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AMAgeddon: Reddit Mods Are Locking Up the Site's Most Popular Pages In Protest
vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.
Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.
Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.
This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.
Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.
Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.
This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.
https://archive.is/ppes2
The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that shit down immediately. We can't do that anymore.
Chooter didn't allow anyone to do fake third-party AMAs, nor did she allow anyone to pay money to do an AMA. She practiced what she preached:
http://blog.prspeak.com/blog/p...
My comment from Reddit's banfest a few weeks ago:
Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.
It's exposure that marketers (of anything: products, politics, whatever) would kill for. They want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.
So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.
IMO redditors are right to be suspicious that Reddit suddenly removed (without explanation) the only person whom they trust to expose fake/paid AMAs.
No, we don't know why she was fired. But even if it was for cause, what the mods and community are most angry about is the lack of communication from admins (lots of them were left hanging for scheduled AMAs, with no word from Reddit). You see this lack of communication cited over and over again in the explanations on the subreddits made private. They say it's been a problem for years, and yesterday was just the tipping point.
Reddit's rationalization of its recent taste for censorship is that they want to create "safe spaces" to prevent abuse, harrassment, threats, terrorism, earthquakes, etc. But that is clearly a lie because they never provide evidence of such harrassment and they allow much worse subreddits like SRS to exist, and many other subreddits have been banned since FPH without even the pretense of a "harrassment" excuse, and there are other examples of uneven enforcement (e.g. the admins told KiA (the Gamergate subreddit) that they can't post public company contact info, which appears to be a "rule" unique to KiA).
Saying the wrong thing (especially criticism of Pao) can easily get you shadowbanned, which means you can see your own posts but no one else can see them. This feature can only be used by admins (not mods), and its only legitimate use was against spammers and bots, but even that's no longer the case because tech-savvy users (e.g. spammers) know how to test for it. Now it's just a sneaky way they censor with the hope of avoiding a confrontation and backlash.
Of course none of these unique and secret and biased rules and enforcement policies have been communicated to the community or mods either. This is almost always the real root cause behind every Reddit leadership fuckup with corresponding mod/user uprising, and this time even they and their friends in the corrupt, colluding tech news media--you know, the ones who hailed Pao as a hero of women for her frivilous failed lawsuit--can't hope to spin this user/mod revolt into a "redditor harrassment" narrative. It all started over Reddit's firing of a universally-beloved female employee, for fuck's sake. Redditors would trade
Someone asked a loaded question to Jessie Jackson accusing him of nefarious mob style tactics. Victoria left the question up, in fact it was upvoted near the top. He responded without answering the question. Then she got fired.
My speculation is that Jessie used nefarious mob style tactics to get her fired.
Reddit is done, the only question is how long does it have left?
Since Ellen Pao was made interim CEO its been bad decision after bad decision
Slashcode hasn't been open source in some time. Soylent built their site based on an older version of slashcode that was available and has modified it and improved it from there. Slashdot is built on the closed, and now completely proprietary, slashcode base.
Please Dice, drop the silly share button and return the read more link, and the read comments link. And provide a way to turn off the video stories that get stuck inline. This is an appropriate story to remind you of this. Your money is made because of content provided for free by us.
Please Dice, drop the silly share button and return the read more link, and the read comments link.
Second this, but don't know why, at least, they can't all be displayed?
BTW, I solved this, and the video stories by adding this rule to my Proxomitron config file for "slashdot.org":
Matching expression: </head>
.fhitem-poll { display: none !important; }
.nav-social { display: none !important; }
.popularity { display: none !important; }
Replacement Text:
<style>
</style>
</head>
And killed auto audio play using:
Matching Expression: <audio \1 autoplay="*" \2>
Replacement Text: <audio \1 \2>
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You want me to give a shit about the "other things" gamergate represents start a new fucking movement. I could give two fucks what that movement has to say at this point.
Hey, I recognize that shitty attitude. It's downright identical to Gawker's . . . right before the FTC got involved in December (in direct response to GG pressure), and Gawker was forced update their disclosure policy (and tons of articles that were then clearly in violation). And things have only gotten worse for them since. Read it and weep:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotaku...
The section of the FTC's website that deals with disclosures was updated late last month:
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advic...
Some of this new guidance directly reflects the language and particulars of the concerns GamerGate asked the FTC to address.
"Is “affiliate link” by itself an adequate disclosure? What about a “buy now” button?"
Consumers might not understand that “affiliate link” means that the person placing the link is getting paid for purchases through the link. Similarly, a “buy now” button would not be adequate
Does this guidance about affiliate links apply to links in my product reviews on someone else’s website, to my user comments, and to my tweets?
Yes, the same guidance applies anytime you endorse a product and get paid through affiliate links.
The revised webpage contains a great deal more language that needs to be analyzed but these two examples in particular reflect specific complaints GamerGate had about how Gawker Media handle their affiliate link disclosures. I know of no other group of people who were vocally complaining about this specific practice to the FTC. In addition, the FTC emails from my previous posts confirm that, yes, the FTC tailored part of their new guidance because of frequent complaints sent by GamerGate.
That's only scratching the surface of the FTC guideline updates directly attributable to Gamergate (follow that link for plenty more), but you get the idea.
Yes, you're free ignore the disclosures on Gawker articles if they bother you, or don't care . . . but they will be made available to you, by law . . . just as Gamergate wanted from the very beginning of the journalism scandal. Deal with it.
Reddit, so far, is living on investors money... their last published revenue from advertisement was $8.3M in 2014, of which they gave 10% to charity. In 2013, they operated in the red... as far as I know, they also operated in the red in 2014. In the last funding round (Oct 2014?), they were valued $500M and got $50M in extra funding. 6 times their annual advertisement revenue...
News at 11, reddit is a company and needs to produce money to stay afloat. Do you know what happens when an overvalued company runs out of investors while still not operating in the black?
The one that calls a harassment campaign that's trying to silence women (and other minorities) in tech and their supporters through threats of violence "free minded geeks", and those who oppose them "authoritarian" and "apologists for censorship"?
Which campaign is this ? I haven't seen such a campaign online or in tech. In fact, most tech places I've worked at for the last 18 years have been tripping over themselves to hire any women that actually apply, as long as they are qualified.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
While Voltaire defended free speech, I doubt he defended a form that was as absolute as people who quote him make it out to be.
The quote about "I will defend to the death etc." wasn't actually said BY Voltaire, but ABOUT him, by an early biographer.
Here is a quote from the man himself, from his 1763 Treatise on Toleration: “The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.”
An example of intolerance is Goebels on the radio. Or radio presenters calling on the radio for extermination of the Hutu's in the neighbourhood, telling people where and when to gather for that, and giving out pointers on how and why you should kill the Hutu's - as Radio Milles Collines did in Rwanda. Which was absolutely crucial to the genocide taking place. I doubt Voltaire would approve of that and say "oh, it's free speech. We really should defend the right of those poor folk to criticize the Hutu's for being alive."
There hasn't been a single great thinker or writer on free speech who also didn't recognize its limits. Or had a specific purpose in mind for free speech. Only when the debate is divorced from reality, and waged in abstract terms, do we get the pretty weird outcomes we can see today.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)