Reddit's mods and users are in open revolt following the sudden firing of one of Reddit's AMA liasons and have practically shut down the site. A lot of subreddits are private now until further notice, more are going down.
Reddit's greatest enemy is reddit themselves. It'll be interesting to see what happens but I highly doubt it'll be too long until things are back to normal.
Those enraged over this could really use a breath of fresh air.
The whole ordeal is about how they feel the admins do not respect the moderators for being unpaid volunteers and keeping the site alive. Okay, then don't volunteer.
The whole ordeal is about how they feel the admins do not respect the moderators for being unpaid volunteers and keeping the site alive.
That's the secondary issue that resulted in all the other big subs going down, but the main issue is that Victoria was fired and the rest of the r/IAmA have no way to run AMAs now so they were going to have to go private to sort it out anyway. r/books for example says they have AMAs coming up and no way to contact the authors now.
It's solidarity with a potentially wrongfully terminated employee that was critical to the site itself. She was loved by community, critical to the function of the site and fired without cause + without a backup plan to replace her. 75% of the site is down and more of the subreddits are planning to go dark still. /r/sports is considering joining as are mods for others.
Those enraged over this could really use a breath of fresh air.
The whole ordeal is about how they feel the admins do not respect the moderators for being unpaid volunteers and keeping the site alive. Okay, then don't volunteer.
That is essentially what this is about. The mods have volunteered a lot of their time without any support from the admins, save Victoria. And Reddit sacked her, so it all came to a head.
Watched the revolt break out last night, pretty impressive. One has to wonder how long Ellen Pao can remain Reddit's CEO, as there is an evident and severe lack of clue at the top.
I wouldn't be so quick to opine this will just "blow over". This seems to have the kind of momentum which caused the Digg community to switch over to reddit in the first place.
The working theory is this lady was sacked for how she handled the Jesse Jackson IAMA, which went very badly for him. He would have been better off asking the IAMA to focus on the movie Rampart.
The Following User Says Thank You to Kjesse For This Useful Post:
I wouldn't be so quick to opine this will just "blow over". This seems to have the kind of momentum which caused the Digg community to switch over to reddit in the first place.
The working theory is this lady was sacked for how she handled the Jesse Jackson IAMA, which went very badly for him. He would have been better off asking the IAMA to focus on the movie Rampart.
The other theory I have read is that she was let go as she was resistant to the pressures of the Reddit board to commercialize AMAs. I will see if I can find the post about it.
The other theory I have read is that she was let go as she was resistant to the pressures of the Reddit board to commercialize AMAs. I will see if I can find the post about it.
That would make sense too. I do agree reddit has a monetization problem, they need to do something, but taking money for IAMAs is exactly the thing that stops reddit being reddit... taking money would mean purchasers would want more control over the questions asked to ensure a positive result.
I wouldn't be so quick to opine this will just "blow over". This seems to have the kind of momentum which caused the Digg community to switch over to reddit in the first place.
What may save Reddit is the fact that voat.co can't handle the traffic influx and crashes every time people get upset at Reddit. If they had stable infrastructure, Reddit would be very much in danger.
Yeah though reddit did not have great infrastructure at the time either. They certainly were ahead of where voat is now. I checked voat out the first time this morning and it would need a lot of work to be able to become an actual alternative.
I learned of reddit because of the digg revolt, and the first time I went to reddit the first page was full of people heralding how reddit was better because it was an open community where users could do what they want and the community upvotes creates the front page, it wasn't in the hands of a few powerful mods.
Now reddit is more corporate, and they're pissing the user base off who came there because they precisely were not corporate.
I seem to recall a few years ago Reddit released some statistics that said the vast majority of their visitors (I think it was something like 70%) have no accounts and never participate in the reddit community.
Furthermore a huge portion of their users with accounts only upvoted/downvoted, rarely commented and almost never posted content/links.
So sitting in Reddits HQ I can see why they'd be willing to brush the heavy users aside in favour of eyeballs & commercial interest. Not that it would be a smart thing to do as the heavy users are really the life blood of reddit.
But as we've seen before with digg, flickr, myspace:
Massive Reddit Revolt
