Reddit Moderators Shut Down Parts of Site Over Employee’s Dismissal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Take for example r/IAMA. It was a community created subreddit that became quite popular. Once it became successful, the company seemed to try to take greater ownership of it by directing the process themselves. After the recent scandal, they created a dedicated AMA@reddit.com account to coordinate AMAs. The mods have instead created AMAVerify@gmail.com to own the process separate from the company.
The current leadership of Reddit really does not understand the community and the fine implicit agreement between the community and the host.
This is going to make a great case study in the future on how to manage the relationship with user generated content sites.
Reddit has literally tried to rip control of the mods right out from underneath them, it's ludicrous.
See e.g. /r/IAMA mod /u/firedrops asking:
> Can you share the contact info with us? At this point it might simplify things if we handle it.
Reddit admin /u/kn0thing responding with:
> There's nothing to simplify, we have the relationship and we'll let you know the next steps.
From: https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked...
By providing members of the general public with quality news aggregation and community management tools, Reddit has thrown a wrench into the gears of public relations, which today still resembles the model Edward Bernays outlined back in the 1920s. (Aside: I highly recommend "Crystallizing Public Opinion" for anyone who cares about PR. It is sill relevant after 90 years.) For decades there was a gaping chasm between the general public and public figures, their representatives, and little need to revolutionize the field. Today that chasm isn't closing gradually; it's collapsing with enormous force. The bubble is bursting.
On Reddit, it just doesn't matter how much money you have or how much you've invested in the community or how much perceived legitimacy you have outside Reddit; anytime you make a comment, you're throwing yourself to the lions. Lions who upvote the most caustic, brutal, and incisive questions they can come up with, focusing the community's attention and demanding more of public figures in a way no one could have predicted in 1995 or even 2005.
Do you know what happens when you type "reddit new york times" into Google? The top result is /r/nytimes. As a subreddit, it is essentially dead. Do you think it would be dead if the New York Times did not have its own user-generated commenting system? Do you think the New York Times would like to remain in control of its own user-generated commenting system? Of course it would. The point I'm arguing is that Reddit, by its very nature, has helped push the New York Times to adopt a policy of accepting user comments, and many other news sources have followed suit. Of course this point is impossible to prove, but even if there is merely a grain of truth to it, the implications are that those who own the news business are no longer living in a unidirectional media world.
The larger argument is that Reddit (and its predecessors such as Slashdot and Digg of course; I've unfortunately unintentionally marginalized their role in this comment), by its very nature, has systematically and irrevocably altered the public's expectations for online participation and engagement. There is much more going on here than textbook case studies.
The community doesn't understand the relationship they have with the owners of the site. The owners have final say in the sub-reddits and they made it pretty clear when they forced the sub-reddits back to public, circumventing all of the changes to private.
"This is going to make a great case study in the future on how to manage the relationship with user generated content sites."
Reddit is really a terrible example of anything progressive. It's really a form of social regression. Witch hunts, bullying, silencing, and bigotry toward anything that's not liked and no acceptance or tolerance.
Even look at Pao. When it was thought she was fighting for women's rights, she was looked at as a great person and an asset to the community. Now, after not even knowing all of the facts, she is enemy #1.
If this were all just for entertainment, it would be fine. However, it actually destroys lives, businesses, and careers.
HN is going the same way. 5 years ago, it was a place for intelligent and open discussions away from political correct nonsense. But it's not the same anymore.
Opposing opinions are down voted immediately instead of discussed and bigotry is accepted, as long as it's against groups of undesirables. IE: religious, conservatives, or Republicans. It pretty much fits the definition of fascism.
This uproar has a bit more legitimacy, and I think a lot of mods have right to be mad over not being told about Victoria's firing/layoff/whatever it was (we don't actually know) -- but the response has been a grab bag of assumptions and conspiracy theories. Anonymous Quora posts were taken as gospel; assumptions about what decisions leaders at Reddit made were rampant and then soon themselves became the defacto explanations of what was going on -- without any shred of evidence.
I sympathize with the mods, and think that Victoria's departure hurts mightily the entire IAmA community; but I cannot support the response so far. Go to reddit and click on 'All', and then 'Rising' at the top (warning, some stuff will be NSFW) -- look at the unbelievable vile the 'community' is spewing.
The more niche subreddits (especially programming-related) are just as they always have been, but it's gotten to the point where I barely ever look at what's happening under /r/all anymore.
Ellen needs to read the Southwest case study on how the ceo made southwest focus on both the employees as well as the consumer.