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Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

nytimes.com

151–160 of 324 posts

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#151
post #52

A discussion between an admin and the science mods leaked: http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_...

Not just an admin. YC alum and cofounder Alexis Ohanian. This conversation tells you everything you need to know. They aren't sorry. This wasn't bungled. They are doubling down on their lack of communication.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#152
post #118
post #32

"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. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less." I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to…

This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replac…

> But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power.

I was a moderator and I left...

Also League of Legend mod left not too long ago, he had other responsibility and being a moderator was taking a toll on him and LoL is a big subreddit compare to my subreddit.

So you're argument doesn't hold for all.

It also ignore the fact that Reddit is partly run by volunteer people, moderators. You can't just handwave this fact by saying people are power hungry. The fact is if people leave like Digg then Reddit would be screwed.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.

It's a cognitive bias. The assertion from the admins was pretty clear regarding the harassment of individuals and threats of violence, but rather than acknowledge their prejudice, some have tried to make it into a first amendment issue. On a privately owned website.

There is no public ground on the Internet. Everything is owned by someone or some corporation. Our ideas about free speech will have to adapt to that reality, or they will be lost entirely.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that?

I don't think poster knows for sure but you can assume based on traffic levels to comments and just general web stats. A majority of users don't comment on anything. Most people don't even create an account to vote. They probably don't even know what was going on.

That seems like a pretty silly argument. You can literally use it as an argument against any sort of change because "most people don't vote."

In fact they do vote, not with upvotes and comments but with their views. Those views indicate the place is somewhere they like spending their time, which is primarily a function of the moderators and the people posting content to the subreddit in the first place (the "vocal minority"). Since they already show they appreciate the work of those people by regularly viewing the content, it's actually more likely they agree with that minority by default than disagree.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#155
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Then you get a substitute for the appointment, even if you have to delay it. You don't just tell the client that the appointment is cancelled and to have a nice day. > You don't have enough information to speculate like that. T…

> There is no information that can make the way the out of town guest was treated acceptable. Sorry, but is this guest the Queen of England or the Pope? Did the mods pay for his/her way to New York? As the GP said, this is an overreaction -- the mods act as if insulting one celebrity means that IAMA, a subreddit that was originally populated by regular reddit users, has been inconvertibly sullied. Or that they, the m…

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith has a considerable staff who would have managed the situation with their customary grace and good humour. Piss off Prince Philip however and you could be in for a hard time.

http://i.imgur.com/ICSz7Xp.jpg

Image of a now deleted discussion between the Science moderators and the chap who runs Reddit posted down the screen. The bit that caught my eye...

"We were right in the middle of setting up an AMA with Steven Hawking when I don't know what happened"

This organisation has problems.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#156
post #76

This 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…

If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg. The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators. Developing an adversarial relationship with the community or the moderators is the absolute fastest way to torpedo the site. In addition, as a few other comments on this article have pointed out, the shutdown was not a reac…

> moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators.

Moderators create very little content. Most of the content is taken from other places, and most content is posted by people who are not mods.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#157
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's the point of a contingency plan. Where I work, we have an emergency evacuation plan. They don't only start coming up with that plan when the building needs to be evacuated. They have it in place in case they need it.

Their backup plan was to email immediate issues to ama@reddit.com, but that didn't satisfy the nerd rage, so the users had to go into nuclear mode.

But they didn't tell anyone this plan until way too late, so it failed. It's not even clear that they came up with that until the site was deep into the protests.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#158
post #48
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.

This is an incredibly dishonest thing to say. There's only one reason to publish someone's verbal responses verbatim, which is that you're trying to make them look like an idiot. Someone who gave verbal interviews and published the responses verbatim would be totally unfit for their job.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#159
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bad communication" - they fire Victoria without telling IAMA moderators "Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly." is very concrete and specific "Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way"". - banning of "hateful" subreddits such as /r/FatPeopleHate "A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job." - that is ve…

>Bad communication. - they fire Victoria without telling IAMA moderators I asked for things that were already "on the camel's back". >Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly. They are volunteering for a for-profit company. What are some specific concrete examples of mods being treated poorly? I'm a mod of two subreddits (20k and 8k subscribers) and I've never once been "treate…

> Who gets to decide what "the reddit way" actually is? My reddit account is nearly seven years old now and I say "good riddance".

reddit admins used to say that they would never ban content as long as it was legal. Well /r/jailbait was technically legal, but they banned it. Then came FatPeopleHate and others. Some people think hardcore freedom of speech was the reddit way. It is no longer. Of course it's hard for a rational person to defend leaving those up, but it's just how some people feel about free speech.

Oh and then Pao used the phrase "safe spaces" which is a total shift from their previous stance.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#160
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replac…

I totally agree that Reddit is an old boys club. But this is how all online communities seem to work: age = power and respect. How would you solve this problem? It's been like that since newsgroups. It seems to be just a human tendency.

slashdot randomly assigned the task of moderation to logged in users. that moderation was then metamoderated. it was just part of your duty as a logged in user to contribute a little metadata about content. http://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml
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