Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by steve-howard » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

tfinniga wrote: post #113

steve-howard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Popcorn" as a metaphor for drama is a daily in-joke at SubredditDrama, where that comment was posted. What kn0thing didn't count on was that a lot of readers had never been there before and instead took it at face value.

The way I took this statement was roughly "I will enjoy watching this drama unfold, but I won't do anything other than watch". Is that inaccurate?

I just saw it as someone throwing out a joke in the middle of handling a stressful situation. Reading his retrospective post on the matter, it sounds like he'd been trying to understand and address the situation all day and hadn't realized that the userbase at large didn't know that.

Given that most of the popular subreddits were offline for the day, I can't imagine anyone would seriously think they didn't care at all. Failing to address that situation would have been a great way to kill the site entirely.

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

#272

Post by smacktoward » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

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…

> They are landowners

Landowners who don't actually own the land they spend so much time improving.

So more like sharecroppers, actually.

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

#273

Post by uxp » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

zxcvcxz wrote: post #95

slg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power users to treat the majority of users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing the majority of users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of…

So it's okay when reddit does it because they're a private corporation and can censor whatever they want, but when the mods of a subreddit censor themselves there's a problem? Hypocrisy and double standards.

I don't think you're correctly characterizing the subreddit shutdowns.

When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.

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

#274

Post by celticninja » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #122

jonlucc wrote: 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.

they didnt communicate the back up plan to anyone that would have needed it. In fact details of the backup plan only surfaced some 12-24 hours after the sacking and the subreddits going dark. SO whether there was a backup plan in place prior to this occurring is difficult to say for certain, that they have one now is not in dispute.

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

#275

Post by Chathamization » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

jmount wrote: post #247

Rambling and self contradictory (presumably even after editing). "We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest." "The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that ..." Own up to one or the other.

Yeah, it's interesting that right after the shutdown they said that they were closing it down merely to figure out how to operate without Victoria (what would they have done if she caught the flu?), not protesting. The shutdown was fairly brief (less than a day, it seems). Now days later they're coming back with, "eh, that thing we did a few days ago, it was also a protest." Doesn't seem terribly effective.

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

#276

Post by arprocter » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #122

jonlucc wrote: 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.

If you read the modmail leak from elsewhere in this thread it didn't satisfy mods who were trying to pick up the pieces either

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

#277

Post by celticninja » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #107

darkstar999 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad communication. Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly. Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way". A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job.

Literally none of these are specific or concrete.

bad communication - when mods email admins they are unlikely to ever be responded to. Victoria was the one point of contact within the admins that did respond to mods and try to resolve issues, other than her they were left to deal with issues themselves. SOmetimes that just wasnt possible. Honestly if you care look into some of the blackout threads plenty of mods will give you concrete examples of poor or non-existent communication, and we are not talking a mod of small subreddit with ~1000 subscribers, but reddits with 100k+ subscribers.

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

#278

Post by mason240 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #117

ChargingWookie wrote: post #97

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.

If they contribute nothing to the community, then why should I care how they feel about the blackout?

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

#279

Post by FireBeyond » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #131

basch wrote: 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…

> Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. They care about the quality of the comment they see on the subreddits they follow. That transitively means they really care about the plight of the moderators. They just don't know it. > Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. On the well-moderated subreddits—which are increasingly the largest ones—they do a hell of a…

"Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit."

I don't see how this is the case. Replace spam with 'off-topic' and you have it. It really isn't an earth-changing thing to filter spam/off-topic/rude/offensive commentary (and it could be argued that even on the larger sub-reddits, that a good job isn't necessarily being done of that).

"Instilling the voice and culture" sounds like self-aggrandizement to me.

But I would be willing to be corrected.

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

#280

Post by jaawn » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

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…

The negative tone of this comment may be off-putting for some, but aside from that, this is very insightful. Calling "we do this because we love the community" a veneer especially makes a lot of sense to me, based on what I've seen of Reddit mods.