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.

    • LanyrdSkynrd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think the fact that reddit has never paid moderators in the past shows that they fear setting such a precedent. IAmA has always been a big draw for users and celebrities, yet they never put an employee in charge of it.

      Once they start paying one set of moderators, other mods might start to expect something in return for their labor. This especially won’t look good to investors who might otherwise like the business model of paying nobody for moderation.

      • b_n@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        The used to have an in house employee that was paid to write up the answers. I forget their name and handle though. But that was axed years ago in favour of the free moderators doing the job.

        The cost of person hours is huge though. Whatever the “wage” they would consider for mods would essentially be volunteer slave labour.

        • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          I think you may be referring to the admin that used to coordinate the AmAs, Victoria Taylor.

          They shot themselves in the foot back then, and apparently they haven’t changed in their decision making.

    • Wowbagger@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The problem is that the people that have done it for years has a bunch of experience a new team doesn’t have. It will most likely take years for the subreddit to run as well as it has been.

    • OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s where the protest is. The bare minimum.

      Agree agree agree. Mod away, but let garbage, dupes, and low effort stuff gradually fill up the sub. See how the userbase reacts to neglectful moderation.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I think the blackouts worked well enough. You can’t go to 100% protest mode without raising awareness of the issue first. The blackouts accomplished that. There were many threads where people where people hadn’t heard of the problem before the blackouts happened.

      Also you don’t want to come off as the unreasonable ones in this sort of thing. You want everyone to see the Reddit leadership as the unreasonable party.

      Many activist movements have hurt themselves by going completely ballistic without most people knowing what’s going on. Demanding EVERYTHING CHANGE NOW OR ELSE!!! Which results in most people thinking it’s just a bunch of crazy people and ignoring them.

      So it’s correct to escalate this over a course of weeks. I mean it’s very unlikely no matter what anyone does Reddit isn’t going to back down. But if mods went to DEFCON 1 on the first day, Reddit just bans the “crazy mods” and most people just think “well that was weird that a bunch of mods went nuts at the same time, oh well back to the memes.”

      The end game was always going to be to migrate to another site. Sure there was a small possibility that the Reddit leadership would change, but that’s a very slim possibility. But you gotta get caught trying, you have to exhaust all other possibilities before you can convince people to take the step to migrate elsewhere.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          If the /r/IamA thing was the first thing that was tried would the reaction be the same as it is now? You’d have hundred of comments in that thread asking “what’s going on?” rather than in all of the blackout threads.

          Reddit is a silly place. The John Oliver type fuckery is exactly the kind of thing that I liked about Reddit. People just being a little silly.

          And the blackouts were just a pause. A warning shot. Meant to get a reaction from Reddit execs in an attempt to to still achieve a positive outcome. Sure it was messy, but what do you expect? There isn’t actually a single hive mind on reddit that can write an eloquent well reasoned essay that would sway the hearts of the reddit execs. They only think in terms of money, not words.

          The IamA thing isn’t something that’s going to be effective. Read the comment the mods posted. They say clearly it’s not going to change anyone’s minds at Reddit. My guess is they didn’t do a black out in an attempt to act as a mediator. The IamA mods would have the best relationship with the reddit execs given the sub’s high profile status. Maybe they could convince them? But they didn’t.

          Look at the timing of it. At midnight July 1, third party apps had to disconnect from Reddit. 8am the next morning, IamA makes their post.

          This isn’t IamA mods making the big critical blow that’s going to force the Reddit execs to change their ways. This wasn’t an ultimatum, this is the mods of IamA giving up. They tried to find a resolution, but the deadline passed. Nothing left to do but say “fuck it, we don’t get paid for this shit anyway”

    • Strangian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I knew the protests weren’t gonna do anything the moment they gave it a time limit at the very beginning. Shit like that makes it seem like they wanted the protest to fail

      • kwot@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I know it sounded stupid in hindsight, but hey at least it got the ball rolling on asking the question if reddit was really worth going back to after all this blew over (of course, we know the answer to that already)

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      People who have actual agency over their communities and aren’t at the whims of a corporation.

      A Lemmy community can have real collective ownership. You can create your own instance where you own your own hardware. Or if you don’t want to have to manage a whole instance, it’s technically possible that a bigger instance could sell hosting if you don’t want to officially partner with the insurance and the community could pay for their own hosting that way to have true autonomy. Lemmy has lots of ways and potential ways for communities to be able to own themselves.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I can’t imagine the effort it must take to mod a sub like IAmA where you have daily posts with thousands of comments. They do it all for free and Spez insults them for it.

  • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    You made a misleading title. They basically won’t be seeking out celebrities or those high value activities, and will just let the sub take its course while doing very basic modding.

    Hope they come to lemmy.

  • Lakija@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Man the hits just keep in coming.

    I hope more big subs follow suit. But part of me knows many won’t.

    • ijeff@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Some of us are still figuring things out, including a likely lemmy migration. Just need to work out some performance optimizations for the instance.

    • Brownboy13@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      That is an understatement. I’m a former mod of r/iama (u/Brownboy13) and I was signing on to handle a high profile ama when Victoria messaged that she wouldn’t be able to help us as she was let go without notice. Admin didn’t even bother informing the guest that the employee handholding them through the process would no longer be available. We were caught entirely off guard and I don’t think /r/iama has ever been the same. There was a level of trust the /u/chooter would be in the same room as a guest or at least on a call and make sure it was them answering and not pr teams. It’s been like fucking pr junket since then.

      This was the start of my disillusionment with reddit, and it seems to have been finalized with this last shitshow of a decision.

        • Brownboy13@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          No, thank you. I’m done with putting in volunteer effort for these kinds of things. I transitioned to mostly lurking on reddit, and I’m likely to remain that way here as well. Modding requires too much of a time and effort commitment for something that I’ll have nothing to show for depending on the whim of others.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Wow, hard to grasp that was 8 years ago?!

        I was never a user of IAMA, but I clearly remember how shitty reddit behaved in that situation.

        I did delete my account later, and only lurked through links to my favorite subs for a few years. Now I have deleted my links too.

        Reddit has devolved steadily for to many years, time to cut the cord completely.

        • grizzledgrizzly@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Victoria was the original “moderator” of AMAs and they shit-canned her for corporate politics. She was amazing with the celebs and the community. You know, the more you look back the more you realize Reddit’s management has always been shit. I’m not going back. I’d rather be low-key here where we aren’t seeing corporate politics at play - yet (hopefully never)

        • another_busted_robot@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          She was a Reddit employee that ran the larger AMAs, often acting as the transcriptionist for the person. Reddit fired her because she refused to to run them as paid advertisements, feeling that the spirit of an AMA was about being asked anything, not just paid promotions.

    • Stranded@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Which makes no sense, because the high-profile AMAs she made happen certainly broadened reddit’s public appeal by quite a bit.

    • Gull@kbin.social
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      They fired Victoria because they were trying to aggressively monetize IAmAs in ways that were going to fuck community interests, and Victoria pushed back. Think Rampart, except companies can pay to ensure that it doesn’t become a PR fiasco, so it’s guaranteed astroturf.

      Reddit has been classy ever since.

  • 888@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    So, “we’ll still do some work for free, but not as much”? I can’t see Reddit caring about this ho hum response, and if they do notice it has a negative impact on the sub they’ll just replace them.

    Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.

    • Anomander@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it’s one that’s seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.

      There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you’re talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.

      Which is kind of … a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don’t get their way.

      The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren’t protesting because they’re part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They’re going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.

      AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they’re going to let it return to it’s natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.

      Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.

      In this case, what do you think “scorched earth” would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.

      • some_guy@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think people are asking mods to burn the place down as much as they’re asking them to just stop. Stop working for free. Stop trying to negotiate. Don’t work for them and don’t work with them. Move your community elsewhere if you want to keep your moderator status and forget about Reddit.

        That’s not radical nor is it a huge workload. It’s less work for most.

    • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
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      Tricky question. But yeah, if you’re modding a channel just for the sake of being a mod and you do it for free. You’re a sucker.

      I help moderate a small discord channel, Maybe I’m a sucker too. But I help so our outfit can have a place to hang out outside of the game, share ideas and plan events.

      I bet some reddit mods feel the same way.

      • Strangian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think all forms of free voluntary moderation make you a sucker. I think the only suckers are the ones who do whats basically a full time job for free.

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Your hard work is rewarded with a home for your community. Sounds very worthwhile if you ask me. That’s very different from work that gets rewarded by lining the pockets of shareholders.

          • howrar@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Or so they thought until the Reddit admins told them they actually don’t have any authority over their community and can’t run it the way the community wants.

        • Robaque@feddit.it
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          1 year ago

          Also the prospect of profit would just pull in the wrong kinds of people.

          Tbh moderation is one of those things AI might be able to do pretty well, at least sometime down the line.

    • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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      This is the perfect change. Admin can’t kick you out, all the high value is gone.