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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
I decided to give up on Reddit and come back to my roots on slashdot, and this is the top story I see.
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.
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.
Looks like 4chan is the only reasonable alternative.
>4chan
>reasonable alternative
We're DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.
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.
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.