To our users, AMA guests, and friends,
You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit’s poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.
This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.
Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:
Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.
Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.
The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.
We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.
Amazing how little has changed, really.
So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won’t yield to the pressure of a protest. They’ve told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.
So, moving forward, we’re going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we’ll recruit people to replace them as needed.
However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:
Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary). Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs. Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts Moving forward, we’ll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn’t mean we’re allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you’ll need to pay more attention.
Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
Thanks for the ride everyone, it’s been fun.
Sincerely,
The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)
Note, this is a copy of the moderator post. I (GoodKingElliot) am not a moderator of that community.
I really don’t understand this mod behaviour.
You’re doing work for free, and promise to do it for free despite Reddit making it much harder.
If any mod complains, you plan to replace them instead of bringing the challenge to Reddit.
No wonder Reddit doesn’t care about protests. They not only get free workers, but by looks of it, ones who have Stockholm syndrome
This one is actually more complicated than that.
After Victoria was fired by Reddit, it was left to moderators to communicate with public relations groups for celebrities for organizing AMAs.
They went as far as creating their own private website for moderators to schedule and organize AMAs.
This means people outside of Reddit were paying for that website and doing all the work of communicating. They literally own the website in question, Reddit does not.
The other moderator that wants to replace them? Are they going to build their own website? Because I’m pretty fucksure that the moderators who built their own website to facilitate AMAs on Reddit retain ownership over said website and the data therein. Replacing them outright loses access to the tools they built to facilitate AMAs.
This is pointedly not as simple as replacing moderators. You have to replace them with competent people who can organize all of this as well as safely verify who is real and who isn’t. These are actually relatively labor-intensive things, and these moderators are not just going to hand off all their hard work to another moderator.
If Reddit itself wanted to take the website away from them, Reddit would literally have to sue the mods for ownership of the website, and that will take time, money, and probably won’t work unless the website has Reddit in the name or uses Reddit assets. Even in that event, all they have to do is rename the website and remove the Reddit assets or just shut down the website entirely, and all the ability to organize AMAs is poof, gone, in a puff of smoke.
You’re really, really underestimating this one.
You actually made my point with this.
Mods are doing all those work, drive engagement to Reddit, ut earn nothing.
If mods take out AMA website by some other name and make a business out of it, it’s only great. They will make profit and Reddit will not get free labour.
And this is why their ordeal of still moderating when Reddit making things harder is exactly like Stockholm syndrome
Making a website to host AMAs would be an enormous amount of work. Even if they retained their userbase, the costs of hosting a site that wouldn’t crash would be significant. If they don’t retain their userbase, it ruins the entire reason who many notable people do AMAs which is to advertise whatever they’re doing. To make a profit, they would need to monetize it too somehow.
What exactly are you saying here, that they should stop moderating the iAmA subreddit altogether? Reddit has shown they will actively remove and replace moderators who do not kowtow to their demands.