Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
41–50 of 324 posts
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#42Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management. This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matte…
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Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#43When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions. Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know. Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when…
> Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario. When you have people travelling from out of town specifically to meet the person you are a…
Did you consider that it might not have been an option? That maybe it was an unexpected termination, and they didn't have a way to know about or contact the people arriving from out of town?
You don't have enough information to speculate like that.
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#44How hard would it be to fork reddit AMA on a third party site? I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board, a lot of the mods/community would follow. Certainly some custom support for the AMA would be nice, like getting cleanly summarized final outputs and highlighting direct conversation with the askee, and making it easy to find highly upvoted non-answered questions.
This is pretty much what voat is. The biggest issue is handling the traffic. Only a fraction of users went to voat and it was offline for days, crippled by the traffic.
edit: I previously said Voat was a reddit fork, that wasn't correct.
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#45This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit, which isn't the case. This is the problem, actually. Because it's not a paid position, the company can't use that as leverage in situations like this. The moderators essentially have nothing to lose. Even in the article, it states that it was shutdown because of the abrupt termination of Ms. Taylor. Anybody that makes these sort of emotional de…
You think they should begin paying moderators? Any suggestions where that money should come from? Any thoughts on whether it will lead to conflicts of interest on the larger subreddits which could harm the site (such as, and especially, IAmA)?
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#46What really baffles me is the way reddit management handled this situation. There were many things they simply fucked up - They did not install the new AMA team properly (hell, the subreddit mods did not know about it), they reacted childish to the shutdown (something along the lines of "popcorn tastes good" - one of your biggest communities just shut down because you failed to do basic management, in what universe is this a proper response?) and they won't address the real issues, it's all PR speech (take a look at the "we' sorry" post, a lot of important questions raised are not answered).
This is just horrible - You cannot anger your community in such a "business model". reddit depends 100% on their users and especially the content creators and moderators. They do very little by themselves, and most of it is stuff around the core functionality only a small percentage is even using.
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#47When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions. Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know. Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when…
Two things they should have done:
1) had a transition plan in place for key employees, especially the most prominent public-facing employees
2) communicate after the fact; basically get all hands on deck to find and handle each of the AMAs happening that day and in the next few days, make a single point of contact to triage those needs and tell the mods
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/reddit-victoria-tayl...
> One of the criticisms of the Jackson AMA was that, in some cases, his responses seemed out of sync with the questions. But this wasn't the standard AMA format, wherein an interviewee reads questions off the screen and types in answers directly. As often happens with other celebrity AMAs, Taylor selected Redditors' questions and asked them to Jackson live. She then transcribed his verbal responses and posted them on his behalf. Yet Jackson's AMA was even more complicated than usual because it was also one of the first in a forthcoming series of video AMAs to be released this fall. In this setup, he answered the questions in front of a camera in a ballroom in Los Angeles' Hyatt Century Plaza while Taylor communicated with him remotely from New York...
> ...Taylor asked Jackson the upvoted question despite its confrontational nature. It was hard to blame her, since Reddit does call it "Ask Me Anything." Jackson's response was criticized as rambling and nonsensical, and to an extent it was, but the critics may not have realized that he didn't hear the full question. Out of politeness, perhaps, Taylor had paraphrased it to omit the most incendiary language. It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.
As the Mother Jones article quotes Reddit's execs as saying, this purportedly didn't have anything to do with Victoria's firing. While I still think there's a need for a community leader like her, I wasn't aware how much of her job was being the transcriber and translator between celebrity and fans. Frankly, I think Reddit's IAmA would be much better off without this kind of arrangement...this isn't a statement against Victoria's performance, but against the whole dog-and-pony show in the first place. IAmA's give the appearance that the questionee is deciding which things to answer...as the MJ article describes, not only was a Reddit employee acting as a filter, but was paraphrasing both question and answer.
That to me kills a bit of the spirit of Reddit IAmA's...again, there's obviously a need for Victoria in a community leader role, but I'm happy if IAmA's go on without a Reddit employee acting as a translator for celebrities. If that means fewer celebrities do IAmA's, whooopteedoo. The best IAmA's have always been the non-celebrities, like the vacuum repair technician, or the woman who fought off a bear who ripped her face off, or the guy with two penises.
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The censorship is not happening by the community, it is coming from the admins that are on the reddit payroll. There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.
> There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.
You got a source for that?
Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is not a campaign to bring her back personally. Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.
>Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. What if she did something really bad and was fired on the spot? How could they "have a plan in place" for a situation like that?
It would take only a few minutes to come up with a simple last-minute backup plan (pick an employee to temporarily handle RedditAMA, mods communication, and then tell the mods about it). That would be enough to give Reddit enough time to sort out something more permanent.