/r/IAmA set to “private” after Victoria is let go from Reddit | Hacker News Reader

/r/IAmA set to “private” after Victoria is let go from Reddit

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83 pointspuredemo28 comments

Seriously thinking this was a result of the Jesse Jackson interview. Likely the new Reddit is going to cater to celebrities and politicians in such a way that the idea of AMA isn't going to be unfiltered anymore. I would expect them to sell AMAs that are wholly staged/filtered/etc just like any political press conference. With the upcoming elections its to be expected, the slant of the current reddit is very obvious and its a new SJW paradise of late.

Karmanaut is one of the few default mods who allows fairly "contentious" comments to stay up. As long as he is top mod of /r/IAmA I don't think that will change.

Given that Reddit just nearly imploded due to "censorship," this is probably a fair policy.

There was a lot of noise about censorship but I think 'nearly imploded' is a bit dramatic.. There was no noticeable decrease in traffic or uniques:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic

(Some data was lost from DB corruption, but if you add back round numbers, they're right on trend again)

That was purposefully hyperbolic. :P

The dramawave of more perceived censorship would actually be somewhat funny.

What's odd is that it was the Jesse Jackson AMA that was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. There have been far worse AMAs than that. (e.g. the infamous Woody Harrelson Rampart AMA)

/r/amadisasters has a good list of them: http://www.reddit.com/r/amadisasters

EDIT: Response from Alexis: https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has...

Ellen Pao didn't become interim CEO until November 2014, and it took a while still to start enacting her plan... So its not that odd that this was finally the one that broke the camels back, considering the timeline of who's been CEO when.

I remember Microsoft's AMA. I agreed with many sentiments but felt sad for Microsoft PR in the end. If this was the final straw of "mishandled AMA's" (seriously? what does AMA stand for again? don't go there if your kind of celebrity status / personality can't handle this elegantly), I think it had to do with the sensitive nature of religion. I don't doubt Jesse Jackson's team have capacity to put some pressure on reddit. Ugh. Then again, just speculation. Part of the problem is that they aren't speaking.

Reddit is really going down the toilet.

I agree with just about everything you said except for Reddit being an SJW paradise. There's definitely a loud contingent of them but most of the main board threads on controversial topics slant pretty far in the opposite direction. Your milage will vary by which subreddits you hang out in, though.

When default subs suddenly go private you know some crazyness is happening...

ETA: https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...

AskReddit only went private because they had legit organization issues with her gone. The other subreddits apparently are going private in solidarity.

From the chatter it seems like several subs have been left high and dry by Victoria's departure.

I'm really struggling to understand the logic behind this move.

/r/science

/r/gaming

/r/movies

/r/askreddit

/r/iama

/r/law

/r/history

/r/art

all closed for now

Interesting to see how long they stay shut

https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has...

The secret popcorn groups have some more details, but it'd be interesting to see what actually happened.

EDIT: I'm interested because people here were saying that AMA was going to be the only thing to save Reddit, and that Reddit would start selling AMA opportunities.

> I'm interested because people here were saying that AMA was going to be the only thing to save Reddit, and that Reddit would start selling AMA opportunities.

/r/IAMA was the only subreddit Reddit took seriously, to the point of giving it its own iOS app and tailored design. It's also believed that high-profile AMAs (like Obama's AMA) are the largest driver of traffic to the site. (I haven't checked the data, though.)

The firing of Victoria indicates either a) bad management who don't know what makes AMAs successful or b) Reddit has alternate plans to make AMA more marketable. The lack of notice is suspicious, though.

In the meantime, Alexis is making unfortunately snarky responses to the firing: https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing

I'm pretty sure a) is a given at this point. Poor management of the situation, however justified the firing may be.

Am I the only one who doesn't see Alexis's responses as snarky? Given that the userbase is going to hate him anyway for dismissing a well-liked public figure and that he's already admitted that they should've communicated better with mods, I don't see what he could do differently.

I would bet on b), BTW - the only explanation I can think of for why they would dismiss a well-liked community liaison is if they wanted to monetize AMAs and she objected.

Reddit seems engaged in a test to see how far a company built on a community can attack that community's leaders before everything falls apart at the seams.

And vice versa.

Will we get all the juicy details in "I am Victoria, ex-AMA liaison. AMA."?

Some of the AMA can be found on Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150701154352/https://www.reddi...

You can also read the most popular AMAs at http://amatranscripts.com/

Shameless plug for Voat.co and the subVERSE that has been tracking all of these happenings in great detail, if you are interested in more information: https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit

/r/Science is gone too.

Reddit is biting the hand that feeds it...

PLoS, the open-access science publication, was putting on an excellent series [1]. Given Victoria's role in that, her loss puts that significant scientific outreach in jeopardy. A sad casualty. It was fantastic to see the front-lines of cutting edge research getting asked, answering, and otherwise motivating a lot of really interesting public discussion. Even if they repost all that old discussion (all those links on the blog currently don't work), it won't be trivial to fill Victoria's role in the upcoming AMAs, if they hold them at all.

[1] http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2015/06/update-on-plos-science-we...

It seems like Reddit keeps creating news for all the wrong reasons.

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