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.
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 cover to lemmy.
🍿🍿🍿 … How can you not love this?
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.
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.
.
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.
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
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
The only way they make money with IPO is if they short reddit.
See also “if you want to tell me what to do, put me on the **** payroll.”
“Act your wage”
Yes, exactly!
I wonder how long before we start seeing some plausible but fake AMAs
IAMA Reddit CEO with a micro penis AMA
I was skeptical at first, but the intimate knowledge of his micropenis convinced me.
Hi, longtime fan here, is it a warm comforting feeling or more of a gross sticky and ashamed feeling when you pee on your own testicles?
It’s kind of like syrupy pancakes. At first, it’s awesome. Later though it’s just a sticky mess and I wish I’d gotten waffles instead.
AOL had to pay their volubteers, after being sued. So why not reddit ? They expect their mods to follow their guidelines.
deleted by creator
I knew the protests weren’t gonna do anything the moment they gave it a time limit at the very beginning. Shit like that makes it seem like they wanted the protest to fail
I think the blackouts worked well enough. You can’t go to 100% protest mode without raising awareness of the issue first. The blackouts accomplished that. There were many threads where people where people hadn’t heard of the problem before the blackouts happened.
Also you don’t want to come off as the unreasonable ones in this sort of thing. You want everyone to see the Reddit leadership as the unreasonable party.
Many activist movements have hurt themselves by going completely ballistic without most people knowing what’s going on. Demanding EVERYTHING CHANGE NOW OR ELSE!!! Which results in most people thinking it’s just a bunch of crazy people and ignoring them.
So it’s correct to escalate this over a course of weeks. I mean it’s very unlikely no matter what anyone does Reddit isn’t going to back down. But if mods went to DEFCON 1 on the first day, Reddit just bans the “crazy mods” and most people just think “well that was weird that a bunch of mods went nuts at the same time, oh well back to the memes.”
The end game was always going to be to migrate to another site. Sure there was a small possibility that the Reddit leadership would change, but that’s a very slim possibility. But you gotta get caught trying, you have to exhaust all other possibilities before you can convince people to take the step to migrate elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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
