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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:

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)

🍿🍿🍿 ...... How can you not love this?

Honestly? Good. The protests were incredibly weak. Going dark for a couple days, or even a week or more, was NEVER going to do anything. Of course Reddit was going to force you to do the bare minimum. That's where the protest is. The bare minimum. Yet everytime I suggested it in the early days of the protest I was downvoted to hell. When r/Pics went with the John Oliver I said the same thing and it got a bit more of a reaction. It's taking WEEKS to get to this point.

Reddit relies entirely on free moderation. Facebook and other companies pay their mods but reddits whole thing was "Your community, your rules! You just gotta follow some basics." If you haul out the moderation from under their damn feet then reddit will end up with a non-existent valuation. Yet I suspect the reason this is taking pathetically long to get to this point is because most of the mods are terrified of the idea of giving up the power they've had for ages.

Maybe I'm already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?

It's dead to me.

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

I wonder how long before we start seeing some plausible but fake AMAs

"has all the funds they need to hire people"

r/IAmA is really coming full circle

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 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.

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.

What's the point, just move out of reddit already and let it die

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."

Man the hits just keep in coming.

I hope more big subs follow suit. But part of me knows many won’t.

I was surprised they didn't participate in the blackout, but at least it's better late than never.

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

unfortunately all of the work this team has done made this a big enough draw to justify paid professional mods. Anything that draws millions of views and engagement can be taken over by reddit. I doubt a single tear is being shed over full control being handed over to a paid reddit employee

let’s start an AMA community here on this instance

All mods of reddit should refuse to do it for free.

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.

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

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?

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 fired Victoria because they didn’t want to spend any cash on this kind of thing.

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

Ohhhhhhhhh! Burn!

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

🍿🍿🍿 ...... How can you not love this?

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

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

See also "if you want to tell me what to do, put me on the **** payroll."

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.

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.