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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.
I am hearing that several subreddits that went private were forcibly reopened by the admins, and the mods were unable to do anything about it after. I don't have sources, but if it's discovered that it true, that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. The Reddit administration is interested in one thing, and one thing only right now: Milking the site for as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, and fuck the users. Well, fuck them then, as a user. We'll see if they can make their sweet cash when no one wants to use their site anymore.
8+ million users with accounts. 12 million unique ip's a month.
400k unique ip's a month for slashdot...
And that's why I like not putting all of my discussion eggs in one basket.
I personally don't care if someone is a racist or a fatty when they talk about their opinions on technology. I'm sure I've picked up a great number of things over the years from people I may not have agreed with on other subjects. I'll just copy and paste my old post on what slashdot needed to do
Dice you've successfully figured out how to run one of the most best 'news' and opensource websites and run them into the ground for profit. /. and Fark were the only 2 places that could handle 9/11 traffic. I rode out that entire day on both sites when CNN was crumbling.
I'm glad I had Slashdot over Reddit when I was an angsty tenager. I took pride in trying to get +5 comments and put effort into doing so. Honestly slashdot made me a better writer. Reddit is nice for short terse communication but sometimes I want to "talk with adults".
Slashdot didn't need much. Unicode support. Newer HTML5 support. CSS3. Make a decent mobile app, move away from HTML for Markdown. Moderation made sense and was much better than a simple +- system. Voting was randomly enabled and you couldn't both vote and comment on the same article. -2 to 5 also limited band wagoning. It's easier to recover from a bunch of early 'down votes'. Instead you drove everyone away to other sites (which still don't quite scratch the /. itch). You shoe horn in what ever fucking agenda is "big in IT". Looking back at all the news I got from /. I can't ever remember thinking "I wonder if a woman did this" or "Too bad a woman didn't do this" because I didn't care. It was about the tech and news for nerds.
On 'Gamergate', 'sexual equality', 'gender issues', we don't care "Trans-gendered" is a big thing in the news these days (and especially around tech) but a long, long time ago I remember a Mac developer made the transition. (This was in the late '90s.) I read her bio. Shrugged my shoulders went "Neat" and moved on. Why? Because she made some awesome Mac games. Most other person I know in IT or engineering think the same way. None of us care what you do with your body or who you take to the bedroom. I do care if you can cut it and get your work done or contribute to society.
On the other side of that is Randi Harper (FreeBSD Girl) [twitter.com] who actually write decent code. I've dug through some of her BSD commits, major props to her for doing that. But it can all be done without photoshopping traffic tickets to make it look like you got swatted, begging for money to move on twitter [youcaring.com], (When you already earn $3k/month from Patreon [patreon.com]), grandstanding on Twitter for no reason and bandwagoning users against anyone that disagrees isn't the way to do it.
You had the same opportunity to fix Sourceforge all of its' convoluted download mirrors (just use a proper CDN), update to Git, and everything else that Sourceforge isn't and GitHub is. Instead you rested on your laurels and are now trying to use this as one last cash grab before the Titanic goes down.
I don't know where I was going with this either. Just thought someone up top should know why your traffic is tanking and a lot of us are pissed off at you for what you've done.
I still won't forget the time you broke the capslock filter [slashdot.org], I remember BitTorrent being announced and people thinking it was useless, the iPod's lack of wifi and space compared to a Nomad, et al.
Thanks for the fish?
Here is the thing. Suddenly they have to get rid of someone and had no plans on how to replace her? I mean it would take about 10 mins to pick someone else to do that job and say 'this is your job now work with her to make sure it goes smoothly'. They did not plan it out because they did not plan on her leaving. It was a firing of passion not because she screwed up.
If she was leaving on 'her own' then she would have said 'you need to find someone to xyz'. If they had planned for a couple of weeks to get rid of her someone would have asked 'who does her job when she is gone?'. If not that is a massive fail of management.
No one asked those questions. Because it was 'get rid of her or I turn up the heat'. They can spin it however they like at this point. They probably can even find something to 'justify' it. But it happened too quickly for it to be a justifiable reason.
They do not want to cave to Mr Jackson. When they are actually in a position to do so. They could literally say 'he asked us to' and it would be on him. They are helping bury the bodies. This is part and parcel for Mr Jackson. Just to be clear I am not racist. This man is an opportunist who uses race to make himself and his friends lots of cash with a shakedown racket. The black community would do a lot better without people like him. He may have started with good intentions but now it is just about the greenbacks.
I would not be surprised to find out that somehow reddit is behind getting the new site the community was building banned from paypal.
The guys over at soylent have been revamping the code. Full Unicode support and full SSL is in already. They are *very* upfront about the changes they make to the site. They even added in some meta moderation types that have been needed for a long time (disagree, touché, spam). You may not like the traffic levels but they are the only ones keeping the code going. It is a very *classic* Slashdot interface.
https://soylentnews.org/meta/
https://soylentnews.org/about.pl
https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash/
I was there in the early days of the internet, and the BBS systems before. You aren't the same people who were around then. Maybe you have changed. Back then people weren't bent on making forums into cess pools. Even the trolls on Usenet were of a higher standard.
What really gets me is the war on free speech. While claiming to support it, the trolls keep telling us that there is "no right to be offended". There is, it's called free speech. Everyone has the right to express their disgust with you, and take whatever measures they like in response. If Reddit or any other site doesn't owe you a soapbox, you can't stifle their freedom to condemn you. Same with GamerGate trying to silence critics and web sites it doesn't like.
The level of organisation is shocking too. This is way more than anything the GNAA did. We see the same tactics spooks use, right out of the Snowden leaks. It's not just trolling for fun any more, it's people fighting an imaginary war.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We are the same free minded geeks who have been around since Internet day 1
No, you're not. You weren't born on the Internet's "day one". I was there on the other hand, and the people I knew back then would have had pieces of Gamergaters/MRAs/KiAs/and /pol in their crap. You guys aren't fit to name the people who were there at the Internet's day one.
To be honest, when we only had usenet I was nearly suspended from my CS study for a few weeks because a flame with what was probably the first notorious troll in the country got a bit out of hand and we descended into namecalling ("idiot" was used, I believe)... good times :)
But you're right. The folks driving gamergate are a bunch of right wing teens that think that shouting "free speech! free speech!" is somehow a laissez-passer for racism and sexism, and then act like victims if someone responds to it and shoots back.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Plenty. You can start here.
The wikipedia article on this subject is rooted in controversy, up to the point that some of its editors were both topic and site banned from Wikipedia. At this point, no, I won't start with it as it's obviously not a neutral source.
we read what you write...
because you fuckers SHITPOST...
you really are so stupid...
What's this YOU stuff ? Who are you talking to ? You're assuming things about me... for instance :
in your own words on 8chan, /r/KIA, and under the #gamergate hashtag.
I never visited the chan's, and have neither Twitter nor Reddit accounts. So those words can't be mine.
Now, let's review your list of allegations, all of which have no backing or evidence :
- Do everything possible to prevent discussions of women in tech. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Where have you been prevented from discussing women in tech and how have you been prevented from doing so exactly ? I mean, if you try to inject "women in tech" in discussions unrelated to women, I could see how people would dismiss you and downvote you, but in actual discussions about women in tech ?
- Harass female game devs constantly, because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Do you have any evidence showing these female game devs were not harassed because of ethics in gaming journalism ? It seems the whole issue that launched this (outside of years of build up with things like Doritogate and other growing concerns) is the fact that Nathan Grayson wrote this favorable piece :
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-valve-greenlights-50-more-games/
It seems to me that the issue people have is not that the developer is a woman, it's that Nathan Grayson (a man) used a screenshot to feature prominently the game of a person he had a personal relationship with, without disclosing said relationship. On top of that, it seems Nathan participated in making the game as his name is part of the credits, so essentially pushing his work.
Rather shoddy for a journalist.
- Talk non stop about so-called "SJWs" and never mention journalists. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Looking at one of Gamergate's projects, http://deepfreeze.it/, all the listed journalists seem to in fact be journalists.
I mean, I could see where SJW (a pejorative term used for people who use Social Justice causes to label and attack other people, with little care to the actual cause itself) could be used to describe some more fringe "journalist" like Jessica Valenti of the Guardian, because some of her opinions are pretty extermist in nature (nothing to do with her gender before you draw the conclusion it's because she's a woman) though.
- Demand Slashdot ban discussions related to diversity in tech. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Do you have a citation for Gamergate asking Slashdot (specifically) to not discuss diversity in tech ? Because Slashdot doesn't seem to have listened, we have diversity in Tech articles all the time.
- Call JACK THOMPSON "BASED DAD", a lawyer who has actually tried to ban games, while calling Anita Sarkeesian a "censor" or "authoritarian", because she produced a video identifying tropes she feels are sexist in various video games. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
I'll have to ask for a citation on this. In fact, looking at GamerGhazi's (which seem to be a group that opposes Gamergate) post about this situation,
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I'll take Gamer Gate people seriously when they can bear to hear the name Sarkeesian without going bat shit crazy. It would be nice to talk about genders in gaming, in a sane manner without making the extreme views the most important part of the discussion.