Reddit’s IAmA community moderators wrote in a post Saturday that they will no longer solicit and moderate question-and-answer (AMA) conversations with celebrities and notable personalities.
Reddit’s celebrity-starred AMAs have become a signature aspect of the platform, giving regular users the chance to ask questions of people they might never have the chance to talk to. (Bill Gates has done 11 of them.) AMAs are often a fascinating mix of interesting perspectives and personal anecdotes, even if the person being recommended is usually doing some kind of self-promotion. Sometimes the entertainment is reading how the AMA went south.
r/IAmA has over 22 million subscribers, so the Reddit subreddit offers a potentially large audience for anyone looking to promote their own work or just want to chat with the Reddit hivemind. But now the moderators of the community will no longer be actively working with big names and their teams, so it’s even harder to believe that people doing AMAs are real traders.
Moderator post says they are unpaid volunteers and will stop engaging in the following activities “effective immediately”:
Actively invite celebrities Or famous people do AMAs.
Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and prominent personalities and their PR teams to promote, educate, and run the AMA. (We are still available to answer questions about the post, but response times may vary).
Run and maintain a website for scheduled AMAs with pre-validation and testimonials, and social media outreach.
Maintain an up-to-date scheduled AMA sidebar calendar , and provide users with schedule reminders.
Sister Reddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
Moderator conducts confidential verification of AMA.
Run various bots, including auto-editing live posts
“Going forward, we will allow Most AMA topics, leave proof and verification requests to the community, and limit us to removing only material that violates the rules,” the moderator added. “This doesn’t mean we explicitly allow fake AMAs, but it does mean you need to be more careful.”
Community Chief Moderator in DM at The Verge said the key change is that the team will be decommissioning its IT infrastructure and the bots they built, including verification information used to schedule AMAs and submits that are currently offline. (This seems to be true; I can’t load the link to a step-by-step guide for doing an AMA, and when I try, a different link on the same domain that I get from an autoresponder doesn’t load either. Email the moderator. ) According to the mod, the team shut down the site “primarily because none of the people on our team who had the technical qualifications to run the site had any interest in doing it anymore”.
The mod says they let Reddit know this was a “likely outcome” as early as June 1st – right after Reddit developer Apollo said that based on the new API pricing, he might The day after the $20 million fee was due — apparently no reply to the message was received.
As to why they are quitting, in Saturday’s post, moderators cited a 2015 New York Times Two of them wrote after Reddit closed the community after firing Victoria Taylor. Taylor, known for helping many celebrity AMAs, was abruptly fired in July of that year, and IAmA, along with other Reddit subreddits, was briefly shut down in protest.
“Our main concern and reason for temporarily taking this site down is that Reddit’s management made major changes to a very popular site without apparent consideration of how those changes might The resources that influence them the most: the community and the moderators who help moderate the Reddit subreddits that make up the site,” wrote Brian Lynch and Courtney Swellingan in a column. “Moderators spend their time on the site cultivating an engaging community. Ms. Taylor’s sudden firing is just the latest example of management making changes without considering what these changes might mean for the people who use the site every day. What. Many moderators have made similar comments during the recent protests.
“Would this ruin most of what makes IAMA special? Likely”
In their post, the r/IAmA mod pointed out that they did not participate in the recent protests, which is to focus on Reddit’s new paid API pricing, the launch of some third-party apps, and the company’s treatment of moderators who keep their communities private. “That doesn’t mean we think things are better managed now,” They wrote. “Rather, it reflects our belief that such action at this time will not have any significant impact. “
They realize that a change in their approach could make the community worse – but that’s their point of view. “Would this destroy much of IAMA’s character? Maybe,” the moderator wrote. “But Reddit leadership has all the money they need to hire people to carry out the extra tasks we used to take on as volunteer moderators, and we’d love to work with them if they chose to do so.
Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt declined to comment.
Update Jul 1 10:35PM ET : Added context from r/IAmA lead moderator.
