IAmA mods no longer willing to work for reddit for free
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.
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[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:
-
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)
thank you for posting this, it annoys me to no end the amount of "omg this happened now on reddit" posts that link to the source on reddit. Like that defeats the purpose of leaving the platform if I'm forced to go back anyway and give them traffic. Make a mirror, stop giving the site more traffic lol
Yeah theres no point in mods making a community a special place when reddit is going out of their way to shit on the mods and users.
It's pretty insane the amount of work they did for free. I never even thought about the effort that went into a sub like that. Good for them
Wow the mods were really working hard to make IAMA a special place. Hope the drop in quality becomes clear ..
Oh man, I'm not going back to Reddit, but it would almost be worth it to watch all the fake celebrity trolls do AMAs.
Thank you I really didn't want to open Reddit today.
-
🍿🍿🍿 ...... How can you not love this?
Truly masterful.
Maybe I'm already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?
It's dead to me.
Some people like to watch the fire go out.
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
I would imagine everyone subscribed to !reddit does.
Is there a way to block a community from feed? Not for this case, just trying to figure out how lemmy works while app i was using gets adapted.
It's like seeking drama about your Ex when you find out they're dating an uglier person
The people who coordinated celebrity AMAs did it for free...? That disgusting sisyphian labour was done for free? That might have been the most important work any mod team did from the perspective of Reddit's PR. How could Reddit be that ungrateful? They had it all
Yeah, I can't fathom why people work for a for-profit company as volunteers, especially in time-consuming and high-profile jobs like this.
Reddit didn't really use to feel like a for-profit platform. We always knew there was corporate somewhere far away in the background but otherwise the communities and mods were making the entire website.
We now know how foolish that was of course.
That's because the official Reddit stance was that the communities themselves belonged to the moderators so it wasn't that you were doing with for Reddit, they were just providing you with a tool to build a community.
Of course that was clearly a lie, and as soon as moderators exercised their own power by protesting, with the support of their communities, Reddit was like "jk never mind, actually we own the communities and you're disposable".
I really don't understand why anyone would volunteer for a corporation for free, that doesn't pay you, doesn't care about you, and will drop you like hot garbage if it benefits them. There was a myth of ownership over the subreddits, but that myth is gone.
reddit was/is not really a for profit corporation as they burn money every day. So they paid for the platform people could use to build their communities and people were willing to do it for free. Now reddit wants to make money and sell all those communities to the fancy new LLM companies.
I think in the early days volunteer moderators were necessary because you wouldn't want a paid employee dictating the content and direction of a community sub that was created by users. That's what made reddit special back then. Now that it has a high user volume it's taken on a life of its own and the company feels they can move forward without those volunteers. I think it's a mistake but time will tell.
"has all the funds they need to hire people"
r/IAmA is really coming full circle
That is an understatement. I'm a former mod of r/iama (u/Brownboy13) and I was signing on to handle a high profile ama when Victoria messaged that she wouldn't be able to help us as she was let go without notice. Admin didn't even bother informing the guest that the employee handholding them through the process would no longer be available. We were caught entirely off guard and I don't think /r/iama has ever been the same. There was a level of trust the /u/chooter would be in the same room as a guest or at least on a call and make sure it was them answering and not pr teams. It's been like fucking pr junket since then.
This was the start of my disillusionment with reddit, and it seems to have been finalized with this last shitshow of a decision.
Wow, hard to grasp that was 8 years ago?!
I was never a user of IAMA, but I clearly remember how shitty reddit behaved in that situation.
I did delete my account later, and only lurked through links to my favorite subs for a few years. Now I have deleted my links too.
Reddit has devolved steadily for to many years, time to cut the cord completely.
remember when spez tried to throw victoria under the fucking bus? pepperidge farm remembers
r/IAmA is really coming full circle
Status: Chooted
I wonder how long before we start seeing some plausible but fake AMAs
This is a great move. In the spirt of malicious compliance. Doing everything a moderator is expected and none of the added value stuff that makes ama’s valuable
You made a misleading title. They basically won't be seeking out celebrities or those high value activities, and will just let the sub take its course while doing very basic modding.
Hope they come to lemmy.
I know the answer, but I couldn't ask "why fucking bother?" any harder.
I can't imagine the effort it must take to mod a sub like IAmA where you have daily posts with thousands of comments. They do it all for free and Spez insults them for it.
I agree, everyone should insult them for doing it for free.
Well this is the bare minimum because if Reddit wants to have direct control over subreddits they ought to pay moderators. The fact they will still moderate is still a concession that i think they should rethink. Literally if Reddit wants control over communities let them deal with all the hassle of moderation. Sometimes stuff end and it does not need to be a gracious end.
This is what makes Lemmy amazing. "You're a mod who wants to get paid? Yeah join the club, we're losing money on server costs."
Yeah the unfortunate reality is that irl the system we live in still stucks. But as you said that's precisely what makes the people willing to put all this together, in spite of the difficulties, so special. It's like an anti profit motive lol.
Man the hits just keep in coming.
I hope more big subs follow suit. But part of me knows many won’t.
Some of us are still figuring things out, including a likely lemmy migration. Just need to work out some performance optimizations for the instance.
I was surprised they didn't participate in the blackout, but at least it's better late than never.
This is the perfect change. Admin can't kick you out, all the high value is gone.
Yeah, this is what happens when you stop listening to people who prop up your organization.
All mods of reddit should refuse to do it for free.
Tricky question. But yeah, if you're modding a channel just for the sake of being a mod and you do it for free. You're a sucker.
I help moderate a small discord channel, Maybe I'm a sucker too. But I help so our outfit can have a place to hang out outside of the game, share ideas and plan events.
I bet some reddit mods feel the same way.
I don’t think all forms of free voluntary moderation make you a sucker. I think the only suckers are the ones who do whats basically a full time job for free.
let’s start an AMA community here on this instance
I’m all for compensating moderators but I think it should come with additional oversight, vetting, and higher expectations. There are many terrific moderators out there who absolutely deserve to be compensated for their efforts. However, there have been too many instances of power hungry mods who have had a negative effect on a community.
Either hire mods as employees so that they have oversight from management or make it so mods can be voted out. There needs to be some level of accountability.
For smaller communities it probably matters less, but as soon as you break a certain point it becomes a fair bit of work, even with bots.
I like the idea of voting mods out, but I think the bar should be rather high. If 2/3 of the other mods want a top mod out, definitely out them. With the community it's a bit harder because for smaller communities that can be gamed with bots.
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)
Stop giving a shit about a corporation that doesn't care about you - impossible challenge
gone sexual
AOL had to pay their volubteers, after being sued. So why not reddit ? They expect their mods to follow their guidelines.
I tried to upvote OP post on reddit and RIF reminded me I'm not logged in. I frowned, then I laughed.
Who's going to mod this place?
People who have actual agency over their communities and aren't at the whims of a corporation.
A Lemmy community can have real collective ownership. You can create your own instance where you own your own hardware. Or if you don't want to have to manage a whole instance, it's technically possible that a bigger instance could sell hosting if you don't want to officially partner with the insurance and the community could pay for their own hosting that way to have true autonomy. Lemmy has lots of ways and potential ways for communities to be able to own themselves.
Reddit fired Victoria because they didn’t want to spend any cash on this kind of thing.
Which makes no sense, because the high-profile AMAs she made happen certainly broadened reddit's public appeal by quite a bit.
.
It's the same logic they're still using: they want to monetize Reddit more aggressively, even if that kills its appeal and they have to brutalize their own community to do it.
You’re right, of course, but the person you’re replying to is also correct in that the firing of Victoria years ago was an early indication that Reddit seems to have decided as a matter of principle that it will not under any circumstances pay anyone to manage content.
They fired Victoria because they were trying to aggressively monetize IAmAs in ways that were going to fuck community interests, and Victoria pushed back. Think Rampart, except companies can pay to ensure that it doesn't become a PR fiasco, so it's guaranteed astroturf.
Reddit has been classy ever since.
Idk...in another post it read that reddit has more than 2000 employees.
And they weren't willing to have one person on the payroll for their most famous format?
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.
🍿🍿🍿 ...... How can you not love this?
Ohhhhhhhhh! Burn!
Reddit isn't ever going to pay anyone to mod a sub. They'll drag all of this out until the IPO and then sell off the whole site to the highest bidders who will probably scrap it all and turn it into a new TikTok app or something.
By that time Steve Huffman will be on a private beach somewhere not giving a single fuck about what happens to all the redditors who made him rich
The only way they make money with IPO is if they short reddit.
They already do though, kind of. Their "Community Points" are an opt-in crypto shitcoin that the mods get a chunk of every month, and they're free to sell them to anyone willing to buy.
And there's always someone willing to buy, for some reason.
Just look at /r/cryptocurrency and their MOON token. Mods get something like $2000+ USD worth per month. I'm always surprised that 99% of reddit has never heard of them.
So you mean Reddit gives mods a bunch of worthless garbage, er I mean "moon tokens", and then it's up to the mods to convince someone else that it's worth something and trick them into buying it?
That just makes me even more glad I'm not there anymore lol
See also "if you want to tell me what to do, put me on the **** payroll."
"Act your wage"
Yes, exactly!
They can do what communities like /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortniteBR do and opt-in to Community Points. Mods of the former make a decent killing with their MOON token.
Granted it's done by milking their users for dollars... but if it's good enough for reddit the company!
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
LOL do they realized they can get replaced in a second? They're unpaid internet janitors, they do it for internet power tripping and ego.