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IAmA mods no longer willing to work for reddit for free

Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we'd be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

175 comments

  • Copy and paste mirror

    [Mod Post] The Future of IAmA : IAmA

    To our users, AMA guests, and friends,

    You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit's poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.

    This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.

    Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:

    Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.

    Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

    The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

    We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.

    Amazing how little has changed, really.

    So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won't yield to the pressure of a protest. They've told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.

    So, moving forward, we're going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we'll recruit people to replace them as needed.

    However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

    1. Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.
    2. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).
    3. Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
    4. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
    5. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
    6. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
    7. Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

    Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention.

    Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we'd be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

    Thanks for the ride everyone, it's been fun.

    Sincerely,

    The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)

  • Yeah, this is what happens when you stop listening to people who prop up your organization.

  • Full text:

    To our users, AMA guests, and friends,

    You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit's poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.

    This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.

    Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:

    Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.

    Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

    The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

    We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.

    Amazing how little has changed, really.

    So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won't yield to the pressure of a protest. They've told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.

    So, moving forward, we're going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we'll recruit people to replace them as needed.

    However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

    Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

    Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention.

    Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we'd be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

    Thanks for the ride everyone, it's been fun.

    Sincerely,

    The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)

  • AOL had to pay their volubteers, after being sued. So why not reddit ? They expect their mods to follow their guidelines.

  • Kind of like the reddit Sekrit Santa shutting down. It was huge, really hard to run, and the volunteers all agreed to stop.

    I vaguely remember reading at the time a lot of users went there only for the exchanges and didn't use any other part of reddit.

  • Reddit has killed its golden goose. I don't see Reddit recovering from this, certainly not without reverting the API changes.

    • Doubtfully even if they reverse the changes. There has been a culture shift in what people are willing to do for free as a whole, let alone for reddit. Reddit won't pay, and then they made the mistake of letting everyone see that the grass is greener on other platforms, and the devs they screwed are scrambling to build up those other greener platforms like they did for reddit.

      Its the equivalent of a brain drain of scientists fleeing a country at war.

      • Thing is, only total nerdburgers like us (myself included) use Federated social media. WE understand the dangers presented by "gentlemen" like Elon and the paint huffer, but mainstream internet users just aren't involved enough in tech to care. The celebrities who were using Twitter to promote themselves will, almost without exception, just abandon social media entirely. A few have left for Mastodon purely out of spite (ie Kathy Griffin) or have explored Mastodon as an alternative (ie George Takei), but the big fish will just scatter. You'll get George Takei on Masto, but George Clooney, not so much.

        Perhaps it's for the best. When a web site achieves mainstream popularity, that's the first step on the road to enshittification. The internet was more fun when it was underground.

  • So, “we’ll still do some work for free, but not as much”? I can’t see Reddit caring about this ho hum response, and if they do notice it has a negative impact on the sub they’ll just replace them.

    Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.

    • they’ll just replace them

      replace them with who and how though? For loyalty and allegiance they'll have to wind up paying someone eventually. If they really think they're just going to be able to find some 15 year old on summer break willing to do it for free, it'll only last so long. That stuff takes work.

    • I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it's one that's seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.

      There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you're talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.

      Which is kind of ... a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don't get their way.

      The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren't protesting because they're part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They're going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.

      AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they're going to let it return to it's natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.

      Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.

      In this case, what do you think "scorched earth" would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.

      • I think you're dead-on.

        In some ways a degraded system is much harder to fix (or even identify as broken) than an outright destroyed one.

        If the IAmA mods vandalized the sub, they would get booted and replaced. But if they just stop doing anything but the bare minimum... that sub was such a magnet for traffic, it might slowly degrade traffic to Reddit as a whole.

        But just looking at the data, it might be very very hard to figure out that what is driving that is the IAmA moderators starting to restrict their activities only to moderation. It degrades the experience of the site as a whole.

      • I don’t think people are asking mods to burn the place down as much as they’re asking them to just stop. Stop working for free. Stop trying to negotiate. Don’t work for them and don’t work with them. Move your community elsewhere if you want to keep your moderator status and forget about Reddit.

        That’s not radical nor is it a huge workload. It’s less work for most.

    • Such a strong statement

175 comments