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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, though... isn't this just a total overreaction? I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA (which once WASN'T a celebrity PR stop) but how does setting the whole damn subreddit to private help anyone? Like, I'm seriously asking. How?

The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all.

Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough?

It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.

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Victoria being fired is basically the last straw in what has been close to a year of friction between the people who volunteer to provide and manage reddit's content (the moderators) and the people who profit off of their work (reddit the corporation).

This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.

Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.

It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that one of the IAmA mods went "It's been a good run, I'm shutting it down?")

So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.

Japan's 2ちゃんねる http://www.2ch.net/ has had volunteer moderators for a long time, so it should be workable.

Volunteer moderators are an extremely common feature of forums all over the internet. The only forums I know of that have paid moderators are forums for specific companies and their products.

Sure, but those forums don't get millions in funding.

"Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong"

It's even worse than that... the firing seems to have been related to friction about monetizing AMA's

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png

The IAMA sub going offline/private was NOT about solidarity.

They needed Victoria to function, without her they are scrambling to figure out how they will do any upcoming AMAs.

The current AMA schedule (20 AMAs) will be scrapped.

"a load bearing wall in the house of AMA has been removed"- Knothing.

R/science had a similar problem, based on what a mod said in the original out of the loop thread.

As for The other subs, they may be doing it in solidarity.

> "a load bearing wall in the house of AMA has been removed" - Knothing

That is a quote by karmanaut not kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian). The comments by kn0thing have been in some cases just fuel for the fire.

Yeah, I feel a bit sorry for kn0thing. This must be an incredibly stressful time in the Reddit office, and that really comes through in his comments.

You clearly missed his antagonizing of the community in about nine different threads.

I believe nathans comments were sarcastic in nature.

Its more of a last straw. More at [0] but other complaints include outdated modding tools, new search UI, lack of communication.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...

> I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA

And a number of other subreddits, all fairly large, and all now without a way to fulfill promises made because of this. You don't get it, because if you did, you'd realize why it was more than just /r/IAMA.

So, you should do some reading until you do understand it, because right now, everything you just said screams ignorance.

Judging by my occasional reading of /r/bestofoutrageculture, overreacting is a thing for some time now.

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