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

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

#141

Post by yiyus » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

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…

Overreacting by immense proportions is what reddit does.

I do not know any details about Victoria's firing and I do not care about them, but obviously somebody up there did a terrible job managing the whole situation.

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

#142

Post by slg » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106

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…

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 company?

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

#143

Post by zxcvcxz » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

Why is it okay for a corporation to do it, but when mods do it everyone accuses them of pushing their own agenda?

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

#144

Post by VonGuard » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:56 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…

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.

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

#145

Post by jonknee » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #94

nanny wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You should always have some kind of plan for what to do if key employees get run over by a bus.

The problem seems to be that reddit didn't have a plan for when the users started believing it wasn't a bus at all, but a conspiracy.

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

#146

Post by hoopd » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #35

robrenaud wrote: post #26

How 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.

I imagine it'd be extremely difficult. It's the users that give reddit its power. You can set up another site but if it hasn't got the readership, fewer people are going to do AMAs there. There are already several reddit clones but they are nowhere near as successful.

When Barbara Walters switches networks viewers and celebrities follow her because they like and trust her, people feel the same way about Victoria.

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

#147

Post by basch » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #139

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…

> it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike Unionized laborers collectively bargaining for more money from the company they work for is almost the exact opposite of unpaid volunteers maintaining the profit making infrastructure of a for profit corporation.

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

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

#148

Post by jonknee » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

The problem with volunteers is that you can't easily fire them. It's great that reddit gets a lot of free labor from moderators, but their sense of entitlement is a huge drag. Regardless of why Victoria was let go, it's very difficult to run a business when you can't make staffing changes without threat of open revolt.

I would hire a replacement for Victoria and swap out every moderator of /r/IAmA who was part of this coup. It's not their property, it's reddit's. It will be ugly (not that it isn't already), but in the end there are a few moderators and millions of users who literally could not care less and just want to read interesting stories.

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

#149

Post by sparkzilla » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

Article>The issue goes beyond Reddit. We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers — and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant.

It's time for companies to stop treating the free work of contributors as a given, and pay them for their contributions: http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-sam...

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

#150

Post by ChrisPebble » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:01 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…

Fair points, but the comment "because the moderators volunteered" made me cringe.

I have a great deal of respect and sympathy for mods because I've helped moderate other forums and the task is both rewarding, unrelenting, and filled with ceaseless drama. Even though they volunteered I still give them a lot of credit if they're running a successful board. It takes a lot.

I'm really intrigued to see if you're correct and we will eventually see mechanisms to replace mods. StackOverflow has moderator elections yearly, but the company has a tight control on the direction of the product. Mods have a lot more freedom to dictate the course of a board so I don't think elections would work for every board. Would be interesting to see though.