"effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities:
Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.
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).
Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts"
I feel this was Reddit biggest sub, and probably the most prestigious. Wonder what the effect will be on reddit overall and if reddit will replace the mods.
Foe me the biggest are 6 and 4, reason being IAMA is going to go back to just being random AMAs, lots about average workers/people, without verification by the mods nor any big events that everyone knows about ahead of time, it will literally turn into the same as r/ama wich is kind of ironic since they had splitted such a long time ago.
It's funny... Moderators are SO hungry for power that they just can't let go. If the moderators for huge subs like IAMA, PICS, etc. dropped the cutesy meming bullshit "protests" and just simply quit doing the job for free, some damage could actually be done to reddit.
But these people are simply too invested in the communities they built and in love with the power they have to let go of the dead corpse they are clinging to.
I agree but with slight differences, I don't think it's only about power but more on the first thing, they have built communities for over a decade, to just leave is extremely difficult when you have poured this much work and time into the thing, it might be like an abusive relationship but they still love the places they've built.
That being said, some of mods have left big subs, but it's kind of difficult to get everyone on board.
Lastly I do think this is impactful, it literally strips one of the most "prestigious" and well recognized sub of all the functions that made it special, only doing the bare minimum to keep it alive
but that's what this post is, they're quitting. did you reply in the wrong thread or something?
They're not quitting. They are going to continue to moderate their sub. Yes they have agreed to no longer do a huge laundry list of responsibilities they took upon themselves to improve their sub - but they are not quitting.
Quitting would truly impact reddit. Losing this group of moderators who have built relationships with agents and PR groups would be huge. They are literally unreplaceable. It would take reddit years to get mods in place that could do what these do on the daily. But they are unable to quit because they don't want to give up their throne and things will eventually return to normal without reddit conceding an inch.
Look at the media coverage losing r/Minecraft got because those devs/mods had the courage and backbone to quit. We need more of that.
Even in their letter, the mods of IAMA said they'd been asking for tools since 2015. No changes. 8 years and they still haven't gotten what they wanted. Yet they refuse to take the next necessary step. To quit.
Sunk cost fallacy and power hungry are a terribly greedy combination.
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.
That doesn't sound to me like they're quitting, that sounds to me like they'll protest but support Reddit for as much as it takes to still be moderators.
It's weird, I always thought the "power hungry mods" thing was a bit of a running joke spread by people who'd been annoyed about a mod decision or two - it's really surprised me how true it's been proven to be and how many actually folded when threatened to be removed.
There's been a pretty wide range of responses, and while some boil down to that, I think the general trend is attachment and people fearing the result of some rw 'scab' taking over. Elkaki above's comparison to an abusive relationship feels really on the mark.
Even without all that though, sometimes it's genuinely hard for people to break habits; and many of these habits are years old. Doesn't really come down to region or logic.
Nope, the biggest sub to my knowledge that tried to move bringing a sizable audience is r/piracy.
Most other subs have kind of mentioned lemmy or kbin exist, but haven't established communities over here. (IAMA didn't promote anything at all sincethey didn't even take part on the protests)
I'm pretty sure AMAs in the past have introduced a lot of people to Reddit (Obama's AMA comes to mind). Before that AMAs were fairly popular too amongst celebrities.
Yes, but the sub will definitely go down in quality, and it's one of the biggest. They will do the bare minimum, not even requiring previous verification.
At least for me its kind of insane and a lot more meaningful that all the subs that only went private 2 days and then nothing else (those that kept private are the real goats of course)