IAmA mods no longer willing to work for reddit for free
redd.it
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.
Copy and paste mirror
Yeah theres no point in mods making a community a special place when reddit is going out of their way to shit on the mods and users.
It's pretty insane the amount of work they did for free. I never even thought about the effort that went into a sub like that. Good for them
thank you for posting this, it annoys me to no end the amount of "omg this happened now on reddit" posts that link to the source on reddit. Like that defeats the purpose of leaving the platform if I'm forced to go back anyway and give them traffic. Make a mirror, stop giving the site more traffic lol
Yep, it's still clingy with the direct links and the constant posts, so many saying "Reddit is DEAD to me!"... yet they keep on talking non-stop about Reddit.
So why are you here talking about it?
Wow the mods were really working hard to make IAMA a special place. Hope the drop in quality becomes clear ..
Thank you for posting this. I still have RIF installed and refuse to download the reddit app, so I can't see the original post. Appreciate it.
Rumor has it, Reddit has a website.
Sounds like a lot of work to see something on a site I don't want to be on.
Do you want to hate read or not???
idk about others but, I left that site because I don't agree with their policies, I would much rather have a mirror then give the site more traffic.
Sure, but why grace the dumpster fire with traffic, when you also can just copy the relevant parts here?
shit bro no way, really?
Oh man, I'm not going back to Reddit, but it would almost be worth it to watch all the fake celebrity trolls do AMAs.
Thank you I really didn't want to open Reddit today.
Maybe I'm already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?
It's dead to me.
I agree but on the other hand the schadenfreude is delicious
I wish I could have some less of it, at the moment though 90% of the posts on the fediverse are Reddit this, and Reddit that.
Post some other stuff please.
Please look at the community you are in right now :)
Be the change you want to see
Switch to All and then sort by New Comments. You'll it's like All->New and you'll get a lot of interesting stuff.
I would imagine everyone subscribed to !reddit does.
Problem is that I'm browsing the All filter until I find the right communities for me, so people like me inadvertently see these unwanted Reddit topic posts too 😕
It's always a good idea to take a look at the community label to understand the context though
I'm sure a lot of people are in the same boat as you as well. I know I am. I just meant to point out that a decent number of people do care considering how many people are subbed to !reddit.
I'll admit I'm at least somewhat interested though, else I would have kept scrolling.
Some people like to watch the fire go out.
It's like seeking drama about your Ex when you find out they're dating an uglier person
🍿🍿🍿 ...... How can you not love this?
Truly masterful.
"has all the funds they need to hire people"
r/IAmA is really coming full circle
That is an understatement. I'm a former mod of r/iama (u/Brownboy13) and I was signing on to handle a high profile ama when Victoria messaged that she wouldn't be able to help us as she was let go without notice. Admin didn't even bother informing the guest that the employee handholding them through the process would no longer be available. We were caught entirely off guard and I don't think /r/iama has ever been the same. There was a level of trust the /u/chooter would be in the same room as a guest or at least on a call and make sure it was them answering and not pr teams. It's been like fucking pr junket since then.
This was the start of my disillusionment with reddit, and it seems to have been finalized with this last shitshow of a decision.
Wow, hard to grasp that was 8 years ago?!
I was never a user of IAMA, but I clearly remember how shitty reddit behaved in that situation.
I did delete my account later, and only lurked through links to my favorite subs for a few years. Now I have deleted my links too.
Reddit has devolved steadily for to many years, time to cut the cord completely.
tbh I had totally forgotten about the Victoria situation. In retrospect, maybe I am dumber than I realized for being surprised at some of the recent Reddit decisions.
IDK, I started using reddit 15 years ago. Maybe you had to contrast it to what it was back then to see it clearly.
For instance it was open Source, which they abandoned about 10 years ago.
Reddiquette was a thing that was actually observed, and you were reminded of if you broke it. Have you even heard of it?
e/The_Doonald could never have existed if reddiquette had been observed. Pau who worked to prevent such things were fired in 2014.
The new layout is pandering to bling and short attention span, a repeat of mistakes made by Digg, that hurt more valuable content, and increase the amount of comments that are nothing more than noise without value.
Cofounder Alexis Ohanian was instrumental in the firing of Victoria, which till this day has no reasonable explanation why she was fired.
There are few real values left at reddit, but fortunately they exist here. ;)
Good answer!
Now we should protect these values so that they will stay on the platform for always.
Thank you and yes.
A good start for that is to not forget the Lemmy code of conduct:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
Lemmy.world takes it a bit further and borrows from Mastodon. (Linked from the front page.)
https://mastodon.world/about
IDK, I started using reddit 15 years ago. Maybe you had to contrast it to what it was back then to see it clearly.
For instance it was open Source, which they abandoned about 10 years ago.
Reddiquette was a thing that was actually observed, and you were reminded of if you broke it. Have you even heard of it?
e/The_Doonald could never have existed if reddiquette had been observed. Pau who worked to prevent such things were fired in 2014.
The new layout is pandering to bling and short attention span, a repeat of mistakes made by Digg, that hurt more valuable content, and increase the amount of comments that are nothing more than noise without value.
Cofounder Alexis Ohanian was instrumental in the firing of Victoria, which till this day has no reasonable explanation why she was fired.
There are few real values left at reddit, but fortunately they exist here. ;)
16-year Reddit account here. There was definitely a different atmosphere in the earlier days. The community aspect felt stronger.
They also hired exclusively from the community, and were part of it. All the early admins, myself included, came from reddit. The idea of an admin with a 1 karma account was absurd
I agree, and the difference is huge. As you say, there was much more community about it. Not because it was smaller IMO, it was plenty big when I started using it. But the users were different, and it wasn't as toxic as it became later.
Definitely. Somewhere along the way, it was also missed that downvotes were intended to be for content that were off-topic or not constructive to the conversation rather than something one merely disagreed with. I've found much of my moderating had become about reminding people to keep it civil.
Yes absolutely, it's bad rediquette to downvote just because you disagree, if it contributes to the debate.
I wonder how many even know that on reddit today? I bet most think they are just "like" buttons.
As someone who joined Reddit when it became mainstream, I didn't know that something like "Reddiquette" existed, and that it had changed drastically in its history. I thought it just boiled down to social norms like "NO EMOJIS ALLOWED", don't ask obvious questions (which can be subjective), or answer a question that was meant to be rhetorical.
No the rules are actually quite good:
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
Notice also the point of linking to canonical persistent URL, today it's absolutely riddled with amp links, that should be illegal IMO, because they infringe copyright, and remove traffic from content creators, and Google takes that traffic instead. I have no clue how that shit is legal.
Oh shit, it is. I don't think I've ever read that, and most people probably haven't too, if I looked at the comment section on any post on r/all I would see the reddiquette broken many times (I am personally guilty with non-transparent editing). Most of the behaviour I found annoying on Reddit were breaking the Reddiquette rules lol.
More mainstream appeal and younger users joining doesn't really help with the quality of the discussion. IIRC when I created an account at reddit in 2011, the active users is still under 50 mils compared to 500 mils. Eternal September is a very real thing.
Would you be interested in running a new version of iAMA on Lemmy?
No, thank you. I'm done with putting in volunteer effort for these kinds of things. I transitioned to mostly lurking on reddit, and I'm likely to remain that way here as well. Modding requires too much of a time and effort commitment for something that I'll have nothing to show for depending on the whim of others.
Completely understandable. Thanks for the mod work you previously did. It's a shame reddit happily took your good will, time and effort only to basically kick you in the nuts as reward.
I can be the first guest. I have many leather bound books and drive a Dodge Stratus.
Victoria is still very much missed
Who was she?
She was a Reddit employee that ran the larger AMAs, often acting as the transcriptionist for the person. Reddit fired her because she refused to to run them as paid advertisements, feeling that the spirit of an AMA was about being asked anything, not just paid promotions.
The change was so evident, even for someone like me who (used to) not keep up with reddit drama and inner workings. AMAs used to be so fun, they'd always end up on the front page. I can't remember the last one (other than Rick Astley's) that wasn't a bore
Reddit had a paid employee to facilitate AMAs
Victoria was the original “moderator” of AMAs and they shit-canned her for corporate politics. She was amazing with the celebs and the community. You know, the more you look back the more you realize Reddit’s management has always been shit. I’m not going back. I’d rather be low-key here where we aren’t seeing corporate politics at play - yet (hopefully never)
remember when spez tried to throw victoria under the fucking bus? pepperidge farm remembers
Status: Chooted
This is a great move. In the spirt of malicious compliance. Doing everything a moderator is expected and none of the added value stuff that makes ama’s valuable
I wonder how long before we start seeing some plausible but fake AMAs
IAMA Reddit CEO with a micro penis AMA
Hi, longtime fan here, is it a warm comforting feeling or more of a gross sticky and ashamed feeling when you pee on your own testicles?
It’s kind of like syrupy pancakes. At first, it’s awesome. Later though it’s just a sticky mess and I wish I’d gotten waffles instead.
A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap.
I was skeptical at first, but the intimate knowledge of his micropenis convinced me.
You made a misleading title. They basically won't be seeking out celebrities or those high value activities, and will just let the sub take its course while doing very basic modding.
Hope they come to lemmy.
I know the answer, but I couldn't ask "why fucking bother?" any harder.
I can't imagine the effort it must take to mod a sub like IAmA where you have daily posts with thousands of comments. They do it all for free and Spez insults them for it.
I agree, everyone should insult them for doing it for free.
I was surprised they didn't participate in the blackout, but at least it's better late than never.
This is the perfect change. Admin can't kick you out, all the high value is gone.
The people who coordinated celebrity AMAs did it for free...? That disgusting sisyphian labour was done for free? That might have been the most important work any mod team did from the perspective of Reddit's PR. How could Reddit be that ungrateful? They had it all
Yeah, I can't fathom why people work for a for-profit company as volunteers, especially in time-consuming and high-profile jobs like this.
That's because the official Reddit stance was that the communities themselves belonged to the moderators so it wasn't that you were doing with for Reddit, they were just providing you with a tool to build a community.
Of course that was clearly a lie, and as soon as moderators exercised their own power by protesting, with the support of their communities, Reddit was like "jk never mind, actually we own the communities and you're disposable".
I really don't understand why anyone would volunteer for a corporation for free, that doesn't pay you, doesn't care about you, and will drop you like hot garbage if it benefits them. There was a myth of ownership over the subreddits, but that myth is gone.
Classic bait and switch
Reddit didn't really use to feel like a for-profit platform. We always knew there was corporate somewhere far away in the background but otherwise the communities and mods were making the entire website.
We now know how foolish that was of course.
reddit was/is not really a for profit corporation as they burn money every day. So they paid for the platform people could use to build their communities and people were willing to do it for free. Now reddit wants to make money and sell all those communities to the fancy new LLM companies.
I think in the early days volunteer moderators were necessary because you wouldn't want a paid employee dictating the content and direction of a community sub that was created by users. That's what made reddit special back then. Now that it has a high user volume it's taken on a life of its own and the company feels they can move forward without those volunteers. I think it's a mistake but time will tell.
This is what makes Lemmy amazing. "You're a mod who wants to get paid? Yeah join the club, we're losing money on server costs."
Yeah the unfortunate reality is that irl the system we live in still stucks. But as you said that's precisely what makes the people willing to put all this together, in spite of the difficulties, so special. It's like an anti profit motive lol.
Well this is the bare minimum because if Reddit wants to have direct control over subreddits they ought to pay moderators. The fact they will still moderate is still a concession that i think they should rethink. Literally if Reddit wants control over communities let them deal with all the hassle of moderation. Sometimes stuff end and it does not need to be a gracious end.
Yeah, this is what happens when you stop listening to people who prop up your organization.
unfortunately all of the work this team has done made this a big enough draw to justify paid professional mods. Anything that draws millions of views and engagement can be taken over by reddit. I doubt a single tear is being shed over full control being handed over to a paid reddit employee
I think the fact that reddit has never paid moderators in the past shows that they fear setting such a precedent. IAmA has always been a big draw for users and celebrities, yet they never put an employee in charge of it.
Once they start paying one set of moderators, other mods might start to expect something in return for their labor. This especially won't look good to investors who might otherwise like the business model of paying nobody for moderation.
The used to have an in house employee that was paid to write up the answers. I forget their name and handle though. But that was axed years ago in favour of the free moderators doing the job.
The cost of person hours is huge though. Whatever the "wage" they would consider for mods would essentially be volunteer slave labour.
I think you may be referring to the admin that used to coordinate the AmAs, Victoria Taylor.
They shot themselves in the foot back then, and apparently they haven't changed in their decision making.
Oh yeah, they've done so poorly since then... You can almost go a whole day without running into an AMA.
Yes her!
"Reddit in chaos" haha. Sometimes things are so relative.
Plus, requiring Reddit to hire a bunch of new employees would be a very effective and expensive form of protest :)
Can you tell me more about Rampart?
I'm sure they don't want to pay anybody, but I don't think they need to worry about precedent. They can easily say some subs are strategicly important to the business and get support while others aren't. Like other platforms have "partner" status that they only offer to some users not all.
I thought Victoria was shitcanneda while ago? Wasn't she the full timer who helped run that?
The problem is that the people that have done it for years has a bunch of experience a new team doesn't have. It will most likely take years for the subreddit to run as well as it has been.
All mods of reddit should refuse to do it for free.
Tricky question. But yeah, if you're modding a channel just for the sake of being a mod and you do it for free. You're a sucker.
I help moderate a small discord channel, Maybe I'm a sucker too. But I help so our outfit can have a place to hang out outside of the game, share ideas and plan events.
I bet some reddit mods feel the same way.
Your hard work is rewarded with a home for your community. Sounds very worthwhile if you all me. That's very different from work that gets rewarded by lining the pockets of shareholders.
To be fair, reddit moderation did both (rather than only the later)
Or so they thought until the Reddit admins told them they actually don't have any authority over their community and can't run it the way the community wants.
Also the prospect of profit would just pull in the wrong kinds of people.
Tbh moderation is one of those things AI might be able to do pretty well, at least sometime down the line.
I don’t think all forms of free voluntary moderation make you a sucker. I think the only suckers are the ones who do whats basically a full time job for free.
Man the hits just keep in coming.
I hope more big subs follow suit. But part of me knows many won’t.
Some of us are still figuring things out, including a likely lemmy migration. Just need to work out some performance optimizations for the instance.
What's the point, just move out of reddit already and let it die
Delete all the content you donated and never log in again.
I wish there was a way to quickly delete all your content. I could just delete my account, but I don't my comments and posts to still be around and orphaned.
Request a GDPR takeout from reddit, wait for them to deliver, and then use a tool like Redact that can use that data to delete everything.
Nearly 20 days later and I'm still waiting
Me too.
let’s start an AMA community here on this instance
I’m all for compensating moderators but I think it should come with additional oversight, vetting, and higher expectations. There are many terrific moderators out there who absolutely deserve to be compensated for their efforts. However, there have been too many instances of power hungry mods who have had a negative effect on a community.
Either hire mods as employees so that they have oversight from management or make it so mods can be voted out. There needs to be some level of accountability.
For smaller communities it probably matters less, but as soon as you break a certain point it becomes a fair bit of work, even with bots.
I like the idea of voting mods out, but I think the bar should be rather high. If 2/3 of the other mods want a top mod out, definitely out them. With the community it's a bit harder because for smaller communities that can be gamed with bots.
Full text:
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:
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
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)
AOL had to pay their volubteers, after being sued. So why not reddit ? They expect their mods to follow their guidelines.
I tried to upvote OP post on reddit and RIF reminded me I'm not logged in. I frowned, then I laughed.
Kind of like the reddit Sekrit Santa shutting down. It was huge, really hard to run, and the volunteers all agreed to stop.
I vaguely remember reading at the time a lot of users went there only for the exchanges and didn't use any other part of reddit.
AOL had to pay their volubteers, after being sued. So why not reddit ? They expect their mods to follow their guidelines.
Triple-posted. This website works definitely like Reddit!
I've only had double posts on reddit. Lemmy is clearly superior. 50% more post for your click.
Stop using up all the post rations. We might need them later 😡
What is this, Twitter?
Does kbin 4 post that would be more proof of the superiority of kbin over lemmy
Reddit fired Victoria because they didn’t want to spend any cash on this kind of thing.
Which makes no sense, because the high-profile AMAs she made happen certainly broadened reddit's public appeal by quite a bit.
.
It's the same logic they're still using: they want to monetize Reddit more aggressively, even if that kills its appeal and they have to brutalize their own community to do it.
They fired Victoria because they were trying to aggressively monetize IAmAs in ways that were going to fuck community interests, and Victoria pushed back. Think Rampart, except companies can pay to ensure that it doesn't become a PR fiasco, so it's guaranteed astroturf.
Reddit has been classy ever since.
Ohhhhhhhhh! Burn!
AOL had to pay their volubteers, after being sued. So why not reddit ? They expect their mods to follow their guidelines.
Who's going to mod this place?
People who have actual agency over their communities and aren't at the whims of a corporation.
A Lemmy community can have real collective ownership. You can create your own instance where you own your own hardware. Or if you don't want to have to manage a whole instance, it's technically possible that a bigger instance could sell hosting if you don't want to officially partner with the insurance and the community could pay for their own hosting that way to have true autonomy. Lemmy has lots of ways and potential ways for communities to be able to own themselves.
So, “we’ll still do some work for free, but not as much”? I can’t see Reddit caring about this ho hum response, and if they do notice it has a negative impact on the sub they’ll just replace them.
Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.
replace them with who and how though? For loyalty and allegiance they'll have to wind up paying someone eventually. If they really think they're just going to be able to find some 15 year old on summer break willing to do it for free, it'll only last so long. That stuff takes work.
I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it's one that's seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.
There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you're talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.
Which is kind of ... a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don't get their way.
The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren't protesting because they're part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They're going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.
AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they're going to let it return to it's natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.
In this case, what do you think "scorched earth" would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.
I think you're dead-on.
In some ways a degraded system is much harder to fix (or even identify as broken) than an outright destroyed one.
If the IAmA mods vandalized the sub, they would get booted and replaced. But if they just stop doing anything but the bare minimum... that sub was such a magnet for traffic, it might slowly degrade traffic to Reddit as a whole.
But just looking at the data, it might be very very hard to figure out that what is driving that is the IAmA moderators starting to restrict their activities only to moderation. It degrades the experience of the site as a whole.
It's a fairly brilliant move. They're doing their duty as mods to the community. If Reddit wants to replace them, it has to be with people who are willing to actively do more work than just moderation, for free. They'd probably have to hire someone just to do AMA.
I really, really hope Victoria is getting a pitiful call from HR right now to come back.
I don’t think people are asking mods to burn the place down as much as they’re asking them to just stop. Stop working for free. Stop trying to negotiate. Don’t work for them and don’t work with them. Move your community elsewhere if you want to keep your moderator status and forget about Reddit.
That’s not radical nor is it a huge workload. It’s less work for most.
Such a strong statement
Reddit has killed its golden goose. I don't see Reddit recovering from this, certainly not without reverting the API changes.
Doubtfully even if they reverse the changes. There has been a culture shift in what people are willing to do for free as a whole, let alone for reddit. Reddit won't pay, and then they made the mistake of letting everyone see that the grass is greener on other platforms, and the devs they screwed are scrambling to build up those other greener platforms like they did for reddit.
Its the equivalent of a brain drain of scientists fleeing a country at war.
Thing is, only total nerdburgers like us (myself included) use Federated social media. WE understand the dangers presented by "gentlemen" like Elon and the paint huffer, but mainstream internet users just aren't involved enough in tech to care. The celebrities who were using Twitter to promote themselves will, almost without exception, just abandon social media entirely. A few have left for Mastodon purely out of spite (ie Kathy Griffin) or have explored Mastodon as an alternative (ie George Takei), but the big fish will just scatter. You'll get George Takei on Masto, but George Clooney, not so much.
Perhaps it's for the best. When a web site achieves mainstream popularity, that's the first step on the road to enshittification. The internet was more fun when it was underground.
See also "if you want to tell me what to do, put me on the **** payroll."
"Act your wage"
Yes, exactly!
🍿🍿🍿 ...... How can you not love this?
Reddit isn't ever going to pay anyone to mod a sub. They'll drag all of this out until the IPO and then sell off the whole site to the highest bidders who will probably scrap it all and turn it into a new TikTok app or something.
By that time Steve Huffman will be on a private beach somewhere not giving a single fuck about what happens to all the redditors who made him rich
The only way they make money with IPO is if they short reddit.
They already do though, kind of. Their "Community Points" are an opt-in crypto shitcoin that the mods get a chunk of every month, and they're free to sell them to anyone willing to buy.
And there's always someone willing to buy, for some reason.
Just look at /r/cryptocurrency and their MOON token. Mods get something like $2000+ USD worth per month. I'm always surprised that 99% of reddit has never heard of them.
So you mean Reddit gives mods a bunch of worthless garbage, er I mean "moon tokens", and then it's up to the mods to convince someone else that it's worth something and trick them into buying it?
That just makes me even more glad I'm not there anymore lol
They can do what communities like /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortniteBR do and opt-in to Community Points. Mods of the former make a decent killing with their MOON token.
Granted it's done by milking their users for dollars... but if it's good enough for reddit the company!
LOL do they realized they can get replaced in a second? They're unpaid internet janitors, they do it for internet power tripping and ego.