That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy.
When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit.
Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.
I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.
Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell.
It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.
It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.
It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base.
The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find).
None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.
The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case.
Everything you're saying actually corroborates OP's claim.
That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.
It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago.
Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.
I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
My guess is she trained the guests less familiar with Reddit on how to have a successful AMA (e.g., “don’t be Woody Harrelson”).
And because they were so successful, publicists were probably more willing to allow them to happen.
Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic.
After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.
I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.
The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all
I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago.
It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.
I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.
Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.
I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event.
But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.