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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.
It's a shame we can't do something similar to get some changes made on this site. Shithole that it now is.
Nothing of value was lost.
The faster that cess-pool of a circle-jerk self-congratulatory website goes away, the better off the web will be.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Dig 2.0 all over again.
What these companies seem to fail to understand is that by having "the community" do their work for them without pay, they lose any kind of hold on the site and the community.
The mods have nothing to lose by fucking up you site if you mess with them. They can move to a new site tomorrow.
Maybe if being a mod was a payed job you could tell them what to do.
I miss fatpeoplehate, because any time someone said something good about it, I knew they were a piece of shit. I don't know enough about Reddit to know which boards to have that opinion of, so I just have that opinion of all of 'em now... because Reddit is home to big collections of jackholes, and they're proud.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Put another way: If the Reddit leadership wants the mods' valuable labor to remain free as in beer, then they'd better allow it to remain free as in speech.
A website comes and makes some "social web application for sharing stuff", said web application has some very interesting discussions -> said web application gets popular -> said web application gets increasingly worse usually as a consequence of trying to monetize it or due to the sheer number of people using (drowning everyone else in noise) -> users start to migrate to alternatives -> only a shell remains -> death.
See: digg, facebook, myspace, orkut, slashdot...
Every time there's an article about reddit I have to visit their site to remind me exactly what reddit is.
And at that moment I remember why I don't ever remember. I'm still not sure what it's supposed to be.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
awhile ago
and i feel vindicated
reddit needs to pay its mods (say, a cut of ad revenue from their sub)
if they work for free, they have no real power over them. which is unstable as current developments indicate
also, if they pay them, they can fire them
you can say paying mods will change the tenor of reddit but this is bullshit: what motivates someone to mod for free is a sort of pathetic need for power, which is actually worse than any nefariousness due to filthy lucre as their motivation
bye bye reddit, you were fun. but you have a fatal flaw in your power structure:
uncaring admins and abusive mods
so what's the next site to rise?
any tips?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's happened before, it'll happen again.
The people that have historically been on reddit were a 'techy' or 'nerdy' minority. They were who Slashdotters were 20 years ago. They want to attract bored housewives and people not currently on reddit and they'll never do it with fat people hate or other people having full control of subreddits or big things like Secret Santa, so they got rid of everyone that disagrees. Victoria actually made celebrities do their own AMA. Now they can just have the PR firm phone it in.
If anyone is upset at the changes then you they weren't the target demographic of Reddit 2.0. The type of people that originally came to Reddit a decade ago will find elsewhere. Reddit will continue to exist as a place for bored housewives to continue talking becoming a facebook of sorts. Right now all of those people are shoehorned into a terrible ayout of Facebook (Notice how facebook just added threaded discussion?). They're going to attract the people that want a "better" place to discuss things than Facebook but not actually have any real discussion. Why do you think CoonTown and SRS still exist? Loud vocal minority idiots are very profitable (Patreon).
Write something in a low level, portable language. Someone on slashdot should know how to roll up Usenet, IRC, voting & a web front end into a single set of packages that anyone can host.
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running for most people it wasn't worth it.
Add on Tor/I2P and you now have all of the above 'off' of the main internet.
And people have loyalty to the mods and the other posters on the sub, not the admins. If the mods of /r/IAmA or /r/AskScience said "fuck it, we're going to voat," lots and lots of people would go with them.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Having been in various stages of management for years you don't just fire people unless they are stealing or grabbing peoples asses without doing a risk assessment first and getting coverage. That isn't like black belt shit that's common sense.
They are a large part of the community. Your whole site runs based on the community. Your community is more like a customer than a non-employee. A customer that suddenly loses their favorite member of the company they are in contact with certainly will have some questions and might chose to bring their business elsewhere if the answers are no satisfactory.
You think students have never had questions about why a certain teacher was fired, especially if it was a teacher that did a very good job from the students perspective? If they are an important part of your community, there better be a good reason to kick them out.
Fuck Reddit. It's turning into a SJW/corporate shit-show. Let it go the way of Digg.
Ah, Slashdot quickly reporting on Reddit drama, while simultaneously suppressing the Sourceforge drama. How lovely.
Someone asked a loaded question to Jessie Jackson accusing him of nefarious mob style tactics.
Bluntly stated, such a question can't possibly be "loaded". It's fully legitimate given Jackson's background and current activities.
I was bemused that Reddit would put someone with Ellen Pao's background in to run the place, and I figured it would probably cause a lot of problems. I was correct. First she had the stupid "we're not going to negotiate your salary" stunt (whaddaya bet she negotiated *her* salary?) and now crap like this.
Sometimes I think people miss out on the fact that these companies are ephemeral. There's literally nothing there, just a bunch of people who come together and form a community. Those people will quickly go elsewhere - ask myspace. Someone mentioned Dig and it's a good lesson for those who would learn. You can lose 99% of the value of your company in the course of a few months by making a few stupid decisions.
Do you have ESP?
Agree, but they should have had a much better response prepared.
It's like if you suddenly fire the company rep that your main customer has been dealing with exclusively for years. You don't just call them up and say "hey, Joe's no longer with us, we'll get back to you in a bit about his replacement."
That means Reddit as a whole is popular (and fairly large) but popularity != influence.
Especially when you consider that even the largest subreddit is but a fraction of that traffic - much of the traffic is spread across thousands of subreddits (many of them quite small, even though they're popular among their habitues). It's essentially a collection of independent websites (though bound by a common interface and portal) ranging from fairly small (in terms of the overall web) to infinitesimally tiny.
Looking at this list of subreddits that have gone dark is instructive. Relatively few break the 100k subscribers mark, most are under 10k. And unless Reddit is very unusual in it's counting, the number of subscribers is a significant multiple of the number of active users.
... hmmm... not really... all the gaming journalism sites updated their ethics policies which was what GG wanted... the "gamers are dead" articles were killed and they haven't done that again.
I think comic con san diego is going to have a GG discussion...
And the developers and publishers have almost entirely sided with the evil gamers... because... they actually buy games.
Most of the important people in anti GG were fired or have been marginalized and a few of the pro GG people have actually openly gotten jobs at some of the bigger gaming news sites like the Escapist.
so... everything you said would make perfect sense... if you said the exact opposite. :-)
Contradict me... I would love to rub your face in a bit more... I am turgid with excitement. :-D
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> I for one won't be back until /r/coontown and it's ilk are gone.
But you won't be satisfied with that. In fact you'll ask for more. And we know exactly how far this will go. Insane gender wars and politicization of every community from video games to movie goers. Callout culture, moral panics, hysteria, corruption and above all censorship everywhere, all the time. You'll turn the communities others have built into propaganda platform, and in the process wreck them.
Your kind is known to us now. It's better not to give an inch. Let the racists have their gutter. They do less damage than the likes of you.
the policy changes were precisely what GG was asking for...
I mean... EXACTLY.
As to GG dying down... GG is the dog that gets kicked. It dies down when you stop kicking it. Kick the dog and see exactly how dead it is... And the reality is that it existed before it had a name.
the whole thing started because the media kicked the dog... and they didn't stop... they just kept doing it until the dog go really really pissed. And the dog bit the media... the media said "ouch"... and things have been more civil since. But the dog is still there. Try kicking it and see what happens.
As to Anita... she's actually floundering pretty hard. You're apparently not following that all. Her latest ploy at relevance was citing some japanesy cutey girl thing that she got in a swag bag when she went to E3 which she misrepresented as the E3 access pass. Even many of her supporters were saying "wtf" over that. And very recently she got upset about pregnant ladies in a Fallout mobile game not rushing to put out fires or attack bandits like the non-pregnant men/women. Because that's something pregnant women do right... well known for being fire fighters and soldiers. They just strap a little helmet on their distended bellies and go to war... right guys? Right?
Anyway... she's a fad. The gamers were there before her and will be there after no one even remembers her. Its like attacking action movies or something and expecting either hollywood to stop making them or the people that go to the movies to give even some absurd fraction of a shit what the harpies have to say on the issue.
You say some people take her seriously? Okay... but who takes those people seriously? Nothing times any number... equals nothing.
As to the FBI... so what? People make specious complaints and law enforcement checks it out. No convictions. ;)
As to restraining orders... you don't have to do anything to get a restraining order. You just ask for one.
In any case... you're apparently going to keep cruising up and down the Denial river... so believe what you like. There is a long list of developers that have come out as against your antagonistic attack on what was previously a pretty chill community of people that just wanted to be left alone and have a good time. We don't really need anyone else besides our developers and our developers don't need anyone else besides the players. if you don't play the games and don't make the games... you're irrelevant to us. You can't touch us. That applies to any fandom or market.
One of the reasons so many of you twits get so mad at the free market. YOUR developers keep making games... and no one buys them. Take the maker of Sunset. Big SJW blow hard... hates gamers and the gaming community. She even got Leigh Alexander to promote her game... you know, the women that said "gamers don't have to be your market"... and then was fired from her job... she had so many great quotes. I think the best one was "I am gaming. I can make you or break you." Followed by something about how the person she was arguing with should go make her a sandwich or something... So she lost her job and decided to make a gaming advertising and promotion firm.
And this person inline with your laughable faction hired the disgraced games journalist to promote the game. Sales were basically zero. And the developer raged and said she was leaving game development... she hates everyone... And now she's got a promotion on Patreon where you can pay her to to bitch about how the gaming market is bad. Why anyone would do that is a mystery to me but stranger things have happened.
Point is... there is winning... and there is Charley Sheen WIIIIIINNNNIIIIING.
All you're telling me is that you have tiger blood... you're like a warlock... you're saying I couldn't handle your brain because if I tried my head would explode. And other hilarious things Charley said before apologizing and going into rehab again.
Anywho... you're adorable... like a cross eyed kitten. Never change.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.