Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
The people who coordinated celebrity AMAs did it for free…? That disgusting sisyphian labour was done for free? That might have been the most important work any mod team did from the perspective of Reddit’s PR. How could Reddit be that ungrateful? They had it all
Yeah, I can’t fathom why people work for a for-profit company as volunteers, especially in time-consuming and high-profile jobs like this.
Reddit didn’t really use to feel like a for-profit platform. We always knew there was corporate somewhere far away in the background but otherwise the communities and mods were making the entire website.
We now know how foolish that was of course.
That’s because the official Reddit stance was that the communities themselves belonged to the moderators so it wasn’t that you were doing with for Reddit, they were just providing you with a tool to build a community.
Of course that was clearly a lie, and as soon as moderators exercised their own power by protesting, with the support of their communities, Reddit was like “jk never mind, actually we own the communities and you’re disposable”.
I really don’t understand why anyone would volunteer for a corporation for free, that doesn’t pay you, doesn’t care about you, and will drop you like hot garbage if it benefits them. There was a myth of ownership over the subreddits, but that myth is gone.