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.

Comments

Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologues

[Kunedog]

One of the many reasons mods are upset is that the employee who was fired was (by all accounts) crucial to the reliability and credibility of AMAs.

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

Its because she refused to censor a question

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Its because she refused to censor a question

[Victor Liu]

There's suggestion that this is not the case: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI... Please do not continue to spread this rumor as it is just causing more harm.

Re:Its because she refused to censor a question

[Trailer Trash]

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.

Re:Its because she refused to censor a question

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stick a fork in it

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in

[Lord Agni]

I decided to give up on Reddit and come back to my roots on slashdot, and this is the top story I see.

Good

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

The faster that cess-pool of a circle-jerk self-congratulatory website goes away, the better off the web will be.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait -- is that a comment about Reddit or Slashdot...?

That's not merely cheap snark. I've been reading this site since shortly after it launched, and it's become a howling example of self-parody.

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Indeed

[Kunedog]

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.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

how to behave a little bit

You're talking to grown adults. There isn't anything wrong with our behaviour, nor are we the "MRA/Republican/Stromfront/Rascist/Misogyo-nerd" strawmen you and your authoritarian friends constantly paint us as.

We are the same free minded geeks who have been around since Internet day 1. People who are jot afraid of critical discourse, thinking, and who have enough intellectual honesty to recognise censorship and dangerous abuses of power when we see them.

It's getting tiresome to have the open, free, principled sites and communications networks we built being labeled as "septic tanks" by the likes of yourself; apologists for censorship, media panics, and general authoritarianism. Is someone saying something on the internet that offends you? Grow up. We are not burning down the bridges we have built to the future just because you have found a half dozen trolls making cruel jokes in the darkest corner of the web. There are 2 billion people online, we built this network for them, and we will not turn around and hand it over to your feelings, your agendas, or your petty lust for power.

You people are the creationists of the internet, and you are not taking us back to the stone age.

Re:Indeed

[thaiceman]

For all the shitty things you will see on 4chan the one thing that remains constant is it is more or less uncensored free speech, with that freedom comes trolls, with it comes some things most people will not like (there is a reason it is known as the asshole of the internet) but at the same time there are some really intelligent people there.

Some of the most stimulating tech conversations I have had in my life have been on 4chan of all places and lasted the better part of 3 days and numerous threads, at the same time you've got things like the fappening & the hate threads for all shapes sizes and colors. Its humanity uncensored, its something that more and more you don't see because the world has turned into a politically correct, watered down version of a PBS kids morning show...

Re:Indeed

[RedK]

You people are the rednecks of the internet, and YEEHAW I GOTS MY FREE SPEECH BUT DON'T KNOW WHERE TO POINT IT.

Your opinion is not the one that is objectively right, as opinions cannot be objective. So stop trying to pretend you're a good guy to everyone else being "evil". Voltaire was not evil.

Re:Indeed

[RedK]

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.

Re:Indeed

[squiggleslash]

Got any evidence ?

Plenty. You can start here.

Nobody's trying to "smear" GamerGate, we read what you write in your own words on 8chan, /r/KIA, and under the #gamergate hashtag.

Your entire movement started when Adam Baldwin tweeted links to YouTube videos smearing a female game dev's sex life because her ex-boyfriend wanted to run a hate campaign against her. That information is public domain. It's not something I just made up. It's the ORIGINS OF GAMERGATE. It's where the hashtag came from.

Forget the links I point to you above, take a look at the last few articles on Slashdot concerning gender - concerning subjects as minor and unthreatening as whether marketing a chemistry set specifically at girls might have the opposite affect to that intended (ie doing so might decrease interest by girls.) Something many of us would like to discuss, but can't, because you fuckers SHITPOST over EVERY. SINGLE. DISCUSSION, doing your absolute best to discourage anyone from even discussing the subject by flooding the comments section with misogynist trolls and off topic bullshit.

If you really are so stupid as to think that GamerGate is something to do with Ethics in Gaming Journalism, you might want to actually look into the movement. You might even want to look at the "journalists" it allies itself with.

Because if it did, it wouldn't:

- Do everything possible to prevent discussions of women in tech. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".

- Harass female game devs constantly, because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".

- Talk non stop about so-called "SJWs" and never mention journalists. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".

- Demand Slashdot ban discussions related to diversity in tech. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".

- 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".

- Support the "journalism" of Milo Yiannopoulos, because he certainly has NOTHING to do with "ethics in (ANY) journalism" FFS.

- Pretend a mass harassment campaign against prominent women in journalism is not going on, pretending instead it's some kind of fund raising stunt (even though it doesn't apparently help any of the targets that it's going on), because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".

Do you get the picture?

Re:Indeed

[St.Creed]

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.

It is a vicious cycle

[Daniel Hoffmann]

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...

Reddit, schmeddit

[Godwin O'Hitler]

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.

i left reddit in protest of bad treatment by mods

[circletimessquare]

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?

Re:Dugg

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like 4chan is the only reasonable alternative.

>4chan
>reasonable alternative
We're DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[0100010001010011]

• Fark's "You'll get over it"
• Slashdot's buyout by Dice.
• Digg 4.0
• Reddit Pao-Pao-Paower Fail.
• Myspace's Myspaceness
• Facebook's "We'll let everyone sign up!"

  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.

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[meta-monkey]

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.

Re:Like a Confederate Flag

[0100010001010011]

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?

Re: Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideolog

[StormyWeather]

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.

Rival controversy

[Dwedit]

Ah, Slashdot quickly reporting on Reddit drama, while simultaneously suppressing the Sourceforge drama. How lovely.

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[caseih]

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.

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[Karmashock]

... 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

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[fahrbot-bot]

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>
Replacement Text:
<style>
.fhitem-poll { display: none !important; }
.nav-social { display: none !important; }
.popularity { display: none !important; }
</style>
</head>

And killed auto audio play using:
Matching Expression: <audio \1 autoplay="*" \2>
Replacement Text: <audio \1 \2>

Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu

[EvilAlphonso]

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?