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.
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.