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

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

#71

Post by joshie_woshie » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:20 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…

Your language is pretty strong and one-sided -- 'petulant moves...to treat their users as pawns'? Have you even been paying attention? A lot of those moderators actively sought the opinions of their subreddits before blacking out. It was often the communities, and not the moderators, instigating those decisions.

The censorship claims do not just apply to the hateful subreddits that were shut down -- censorship happens in more insidious ways, too. A lot of posts involving the Reddit debacle have been swept away, comments deleted, users shadowbanned. I think this is the kind of censorship that's being highlighted.

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

#72

Post by zxcvcxz » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:20 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…

> 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.

Well the moderators say that was only part of it, but after reading your whole comment it seems you're just here to push your authoritarian political agenda under the guise of social justice by ignoring half the facts.

>And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing.

Half your comment history is disturbing. I support the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate, but you're trying really hard to paint the parent comment in bad light to push your political agenda. They never said they support FPH, but you make it seem as if they must be a "disturbed" individual. They said that the censorship is heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently.

It would be pretty hard to push your authoritarian political agenda without demonizing others though.

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

#73

Post by valarauca1 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:21 PM UTC

speeder wrote: post #38

Stefan-H wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The censorship is not happening by the community, it is coming from the admins that are on the reddit payroll. There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.

Also adding to what Stefan said, the admins have been deleting subreddits too, sometimes the wrong ones (for example they deleted an Whale Watching subreddit believing it was a fat people harassment subreddit...)

Deleting a sub that existed purely to dehumanize people is your primary example of censorship going to far?

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

#74

Post by jperras » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:21 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…

> 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.

As stated in the article, this was one of the reasons. The other reason is as you would suspect:

> The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

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

#75

Post by cowsandmilk » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:21 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #11

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…

> This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit

How do you get that impression? Second sentence of the article is: "We volunteer our time to help manage the subsection called IamA?" Other phrases include "We donate our time and talents to Reddit".

Nothing in the article suggests employment by reddit.

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

#76

Post by lmartel » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #11

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 reaction to the (sudden) firing of a (vital) employee, but to years of serious issues and mismanagement.

The first subreddit to shut down did so because it literally couldn't keep functioning without Victoria, and the rest saw an opportunity to finally voice their complaints and be heard.

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

#77

Post by 001sky » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

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…

"Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause." Anyone that makes these sort of decisions based on absolutely no evidence besides that she was fired, is childish and should not be a moderator. "The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management." They might be physically adults, but emotion…

They fired the relationship manager for the AMAs. The way the did that harmed/ruined some relationships. The 'how' is as important as the what in that case, so your comment seems bizarreley off base.

This is a wholy different issue that the dust up a month ago. Thats why a petition for the CEO's resignation has 200,000 signatures. The incident 1 month ago promted onlt 10K or so, so this latest issue is a 20x increase in pissed off people.

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

#78

Post by fortytw2 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

morganvachon wrote: post #65

[deleted] wrote: post #21

[deleted]

You need a proper SSL cert for edenboards.com, it's flagged as untrusted in Firefox.

Yeah, nothing is up on that site right now, a friend of mine was messing with and failing to set up SSL on that domain...

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

#79

Post by kedean » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:23 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #49

Stefan-H wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The censorship is not happening by the community, it is coming from the admins that are on the reddit payroll. There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.

> There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit. You got a source for that?

I don't know of any time the admins have done it, but some subreddits have been known to do it:

http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-technology-banned-words/

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

#80

Post by mason240 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:23 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…

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