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/r/IAmA mods to stop hosting celebrity AMAs, verifying identities, and more
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- Title
- The Reddit moderators who coordinate many celebrity AMAs will no longer do so
- Authors
- Jay Peters
- Published
- Jul 1 2023
- Word count
- 105 words
AMAs are so closely tied to Reddit's identity in the past that this feels like an especially strong condemnation. Easily one of the best parts of the site, once again coordinated by unpaid volunteers (after they fired Victoria, at least), and once again being left to fallow.
I'm surprised that specific sub isn't moderated and run completely by paid reddit staff.
VIctoria was a paid employee. I expect reddit will assign their staff to take over the tasks the moderators have said they will no longer do.
Here's a quote part of my final comments at reddit:
NB: spez left reddit in 2009, and created a flight search site, Hipmunk in 2010. He later left to become reddit CEO in July 2015 and sold Hipmunk in 2016. I've no idea what was happening at Hipmunk but I suspect things weren't going well. He has a history of bad decision making, leadership and communication with the reddit community since his return and that seems like an established pattern. I speculate he wasn't leading Hipmunk and decided or persuaded to leave. I firmly believe when he decided to leave and sell Hipmunk, he would have been heavily influential at Reddit still to become the new CEO.
A lot of media attention came to jailbait leading to it eventually getting shut down. Most vilification was directed at the most active moderator violentacrez , but spez was originally a mod there too. It was voted best subreddit by reddit's users in 2008.
Update: I'll leave the above section but do read the sub-thread below this comment- in particular this one - for important missing context regarding early ability to add mods without their knowledge and approval. This may well have been the result of a stunt.
People bring up the spez jailbait mod thing as a gotcha a lot, but there was no acceptance process for being made a mod at that time - if you were a mod of any subreddit, you could make anyone else a mod without their approval. It only stopped when people started using that 'feature' for harrassment.
It's possible he was added as a moderator without his knowledge, but is there any actual evidence that's what happened? Has he even commented publicly about it?
Is there any evidence he was ever active on that sub though? If he never posted or commented there at all couldn't we assume he was added unknowingly? I hate spez as much as anybody else but I haven't seen any evidence he wasn't just added as a goof besides people that want to call him a pedo.
That's not a sound logical argument, it's emotional justification. Unless you're going to pursue everyone who allowed /r/jailbait to exist with the same vitriol, using this to pile more onto spez is in bad faith.
It's far more powerful to let someone prove they're an asshole. He's done plenty of shitty things out in the open with irrefutable evidence. Use those things, don't grasp at a speculative "gotcha."
You have completely missed my point. I'm not debating the morals or ethics of /r/jailbait, because that is irrelevant to what I'm saying.
@vakieh worded it beautifully, so I won't rephrase:
By pursuing this, you dilute and diminish the strong, proven arguments. You defeat yourself by muddying the waters. How you or I may feel about /r/jailbait and spez's involvement does not matter. What matters is what can be proven.
Think of it this way, if you were presenting this argument in a courtroom, how do you think it would be received? Do you think the judge would be interested in speculation? Do you think a judge would care about personal opinions of Steve Huffman's character? You have to remove yourself, sterilize your argument, present only that which you can prove. Making wild assertions about a person's character backfires pretty quickly the first time you're asked for proof and don't have any.
Listen, I am on your side. My personal feelings towards spez are not positive, but my personal feelings also happen to be irrelevant here.
This is a little broad (it's 325 pages), but I feel it's topical. To Kill a Mockingbird and Legal Ethics: On the Role of Atticus Finch’s Attic Rhetoric in Fulfillment of Duties to Client, to Court, to Society, and to Self.
Breaches of decorum serve only to defeat one's own argument.
But why are we picking jailbait specifically to pile onto him for? There have been dozens of disgusting illegal subs that existed for just as long on reddit and nobody remembers those. Everybody picks the one spez got added as a mod for? Get mad about the tons of other bullshit he allowed then too. Jailbait was such a minor (pun intended) part of his responsibility on reddit. I have a million complaints about him as CEO before I would consider that one sub
Absolutely no evidence that I know of, no. And given the attention that the sub was getting, as well as all the sturm und drang of people defending the sub and violentacrez and others, you'd really expect evidence to come to the surface if there were any, especially given the opprobrium Huffman is coming in for now.
Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, obviously, but still. It really does seem vastly unlikely Huffman was an active participant in that sub in any way.
That said, it doesn't mean "getting added without his knowledge" is the only remaining option, though - I mentioned before that it's not implausible he'd joined or been added to keep a semi-official eye on a sub that was proving a lightning rod for criticism. And there are probably other possibilities to be had, if you wanted to get creative about it :) But afaik there's zero evidence for any theory or claim.
Yes, that's the story being told. But all I've seen are competing narratives, no actual corroboration or facts.
Edit: Just to clarify why I'm sceptical about the various uncorroborated narratives: the issue of /r/jailbait got a LOT of media attention at the time. It was called out on CNN, among others. It wasn't some fringe subreddit no one knew about, and Alexis Ohanian specifically commented that "as long what’s going on is legal, there’s nothing we can do to effectively police it."
So it seems highly unlikely that senior reddit management weren't keeping an eye on it, given it was very much being brought to their attention, and on their PR radar. The notion that one of the management team could be silently added as a moderator and no one including him noticed? That seems...doubtful. Part of a management team conducting oversight, seems more plausible. But that too would be pure speculation.
Spez was not part of the team back then. He wasn't even very active on reddit at the time. There was not a "management team" to conduct oversight: reddit was ~9 people in a room, 7 of which were engineers. Spez was added as a troll move during the violentacrez drama along with many other redditors. It's likely we found out from a reddit comment and sent him a heads up. Edit: I'll add: spez probably remained longer on the roster than the others because he was inactive.
It used to be easy to add users as mods without their consent, especially for users with spammy inboxes where the single line notification was easy to miss. Once we saw widespread abuse of the add moderator form I added a second confirmation step to the flow.
Please lay this conspiracy theory to rest.
Source: I was a reddit admin during this period and implemented the moderator invite system.
Thanks for the insights! I don't think many rational people give much credence to the conspiracy theory - the idea that /u/spez was an active participant in /r/jailbait. Unfortunately, I don't think Steve Huffman or Reddit will be able to put the theory to bed - it's going to linger for as long as the internet remembers, because...
Just as the conspiracy theory is pretty bonkers, what you're proposing is also hard to take at face value - that it somehow happened invisibly. Again, this wasn't some random Joe on one fringe subreddit among 10,000. This was the account of the site's co-founder (though I believe you're right - he wasn't on the management team at the time - Hipmunk, right?), being attached to a subreddit that was actively being used by mainstream media to cast shade on the entire Reddit operation, and very much in the public consciousness as well ("jailbait" was the 2nd-highest search term leading people to the site [1]), and sensitive enough that the other co-founder Alexis Ohanian was making public statements about it, and later Reddit GM Erik Martin as well. Is it possible the site was so poorly managed that, in that surrounding context, no one had a clue? Yeah, it's possible, if you grant an astounding degree of management and technical ineptitude, which are jointly necessary to justify the void of attention. For example: who exactly was it who added /u/spez as a mod to /r/jailbait, and when? That should have been a line in a mod log somewhere, right? Starting there would have made sense.
And that's part of the ongoing problem. The best case is that you're completely correct, and the company was collectively incompetent enough to a) let it happen b) without anyone noticing and c) with no exculpatory evidence to defend its own co-founder in such a sensitive issue. That's stretching credulity but not actually impossible, but even if true it's going to ensure the conspiracy theory persists. There's almost certainly no data available now, even if the current team wanted to dredge it up, so they get to live with that lingering smell.
There may be a lesson there for other small hyper-growth teams: building in visibility and transparency may slow you down today, but could help bury unpleasant accusations tomorrow.
Edit:: One point: your description of /u/spez as "inactive"? Not sure I agree with that - he appeared to be less prolific but still plenty active during that period; archive.org has many snapshots of his user page and posting history. What did you mean there?
[1] Allegedly. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/bblep/til_that_jailbait_is_the_number_2_search_term/c0lxp3g/
The source doesn't seem to have any value. The top comment in the thread has already explained why that's the case, too.
Thanks. I had completely forgotten about adding redditors as mods until I caught up on this thread. I do now remember that there was a wave of copycats abusing the system and adding users once the idea was discovered.
Did he? That's a viable claim, but it deserves a [citation required] tag. When was he added, and when did he unmod himself? And did he do so, and not some other admin?
Those questions are very low-value, tbh. They won't change anything, and won't change any minds. But still - claims without data are not facts, just more theories.
I think you have that backwards. The assertion that he demodded himself is the claim, and carries the burden of proof.
And the reality is that there IS no proof, in either direction. No proof that he was added as a mod without his knowing and no proof hat he demodded himself. This is why Reddit as a company, and Huffman as an individual, will probably never shake this story off entirely. Like all conspiracy theories, it contains a grain of truth: It's an undeniable fact that he was a moderator of that subreddit. Everything else - positive and negative - is unsubstantiated theory.
I wish people didn’t frame it as him being an active curator of content there, but even more I wish people wouldn’t completely dismiss this fact when evaluating his character. In the end, he was the owner of a website that made money off of the sharing of sexualized photos of children (and tbh, plenty of other completely unacceptable stuff, too), and was well aware of that fact, but chose to do nothing about it until it was calculated that the PR expense was too great to bear. Reddit even gave the creator of the jailbait subreddit a unique “Pimp Daddy” trophy for their userpage… if you want to see for yourself, just put “www.reddit.com/user/violentacrez” into the wayback machine and choose any capture from May 22, 2010 to Sep 25, 2012. WARNING: extremely nsfw content is there, view at own discretion
The 2 things are entirely separate, and you can't bring the one valid claim up in defence of the other invalid claim. The very fact of the invalid claim being invalid weakens the valid claim by association - because if the person making the claims is happy to include 1 thing that is utterly, undeniably wrong, most people will quite rightly dismiss the entire thing.
But I’m not defending the invalid claim, in fact the very first thing I wrote was “I wish people didn’t frame it as him being an active curator of content there” because it’s literally untrue and, for the reasons you specified, counterproductive. However they are also not “entirely separate”, as the fact that it happened and he removed himself as a moderator is literally evidence that he was aware of it existing and, furthermore, had some kind of issue being associated with it.
It's the standard flow of comments every time this happens:
There's no coming back from comment 2 to resurrect the first one, because all credibility is already lost. Write it off and do better later, otherwise you're just polishing a turd.
You’re talking to me like I’m the person who made the original comment, or trying to make excuses for it, or defend it. I am only expressing that I find people completely dismissing spez’s association to jailbait because it’s frequently brought up in a misleading context, similarly disturbing to the people who presented the misleading statement in the first place.
In the end, my comment was not really about the misleading comment, rather it was about yours, so I’d rather not discuss the misleading comment any further because I am literally in 100% agreement with you about it and am trying very hard to make that clear.
Even leaving the jailbait stuff aside, the decision making at reddit has been a masterclass in how not to make money. They continually make decisions that do nothing but increase costs and degrade the service they provide. Their entire business model is based on funneling people to their site, then selling ad space and user data. And for a while, their operating costs had to be low, because really they weren't paying for anything. The content they served up to their users was generated for free by other users and their comments were moderated for free by other users. They didn't even host the majority of their content because they had imgur for pictures and YouTube for videos. They were literally just storing the links and the comment text. They didn't even have an app for the longest time, and relied on 3rd party apps. Everything that would have incurred series costs, they relied on others to do for free.
So they are essentially sitting on a machine to print money. All they have to do is keep the users happy, sell ad space on one of the biggest websites on the planet, and just print money. But then they decide to start bringing all this shit in house. They decide to start hosting their own pictures and videos, bringing on server costs. They buy an app, bringing on developer costs. And this would make sense if they were improving their user experience in some way, because that would increase engagement and the value of their ads. But their not. In the case of the image hosting, it's basically the same. But in video player and the app are just objectively worse experiences. And you can only make the user experience worse so many times before the users, the product in this case, start to go elsewhere.
I think that was part of the problem. A link aggregator's primary job is to send people away to interesting links. Once on Imgur or YouTube, users were no longer on Reddit, looking at ads that paid Reddit money. Costs were low, but was likely hard to sell a story of revenue growth that would justify VC investments at increasingly high valuations.
"Keeping people on the site" seems to be a core motivation behind many of Reddit's technical changes over the past few years. In addition to direct image and video hosting, it also implemented group chat to compete with messaging services, and there was even a brief experiment with livestreaming. Also, aside from style-level differences, one large change in the Reddit website redesign is that clicking on the title of a post opens the associated comments, whereas on old!Reddit the post title opens the link itself. On new!Reddit, the post-associated link has about as much visual weight as the domain does (there for information only) on old!Reddit.
Reddit's 'machine to print money' just didn't seem to scale, and the powers that be evidently thought it had to become a Social Network with a captive userbase, rather than a mere link aggregator.
was he an active mod by choice for jailbait or was he simply added by someone else?
re: IAMA and other subs that are the flagship channels for acquisition, I'm surprised all of those mods aren't employees -- purely to protect the site against these sort of protests.
Remember the post-Victoria Wynter era of reddit? I believe she came over from celeb sites/Buzzfeed with no reddit experience to be shoehorned into the role of replacing Victoria, which basically doomed her to fail. I was coordinating AMAs for /r/music at the time with our PR mod (who was also on the /r/IAMA team - she was great for us for many years), and we never forgave reddit for firing Victoria. We had to scramble big time to fill the void by monitoring emails/PR, using tools like easyAMA to help people hosting AMAs to avoid learning markdown and be able to preview drafts of their posts, doing all the coaching them through the process, etc.
Years ago they noticed employees cost money, and let Victoria go. Honestly it was never the same again afterwards, that woman poured an insane amount of effort into the sub. That's not to belittle anyone else working on it at all, and especially not the unpaid volunteers, but reddit lost someone special when they kicked her out.
didn't they also insist that everybody work out of SF instead of remote? I could be wrong, but I thought they tried to bury her termination in that.
I've never forgiven them firing her. AMA's were so amazing with her, wasn't she the one who got Obama even? What an idiotic idea to fire her.
I thought they were pretty much done with them for some time now. I'd see the odd one pop up here and there but always seemed last minute, not the most popular of celebrities and seemed to be played super safe, like none of them had ever heard of Reddit before.
I'll never understand why they would can Victoria, I can't imagine that they saved much money on that. It caused a backlash as well as took the one consistently positive draw to Reddit away. It was free advertising, at least in a word of mouth way.
Then again I'm not being paid millions to make things worse for everyone so what would I know?
Why pay a salary for a good service when people would tolerate a less-than-average service for free?
That's how business is done these days. Cut as many corners as you can for as much profit as you can.
I'm excited to see what straw breaks the camels back. Will it be McDonald's raising the price of coffee 5 cents? Dollar store sunglasses? I'm sure whatever it is it won't be rational, but when so many companies use people's time and submitted content to then make them miserable I'm sure it's pent up. Add to the the cost of so many things going up with record profits and layoffs and the bubbles gotta pop eventually. I think the general public is getting pretty educated by now about the pump and dump golden paratute executive. More people knowing that's behind ruining some of their favorite things won't go unnoticed forever, people are petty.
I’m curious if the cost of having to replace free moderators with paid Reddit staff to keep the doors to some of these communities open will ever be worth the expected income they’re looking to gain by 1. Cutting the small cost of API access for third parties and 2. Increasing ad revenue in their site / official app.
These numbers are a very rough cut but API change maybe saves them a generous estimate of $1M per year on serving third-party apps and I’d suspect ad revenue is up a bit, but there’s also been an exodus of users from their services so I’d be surprised if the number forced onto the official app offsets that fully.
Now, looking at the state of reddit, what they gave up to achieve these savings and revenue increases is a bounty of passionate free labor. New, paid moderators are going to need a salary and healthcare, and the biggest factor is they most likely will not be as effective as the moderators lost. As with any job, you can’t just fire your 5-10 year senior talent managing key products / subreddits and expect to not have shit hit the fan everywhere.
To summarize, I don’t think there was a chance this was ever a good decision, even from the purely greed / business aspect.
I think from the greed/business standpoint the moves are understandable with the lens of a pending IPO. Its investors and founders would really like to cash out, but Reddit's most recent funding round implied a $10bn valuation. At 5% return on equity, it would need to clear some $500mn per year of profit to justify itself as a steady-state business.
We don't have recent financial statements from Reddit, but I think that level of profit is very unlikely even under a generous argument. One paywalled article suggests that Reddit's total revenue in 2022 was $670mn.
Therefore, to justify a return-to-investors IPO valuation, Reddit needs to demonstrate large and sustained growth. Sure, it might not have the required return on equity now, but in just 5 years it will be 10 times the size and everyone will do everything on Reddit and then it will print money hand over fist.
The API changes work nicely within this goal. They directly increase the share of Reddit's userbase using the official app/website, seeing ads and probably generating other marketable data for the company, and they indirectly let Reddit justify a monetary valuation of its historic data, re: AI training (and ideally income from that use, but we don't know of any contracts signed.)
In contrast, however, withdrawal of moderator labour or power-user content creation is a more gradual, more qualitative change that's extremely hard to see on a balance sheet. It might "eat the seed corn" and lead to the long term decline of the site, but if that happens after an IPO and the investors/founders can cash out, then nobody currently making the decision will be worse off for it.
I saw the post on the subreddit earlier today and was surprised considering they had been sitting this protest out. But this is huge. Reddit won't like this. I expect some kind of response - whether it's retaliation or just taking over the sub themselves. It's been a really popular thing and a way for casual people to learn about Reddit for the first time because AMAs there are usually covered by the mainstream press.
But anyway, I don't blame the mod team. They've been worked to the bone for the community's sake for years and Reddit needs them but hasn't really helped them at all. Why keep doing more than the bare minimum when Reddit shows that not only does it have disdain for you and your community, but the wider mod community and can change the rules to destroy your sub whenever they want? This is the kind of malicious compliance (bare minimum moderation while making it clear they're not actively sabotaging) that can actually hurt Reddit as a company and their reputation.
I think there's a succinct way to put this: if moderators do it for fun, then when it stops being fun they stop doing it.
'Fun' there is a bit relative and includes other qualitative bits of compensation like a sense of pride (of running a community) or respect, but the overall point is still there. Volunteer organizers are particularly sensitive to their working conditions. If the job becomes harder (here lack of third-party apps, but other regular complaints include frequent spam and an inability to deal with ban evasion), then they check out. Additionally, like any other morale-driven system, the prevailing attitude is resilient until it changes suddenly.
To be honest I’ve not read an AMA in years, do they still even draw people in these days?
I am speaking from personal experience only but “celebrity” AMAs are usually don’t answer any question unrelated to the event/show/etc they are there to promote.
When they AMA for other reasons, the questions asked are the stuff the person doesn’t want to answer publicly and they only answer puff-piece questions like their favourite pie flavour.
Now there are certainly exceptions - when the interviewed person has a warm persona and generally loved by all - but anything beyond that it’s a compete shitshow.
There's a reason "Can we just talk about Rampart?" became a reddit meme and that came out in 2011. I think there was always a... Skepticism about celebrity AMAs (Bill Murray asleep on the couch comes to mind) but the diamonds in the rough every now and then kept people coming back.
Victoria was by no means a silver bullet but at least there were a few more quality ones while she was around.
They weren't on iAMA, but /litrpg and I believe it was crossposted to /books and the progfantasy, but some authors I followed had AMAs there, they were great!
I always thought that was odd to begin with. r/iama stood for INFORMAL Ask Me Anything. It was supposed to be a departure from r/AmA for random people with interesting life experiences to ask questions to. Not celebrities who can coordinate something with r/AMA. You can definitely argue that it outlived it's prestige as AMAs moved to specific subs, but still, it was a neat part of old reddit.
What happened to r/AMA anyway?
EDIT: Apologies my history was entirely incorrect. I was mixing IAMA with CasualAma.
Also, to answer my own question, r/AMA is apparently still restricted. Not the main ama sub anymore but i guess there was still some activity and subs.
IIRC, /r/iama actually stands for "I am a...", like "I am a shark dentist" or "I am a corporate shaman" or "I am a distant heir to the dutch throne" or whatever. Long (LONG) ago, the mods realized that /r/iama and /r/ama were basically the same thing, and merged the subreddits. What you're looking for is /r/casualama, which was just the right size to occasionally have some really fantastic threads, right up until the end.
The best AMA I ever read was a very old casual from a vacuum repair tech. So interesting and informative.
We bought a Miele solely on the basis of that AMA. I thought it was nuts to pay that much for a vacuum at the time. That vacuum is still going strong, despire the hose being partially melted from leaning on the heater, the head a bit wonky from people opening it wrong (looking at you sister in law), and that we've never had it serviced.
It still works better than any other vacuum I've ever used, especially Dysons.
He actually did twelve of them!
Ahh interesting. I must have mixed up my lore, apologies. It is interesting that despite "Ask Me Anything" winning out the "I Am A" sub was the chosen subject for merging.
I remember /r/casualama while scrolling through new, that was painful, just a sea of people saying "I'm drunk ask me anything", "I'm bored ask me anything". Unfortunately I think that overshadowed the good ones, as I can't think of any at the moment.
The main issue is happens when something gets popular. Having informal AMAs without verification just turns in to teenagers making stuff up, and the whole subreddit becomes fiction.
It’s a fund idea, but in practice it just leads to chaos. There is /r/casualIAMA
Source: was an IAMA moderator back in like 2011 or something.
They're not getting rid of verification, to be fair. They wont be actively seeking out celebrities or curating AMAs anymore but the sub's rules will, according to the mod post, still be enforced.
Well, yeah, I think that's the point, right - to show exactly how much the volunteers are actually doing?