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8 years ago a bunch of Reddits went dark to protest the firing of Victoria Taylor. The AMA sub claimed that they wouldn't be able to continue without Victoria's

by bnralt 3y ago

8 years ago a bunch of Reddits went dark to protest the firing of Victoria Taylor. The AMA sub claimed that they wouldn't be able to continue without Victoria's help. Eventually the sub opened back up and things continued as they had before; the average user noticed no difference. If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh.

sharkweek 3y ago
I still use Reddit and I get that beloved people get fired for any number of reasons, but AMAs have been noticeably worse since Victoria’s time running them. I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
- a2tech 3y ago
  Actually this is a great example of wht they're going to get. AMA's used to be a GREAT use of Reddit when Victoria ran them. The questions were fresh and it was a very broad pool of people they interviewed. Since then they've either been 1) terrible 2) obviously pimping something or 3) a combination of both. They're not even worth reading and I stopped looking at them years ago.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    I agree. I thought they'd be able to replace Victoria and it'd be no issue. But the magic of AMA, part of what drew me to reddit in the first place, was gone. I scarcely look at them now.
  - sharkweek 3y ago
    Yeah Victoria did a good job queueing up a high quality experience for readers and the AMA participant when celebrities did do their press tours. My guess is she trained the guests less familiar with Reddit on how to have a successful AMA (e.g., “don’t be Woody Harrelson”). And because they were so successful, publicists were probably more willing to allow them to happen.
  - munificent 3y ago
    > I stopped looking at them years ago. Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic. After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
> the average user noticed no difference I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  Yeah I'm thoroughly confused by OP because AMAs are a noticeable bungled opportunity on Reddit's part: They were attracting extremely high-profile people (Obama did one at one point), and now it's far less a preeminent part of the platform than it used to be. The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.
- nanidin 3y ago
  AMA’s now are thinly veiled publicity events - like celebrities dialing into your local radio show to shill their latest project. There is rarely any feeling of actual engagement in modern AMA’s.
CommieBobDole 3y ago
> If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh. That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy. When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit. Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance. I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.
- bnralt 3y ago
  > With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance. Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell. It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.
  - CommieBobDole 3y ago
    I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago. It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.
    - 3y ago
dale_glass 3y ago
I think r/IAMA got a lot worse since Victoria left. I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.
Retric 3y ago
Huh, that explains why I haven’t looked at a Reddit AMA in the last ~5-10 years or so. I’m guess it was actually 8 years and I never realized what happened.
Havoc 3y ago
It's subjective I guess, but the AMA content quality on reddit did seem to fall off a cliff after she left. Not reddit destroying but definitely left a hole
bhouston 3y ago
AMAs are basically dead on reddit these days. Scroll through this listing: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago. It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.
HWR_14 3y ago
I haven't seen a good AMA in a very long time. Tons of enshitification is eventually tolerated, especially by people who had no experience with an older version. That doesn't make it good.
nickstinemates 3y ago
They were actually right. This is exactly when Reddit AMA's went from something spectacular to spectacular garbage. They were producing bangers left and right, and what have they done since then?
wvenable 3y ago
That's funny because I use this example the opposite of you. AMA's completely changed after Victoria's departure and haven't been the same since. There were weekly high-profile AMAs that got large media coverage and it never went back to that. Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.
m_0x 3y ago
Jesus I completely forgot about r/IAMA and Im a daily reddit visitor. I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event. But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.

by bnralt 3y ago

sharkweek 3y ago

I still use Reddit and I get that beloved people get fired for any number of reasons, but AMAs have been noticeably worse since Victoria’s time running them. I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.

a2tech 3y ago
Actually this is a great example of wht they're going to get. AMA's used to be a GREAT use of Reddit when Victoria ran them. The questions were fresh and it was a very broad pool of people they interviewed. Since then they've either been 1) terrible 2) obviously pimping something or 3) a combination of both. They're not even worth reading and I stopped looking at them years ago.
- mlyle 3y ago
  I agree. I thought they'd be able to replace Victoria and it'd be no issue. But the magic of AMA, part of what drew me to reddit in the first place, was gone. I scarcely look at them now.
- sharkweek 3y ago
  Yeah Victoria did a good job queueing up a high quality experience for readers and the AMA participant when celebrities did do their press tours. My guess is she trained the guests less familiar with Reddit on how to have a successful AMA (e.g., “don’t be Woody Harrelson”). And because they were so successful, publicists were probably more willing to allow them to happen.
- munificent 3y ago
  > I stopped looking at them years ago. Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic. After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

> the average user noticed no difference I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.

BoxFour 3y ago
Yeah I'm thoroughly confused by OP because AMAs are a noticeable bungled opportunity on Reddit's part: They were attracting extremely high-profile people (Obama did one at one point), and now it's far less a preeminent part of the platform than it used to be. The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.
nanidin 3y ago
AMA’s now are thinly veiled publicity events - like celebrities dialing into your local radio show to shill their latest project. There is rarely any feeling of actual engagement in modern AMA’s.

CommieBobDole 3y ago

> If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh. That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy. When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit. Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance. I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.

bnralt 3y ago
> With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance. Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell. It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.
- CommieBobDole 3y ago
  I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago. It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.
  - 3y ago

dale_glass 3y ago

I think r/IAMA got a lot worse since Victoria left. I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.

Retric 3y ago

Huh, that explains why I haven’t looked at a Reddit AMA in the last ~5-10 years or so. I’m guess it was actually 8 years and I never realized what happened.

Havoc 3y ago

It's subjective I guess, but the AMA content quality on reddit did seem to fall off a cliff after she left. Not reddit destroying but definitely left a hole

bhouston 3y ago

AMAs are basically dead on reddit these days. Scroll through this listing: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago. It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.

HWR_14 3y ago

I haven't seen a good AMA in a very long time. Tons of enshitification is eventually tolerated, especially by people who had no experience with an older version. That doesn't make it good.

nickstinemates 3y ago

They were actually right. This is exactly when Reddit AMA's went from something spectacular to spectacular garbage. They were producing bangers left and right, and what have they done since then?

wvenable 3y ago

That's funny because I use this example the opposite of you. AMA's completely changed after Victoria's departure and haven't been the same since. There were weekly high-profile AMAs that got large media coverage and it never went back to that. Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.

m_0x 3y ago

Jesus I completely forgot about r/IAMA and Im a daily reddit visitor. I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event. But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.