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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.
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.
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.
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?
... 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.