It may not have come across in the article, but we had explicit permission from numerous admins (including Steve) for our promotion strategies. They fully understood the legitimately our AMA...
It may not have come across in the article, but we had explicit permission from numerous admins (including Steve) for our promotion strategies. They fully understood the legitimately our AMA program brought to Reddit and were willing to turn a blind eye to our actions because it was "good" content. Over the past year we watched as the admins began cracking down on specific actions with each change fighting abuse from a certain political subreddit. Rather than directly discipline a few troublesome subreddits, the admins decided to completely destroy moderators' ability to promote and feature events such as AMAs.
Once it became apparent we could no longer successfully promote content, we tried to work with the admins to find a solution. The best thing they could offer was promotion on their social media accounts, which was a pointless suggestion. We already had plenty of AMA participants (NASA, NIH, etc.) that promoted the events on Twitter/Facebook to their millions of followers. Nobody clicks through to Reddit posts from those platforms and their votes don't even count because of how Reddit treats users coming from external websites. The end of the AMA series was inevitable months ago.
I find it very interesting that the CEO of a social media platform suggested posting on competing social media sites to promote content on his site that wasn't getting enough visibility.
I find it very interesting that the CEO of a social media platform suggested posting on competing social media sites to promote content on his site that wasn't getting enough visibility.
My suspicion is that he wanted to try to have us convert twitter users to reddit users by doing so. Of course, the fact that their anti brigading detection gets triggered and it actually harms the...
My suspicion is that he wanted to try to have us convert twitter users to reddit users by doing so. Of course, the fact that their anti brigading detection gets triggered and it actually harms the visibility of the AMAs if we followed his suggestion didn't really matter to him (my recollection is we could see a leveling off in score growth temporarily around when other people linked in to us).
You mentioned you tried to find a better solution with the admins. What were some of the suggestions or ideas you thought would actually work that they wouldn't agree to?
You mentioned you tried to find a better solution with the admins. What were some of the suggestions or ideas you thought would actually work that they wouldn't agree to?
It's this sort of thing that helps me better understand why folks are creating ~. I'm not on Reddit much, but I knew about science AMAs and I'm interested in science communication. It was clearly...
It's this sort of thing that helps me better understand why folks are creating ~. I'm not on Reddit much, but I knew about science AMAs and I'm interested in science communication. It was clearly a positive aspect of r/science and Reddit in general, and if the website changes made it unsustainable then that should be looked at, not waved off with "features are coming eventually."
This part in particular gives a good hint as to a feature Tildes could have (which I suggested in a ~tildes thread): Basically having a "featured" or "promoted" set of links above the usual links...
This part in particular gives a good hint as to a feature Tildes could have (which I suggested in a ~tildes thread):
Additionally, Reddit stopped allowing what Huffman calls “post manipulation” to highlight certain content. Moderators at r/science and other popular subreddits have been accused of deleting highly ranking posts to push individual items to the top of their page. From there, they would gain visibility and receive upvotes to be featured on the main page.
...
For a while, removing top posts was a reliable way to get AMAs to float to the top of a subreddit, proving moderators could bend the rules to overcome algorithms that tend to rank posts based on viewership, not merit. Once the changes were made to expel the workaround, AMAs on the r/science page took a nosedive. The subreddit no longer had a means of getting its content in front of people, and competing against more “viral” subject matter proved fatal.
Basically having a "featured" or "promoted" set of links above the usual links that are:
limited to a small number of posts
use a different sort order than whatever the user has selected
This would make it possible for ~science (as an example) to always have the latest 3 AMAs (posts tagged with AMA) show up above the other set of links.
I like the idea of an AMA tag activating a vote multiplier effect, so that when a regular user votes up the AMA, whatever their individual weight is gets doubled, or maybe more than doubled (we'd...
I like the idea of an AMA tag activating a vote multiplier effect, so that when a regular user votes up the AMA, whatever their individual weight is gets doubled, or maybe more than doubled (we'd need to tinker to find the proper balance). This should result in a meteoric rise up the page. We can leave the use of the AMA tag in the hands of mods and highly-trusted users and limit them per-day to prevent abuse and casual uses.
The same goes with the 'exemplary vote' idea. Like reddit gold, but when you use one of your limited use exemplary tokens they multiply the vote each time, so 1 gold is 1.1, two users giving it gold is 1.2, etc etc. As people hit it with exemplary votes it'll start getting exponentially more visibility the more gold it gets, but it still needs regular users vote it up to take off - keeps things a bit more democratic and meritocratic that way. It's possible this is the only system an AMA would need, the AMA tag multiples might not even be necessary.
Those all sound like organic ways of solving the problem. I'll be looking forward to seeing which features end up being put in place and how they affect things :)
Those all sound like organic ways of solving the problem. I'll be looking forward to seeing which features end up being put in place and how they affect things :)
I'm trying very hard to keep it all democratic and meritocratic. In practice that means making sure any results are coming not from a couple of individuals, but from aggregated user activity, so...
I'm trying very hard to keep it all democratic and meritocratic. In practice that means making sure any results are coming not from a couple of individuals, but from aggregated user activity, so that it remains fair and gives more people the chance to include themselves in the process.
While those AMAs and other exemplary posts are building momentum, they are also going to be generating the questions and answers that will make them interesting to read, so when their momentum crests and they hit the tops of their respective hierarchies, there will already be a lively discussion going on. It'll help set the tone for the larger group of participants that aren't down in the trenches of the subgroups where it started, and help carry that individual community's culture with it to the larger audience.
I understand your desire to keep the process democratic, but I don't know if that would scale well. I think if there were a group of mods with verified qualifications—similar to /r/science's...
I understand your desire to keep the process democratic, but I don't know if that would scale well. I think if there were a group of mods with verified qualifications—similar to /r/science's qualified users—who were given a sort of super-tag to give to content like official AMAs, that would help curate content. I'm not totally sure how that could be implemented, but I don't think relying on general users would be an adequate solution.
Spez is making it clear that all content on Reddit is created equal, and honestly that's fine if that's what they want. But with such a large user base, it necessarily leads to a front page that...
Spez is making it clear that all content on Reddit is created equal, and honestly that's fine if that's what they want. But with such a large user base, it necessarily leads to a front page that is 100% easy to digest crap. If high effort posts can't compete, then people stop making the effort. It's a downward spiral.
I like the idea of Reddit, with it's content controlled entirely by the community. But there's a reason I've spent much more time here on ~ than on Reddit recently.
See, that's the problem. The content is not all equal. A viral image will always get traction tenfold compared to some unknown guy that will answer questions with lots of text to read on a screen....
Spez is making it clear that all content on Reddit is created equal
See, that's the problem.
The content is not all equal. A viral image will always get traction tenfold compared to some unknown guy that will answer questions with lots of text to read on a screen.
It's the reason we're discussing so much about "fluff"content being allowed here :)
Agree to disagree about /r/science's moderation... but I think we're all in agreement that reddit backtracking on their founding principles is pretty disheartening. They can't be opensource and...
Agree to disagree about /r/science's moderation... but I think we're all in agreement that reddit backtracking on their founding principles is pretty disheartening. They can't be opensource and fully transparent when they're planning to make that $$ with an IPO though, can they?
That's why @deimos went non-profit and is leaning towards AGPLv3 for the opensource license though... so users here can be 100% assured that all their code contributions and efforts to build the communities here won't be for naught and sold to the highest bidder at some point down the line.
Fair enough... p.s. someone was asking about NAB on reddit after I suggested they might like it better than ~ and I couldn't really answer their question for them so you may want to pop in and say...
ಠ_ಠ indeed.... God, reddit thread locking is such a cop out. Thanks for the clarification about your plans too, it'll be interesting to see how they all play out as you implement them. p.s. Is...
ಠ_ಠ indeed.... God, reddit thread locking is such a cop out.
Thanks for the clarification about your plans too, it'll be interesting to see how they all play out as you implement them.
p.s. Is there some place you would prefer I point people to instead of the /r/redditalternatives thread, btw? I imagine in the comings weeks/months the shitstorm abrewing on reddit with the redesign means that people are going to be inquiring more and more about alternatives. I truly think yours could be something interesting and worthwhile so will probably wind up pointing more people to it that express misgivings about our no hatespeech approach.
I'd completely missed that comment thread, and man is it an infuriating read. Literally no nuance to anyone's thoughts beyond "you manipulated votes, so fuck you". No complaints whatsoever about...
I'd completely missed that comment thread, and man is it an infuriating read. Literally no nuance to anyone's thoughts beyond "you manipulated votes, so fuck you". No complaints whatsoever about the garbage design decisions that lead to its necessity.
Yeah that sums up my feelings towards spez and his “response” as well. No attempt to acknowledge their grievances, how much hard work they put into it or talk about ways reddit can work with them...
Yeah that sums up my feelings towards spez and his “response” as well. No attempt to acknowledge their grievances, how much hard work they put into it or talk about ways reddit can work with them to address the issue... just blame deflection and a bunch of users eating it up. It was rage inducing.
P.s. incredibly good summary of the entire situation by dailydot
What immediately comes to mind is the quote about the "pecking party" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--it's like spez placed a drop of blood on nate and suddenly all of the chickens started...
What immediately comes to mind is the quote about the "pecking party" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--it's like spez placed a drop of blood on nate and suddenly all of the chickens started tearing him apart.
Redditors sure do love contrarianism, "gotcha!" moments and tearing people down from "on high"... no matter how flimsy and unfounded the turnaround attempt is, which didn't help either. "OMG...
Redditors sure do love contrarianism, "gotcha!" moments and tearing people down from "on high"... no matter how flimsy and unfounded the turnaround attempt is, which didn't help either.
"OMG /r/science mods tried to figure out a way around the system engineered to suppress their efforts and designed for them to fail no matter what!!!! CHEATERS!!!"
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the situation, but it looked to me like the thing that most of the users were on the admins' side about is the removal of posts to make way for AMAs, and I can't...
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the situation, but it looked to me like the thing that most of the users were on the admins' side about is the removal of posts to make way for AMAs, and I can't blame them for siding with the admins on that.
I understand being frustrated with the admins (God knows we've all been there), but removing posts that don't break the rules in order to promote something else is bad moderating practice, and it's unfair to the users whose posts are removed, even if just temporarily. Especially so when you consider that all subs have sticky slots for when the mods feel something needs to be promoted.
That being said, I'll admit that I don't have an inside perspective on this, so it's entirely possible that there's crucial information I'm missing. But from an outside perspective, Spez seemed to be in the right in that response.
The problem is that reddit has a firewall system in place that prevents too much content from any one subreddit from reaching users' front pages in a set period. So unless the AMAs reach the top...
The problem is that reddit has a firewall system in place that prevents too much content from any one subreddit from reaching users' front pages in a set period. So unless the AMAs reach the top of the subreddit faster than the other content posted by their prolific power-user submitters it is unlikely to ever be seen unless users specifically visit /r/science. Even in /r/science, like most of reddit, the new queue is a relative ghost town so often times things take a long time to climb or get noticed even with active promotion which the /r/science mods have tried through Twitter, Facebook, third party notification systems, etc.
For AMAs, which are by their very nature limited windows of opportunity, especially when the person doing them is already taking time out of their very busy schedules... this makes them basically impossible to get visibility within the timeframe in which they are useful.
Why don't they just sticky the post so it gets instant visibility? They tried that. The problem is that thanks to T_D abusing that system to dominate /r/all by constantly rotating posts to sticky so users could coordinate upvotes and get everything to the top, any post that is stickied automatically gets heavily weighted against in the hotness algorithm and reduces the likelihood it will reach a user's front page or climb /r/all. For most submissions this is not a problem, you just post it, wait a few hours for it to rise naturally and get seen. However once again AMAs are very limited windows of opportunity.
So why don't they simply create the post a few hours before the AMA starts and then let it climb naturally that way? Because once again the hotness algorithm makes that unviable and people are unlikely to upvote an AMA only filled with question but no answers. That and a post that takes hours before it starts picking up steam is never going to get very high on the hotness list. The /r/science mods suggested perhaps allowing them to post an AMA, not allow it go get voted on, so they have time to get it prepped with questions from the community and only activate the voting (and ranking in hotness) once the AMA participant arrives but the admins ignored them.
Sidenote: We have talked to @nate and are most likely going to take that suggestion and implement a similar "reserved space" submission type here.
Now, was it ethical of them to remove posts to increase visibility of the AMAs (even if they put the removed posts back as the AMAs overtook them on the hotness sort)? No and nobody is arguing that it was. But can you really blame them for attempting it when the reddit system is basically designed to discourage limited time events like AMAs from getting any visibility within the timeframe in which they are useful? I certainly can't, especially because I understand how much effort they take to arrange and run, especially by people who are not being paid to do so and have careers on top of their mod duties. Not only that but when AMA after AMA flops because of the system it becomes harder and harder to sell people on the idea of even doing them in the first place, further adding to the problem.
Hence my joke about redditors not understanding the situation and screaming, "OMG /r/science mods tried to figure out a way around the system engineered to suppress their efforts and designed for them to fail no matter what!!!! CHEATERS!!!"
For the record, this is the exact same system that prevents the listentothis yearly bestofs from making it to reddit's front page. They tap out between 2k and 6k votes. Check this out. I can show...
For the record, this is the exact same system that prevents the listentothis yearly bestofs from making it to reddit's front page. They tap out between 2k and 6k votes.
Check this out. I can show you in one image how fucked up and broken reddit's entire system is.
It wasn't exactly hidden that we did that, since we explicitly said we removed posts for AMA promotion in our rules. We had an entire paragraph stating that is what we do, and have had it for well...
It wasn't exactly hidden that we did that, since we explicitly said we removed posts for AMA promotion in our rules. We had an entire paragraph stating that is what we do, and have had it for well over a year.
Sure, but it wasn't exactly kosher per sitewide reddit rules either, if we're being 100% honest. At least here on ~ we're hoping all that nonsense won't be necessary though since you won't have to...
Sure, but it wasn't exactly kosher per sitewide reddit rules either, if we're being 100% honest. At least here on ~ we're hoping all that nonsense won't be necessary though since you won't have to fight against the system to get the attention you deserve... in fact we're pretty much engineering it to encourage and support exactly that sort of high quality, high effort, long-form content.
No one is disputing that. The problem was that 1) the mods had to resort to such under-handed tactics at all because of decisions that the admins made, 2) the admins continued to provide vague...
No one is disputing that. The problem was that 1) the mods had to resort to such under-handed tactics at all because of decisions that the admins made, 2) the admins continued to provide vague mentions of "features" that were being noted for a long time to help address the problem but never came to fruition (kind of a carrot on a stick), and 3) spez chose to throw the mods under the bus and falsely accuse them of throwing blame around instead of simply acknowledging the problems and offering to work with them.
In short: rather than acknowledge and try to help the problem, spez pulled a dick move and shifted the conversation in such a way that users would turn on the mods.
It was probably worse specifically because it was someone of "authority". If you're seen as an authoritative voice and you're caught doing anything wrong, regardless of rationale, justification,...
It was probably worse specifically because it was someone of "authority". If you're seen as an authoritative voice and you're caught doing anything wrong, regardless of rationale, justification, or level of impact, redditors will tear you down without mercy. One only needs to look at the way they view law enforcement to see this.
Granted, I get where they're coming from, but resorting directly to outrage and being unwilling to discuss the subject in order to civilly resolve the dispute is pretty childish.
This is a brilliant summation of Reddit comments. The whole "pitchforks" thing is disturbing. Instead of engaging in discussion, everyone just jumps on one side and pummels the other with...
This is a brilliant summation of Reddit comments. The whole "pitchforks" thing is disturbing. Instead of engaging in discussion, everyone just jumps on one side and pummels the other with downvotes and abuse.
That summary is basically sourced from my phone call with the author, I explained the entire situation in detail. I have nothing to hide, I don't think what we did was wrong at all. We had...
That summary is basically sourced from my phone call with the author, I explained the entire situation in detail. I have nothing to hide, I don't think what we did was wrong at all. We had permission, it made reddit a better place, a special place. Now, low-effort link dump city.
It may not have come across in the article, but we had explicit permission from numerous admins (including Steve) for our promotion strategies. They fully understood the legitimately our AMA program brought to Reddit and were willing to turn a blind eye to our actions because it was "good" content. Over the past year we watched as the admins began cracking down on specific actions with each change fighting abuse from a certain political subreddit. Rather than directly discipline a few troublesome subreddits, the admins decided to completely destroy moderators' ability to promote and feature events such as AMAs.
Once it became apparent we could no longer successfully promote content, we tried to work with the admins to find a solution. The best thing they could offer was promotion on their social media accounts, which was a pointless suggestion. We already had plenty of AMA participants (NASA, NIH, etc.) that promoted the events on Twitter/Facebook to their millions of followers. Nobody clicks through to Reddit posts from those platforms and their votes don't even count because of how Reddit treats users coming from external websites. The end of the AMA series was inevitable months ago.
I find it very interesting that the CEO of a social media platform suggested posting on competing social media sites to promote content on his site that wasn't getting enough visibility.
My suspicion is that he wanted to try to have us convert twitter users to reddit users by doing so. Of course, the fact that their anti brigading detection gets triggered and it actually harms the visibility of the AMAs if we followed his suggestion didn't really matter to him (my recollection is we could see a leveling off in score growth temporarily around when other people linked in to us).
You mentioned you tried to find a better solution with the admins. What were some of the suggestions or ideas you thought would actually work that they wouldn't agree to?
It's this sort of thing that helps me better understand why folks are creating ~. I'm not on Reddit much, but I knew about science AMAs and I'm interested in science communication. It was clearly a positive aspect of r/science and Reddit in general, and if the website changes made it unsustainable then that should be looked at, not waved off with "features are coming eventually."
This part in particular gives a good hint as to a feature Tildes could have (which I suggested in a ~tildes thread):
Basically having a "featured" or "promoted" set of links above the usual links that are:
This would make it possible for ~science (as an example) to always have the latest 3 AMAs (posts tagged with AMA) show up above the other set of links.
I like the idea of an AMA tag activating a vote multiplier effect, so that when a regular user votes up the AMA, whatever their individual weight is gets doubled, or maybe more than doubled (we'd need to tinker to find the proper balance). This should result in a meteoric rise up the page. We can leave the use of the AMA tag in the hands of mods and highly-trusted users and limit them per-day to prevent abuse and casual uses.
The same goes with the 'exemplary vote' idea. Like reddit gold, but when you use one of your limited use exemplary tokens they multiply the vote each time, so 1 gold is 1.1, two users giving it gold is 1.2, etc etc. As people hit it with exemplary votes it'll start getting exponentially more visibility the more gold it gets, but it still needs regular users vote it up to take off - keeps things a bit more democratic and meritocratic that way. It's possible this is the only system an AMA would need, the AMA tag multiples might not even be necessary.
Tinkering with all of this is going to be fun.
Those all sound like organic ways of solving the problem. I'll be looking forward to seeing which features end up being put in place and how they affect things :)
I'm trying very hard to keep it all democratic and meritocratic. In practice that means making sure any results are coming not from a couple of individuals, but from aggregated user activity, so that it remains fair and gives more people the chance to include themselves in the process.
While those AMAs and other exemplary posts are building momentum, they are also going to be generating the questions and answers that will make them interesting to read, so when their momentum crests and they hit the tops of their respective hierarchies, there will already be a lively discussion going on. It'll help set the tone for the larger group of participants that aren't down in the trenches of the subgroups where it started, and help carry that individual community's culture with it to the larger audience.
I understand your desire to keep the process democratic, but I don't know if that would scale well. I think if there were a group of mods with verified qualifications—similar to /r/science's qualified users—who were given a sort of super-tag to give to content like official AMAs, that would help curate content. I'm not totally sure how that could be implemented, but I don't think relying on general users would be an adequate solution.
Spez is making it clear that all content on Reddit is created equal, and honestly that's fine if that's what they want. But with such a large user base, it necessarily leads to a front page that is 100% easy to digest crap. If high effort posts can't compete, then people stop making the effort. It's a downward spiral.
I like the idea of Reddit, with it's content controlled entirely by the community. But there's a reason I've spent much more time here on ~ than on Reddit recently.
See, that's the problem.
The content is not all equal. A viral image will always get traction tenfold compared to some unknown guy that will answer questions with lots of text to read on a screen.
It's the reason we're discussing so much about "fluff"content being allowed here :)
Agree to disagree about /r/science's moderation... but I think we're all in agreement that reddit backtracking on their founding principles is pretty disheartening. They can't be opensource and fully transparent when they're planning to make that $$ with an IPO though, can they?
That's why @deimos went non-profit and is leaning towards AGPLv3 for the opensource license though... so users here can be 100% assured that all their code contributions and efforts to build the communities here won't be for naught and sold to the highest bidder at some point down the line.
Fair enough...
p.s. someone was asking about NAB on reddit after I suggested they might like it better than ~ and I couldn't really answer their question for them so you may want to pop in and say something about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/8lje2s/admins_getting_feedback_on_the_new_reddit_redesign/dzgv8ai/?context=3
ಠ_ಠ indeed.... God, reddit thread locking is such a cop out.
Thanks for the clarification about your plans too, it'll be interesting to see how they all play out as you implement them.
p.s. Is there some place you would prefer I point people to instead of the /r/redditalternatives thread, btw? I imagine in the comings weeks/months the shitstorm abrewing on reddit with the redesign means that people are going to be inquiring more and more about alternatives. I truly think yours could be something interesting and worthwhile so will probably wind up pointing more people to it that express misgivings about our no hatespeech approach.
I'd completely missed that comment thread, and man is it an infuriating read. Literally no nuance to anyone's thoughts beyond "you manipulated votes, so fuck you". No complaints whatsoever about the garbage design decisions that lead to its necessity.
Yeah that sums up my feelings towards spez and his “response” as well. No attempt to acknowledge their grievances, how much hard work they put into it or talk about ways reddit can work with them to address the issue... just blame deflection and a bunch of users eating it up. It was rage inducing.
P.s. incredibly good summary of the entire situation by dailydot
What immediately comes to mind is the quote about the "pecking party" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--it's like spez placed a drop of blood on nate and suddenly all of the chickens started tearing him apart.
Redditors sure do love contrarianism, "gotcha!" moments and tearing people down from "on high"... no matter how flimsy and unfounded the turnaround attempt is, which didn't help either.
"OMG /r/science mods tried to figure out a way around the system engineered to suppress their efforts and designed for them to fail no matter what!!!! CHEATERS!!!"
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the situation, but it looked to me like the thing that most of the users were on the admins' side about is the removal of posts to make way for AMAs, and I can't blame them for siding with the admins on that.
I understand being frustrated with the admins (God knows we've all been there), but removing posts that don't break the rules in order to promote something else is bad moderating practice, and it's unfair to the users whose posts are removed, even if just temporarily. Especially so when you consider that all subs have sticky slots for when the mods feel something needs to be promoted.
That being said, I'll admit that I don't have an inside perspective on this, so it's entirely possible that there's crucial information I'm missing. But from an outside perspective, Spez seemed to be in the right in that response.
The problem is that reddit has a firewall system in place that prevents too much content from any one subreddit from reaching users' front pages in a set period. So unless the AMAs reach the top of the subreddit faster than the other content posted by their prolific power-user submitters it is unlikely to ever be seen unless users specifically visit /r/science. Even in /r/science, like most of reddit, the new queue is a relative ghost town so often times things take a long time to climb or get noticed even with active promotion which the /r/science mods have tried through Twitter, Facebook, third party notification systems, etc.
For AMAs, which are by their very nature limited windows of opportunity, especially when the person doing them is already taking time out of their very busy schedules... this makes them basically impossible to get visibility within the timeframe in which they are useful.
Why don't they just sticky the post so it gets instant visibility? They tried that. The problem is that thanks to T_D abusing that system to dominate /r/all by constantly rotating posts to sticky so users could coordinate upvotes and get everything to the top, any post that is stickied automatically gets heavily weighted against in the hotness algorithm and reduces the likelihood it will reach a user's front page or climb /r/all. For most submissions this is not a problem, you just post it, wait a few hours for it to rise naturally and get seen. However once again AMAs are very limited windows of opportunity.
So why don't they simply create the post a few hours before the AMA starts and then let it climb naturally that way? Because once again the hotness algorithm makes that unviable and people are unlikely to upvote an AMA only filled with question but no answers. That and a post that takes hours before it starts picking up steam is never going to get very high on the hotness list. The /r/science mods suggested perhaps allowing them to post an AMA, not allow it go get voted on, so they have time to get it prepped with questions from the community and only activate the voting (and ranking in hotness) once the AMA participant arrives but the admins ignored them.
Sidenote: We have talked to @nate and are most likely going to take that suggestion and implement a similar "reserved space" submission type here.
Now, was it ethical of them to remove posts to increase visibility of the AMAs (even if they put the removed posts back as the AMAs overtook them on the hotness sort)? No and nobody is arguing that it was. But can you really blame them for attempting it when the reddit system is basically designed to discourage limited time events like AMAs from getting any visibility within the timeframe in which they are useful? I certainly can't, especially because I understand how much effort they take to arrange and run, especially by people who are not being paid to do so and have careers on top of their mod duties. Not only that but when AMA after AMA flops because of the system it becomes harder and harder to sell people on the idea of even doing them in the first place, further adding to the problem.
Hence my joke about redditors not understanding the situation and screaming, "OMG /r/science mods tried to figure out a way around the system engineered to suppress their efforts and designed for them to fail no matter what!!!! CHEATERS!!!"
For the record, this is the exact same system that prevents the listentothis yearly bestofs from making it to reddit's front page. They tap out between 2k and 6k votes.
Check this out. I can show you in one image how fucked up and broken reddit's entire system is.
https://imgur.com/4ivHZAp
That number continues to go up by around 5k views per day. That link is being shared every day by music fiends all over the internet.
It wasn't exactly hidden that we did that, since we explicitly said we removed posts for AMA promotion in our rules. We had an entire paragraph stating that is what we do, and have had it for well over a year.
Sure, but it wasn't exactly kosher per sitewide reddit rules either, if we're being 100% honest. At least here on ~ we're hoping all that nonsense won't be necessary though since you won't have to fight against the system to get the attention you deserve... in fact we're pretty much engineering it to encourage and support exactly that sort of high quality, high effort, long-form content.
No one is disputing that. The problem was that 1) the mods had to resort to such under-handed tactics at all because of decisions that the admins made, 2) the admins continued to provide vague mentions of "features" that were being noted for a long time to help address the problem but never came to fruition (kind of a carrot on a stick), and 3) spez chose to throw the mods under the bus and falsely accuse them of throwing blame around instead of simply acknowledging the problems and offering to work with them.
In short: rather than acknowledge and try to help the problem, spez pulled a dick move and shifted the conversation in such a way that users would turn on the mods.
It was probably worse specifically because it was someone of "authority". If you're seen as an authoritative voice and you're caught doing anything wrong, regardless of rationale, justification, or level of impact, redditors will tear you down without mercy. One only needs to look at the way they view law enforcement to see this.
Granted, I get where they're coming from, but resorting directly to outrage and being unwilling to discuss the subject in order to civilly resolve the dispute is pretty childish.
This is a brilliant summation of Reddit comments. The whole "pitchforks" thing is disturbing. Instead of engaging in discussion, everyone just jumps on one side and pummels the other with downvotes and abuse.
And that's why we don't have downvotes here. We don't care about what people don't like. We only care about the things people do like.
That summary is basically sourced from my phone call with the author, I explained the entire situation in detail. I have nothing to hide, I don't think what we did was wrong at all. We had permission, it made reddit a better place, a special place. Now, low-effort link dump city.