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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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.
Classic bait and switch
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.
Volunteer moderators actually makes sense for the vast majority of boards. I would still prefer much stricter training requirements, but the unofficial board for a youtuber is not corporate reddit's problem (until they start becoming a haven for white supremacists, I guess)
But I was always under the assumption that the ama board was corporate. It is very high profile, used as part of reddit PR, and often interacts with the kind of people who have lawyers on retainer.
The ama mods doing this for free were insane. But holy shit