Recap of AMAgeddon
25 2015-07-06 by justcool393
Sit down here. Comfortable? Let me grab the popcorn. Okay, here we are. Let me tell you about a tale. This takes place in time where drama growing massive was not an uncommon sight. However, this... this... was different. We had never saw it coming. The Fattening was big enough, but we had thought we had reached the peak. Could the drama explode farther? Surely, there could not be something more massive than this?
But less than a month later, we found out that we were wrong, very much so. Reddit fired Victoria Taylor, leading to a firestorm that swept across all of reddit, leaving no subreddit unscathed in it's wake. This is... AMAgeddon.
It all started, when /r/IAmA, a subreddit dedicated to hosting "Ask Me Anything" sessions, had received a moderator mail saying that Victoria, who usually helps with many AMAs, was not available.
Because /r/IAmA would have large problems if it were to continue, they shut their subreddit down in order to sort their problems out. This was unprecedented, but still the calmest part of the largest drama wave ever on reddit.
In the hours following this, /r/science, /r/books, /r/music, /r/AskReddit and almost all of the 100 17 of the defaults would shut their doors, each with a similar message. Screencap of IAmA when it was private.
Many speculation happened over the nature of the firing, and some think that the Jesse Jackson AMA had something to with it, but this is unconfirmed. /u/ekjp (Ellen Pao), however has said that this now-deleted Quora post had nothing to do with it.
Tensions between the mods and the admins and the users and the admins would run high, with almost all admin posts on the issue were downvoted to oblivion, back, and back into oblivion again.
Edit: /u/jbranscum reminded me that I left out a very important part of this. And so, I have edited the OP to show you that these indeed were dark times, that /r/sexypizza had gone private. This is when we knew we truly had something different coming here.
/u/kn0thing makes a highly downvoted remark in SubredditDrama about the whole situation, which had sparked off a drama comment chain, to put it mildly. A subreddit, /r/popcorntastesgood, has been formed around it.
All was buttery, until...
/u/Dacvak, a former reddit admin, did an IAmA once the subreddit came back up made a claim saying that he was fired because of his cancer. This caused round 2 of the dramawave in SubredditDrama, and caused more buttery goodness all across the site.
The popcorn kernels would continue to pop in /r/pics, /r/videos and /r/todayilearned when they reopened, with users upvoting everything and anything that had to do with Victoria. A reddit server was also aptly named that. Also, in this time, /u/kickme444's firing had come to light with [a post to /r/SecretSanta][
/u/kn0thing publicly responds in the Upvoted newsletter. I have copied-and-pasted the response here:
So. Things were… eventful this week. To put it mildly.
It started on Thursday when we let go one of our employees, Victoria Taylor, who had helped coordinate AMAs for the last couple years.
I can’t publicly comment on why we made this decision, but I can talk about the way we handled it—we screwed up. Victoria worked extensively with the moderator teams in r/IAMA, r/books, r/science, and more to make sure AMAs went smoothly, and when she left, we didn’t have a great process in place to handle that transition and didn’t communicate it to those mods very well.
The mods of r/IAMA, concerned about how things would work moving forward, temporarily shut down the subreddit. Many more mods, also upset by our failure to provide proper tools and support, followed suit. As you may have noticed, Reddit looked pretty different from normal for a while.
There’s a much more in-depth overview of what happened in r/outoftheloop.
We’ve received the message, we’ve talked with a lot of moderators, and we’re going to get better. We know we’ve done a pretty terrible job at communicating. We know a lot of things on the site don’t work as well as you—and we—would like. We know there are a lot more issues and that the community as a whole is pretty unhappy with us right now.
I know apologies and promises feel empty right now, but that’s all I can give—with the additional promise that we really do mean it. We’ve recently hired a product manager for the community team who is working on new tools. We’re actively working on brigading. We’re figuring out solutions to improve modmail. But it takes time to make these changes, so they won’t be here tomorrow. But they will be here.
We’re sorry. And we’re going to do better. In the meantime, there were a lot of other really cool things that happened on Reddit this week, and we’d still like to share them with you below.
Edit: I've gotten word that the admins have responsed to this! /u/yishan weighs in here in the announcement thread here.
We were the chosen ones, dramanauts. We had fought, argued, popped popcorn, and yet, we made it. We have survived. We may never know Victoria's secret, but we will have emerged victorious in the end.
Notable threads
Relevant SubredditDrama threads will be nearer to the end of the thread.
| Thread | Description |
|---|---|
| Why has R/IAmA been set to private? | Original OutOfTheLoop question asking why the subreddit was set to private. Comments are now locked. |
| Why was /r/IAmA, along with a number of other large subreddits, made private? | OutOfTheLoop recap thread, explaining a lot of who Victoria was, and why subreddits went private. |
| A complete synopsis of the reddit blackout from the perspective of a pics mod. | Synopsis of what happen from the point of view of an /r/pics moderator |
| Welcome Back! (/r/IAmA) | Modpost describing what will be happening in the future in regards to AMAs in this subreddit. |
| The Recent /r/Science Shutdown. | Modpost about shutdown of /r/science. |
| [Mod Post] The Timer | AskReddit modpost about "The Timer" |
| We hear you, let's talk (x-post from /r/DefaultMods) | Initial admin response to the shutdown (there have been comments and more communication since then) |
| Dear reddit, you are starting to suck. | /u/qgyh2, a notorious user for being a moderator of multiple large subreddits makes a post to /r/self showing his discontent with how reddit is run. Drama inside. |
| AMAgeddon tracking | A full list of which subreddits went private during AMAgeddon |
| Leaked /r/science modmail conversation and mod response | This is a discussion between the moderators of /r/science, and reddit admin /u/kn0thing over frustrations about the event. This is outdated, and not currently relevant to the state of affairs, but I have included it, because it did become a point of discussion at one point. |
| Reddit abruptly fires AMA liason Victoria in the wake of the Jesse Jackson AMA. /r/IAmA mods, left hanging by the admins, have turned the subreddit private. | /r/circlebroke discussion about the event. Contains some bickering, but I didn't see anything too big at first glance |
| /r/IAMA is suddenly forced private; Victoria removed from her position at Reddit | /r/conspiracy discussion, with an appearance of /u/raldi |
| IAmA has gone private with no notice due to one one of its top moderators being fired from reddit | /r/subredditcancer discussion |
| [META] i got reddit's ama's shut down because of the Jesse Jackson ama | /r/ShitRedditSays post, with lots of drama all over the entire thread. |
| We apologize | Official admin response to AMAgeddon |
News Articles
See also
| Thread | Description |
|---|---|
| /r/IAmA set to private over mod firing | First SubredditDrama post about the topic and contained many links to posts |
| Reddit Live Thread for AMAgeddon) | Reddit Live thread. This will be updated with new information until it dies down more. Want to shout out to /u/wicro and /u/SlendyTheMan for providing many updates about subreddits and more during the event. |
| The admins have broken the silence with posts to /r/defaultmods and /r/modtalk | Posts in /r/modtalk and other drama related to it |
| We thought it couldn't get worse, it did: reddit admin claims he was fired by Ellen Pao for CANCER! | SubredditDrama thread about /u/Dacvak's firing |
| /r/secretsanta organizer and reddit employee also fired. | Reddit admin and Secret Santa organizer, /u/kickme444, was let go recently as well. This is the SubredditDrama thread about it. |
| Ellen Pao posts mea culpa; Redditors mostly unimpressed | SRD thread about the admin response to AMAgeddon |
| The Drama so far: Admins address users in the wake of AMAgeddon | Recap over the admin response to AMAgeddon |
Send a PM if you think there are any other notable threads, news articles, or whatever that I should include, and I may update the post. This will be continually updated, as will the live feed.
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