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

nytimes.com

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

#211

Post by dwmtm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #158
danso wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So television interviews...?

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

#212

Post by anthony_romeo »

basch wrote: post #118
imjk wrote: 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…

I guess the only concern I can think of is that if the majority of content submitters are angry, they may become less involved, switch to being commenters/lurkers, or move on to another site entirely. If the content diminishes, then the users might frequent the site less or look elsewhere.

I'm not trying to make any predictions of doom or anything (frankly, I think this kerfuffle is just a flash in the pan), but an unstable community can have an impact on the majority of users if enough people get fed up.

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

#213

Post by slg »

Hello71 wrote: post #199
slg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the compa…

so everyone who visits the Daily Mail website is part of the community?

I would say any regular visitor is part of the community. There is no requirement to give back to a community in order to be a member. It is just a group of people who share a connection due to common interests or objectives.

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

#214

Post by danudey »

slg wrote: post #111
ChrisPebble wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance more than callousness appears to be the sin here. From snippets of communications posted with the mods it looks like they weren't really aware of what Victoria did for the mods. Since the community is their "product" I find it disconcerting that they're not more familiar with the details of how these relationships work and what Victoria actually did. I would actually find it more comforting if they were awa…

Devils advocate, that is partly Victoria's fault. If your managers don't know what you do all day, I don't think it is surprising that you are fired. Yes, it is a sign off bad management, but it is also a sign off an employee not communicating up to management. EDIT: The downvotes seem to indicate I wasn't clear. I'm not saying the Reddit management team thought Victoria wasn't doing any work. However, it was clear t…

If you don't know what your direct reports are doing, why the heck are you their manager? If she's spending so much of her time dealing with AMAs, surely it's worth sitting down and going over her process regularly and how it's changed over time. If her management didn't take an interest in how the system worked, that's on them.

That said, it honestly seems like they didn't know or care. No one told any of the subs she helped moderate (not even one of the largest on the site) that Victoria had been let go. If they had any idea what she did at all, and had any interest whatsoever in keeping the community together, they would have at least tried to get that information to the people who would be affected. Instead, they shoved her out the door and called it done until a celebrity showed up at their door with an appointment and no one knew what to do.

Anyone taking over her role should have immediately checked to see what was happening. Even if she left no notes or schedule whatsoever, they could have checked the AMA schedule, talked to the mods, and gotten some kind of temporary plan in place. Instead, they just let the whole thing collapse and then tried to sweep it under the rug later. It wasn't that they didn't know what she did, it's that they didn't care and didn't think it needed doing.

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

#215

Post by burglecut »

slg wrote: post #142
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy. As such, it was entirely justified. You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit. The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again. Social is littere…

You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the compa…

It doesn't matter if the 90 don't feel strongly. What happens when the 10 move to another site?

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

#216

Post by DanBC »

vidarh wrote: post #176
heyheyhey wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base. Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down? I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.

> and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down? And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number. Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many…

Voting on Pao's comments visualised:

https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png

From https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ell...

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

#217

Post by stcredzero »

basch wrote: post #118
imjk wrote: 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…

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

Many reddit moderators have caused many subreddits to feel like webforums from the early 2000's. Many are heavy-handed and feeling their power a bit. There are some subreddits where a newbie can carefully read all of the instructions about posting, try their best to comply, then still have their post removed or down-voted, then be told that all such posts should be in a certain weekly discussion.

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

#218

Post by danudey »

slg wrote: post #132
munificent wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your managers don't know what you do all day If your managers can't tell what you do all day when they merely need to go to reddit.com/r/IamA and see dozens of upvoted posts from celebrities whose top comment says, "Victoria is here helping me...", then I don't think you can really blame her for that.

I don't expect my boss to dive into my commit logs to figure out what I am doing. I instead tell him.

Really? I don't go bug my boss about everything I do. We have regular one-on-ones so that we can bring up any new issues, but he trusts me to get my job done and let him know if there's anything that needs doing/knowing. If everything was going well in the AMA scene, there seems little reason to waste time discussing it.

That said, they fired Victoria and didn't replace her with anyone. That tells me that they both didn't know what she did in her role, and also didn't care. Anyone assuming the role, even temporarily, even without any of her notes/schedule/documentation, could have just checked the AMA schedule to find out that an AMA was scheduled, and contacted the mods to see what the arrangement was. No one did.

This isn't your boss not knowing what your code does because you didn't tell him. This is your boss firing the IT guy and not telling anyone until someone's laptop needs fixing before a big meeting and there's no one who knows how to do it.

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

#219

Post by 16bytes »

nanny wrote: post #13

When 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…

I've seen high-level departures from corporations for years and recently have been on the inside track of one (i.e. I knew about the departure before it was public knowledge).

From the time that I was told to when it was made public was weeks.

What was done in the interim was make sure nobody was left hanging. Key individuals and customers were called, things coordinated so that there would be no backlash.

Take a look at Microsoft and Gate's departure. Ballmer's departure. Apple and Jobs's.

I get that at-will employment means that either part can walk away at any time, but that doesn't resolve the company from dealing with the ramifications of said departure.

That's what this is about; that Reddit thought so little or had a thorough misunderstanding of her position as to not key in the mods, or otherwise coordinate handling of her duties is the straw that broke the camel's back.

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

#220

Post by Karunamon »

ska wrote: post #193
basch wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you clipped the second half of the sentence ... "people who thought they were above being replaced"

They are certainly replaceable, but they just as certainly not fungible. Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else) They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things ca…

They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process.

I'm not holding my breath. Reddit has promised moderators better tools and users better transparency and more features for months and years. So far, all those promises have been completely empty, and I see nothing to suggest things will be different this time.

Put more crudely, at least two people on the reddit staff, Ohanian and Pao, are completely full of shit.

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