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

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

#261

Post by basch » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:43 PM UTC

iaw wrote: post #230

basch wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they really care about the plight of the moderators no they dont. its like henchmen in a movie. if some fall more will take their place. its a thankless task. they dont care at all about the individual, they just care that the group functions. the group will function without the individual as long as there are reenforcements. >in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again. pr…

There was a post on reddit by a user emphasizing your reasoning but reaching a different conclusion. The user argued that he didn't not care about the plight of the moderators or content creators in one bit, he just wanted to selfishly consume his content. He recognized the importance of the people that do care in creating the community that provides the quality of experience he desires and he was quick to emphasize…

thats the post i linked to at the bottom of my comment

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

#262

Post by Aaronontheweb » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:43 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…

But that's exactly why the moderators are important. Overwhelmingly most redditors are lurker content sponges. As soon as the people who invest in making the content and maintaining the content sources leave, so will the vast majority of users who consume it.

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

#263

Post by zedpm » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #40

zedpm wrote: post #3

Maybe 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…

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong . And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, di…

I'm sorry that you were harassed by Reddit users; I certainly don't approve of that behavior. Like I said before, however, conflating those rotten actions by certain individuals with the larger ideological issues is not constructive. My complaint wasn't against censorship per se, but rather against what appears to be biased censorship. Certain harassment subreddits continue to exist, and it appears that they do so because their ideology is more closely aligned with Reddit management/admins than the ones that were banned. Rules need to be applied equally.

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

#264

Post by arprocter » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #222

mason240 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.

> They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users. r/Cooking went down. They had a vote, and 209 out of 230 people voted to go dark. That sounds like an overwhelming majority! But when you realize that the subreddit has 310,000 subscribers, it means that it went dark because less than 0.1% of the subscribers wanted it to. You can't draw any conclusion of support from that.

From what I saw the shutdowns began on Friday evening and subs started coming back on the Saturday morning (EST, and it was a holiday weekend in the US).

As it was a spur of the moment thing, subreddit mods couldn't have polled users for more than an hour or two or the momentum would've been lost

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

#265

Post by celticninja » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:45 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…

actually there have been plenty of rebuttals to this sort of statement, so I will briefly paraphrase the general content for you. Most users dont care, they dont care about reddit, they dont care about the mods, they dont care about the drama, all they want is their new content. They have no loyalty and would jump ship to an alternative site quite easily if the content was appearing elsewhere first. So if those mods/content creators to go to voat.co, or whatever alternative is being suggested, so will apathetic users who dont care where they get their fix.

Redit wasnt the first social media sharing site, digg.com was way pout in front for a long time, then came along v4 and killed the site dead in its tracks. Users fled because they changed the way stories were submitted and who submitted them. All those apathetic users jumped ship to mainly reddit and whilst reddit was growing and catching digg in term sof page views etc, Digg's failure is what boosted reddit to the number 1 position and the same thing can happen again.

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

#266

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #217

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…

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…

Part of the challenge with that is the available tools.

If there were more tools for re-parenting, editing and revising, or otherwise going through an editing process for submissions, the process could be far less confrontational. Medium operates in this manner, from what I understand.

On Reddit, there's no such cycle. There's no concept of an editorial submission queue (though some subs can and do hold all submissions for approval via AutoModerator hacks). Moderators cannot edit self-posts, even to correct obvious issues (misspelling, broken formatting, broken links). Not even the submitter can correct errors in titles, for which the only option is to delete and re-submit content (losing, of course, all discussion). I'm OCD enough that I do this, though my own subs are small enough that the content loss isn't overly significant.

In other words: many of the apparent limitations of Reddit moderation are the result of poor and or outgrown moderation tools.

Though even at best, the editorial process is brutal, and for newbies can be quite frustrating. Take a look at Wikipedia, where even with collaborative editing, revision history, controls, etc., I'm told that conflicts occasionally occur.

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

#267

Post by theklub » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:48 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #228

Based upon the facts if and as described here, I would have to consider Pao entirely incompetent in her current role. Regardless of how one feels about her as a person. I regret a bit jumping on the bandwagon, here, but if things occurred as described, the facts alone are damning. P.S. I also have to question what the hell Alexis is up to. I've read elsewhere that he conducted the actual termination. Is he really so…

Yes voat is back up.

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

#268

Post by arprocter » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #251

Karunamon wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Victoria was canned accounts for maybe 10% of the outrage. The other 90% is the way the firing was done (uncommunicated, disruptive, and all around poorly handled), and is what led to the annoyance boiling over.

Oh, that's a perfectly valid complaint, and it's one I agree with. But there are a large amount of people treating Victoria as a saint. I've seen a lot of posts going "They fired the one admin everyone actually liked!", and I'm worried there's going to be a huge backlash when the reason she got fired leaks out.

Backlash against who?

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

#269

Post by celticninja » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #243

munificent wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them. I'm tired of that false comparison being repeated over and over again. * reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0]. Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster. If anything, Digg v4 can be look…

The digg exodus didnt happen overnight, I agree. But the v4 was the final nail in the coffin. It really started around the time digg banned anyone posting the DeCSS key. A lot of users started trickling away or splitting their time between reddit and digg. Reddit promoted itself as a free-speech platform at the time. Reddit self posts got posted to digg more often and more digg users came to reddit. After v4 there were some new accounts but actually the trickle had been going on for some time.

Whilst digg changed functionality reddit is trying to change its ethos, something that is much more dangerous than changing functionality. its ethos is what brought users in and people are more likely to leave because of changes to the fundamental ethos of a site rather than the functionality of the site.

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

#270

Post by Frenchgeek » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:51 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.

How so? Their community shut down to regroup and protest, without anticipating others doing the same.