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[Mod Post] The Future of IAmA : IAmA

To our users, AMA guests, and friends,

You may have noticed that, in spite of our history of past protests against Reddit’s poor site management, this subreddit has refrained from protesting or shutting down during the recent excitement on Reddit.

This does not imply that we think things are being managed better now. Rather, it reflects our belief that such actions will not make any significant difference this time.

Rather than come up with new words to express our concerns, I think some quotes from the NYT Editorial we wrote back in 2015 convey our thoughts very well:

Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities.

Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site.

Amazing how little has changed, really.

So, what are we going to do about this? What can we change? Not much. Reddit executives have shown that they won’t yield to the pressure of a protest. They’ve told the media that they are actively planning to remove moderators who keep subreddits shut down and have no intentions of making changes.

So, moving forward, we’re going to run IAmA like your average subreddit. We will continue moderating, removing spam, and enforcing rules. Many of the current moderation team will be taking a step back, but we’ll recruit people to replace them as needed.

However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

1. Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.

2. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).

3. Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.

4. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.

5. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.

6. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.

7. Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

Moving forward, we’ll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn’t mean we’re allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you’ll need to pay more attention.

Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.

Thanks for the ride everyone, it’s been fun.

Sincerely,

The IAmA Moderator Team (2013-2023)