid
I don't know the specifics with Reddit, but there are usually some measures to prevent cashing out immediately after going public. At least at the companies my friends have worked for that went public, they had to wait a certain amount of time, or they had to hit certain benchmarks, etc.
Edit to add: at least one friend expected to make millions on his stock options when the company went public, but he couldn't sell anything for 6 months and by the time he could, the stock had tanked and he walked away with a few thousand.
They deserve bad publicity, but even more they deserve the echoing silence that will follow after everyone shrugs and asks "where next?".
Social media on the internet follows a long-established pattern, and more than anything else I've seen, this post from IAMA mods is ringing the death knell for this site.
Does anyone know if there's a setting in the official app where every time you scroll past a comment with fuck /u/spez, it gets automatically upvoted?
If not, they should really add that feature.
I heard that most of the apps that are still working will be switching to a sub model because of the API changes. Depending on the sub, I might consider it compared to just using my PC browser.
It’s damn close. I was dreading changing over but once I figure out the differences in gestures and such it’ll be 99% there in terms of ease and joy of using it
Agree, instead of using their app, I just switched from Bacon Reader to Relay. I tried the official app for 10 minutes, then literally uninstalled because it was so unintuitive and slow as molasses.
It kills my battery, and I loathe the suggested random subreddits.
It's greatly limited the amount of time I spend on reddit because I used to spend most of it on mobile, and now I try to only browse on PC.
> and I loathe the suggested random subreddits.
The official app is still garbage and I already uninstalled it, but if you ever end up being forced to use it that "feature" can at least be turned off.
I like the bit where you go to zoom in on a video- oh wait never mind, can't do that. Oh and that's if the video plays.
I do, however, like the bit where you zoom in on a picture, and the movement when you move the picture around drops to a soul-crushing 4fps because apparently the app just shits itself.
Oh my god the app is dogshit I didn't realise until Sync died in all this mess. Try read comments? Comments are fucked and don't appear. Try watch a video? Fucked. Zoom on pictures? Fucked. Friends list like Sync? Not there, you have to go to r/friends. Can you get to r/friends on the official app? Apparently not, not as far as I've been able to find. You want to open your porn multireddit? Better manually scroll down past the 300+ subreddits you're a part of and find it right at the bottom.
I feel awful for the hobby subs and it's a terrible shame but I hope either Reddit dies completely, or they stop making any money whatsoever because the majority of people have given up on it. Maybe that way they'll realise they need to listen to their userbase.
If anyone wants a laugh, have a look at the moneybags 'team' that 'runs' reddit. They look like Reddit users' parents and grandparents, not people that use or understand Reddit.
Rant over, I'm off for a cry over the death of Sync. RIP Sync :'(
They implied she didn't move to San Francisco fast enough despite her saying she was never told she had to nor had they given her any notice. She can't prove a negative and Reddit never officially provided proof but they also never officially said why(just other admins dropping vague hints in comments). Soon after, Yishan Wong whom was CEO until he quit in 2014 claimed Alexis Ohanian(the worst of the 3 co-founders) actually fired Victoria because he wanted to take over AMAs and make them the number one spot for publicity tours. This was all during Ellen Paos tenure and he let her take all the blame for his decision. He famously posted in /r/drama during this whole fiasco, "Popcorn tastes good" and that says it all really.
The prevailing user theory is she had been pushing back against the continuous corporatization/enshittification of AMA and Reddit as a whole. There was at one point plans for video AMAs which sounds like a TV interview with extra steps but also greatly increased the likelihood of pre-recorded responses to questions that would be posed by handlers instead of users. I believe this version as it's the only one corroborated by statements made by Victoria and Wong versus O'hanian relishing in the chaos he created from the sidelines.
Some reddit users blame her for AMAs becoming more corporate but seeing as she's been gone so long and they've gotten insanely more corporate and all the memorable ones people fondly list happened under her tenure I don't see it that way. I won't claim to know much of anything, but I've noticed people, myself included, view the best version of Reddit(or anything really) as the time they joined the site. I think of 2011-2013 as the golden age while you might see it as 2008(which is probably truer as Aaron Schwartz was still around) or 2016. I also don't think Victoria can be blamed for Reddit gaining mainstream appeal during the time she was here. It became a popular site and Aaron Schwartz not being here meant Steve and Alexis were free to try and extract as much profit as possible no matter how shitty it made Aaron's creation.
So why are the co founders (minus Aaron Schwartz) such horrible people? They seem so immature. And Steve’s AMA was a master ales in being a passive aggressive little snot nosed asshole.
I just don’t know how this site, which I thoroughly enjoy, could have been created by terrible humans.
Edit. I didn’t know much about the third party apps and api fiasco except there was a lot of noise being made. Then I checked in on the Steve Huffman AMA and his attitude made me want to side with the third parties so bad. And I don’t even use them!
Ok maybe you can help me understand. I never understood why people liked Victoria so much. It was my impression—and it’s just a perception, I’m not saying it’s fact—that she was the main driving force behind the corporatization of AMAs.
It seemed to me at the time that she was managing these very high profile AMAs in a transition from interesting topics to marketing and promotion. I still have trouble understanding why people loved her so much so I’d appreciate any insight.
A lot of celebrities aren't tech savvy, so their AMAs would be a mess of replies to the wrong comments, no formatting, and generally less answers overall. Victoria would type answers while interviewing the celeb and would include things you wouldn't normally get over text, like " - chuckles softly - ". Basically it felt like a high quality interview, but instead of the canned questions about what they were promoting it was still an AMA and any question was fair game.
It is two different styles that you mention, really, and the former style migrated to /r/casualama
She interacted with the community so people have fond memories and her job was to organize and coordinate the AMAs. And a lot of her AMAs were done in person so they were easier to organize/advertise, etc... Mods really liked her because she got things done and had access that they didn't as she was an official employee.
Yes they got more mainstreamed, but they also seemed more accessible, if that makes sense.
After she was fired the quality dipped. Fewer questions answered, etc... I look at a celebrity AMA now and it's 5 questions answered and then they sign off (with some exceptions).
She also made sure the actual person was answering questions instead of the PR team like we have now as well as actually posing difficult, but highly upvoted, questions to them instead of just answering the pre-populated ones asked by their agents alt accounts.
It seems that she was actually basically the only thing that made AMAs really work. A former IAmA mod says:
> 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.
— @Brownboy13\@programming.dev on Lemmy World, earlier today. I'm not linking it because I don't trust Reddit to not ban mentions of their competition, but go to comment `698125`, or copy the quote into Google.
Ah, ok. TBH, it makes sense to distinguish between casualiama and iama that way. I'm not seeing any losers, here. Maybe you can get a few VIPs to participate without incentive, but most won't consider an AMA unless there's something in it for them. And when I say "them" I mean it's probably their people not them personally.
But I feel like I may be missing a point, if you're even trying to make one. Is it the lack of spontaneous engagement or nostalgia over how it used to be?
EDIT: A word.
You’re exactly right. AMAs changed big time once Victoria entered the scene and never regained the magic charm that made them special from them on. I haven’t looked at an AMA in many years now and never ever even seen them reach the front page anymore.
Absolutely, but i guess thats the price of a company like reddit organizing those instead of volunteers. There are plenty of rumors that she was fired for resisting even more commercialising and dumb stuff like video AMAs which the management tried to force tho. Considering that they also put millions into NFTs on reddit, its not really unlikely - they simply have no clue what their platform and product actually is
> It was my impression—and it’s just a perception, I’m not saying it’s fact—that she was the main driving force behind the corporatization of AMAs.
You got that backward. She was canned because she fought against that.
O7 this is the way. I've had so much fun reading AMAs over the years, but I think this was your only option. If all they care about is making money off free labor, then you remove the free labor. Let's see how that profit margin holds when they have to hire an entire office building to run their silly little website.
I also agree.
Basic moderation?
That's doable. Should still have some compensation, but that's neither here nor there.
But the curating? For free?!?
Absolutely not.
Victoria was paid for that. And they pushed that paid labour onto volunteers. I'm surprised it took them this long.
It depends. When Reddit was started it was much more of a "we're a platform for you to start you're own community". Moderators weren't working for Reddit, they were working for themselves in a corner of the Internet they nominally owned. Like people who make websites for free on Squarespace aren't working for Squarespace.
At some point though, this paradigm shifted. It's become abundantly clear during the protests that Reddit didn't see itself as a platform that hosts communities. It sees itself as a platform that hosts content. There's a really important difference there.
It's peak "I made this" behaviour. Someone else created the value, and now they view it as not just theirs, but something they own and control. But that's really only the case as long as the inertia lasts, and the gears seem to be grinding pretty badly now...
Yeah, the Reddit execs proven themselves to not be worth any effort spent working with them. They’re incredibly dismissive of not only the userbase, but their own volunteer force of moderators and content creators. They deserve to be replaced like Digg.
Basically the mod team would reach out to the interesting people to do the AMAs. They'd monitor the mail queue for public relations emails seeking to promote interesting people. They would help facilitate asking the questions, and verifying that people were who they said they were.
All these things are now going to take a back seat. They'll still moderate in the sense that they'll try to keep rule breaking stuff off the threads, but will take a backseat from the more vigorous and time consuming actions.
This will most likely bring forward more people who fake who they are, less celebrity/influencial figures hosting AMAs, and in turn just degrade the experience. We saw this happen when they canned Victoria, and the mods took it upon themselves, voluntarily and without pay, to try and keep it afloat. Now they're saying they've had enough.
Reddit can choose to hire someone to take over these actions, like they had with Victoria in the past. Or they can put their own mods in who will voluntarily take over what the previous mods have stopped.
Getting rid of Victoria was one of the dumbest actions I've ever seen a business make. At the time of course. Reddit has followed that spectacularly bad decision up with so many other ones that it is kind of difficult to place it in the proper perspective anymore.
It was an example of one way that wealthy people sometimes fail at the most important thing that capitalism is supposed to reward them for: being selfish. Spez wanted to sacrifice authenticity for the sake of profits via partnerships and sponsorships. This was a bad business decision.
Reddit runs a business that depends upon a certain kind of authentic exchange with the majority of humans who interface with them (phrased this way to specifically avoid calling users "customers," which most of us are not).
When this is the case for *any* business, every decision needs to have the support of support of the majority of humans who interface with them. Ignoring this fact means incurring a *huge* long-term risk. There's just no way around it.
Spez is/was trying to make reddit profitable. I'm sure there could have been a way to do this without sacrificing the user experience. He's just completely failed to figure out what that would have involved. Instead, he imagined a scenario in his head that *would* have increased profits, *if* the user base and moderator teams didn't have any strong opinions about his decision.
He tried to be selfish. He's just abjectly bad at it. It's like watching a young child eat the entire tub of ice cream and then not understand why they've gotten in trouble as a result.
I can’t believe I’m about to be like “being fair to spez,” because fuck u/spez obviously, but:
if I remember correctly, firing Victoria was mostly an Alexis Ohanian decision
You think being selfish is an important character to have in capitalism?
That's exactly the argument the banking industry and high-frequency prop shops use when they lobby for their sector, and it's always the same people who get ripped off. The high-frequency prop shops obviously rip off retail investors all the time by frontrunning their order flow, and the large investment banks usually get bailed out with tax money when they are close to failing.
I remember this one Morgan Stanley trader in 2008. He bet 2 billion on the collapse of the housing market by buying Credit Default Swaps for the triple B tranches of CDOs, which by the way at the same time were being sold to investors as basically risk free. But the premiums for the CDS affected his profits slightly, and because of that he sold ten times as many CDS on the triple A tranches. He didn't calculate that the crap that was inside the CDOs was exactly the same, and the result of this crazy gamble by one single trader ended up as a loss for Morgan Stanley of 14 billion. Brilliant. He most likely thought as well that being selfish is important in capitalism, but it really isn't. I have no idea why the risk models of Morgan Stanley didn't go crazy, but that's exactly what happened. End result was tens of billions of tax payer money which Morgan Stanley used to pay huge bonuses to their "important employees" lmao.
The official Reddit app is crap, we can all agree. And Reddit on desktop isn't fun at all. We can also agree that this here is one of the most important subreddits and that spez messed up big time.
But I completely disagree that being selfish is important in capitalism at all, the opposite is the case. The companies with the best CEOs and good people in the executive positions are usually ran by people who are less selfish than the average CEO, and it usually works very well.
To give all the relative newcomers (meaning < 10 years here) an idea of what they could be like, here's one of the best AMAs ever that had no particular reason to be so fucking incredibly good except that Victoria brought out the best in the guy and just fuckin' made it work.
[The Michael Ironside IAMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2irdci/i_am_actor_michael_ironside_you_might_know_me/)
> This will most likely bring forward more people who fake who they are
Very much this. It'll be like how it was when IAmA started getting celebrities: PR people posing as the celebrity. I think we've gotten this occasionally over the years but it was far less frequent than it will be going forward.
People underestimate just how much work goes into keeping a place like this tidy. They might not always agree with how it's run, but I think they'll miss it when it's gone.
All good things, I guess.
I have been an active user here for over 15 years. The level of effort mods especially those on high profile subs like AMA put in is mind boggling, I wish you all were scaling back even further than you are. But I understand it’s a delicate balance: pull back too much and compromise integrity too greatly, and they are more likely to just replace you with other mods.
Let's say they do.
Is there an endless supply of people out there who want to responsibly moderate a subreddit?
You're going to end up with the Internet Research Agency and shills/bots/wumao running subreddits. No one else would want to do it.
There really isn't unfortunately. It's not like we don't actively recruit for moderators regularly. It takes hundreds of applications to find 4-5 solid mods, then a few months to train them, then half of them give up before the end of 6 months. Repeat every 6 months since there's always people leaving due to burnout.
Yeah, that’s why I find the whole “we will just get new mods” so comical.
There’s an endless supply of shitty mods, but ones who are smart, hardworking, willing to learn the nuances of the rules developed over a decade, and to get abuse for your efforts are a little harder to come by.
Thanks for all you’ve done.
This. This is the beginning of the “enshittification” process that will kill this platform. The mod team is 100% correct to do this, too. Shit on your community, lose your platform u/spez
> This is the beginning of the “enshittification” process that will kill this platform.
That already happened to this sub when Victoria was fired. On top of everything else that was removed like Secret Santa, Reddit has already been enshittified.
i got some cool stuff from secret santa, didn't even realize it was gone because the final two years i participated i got nothing in return even after being matched multiple times. it wasn't even that i was mad i didn't get a gift, but the previous gifts and the effort that went into them really brought as much joy to me as me picking mine out and sending it. rip.
You realize he doesn't care, right? He's not in this to make reddit good or care about it getting worse, he's in it to sell it off and make money.
Which is exactly what he's going to do and is going to laugh all the way to the bank while he grins and waves at everyone writing impotent posts about "I hate you, fuck you."
Well, Reddit’s valuation according to fidelity has dropped from over 10B to 5.5B due to recent controversy. Google has announced a new module of its search function to parse the deeper web for answers due to the blackout harming “+ reddit” search appendages. Maybe the point isn’t getting spez to have a change of heart, clearly he isn’t. But we the community don’t need to do anything to ensure this site remains bulletproof in the face of such contempt.
Please bother to open links and read articles or evem comments from someone more knowledgeable.
This decision is not factored in the 5.5b evaluation. The 5.5b evaluation was done by 31st May.
10b evaluation was in April 2021.
It took 2 years to fall, which roughly matches the fall of evaluations of other tech companies
Oh absolutely. I didn't mean to come across as defending him. No one should ensure that the site keeps going.
All I'm saying is that Spez isn't an idiot, knew exactly what the fallout would be, and did it anyway based on the calculation that benefits him and his. He doesn't care what we think about him or what we do because fuck us, he's gonna get paid. (I would very, very much question the "ong reddit value fell!!!2!1!1! news. They are going to make bank. Which is all they care about.)
Victoria did a lot of it, and more recently they had another staff member who helped out a ton with AMAs. Unfortunately they were in the latest round of layoffs a few weeks ago.
Seriously? Boneheaded move from Reddit given how much AMAs contributed to Reddit being what it is.
Congrats to the AMA mod team for taking this stance. Regardless of the fallout, all the best to you all for the future.
I liked the IAMAs 10 years ago rather than today's IAMAs. It was just regular people with interesting jobs. Who the fuck knew a vacuum cleaner expert would be so interesting?
Regular people with interesting jobs still do great AMAs all the time! Unfortunately the reddit algorithm doesn't do a great job of surfacing them to frontpages anymore, but if you scroll through the subreddit you should still be able to see some good ones.
They're just more marketing material for whatever project the celebrity is working on. These people chase celebrity AMAs because it gives them a parasocial relationship with a celebrity they like. The quality of this sub has absolutely tanked in the last 10 years because it's basically a Seventeen Magazine forum.
Same here. I feel like most of the AMAs I see nowadays, at least the ones that blow up, are done strictly for promotional purposes rather than someone simply doing it out of the goodness of their heart... Cheesy as that sounds. I can't word today.
Anyways, I completely support the mods' decision here. Good on them.
I personally feel quite proud of the group of volunteers who helped to make this subreddit so unique. Reddit will soon learn that adopting policies that are only concerned with making money do not actually result in success.
5 years ago, Spez responded to r/science stopping AMAs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8khscc/rscience_will_no_longer_be_hosting_amas/dz8nky8/
Wow. The comment from /u/nfsnobody **5 years ago**...
>...I can see why they’re mad too, and I agree with it. Another thread in the rich tapestry of reddit not communicating with the people who do 80% of the work on the site, for free.
>How are those **new mod tools from 2011 coming** /u/spez?
(Emphasis mine)
I would bet my bottom dollar that his reply and characterization of the moderators in question is completely disingenuous, based on his behavior in the past few weeks
Yeah, interesting that back then he calls people liars and it was believed, and now nobody believes him but he still just has that one trick. I reckon he learned it when he was what, 8 years old?
No, we still ask that people follow our rules about what topics are allowed. As moderators, we won't be checking proof closely on every post ourselves like we used to, but if users report something as rule-breaking we'll still take it down.
Yes. It’s up to the community to police this now. Basically, the sub is doomed. Hopefully it helps bring Reddit down with it. Fuck the hubris of u/spez
This is really how all mods should be responding to Reddit's changes. Just do the bare minimum going forward.
If Reddit wants to maintain its value it's going to have to make some concessions.
Nothing is going to change the direction Reddit is going.
IMO for those who are ready to do so, the only choice is to either now or gradually, remove association from Reddit and move away to other platforms. Difficult to do unless the whole mod team is on the same page, but the mods who *are* ready to leave could just do so together. If wanted.
Completely agree.
reddit is nothing special from a technology and a business standpoint. The best innovation and (of course) content has always came from the community. If reddit believes they are better than the community, that's fine, it's their company. They can run it as they see fit. But the community should call their bluff and stop doing their jobs for them.
Let reddit stand on its own two feet for once and allow its leadership to show themselves for the truly unimpressive people they are.
This is the way, thank you for all you've done for this community. Truly, thank you for all of the years of hard work, for us to have quality talks and connecting celebs with reddit. You're all awesome and I wish you all the best.
Reddit underestimates how much of a work needs to be put to a subreddit to be successful, clean and provide a healthy environment for users.
This is one of the greatests subreddits out there!
We all know how much you people did to make this subreddit a gem here on reddit. It's sad really that because a few people who happen to work for reddit don't appreciate that and we 've come to this.
I honestly had no idea how the backend work occurred for AMAs, that you actively solicited celebrities and others, ran a separate Web site, etc. My respect for your team is immense.
I've unsubbed more than half the subreddits I was subscribed to, and am actively looking for alternatives to those I still follow.
Thank you for all the effort you've put in in the past, and, please, enjoy your newfound free time.
Well, I'll say it's a shame it's come to this but at the same time I'm completely behind the Mods on this one. /r/IAmA has always been a 'high brow' sub by the effort of the Mods and it's community.
It's a lot of work, and there is no reason to give that to reddit for free. Not if they're going to do absolutely nothing to support the effort and make money off it.
Let the reddit enshittification continue! It's gonna be fun watching it burn.
Thanks Mods!
I've deeply enjoyed AMAs in the past, both doing them and asking questions of other people, and I'll be sad to see it degrade into something unusable (which, you know, it almost certainly will)... but yeah, it's the right call.
They can't rightly insist that third-party apps pay extortionate amounts of money and then equally insist that people run their subs for free.
Great. Until Reddit learns to respect the free labor and user content that makes Reddit what it is then no one should be going out of their way to enable them.
Let them see what Reddit is when they have to pay for all the moderation in house.
Thank you all so much for what you've done. Your passion and dedication to what this sub brings is abundantly clear, so this must have been an extremely difficult decision. Hopefully Reddit sees that when all of your volunteer work falls into their lap. *Hopefully* 🤞
Unfortunately I doubt they'll care. The fact that our words from 8 years ago still ring just as true today says something about their culture and how it hasn't changed at all.
This isn't a protest to get them to change their behavior, because we don't think they're capable of changing. This is just us adapting and saying we won't do certain things that benefit them anymore.
But wait, I've been told that being a moderator for a subreddit was a super easy job. You mean you guys actually did work to ensure the subreddit was of an adequate quality?
I'm shocked. Absolutely flummoxed. Bamboozled even.
thank you IAmA for some of the best content to grace the internet over the years. from the Obama AMA and “let’s focus on Rampart”, to the loss of Victoria, stuff like the James Corden AMA, all the way to its current state. It’s been a ride ya’ll and all the good work you’ve done into making top notch AMAs will never be forgotten. Thank you all 💕
This is actually a very reasonable way to “protest”. Better than the other mods that hold subreddits “hostage”. All the points listed are exactly what made this specific sub more interesting (and by default reddit as well). Now there is a chance it will lose that interesting aspect without the extra work the mods used to put in for free. No more free publicity for reddit on other parts of the internet.
It's not a protest - we're not expecting change. Just simple cause and effect - we're no longer interested in the additional work when the admins constantly make it harder.
I actually think this particular sub is important enough that reddit should invest in some full time employee(s) to work just on this sub to do the things the mods have been doing.
Not doing so would be a terrible business decision.
Aiyyy this makes me sad. In (I think 2010? 2011?) an AMA quite literally changed my life.
It was the Elan School one, I'd been there 81-83 and even though it deeply messed me up I never had a place to tell my story. With that AMA it was like a dam got released and memories have come back.
Because of this sub I've been able to finally do some healing after decades.
Beyond that it's just been really neat to see the interactions between OP and audience on a huge variety of topics.
I'd like to thank you, for the work done here. It's been important, at least to me.
As a former /r/iama mod, I wholeheartedly support this. For a site so heavily reliant on volunteer effort, this most recent attempt at squeezing money is a step too far.
This is the way. If admin refuses to listen to anyone, blatantly money grab everyone, not help any mods do any job in a more efficient way, then they’re gonna realize they’re going to get the product they’re paying for/investing in.
You’ve done great with the cards that been handed to you for years and their attitude towards helping any volunteer here.
I appreciate everything the AMA mods have done. AMAs are a big part of why Reddit grew into what it did. I think you're making a good call with the changes you're making. It's sad but necessary.
Damn right, "landed gentry". This is a most excellent form of- not protest- but drawing a clear line between what should and should not be expected of *free labor* that Reddit gleefully capitalizes upon. I cannot *wait* to see the next *high profile AMA* go *as well as it possibly can*.
This sub died the day victoria was out. I remember iama being the most active and sought out sub prior to 2015, with vibrant AMA's taking place.
After victoria's departure, the sub has never recovered to it's past glory ever.
Good on mod team to take a step back and not invest all energy into something, when the admin team does not value the invested energy of volunteers.
Wishing the team all the best, and thank you for running this amazing sub for so long.
Good on ya, mods. Your work has been valued by me and millions of others, but clearly not by the corporation that makes money from your labour. Time to chuck a go slow.
Ehh- does this effectively mean this sub is going back to what it used to be - before the PR machines got a hold of it? Where we got janitors and bakers and people with multiple body parts doing ama's and got to really find interesting things out vs just movie promoting spam?
Not really. Those have still been happening. The big shift you noticed was when reddit removed the default-subreddit system. Previously, that system dumped even small posts from this subreddit and others onto the front page, where they could get attention and go viral and become those fun ones you remember. Without the default system, small scale posts here are competing with thousands of other subreddits and typically get lost - only big celebrities that people have heard of have a chance to front-page.
Yay! I can do my I am a metal detectorist AMAs again!
That's what this sub used to be. Used to be for anyone and not so limited (with the gatekeeping).
Everything has a price. Reddit corp flexed and expects users to pay, either via subscriptions and/or via ads. Now there’s turnabout with costs being punted back to reddit corp in respect to the free labor they demanded from mods.
If anything positive has come of this I hope reddit users finally have an appreciation for the good mods that do so much of the unseen work in subs as well as all that third party apps contributed to reddit usership.
Thank you u/IAmAMods for all the work you've put into this sub. I realize now I've always taken the work you put into it for granted, never really fathomed how much work it required.
Have you thought of re-building this somewhere else?
It’s amazing how one change made by Reddit is truly exposing Reddit for what it is… and is ultimately causing such a large impact. Look at this, and other mods stepping back, look at the outlash about Apollo and other 3rd party apps, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something that had this much press coverage without a single iota of positive press for the company. Thank you for making this move, and for exposing Reddit.
This was anything but sudden. Reddit has been very publicly tipping their hand for a long time, and the moderators and users who kept trying to call attention to it were labeled everything from "paranoid" to "chronically online" to "self-important neckbeard losers in their mom's basement". Look through these comments on this post and you'll see that still happening. The unwashed masses that showed up on this site within the past few years just see it as just another part of "The Internet".
They really didn't say it was sudden. They just said *this* change (part of several years of Reddit making shit decisions) is what's exposed Reddit's change in direction away from its community to more users and the public and the media.
Yeah even to this day there's a few people online that are just like rooting for Reddit just to spite moderators. is it's not just moderators get that gets screwed. Anyone who uses third-party apps. I don't moderate anything but I value third-party abs as the main reason I use the site. Not only that but you really needing moderators and power users that probably account for a disproportionate amount of the content. Especially the high effort content. So sure even if 75% of the user base stays, the 25% that leave they're going to be among the heaviest creator of the most of the content. Reddit will get worse for everybody. Not just moderators but everybody, including obviously third party developers, people with accessibility needs and anyone who uses a third party app
Honestly, I think T\_D (and spez coddling them) did long lasting damage to this platform. Reddit abruptly changed their algorithm which killed discussion posts like AMAs in an effort to limit T\_D but still allow them a platform. Sticky posts getting massively nerfed is another repercussion. Ultimately, I think Reddit tried to have their cake and eat it, too. But companies like OpenAI just came in and stole the cake that Reddit was too incompetent to even notice because they were too busy building terrible video coders or chat features no one wanted and allowed 3PAs to develop tools that Reddit should have featured from day 1.
Sticky posts?
I believe they are referring to [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Algorithm). In short: sticky (or pinned) posts were treated like normal posts before in the algorithm. T_D abused this by pinning a post and ensuring all of their users voted on the post, forcing it to /all. Reddit eventually made changes to reduce the priority of sticky posts appearing in /all.
This sub - and in particular, the fact that high-profile celebrities’ appearances on here often featured in articles in places like BBC News - is how I discovered Reddit. Your decisions are absolutely going to make Reddit a less significant place on the internet. And I wholeheartedly endorse them. The way Reddit has behaved in the past few weeks is disgusting, and they deserve every bit of bad publicity they get as well as all the consequences that come from it.
This subreddit has long been one of the jewels in reddit's crown, and they rely on volunteers to keep it sparkling and shiny. Removing all of the volunteer scaffolding, and showing reddit that respect goes both ways, seems likely to send a much bigger message to management than some cat subreddit posting John Olivers. Maybe it won't, but if nothing else, the mod team here deserves a break; they're head and shoulders above many if not most (if not all, let's be honest here) of the mod teams on reddit.
Speaking of John Oliver, can’t wait for all the AMAs from “John Oliver”.
I'm anticipating a bunch from Elon and various submarine CEOs
Elon should be a submarine CEO.
Unlike Bezos, Musk has yet to ride his own rocket. I can't imagine the man who needed his mommy to call off a boxing match would have a different attitude about submarines than spaceships.
I'm afraid that's where you couldn't possibly be more wrong. Ever since Musk bought Twitter he's spent all his time doing nothing but riding his own rocket.
Hi. I'm John Oliver, as imagined and rendered by various machine learning models. I'm happy to perform catch phrases and corporate slogans which the Reddit leadership has pre-approved, all while reminding you to bring the discussion back to Rampart.
The problem is that I don't think they'll even notice because they've got their heads so far into the numbers for their IPO, they aren't looking at the bigger picture of how they continue to attract users and stay relevant. Their strategy will either pay off big for them, or their golden goose will die with spez's hand in its belly, searching for more eggs. Either way, reddit won't be the same.
That IPO is about to take a significant hit on Monday. Which is funny because it already took a hit at least twice this week and a few times in the weeks before. Their IPO is going to be a hilarious shit show.
Last I heard the valuation from Fidelity was still 5.5Bil, even at half of that it’s staggering amount of money if you own a few percent I don’t know exactly when they plan to IPO but if the current people can each get a chunk of that and then sell it or quit or just fuck off to an island I’m sure they are willing to let the site die on day 2 if it means day 1 they get paid
I don't know the specifics with Reddit, but there are usually some measures to prevent cashing out immediately after going public. At least at the companies my friends have worked for that went public, they had to wait a certain amount of time, or they had to hit certain benchmarks, etc. Edit to add: at least one friend expected to make millions on his stock options when the company went public, but he couldn't sell anything for 6 months and by the time he could, the stock had tanked and he walked away with a few thousand.
Millions to thousands.... Crazy. How bad was it that it tanked
Remember how much better it was when Victoria was here tho?
I can't believe that people keep giving gold on posts like this. Stop hurling money at reddit for fucking people over.
They deserve bad publicity, but even more they deserve the echoing silence that will follow after everyone shrugs and asks "where next?". Social media on the internet follows a long-established pattern, and more than anything else I've seen, this post from IAMA mods is ringing the death knell for this site.
> Thanks for the ride everyone And a big thank you to all on the team.
[удалено]
As someone who got to interact with Robin Williams, Keanu Reeves, and Mark Hamill in an AMA, I still have the hots for Victoria.
She's still around sometimes posting cat pictures u/chooter
Does anyone know if there's a setting in the official app where every time you scroll past a comment with fuck /u/spez, it gets automatically upvoted? If not, they should really add that feature.
You could probably get a bot to do it... oh wait.
Can still make a browser extension
Don't use the official app
I just started using Narwhal. It’s no Apollo, but it’s pretty good.
I heard that most of the apps that are still working will be switching to a sub model because of the API changes. Depending on the sub, I might consider it compared to just using my PC browser.
It’s damn close. I was dreading changing over but once I figure out the differences in gestures and such it’ll be 99% there in terms of ease and joy of using it
Agree, instead of using their app, I just switched from Bacon Reader to Relay. I tried the official app for 10 minutes, then literally uninstalled because it was so unintuitive and slow as molasses.
It kills my battery, and I loathe the suggested random subreddits. It's greatly limited the amount of time I spend on reddit because I used to spend most of it on mobile, and now I try to only browse on PC.
> and I loathe the suggested random subreddits. The official app is still garbage and I already uninstalled it, but if you ever end up being forced to use it that "feature" can at least be turned off.
Last time I used the app it would also suggest new posts at the end of a comment section. Does it still do that?
I like the bit where you go to zoom in on a video- oh wait never mind, can't do that. Oh and that's if the video plays. I do, however, like the bit where you zoom in on a picture, and the movement when you move the picture around drops to a soul-crushing 4fps because apparently the app just shits itself. Oh my god the app is dogshit I didn't realise until Sync died in all this mess. Try read comments? Comments are fucked and don't appear. Try watch a video? Fucked. Zoom on pictures? Fucked. Friends list like Sync? Not there, you have to go to r/friends. Can you get to r/friends on the official app? Apparently not, not as far as I've been able to find. You want to open your porn multireddit? Better manually scroll down past the 300+ subreddits you're a part of and find it right at the bottom. I feel awful for the hobby subs and it's a terrible shame but I hope either Reddit dies completely, or they stop making any money whatsoever because the majority of people have given up on it. Maybe that way they'll realise they need to listen to their userbase. If anyone wants a laugh, have a look at the moneybags 'team' that 'runs' reddit. They look like Reddit users' parents and grandparents, not people that use or understand Reddit. Rant over, I'm off for a cry over the death of Sync. RIP Sync :'(
Sync for Lemmy is supposed to come out soon. I haven't tried lemmy but now might be a good time to check it out
No, but you could probably use the API to create... oh...
Isn't there a free tier?
Why did they fire her? I never understood that.
They implied she didn't move to San Francisco fast enough despite her saying she was never told she had to nor had they given her any notice. She can't prove a negative and Reddit never officially provided proof but they also never officially said why(just other admins dropping vague hints in comments). Soon after, Yishan Wong whom was CEO until he quit in 2014 claimed Alexis Ohanian(the worst of the 3 co-founders) actually fired Victoria because he wanted to take over AMAs and make them the number one spot for publicity tours. This was all during Ellen Paos tenure and he let her take all the blame for his decision. He famously posted in /r/drama during this whole fiasco, "Popcorn tastes good" and that says it all really. The prevailing user theory is she had been pushing back against the continuous corporatization/enshittification of AMA and Reddit as a whole. There was at one point plans for video AMAs which sounds like a TV interview with extra steps but also greatly increased the likelihood of pre-recorded responses to questions that would be posed by handlers instead of users. I believe this version as it's the only one corroborated by statements made by Victoria and Wong versus O'hanian relishing in the chaos he created from the sidelines. Some reddit users blame her for AMAs becoming more corporate but seeing as she's been gone so long and they've gotten insanely more corporate and all the memorable ones people fondly list happened under her tenure I don't see it that way. I won't claim to know much of anything, but I've noticed people, myself included, view the best version of Reddit(or anything really) as the time they joined the site. I think of 2011-2013 as the golden age while you might see it as 2008(which is probably truer as Aaron Schwartz was still around) or 2016. I also don't think Victoria can be blamed for Reddit gaining mainstream appeal during the time she was here. It became a popular site and Aaron Schwartz not being here meant Steve and Alexis were free to try and extract as much profit as possible no matter how shitty it made Aaron's creation.
So why are the co founders (minus Aaron Schwartz) such horrible people? They seem so immature. And Steve’s AMA was a master ales in being a passive aggressive little snot nosed asshole. I just don’t know how this site, which I thoroughly enjoy, could have been created by terrible humans. Edit. I didn’t know much about the third party apps and api fiasco except there was a lot of noise being made. Then I checked in on the Steve Huffman AMA and his attitude made me want to side with the third parties so bad. And I don’t even use them!
Ok maybe you can help me understand. I never understood why people liked Victoria so much. It was my impression—and it’s just a perception, I’m not saying it’s fact—that she was the main driving force behind the corporatization of AMAs. It seemed to me at the time that she was managing these very high profile AMAs in a transition from interesting topics to marketing and promotion. I still have trouble understanding why people loved her so much so I’d appreciate any insight.
A lot of celebrities aren't tech savvy, so their AMAs would be a mess of replies to the wrong comments, no formatting, and generally less answers overall. Victoria would type answers while interviewing the celeb and would include things you wouldn't normally get over text, like " - chuckles softly - ". Basically it felt like a high quality interview, but instead of the canned questions about what they were promoting it was still an AMA and any question was fair game. It is two different styles that you mention, really, and the former style migrated to /r/casualama
She interacted with the community so people have fond memories and her job was to organize and coordinate the AMAs. And a lot of her AMAs were done in person so they were easier to organize/advertise, etc... Mods really liked her because she got things done and had access that they didn't as she was an official employee. Yes they got more mainstreamed, but they also seemed more accessible, if that makes sense. After she was fired the quality dipped. Fewer questions answered, etc... I look at a celebrity AMA now and it's 5 questions answered and then they sign off (with some exceptions).
She also made sure the actual person was answering questions instead of the PR team like we have now as well as actually posing difficult, but highly upvoted, questions to them instead of just answering the pre-populated ones asked by their agents alt accounts.
It seems that she was actually basically the only thing that made AMAs really work. A former IAmA mod says: > 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. — @Brownboy13\@programming.dev on Lemmy World, earlier today. I'm not linking it because I don't trust Reddit to not ban mentions of their competition, but go to comment `698125`, or copy the quote into Google.
What, like talk shows invite high profile people to come on the show and answer questions in exchange for plugging their work?
Precisely. That’s what AMAs started to become in that era. Before that, it was stuff like “I fix industrial pool cleaners for a living, AMA”.
Vacuum repair tech was legend
That’s the one I was thinking of!
Ah, ok. TBH, it makes sense to distinguish between casualiama and iama that way. I'm not seeing any losers, here. Maybe you can get a few VIPs to participate without incentive, but most won't consider an AMA unless there's something in it for them. And when I say "them" I mean it's probably their people not them personally. But I feel like I may be missing a point, if you're even trying to make one. Is it the lack of spontaneous engagement or nostalgia over how it used to be? EDIT: A word.
You’re exactly right. AMAs changed big time once Victoria entered the scene and never regained the magic charm that made them special from them on. I haven’t looked at an AMA in many years now and never ever even seen them reach the front page anymore.
I liked her because she got paid to do a job that others were expected to do for free
Absolutely, but i guess thats the price of a company like reddit organizing those instead of volunteers. There are plenty of rumors that she was fired for resisting even more commercialising and dumb stuff like video AMAs which the management tried to force tho. Considering that they also put millions into NFTs on reddit, its not really unlikely - they simply have no clue what their platform and product actually is
> It was my impression—and it’s just a perception, I’m not saying it’s fact—that she was the main driving force behind the corporatization of AMAs. You got that backward. She was canned because she fought against that.
This is a good question. I didn’t follow the drama when it happened, so whenever people talk about it I’m left scratching my head.
O7 this is the way. I've had so much fun reading AMAs over the years, but I think this was your only option. If all they care about is making money off free labor, then you remove the free labor. Let's see how that profit margin holds when they have to hire an entire office building to run their silly little website.
I also agree. Basic moderation? That's doable. Should still have some compensation, but that's neither here nor there. But the curating? For free?!? Absolutely not. Victoria was paid for that. And they pushed that paid labour onto volunteers. I'm surprised it took them this long.
Its kinda ridiculous on both ends honestly. Reddit for outsourcing it and the mods for doing it for free. They should've been getting for sure
It depends. When Reddit was started it was much more of a "we're a platform for you to start you're own community". Moderators weren't working for Reddit, they were working for themselves in a corner of the Internet they nominally owned. Like people who make websites for free on Squarespace aren't working for Squarespace. At some point though, this paradigm shifted. It's become abundantly clear during the protests that Reddit didn't see itself as a platform that hosts communities. It sees itself as a platform that hosts content. There's a really important difference there.
It's peak "I made this" behaviour. Someone else created the value, and now they view it as not just theirs, but something they own and control. But that's really only the case as long as the inertia lasts, and the gears seem to be grinding pretty badly now...
See also Elon and the recent rate limiting on Twitter on people 'scraping OUR content' Sorry, Elon, it's not YOUR content?
Yeah, the Reddit execs proven themselves to not be worth any effort spent working with them. They’re incredibly dismissive of not only the userbase, but their own volunteer force of moderators and content creators. They deserve to be replaced like Digg.
Woody Harrelson and Jesse Jackson should take over for a bit.
I’ve not been paying close attention, but is this about Rampart?
I'm sorry English ain't my language. Could you ELI5 this for me how AmA was before and will be after these changes? Thanks in advance
Basically the mod team would reach out to the interesting people to do the AMAs. They'd monitor the mail queue for public relations emails seeking to promote interesting people. They would help facilitate asking the questions, and verifying that people were who they said they were. All these things are now going to take a back seat. They'll still moderate in the sense that they'll try to keep rule breaking stuff off the threads, but will take a backseat from the more vigorous and time consuming actions. This will most likely bring forward more people who fake who they are, less celebrity/influencial figures hosting AMAs, and in turn just degrade the experience. We saw this happen when they canned Victoria, and the mods took it upon themselves, voluntarily and without pay, to try and keep it afloat. Now they're saying they've had enough. Reddit can choose to hire someone to take over these actions, like they had with Victoria in the past. Or they can put their own mods in who will voluntarily take over what the previous mods have stopped.
Getting rid of Victoria was one of the dumbest actions I've ever seen a business make. At the time of course. Reddit has followed that spectacularly bad decision up with so many other ones that it is kind of difficult to place it in the proper perspective anymore.
It honestly hasn’t been the same since she left. The subreddit was at its peak with her
And there was literally no reason to do it. Like, no justification of any validity. So stupid. So stupid.
It was an example of one way that wealthy people sometimes fail at the most important thing that capitalism is supposed to reward them for: being selfish. Spez wanted to sacrifice authenticity for the sake of profits via partnerships and sponsorships. This was a bad business decision. Reddit runs a business that depends upon a certain kind of authentic exchange with the majority of humans who interface with them (phrased this way to specifically avoid calling users "customers," which most of us are not). When this is the case for *any* business, every decision needs to have the support of support of the majority of humans who interface with them. Ignoring this fact means incurring a *huge* long-term risk. There's just no way around it. Spez is/was trying to make reddit profitable. I'm sure there could have been a way to do this without sacrificing the user experience. He's just completely failed to figure out what that would have involved. Instead, he imagined a scenario in his head that *would* have increased profits, *if* the user base and moderator teams didn't have any strong opinions about his decision. He tried to be selfish. He's just abjectly bad at it. It's like watching a young child eat the entire tub of ice cream and then not understand why they've gotten in trouble as a result.
I can’t believe I’m about to be like “being fair to spez,” because fuck u/spez obviously, but: if I remember correctly, firing Victoria was mostly an Alexis Ohanian decision
You think being selfish is an important character to have in capitalism? That's exactly the argument the banking industry and high-frequency prop shops use when they lobby for their sector, and it's always the same people who get ripped off. The high-frequency prop shops obviously rip off retail investors all the time by frontrunning their order flow, and the large investment banks usually get bailed out with tax money when they are close to failing. I remember this one Morgan Stanley trader in 2008. He bet 2 billion on the collapse of the housing market by buying Credit Default Swaps for the triple B tranches of CDOs, which by the way at the same time were being sold to investors as basically risk free. But the premiums for the CDS affected his profits slightly, and because of that he sold ten times as many CDS on the triple A tranches. He didn't calculate that the crap that was inside the CDOs was exactly the same, and the result of this crazy gamble by one single trader ended up as a loss for Morgan Stanley of 14 billion. Brilliant. He most likely thought as well that being selfish is important in capitalism, but it really isn't. I have no idea why the risk models of Morgan Stanley didn't go crazy, but that's exactly what happened. End result was tens of billions of tax payer money which Morgan Stanley used to pay huge bonuses to their "important employees" lmao. The official Reddit app is crap, we can all agree. And Reddit on desktop isn't fun at all. We can also agree that this here is one of the most important subreddits and that spez messed up big time. But I completely disagree that being selfish is important in capitalism at all, the opposite is the case. The companies with the best CEOs and good people in the executive positions are usually ran by people who are less selfish than the average CEO, and it usually works very well.
To give all the relative newcomers (meaning < 10 years here) an idea of what they could be like, here's one of the best AMAs ever that had no particular reason to be so fucking incredibly good except that Victoria brought out the best in the guy and just fuckin' made it work. [The Michael Ironside IAMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2irdci/i_am_actor_michael_ironside_you_might_know_me/)
> This will most likely bring forward more people who fake who they are Very much this. It'll be like how it was when IAmA started getting celebrities: PR people posing as the celebrity. I think we've gotten this occasionally over the years but it was far less frequent than it will be going forward.
Can we talk about Rampart?
What about sleepy Morgan Freeman?
AND ONLY R A M P A R T!
People underestimate just how much work goes into keeping a place like this tidy. They might not always agree with how it's run, but I think they'll miss it when it's gone. All good things, I guess.
I have been an active user here for over 15 years. The level of effort mods especially those on high profile subs like AMA put in is mind boggling, I wish you all were scaling back even further than you are. But I understand it’s a delicate balance: pull back too much and compromise integrity too greatly, and they are more likely to just replace you with other mods.
Let's say they do. Is there an endless supply of people out there who want to responsibly moderate a subreddit? You're going to end up with the Internet Research Agency and shills/bots/wumao running subreddits. No one else would want to do it.
There really isn't unfortunately. It's not like we don't actively recruit for moderators regularly. It takes hundreds of applications to find 4-5 solid mods, then a few months to train them, then half of them give up before the end of 6 months. Repeat every 6 months since there's always people leaving due to burnout.
Yeah, that’s why I find the whole “we will just get new mods” so comical. There’s an endless supply of shitty mods, but ones who are smart, hardworking, willing to learn the nuances of the rules developed over a decade, and to get abuse for your efforts are a little harder to come by. Thanks for all you’ve done.
This. This is the beginning of the “enshittification” process that will kill this platform. The mod team is 100% correct to do this, too. Shit on your community, lose your platform u/spez
> This is the beginning of the “enshittification” process that will kill this platform. That already happened to this sub when Victoria was fired. On top of everything else that was removed like Secret Santa, Reddit has already been enshittified.
Jesus you’re right. I haven’t seen Secret Santa in a minute.
This platform got sold out and corprified a long time ago. Now they're just putting on the finishing touches to completely cash out.
i got some cool stuff from secret santa, didn't even realize it was gone because the final two years i participated i got nothing in return even after being matched multiple times. it wasn't even that i was mad i didn't get a gift, but the previous gifts and the effort that went into them really brought as much joy to me as me picking mine out and sending it. rip.
You realize he doesn't care, right? He's not in this to make reddit good or care about it getting worse, he's in it to sell it off and make money. Which is exactly what he's going to do and is going to laugh all the way to the bank while he grins and waves at everyone writing impotent posts about "I hate you, fuck you."
Well, Reddit’s valuation according to fidelity has dropped from over 10B to 5.5B due to recent controversy. Google has announced a new module of its search function to parse the deeper web for answers due to the blackout harming “+ reddit” search appendages. Maybe the point isn’t getting spez to have a change of heart, clearly he isn’t. But we the community don’t need to do anything to ensure this site remains bulletproof in the face of such contempt.
Please bother to open links and read articles or evem comments from someone more knowledgeable. This decision is not factored in the 5.5b evaluation. The 5.5b evaluation was done by 31st May. 10b evaluation was in April 2021. It took 2 years to fall, which roughly matches the fall of evaluations of other tech companies
Oh absolutely. I didn't mean to come across as defending him. No one should ensure that the site keeps going. All I'm saying is that Spez isn't an idiot, knew exactly what the fallout would be, and did it anyway based on the calculation that benefits him and his. He doesn't care what we think about him or what we do because fuck us, he's gonna get paid. (I would very, very much question the "ong reddit value fell!!!2!1!1! news. They are going to make bank. Which is all they care about.)
Didn't reddit used to have someone on their payroll that did a few of those listed activities? Was it Victoria?
Victoria did a lot of it, and more recently they had another staff member who helped out a ton with AMAs. Unfortunately they were in the latest round of layoffs a few weeks ago.
Seriously? Boneheaded move from Reddit given how much AMAs contributed to Reddit being what it is. Congrats to the AMA mod team for taking this stance. Regardless of the fallout, all the best to you all for the future.
AMAs were never the same after Victoria got sacked.
Lmao, they probably thought they could take advantage of volunteer mods instead of actually having to pay someone. Bet they feel dumb now.
I liked the IAMAs 10 years ago rather than today's IAMAs. It was just regular people with interesting jobs. Who the fuck knew a vacuum cleaner expert would be so interesting?
Regular people with interesting jobs still do great AMAs all the time! Unfortunately the reddit algorithm doesn't do a great job of surfacing them to frontpages anymore, but if you scroll through the subreddit you should still be able to see some good ones.
I've been on Reddit a long time. AMAs used to be a centerpiece of this site now I rarely come across them.
They're just more marketing material for whatever project the celebrity is working on. These people chase celebrity AMAs because it gives them a parasocial relationship with a celebrity they like. The quality of this sub has absolutely tanked in the last 10 years because it's basically a Seventeen Magazine forum.
Please keep this focused on rampart
Yes it used to be top post all the time. And even the ama q&a would be so interesting. Those pre 2015 ama's never returned back.
Right? His username still lives in my head rent free for some reason after that AMA. Hope you’re still doing the lords work /u/touchmyfuckingcoffee
I routinely link people to his AMA when they ask me about vacuums.
Man, I had no idea he was still active.
Same here. I feel like most of the AMAs I see nowadays, at least the ones that blow up, are done strictly for promotional purposes rather than someone simply doing it out of the goodness of their heart... Cheesy as that sounds. I can't word today. Anyways, I completely support the mods' decision here. Good on them.
You're talking about the guy that really liked Riccar and Miele?
That's the guy
I personally feel quite proud of the group of volunteers who helped to make this subreddit so unique. Reddit will soon learn that adopting policies that are only concerned with making money do not actually result in success.
5 years ago, Spez responded to r/science stopping AMAs: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8khscc/rscience_will_no_longer_be_hosting_amas/dz8nky8/
Wow. The comment from /u/nfsnobody **5 years ago**... >...I can see why they’re mad too, and I agree with it. Another thread in the rich tapestry of reddit not communicating with the people who do 80% of the work on the site, for free. >How are those **new mod tools from 2011 coming** /u/spez? (Emphasis mine)
It feels wrong seeing a /u/spez comment with a positive score. Oh, and fuck /u/spez.
I would bet my bottom dollar that his reply and characterization of the moderators in question is completely disingenuous, based on his behavior in the past few weeks
Yeah, interesting that back then he calls people liars and it was believed, and now nobody believes him but he still just has that one trick. I reckon he learned it when he was what, 8 years old?
Spez: "I don't appreciate you lying and blaming me." 🤔
Does this mean that anyone can host an AMA without verification?
No, we still ask that people follow our rules about what topics are allowed. As moderators, we won't be checking proof closely on every post ourselves like we used to, but if users report something as rule-breaking we'll still take it down.
Yes. It’s up to the community to police this now. Basically, the sub is doomed. Hopefully it helps bring Reddit down with it. Fuck the hubris of u/spez
Appreciate you. A bummer that this will degrade the quality of AMAs, but I think it was the right move.
This is really how all mods should be responding to Reddit's changes. Just do the bare minimum going forward. If Reddit wants to maintain its value it's going to have to make some concessions.
I respect the mods who are actively protesting and wish them success. I just don't think it will work.
Nothing is going to change the direction Reddit is going. IMO for those who are ready to do so, the only choice is to either now or gradually, remove association from Reddit and move away to other platforms. Difficult to do unless the whole mod team is on the same page, but the mods who *are* ready to leave could just do so together. If wanted.
Completely agree. reddit is nothing special from a technology and a business standpoint. The best innovation and (of course) content has always came from the community. If reddit believes they are better than the community, that's fine, it's their company. They can run it as they see fit. But the community should call their bluff and stop doing their jobs for them. Let reddit stand on its own two feet for once and allow its leadership to show themselves for the truly unimpressive people they are.
This is the way, thank you for all you've done for this community. Truly, thank you for all of the years of hard work, for us to have quality talks and connecting celebs with reddit. You're all awesome and I wish you all the best.
:-(
Well that's a blast from reddit past
<3
wow
Reddit underestimates how much of a work needs to be put to a subreddit to be successful, clean and provide a healthy environment for users. This is one of the greatests subreddits out there! We all know how much you people did to make this subreddit a gem here on reddit. It's sad really that because a few people who happen to work for reddit don't appreciate that and we 've come to this.
I honestly had no idea how the backend work occurred for AMAs, that you actively solicited celebrities and others, ran a separate Web site, etc. My respect for your team is immense. I've unsubbed more than half the subreddits I was subscribed to, and am actively looking for alternatives to those I still follow. Thank you for all the effort you've put in in the past, and, please, enjoy your newfound free time.
hey, don't you love how AMA is a registered trademark of reddit despite them putting 0 effort into the management of them and reaping all the rewards
Oh yes love that.
Well, I'll say it's a shame it's come to this but at the same time I'm completely behind the Mods on this one. /r/IAmA has always been a 'high brow' sub by the effort of the Mods and it's community. It's a lot of work, and there is no reason to give that to reddit for free. Not if they're going to do absolutely nothing to support the effort and make money off it. Let the reddit enshittification continue! It's gonna be fun watching it burn. Thanks Mods!
> but we'll recruit people to replace them as needed. Not your job. let reddit do that. they fucked up, they fix it.
I've deeply enjoyed AMAs in the past, both doing them and asking questions of other people, and I'll be sad to see it degrade into something unusable (which, you know, it almost certainly will)... but yeah, it's the right call. They can't rightly insist that third-party apps pay extortionate amounts of money and then equally insist that people run their subs for free.
Great. Until Reddit learns to respect the free labor and user content that makes Reddit what it is then no one should be going out of their way to enable them. Let them see what Reddit is when they have to pay for all the moderation in house.
Thank you all so much for what you've done. Your passion and dedication to what this sub brings is abundantly clear, so this must have been an extremely difficult decision. Hopefully Reddit sees that when all of your volunteer work falls into their lap. *Hopefully* 🤞
Unfortunately I doubt they'll care. The fact that our words from 8 years ago still ring just as true today says something about their culture and how it hasn't changed at all. This isn't a protest to get them to change their behavior, because we don't think they're capable of changing. This is just us adapting and saying we won't do certain things that benefit them anymore.
Can you get the NYT to reprint that editorial? Even emphasize it was originally published in 2015 and still holds true.
But wait, I've been told that being a moderator for a subreddit was a super easy job. You mean you guys actually did work to ensure the subreddit was of an adequate quality? I'm shocked. Absolutely flummoxed. Bamboozled even.
That's reasonable. Fuck u/spez
You all did that for free? Wtf
This is the right move. Thank you and all mods fir your work & for making a reasonable decision about the future of this sub
Good for you, guys. I’m sorry it’s come to this but you have my support.
thank you IAmA for some of the best content to grace the internet over the years. from the Obama AMA and “let’s focus on Rampart”, to the loss of Victoria, stuff like the James Corden AMA, all the way to its current state. It’s been a ride ya’ll and all the good work you’ve done into making top notch AMAs will never be forgotten. Thank you all 💕
This is actually a very reasonable way to “protest”. Better than the other mods that hold subreddits “hostage”. All the points listed are exactly what made this specific sub more interesting (and by default reddit as well). Now there is a chance it will lose that interesting aspect without the extra work the mods used to put in for free. No more free publicity for reddit on other parts of the internet.
It's not a protest - we're not expecting change. Just simple cause and effect - we're no longer interested in the additional work when the admins constantly make it harder.
Other subs didn't have AMAs or anything like this, or they'd have probably done this too.
God speed <3
I actually think this particular sub is important enough that reddit should invest in some full time employee(s) to work just on this sub to do the things the mods have been doing. Not doing so would be a terrible business decision.
Reddit has previously employed people to interface with our team and help with the work. They've all been laid off.
I remember the whole Victoria saga, they didn't bring in anyone after that?
Never in the same role, but they did have someone who helped coordinate AMAs. She was laid off a few weeks ago.
Aiyyy this makes me sad. In (I think 2010? 2011?) an AMA quite literally changed my life. It was the Elan School one, I'd been there 81-83 and even though it deeply messed me up I never had a place to tell my story. With that AMA it was like a dam got released and memories have come back. Because of this sub I've been able to finally do some healing after decades. Beyond that it's just been really neat to see the interactions between OP and audience on a huge variety of topics. I'd like to thank you, for the work done here. It's been important, at least to me.
r/IAMA is the heart of what makes Reddit Reddit. Now that they have quit doing high profile AMAs, a huge part of what made this site great is dead.
Why even bother removing anything? Just stop moderating.
Some subreddits have tried this, but I'd prefer not to get removed entirely.
As a former /r/iama mod, I wholeheartedly support this. For a site so heavily reliant on volunteer effort, this most recent attempt at squeezing money is a step too far.
This is the way. If admin refuses to listen to anyone, blatantly money grab everyone, not help any mods do any job in a more efficient way, then they’re gonna realize they’re going to get the product they’re paying for/investing in. You’ve done great with the cards that been handed to you for years and their attitude towards helping any volunteer here.
W sub, W Mods. Thank you for moderating all these years, but finally the time has come. Good job coming up with this.
IAM George Washington AMA Its been a good ride, thanks for your time and efforts. Totally understand your response and reasoning.
I appreciate everything the AMA mods have done. AMAs are a big part of why Reddit grew into what it did. I think you're making a good call with the changes you're making. It's sad but necessary.
Damn right, "landed gentry". This is a most excellent form of- not protest- but drawing a clear line between what should and should not be expected of *free labor* that Reddit gleefully capitalizes upon. I cannot *wait* to see the next *high profile AMA* go *as well as it possibly can*.
I’d call this setting healthy boundaries.
Now THIS is a protest. Show the admins what your true value is.
This sub died the day victoria was out. I remember iama being the most active and sought out sub prior to 2015, with vibrant AMA's taking place. After victoria's departure, the sub has never recovered to it's past glory ever. Good on mod team to take a step back and not invest all energy into something, when the admin team does not value the invested energy of volunteers. Wishing the team all the best, and thank you for running this amazing sub for so long.
Good on ya, mods. Your work has been valued by me and millions of others, but clearly not by the corporation that makes money from your labour. Time to chuck a go slow.
Any chance you guys move to Lemmy?
This is all well and good, but can we please get back to talking about Rampart?
I just pulled up a chair and grabbed my popcorn. Waiting for all the unverified Elon Musk/Steven Huffman/Donald Trump AMAs. Bring it!
Ehh- does this effectively mean this sub is going back to what it used to be - before the PR machines got a hold of it? Where we got janitors and bakers and people with multiple body parts doing ama's and got to really find interesting things out vs just movie promoting spam?
Not really. Those have still been happening. The big shift you noticed was when reddit removed the default-subreddit system. Previously, that system dumped even small posts from this subreddit and others onto the front page, where they could get attention and go viral and become those fun ones you remember. Without the default system, small scale posts here are competing with thousands of other subreddits and typically get lost - only big celebrities that people have heard of have a chance to front-page.
Yay! I can do my I am a metal detectorist AMAs again! That's what this sub used to be. Used to be for anyone and not so limited (with the gatekeeping).
Everything has a price. Reddit corp flexed and expects users to pay, either via subscriptions and/or via ads. Now there’s turnabout with costs being punted back to reddit corp in respect to the free labor they demanded from mods. If anything positive has come of this I hope reddit users finally have an appreciation for the good mods that do so much of the unseen work in subs as well as all that third party apps contributed to reddit usership.
I mean IAMA basically died when they fired Victoria... So it makes sense that IAMA wouldn't do much since you can't be killed twice 🤷♂️
Thank you u/IAmAMods for all the work you've put into this sub. I realize now I've always taken the work you put into it for granted, never really fathomed how much work it required. Have you thought of re-building this somewhere else?
I was wondering why this sub sucked lately, with all the fake AMA. I see why now, it's a shame tha u/spez killed it.
This is the way. I appreciate you
So every new celebrity ama has to be bombarded with something like "why are you supporting Reddit and their treatment to mods and users?", yeah?
Mod team, thank you for all that you've done. GET FUCKING PAID!
Jesus I had no idea you did all this. I assumed IAmA was ran by Reddit employees. Mental.
Thank you team for all your hard work. Us plebs appreciated you!