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> 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

> 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.
  - bnralt 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 does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base. The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find). None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case. Everything you're saying actually corroborates OP's claim.
- 1024core 3y ago
  > If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.
  - bnralt 3y ago
    If the sub is experiencing substantial user growth isn't that an indication that the sub is doing well?
    - TremendousJudge 3y ago
      No, /r/IamA was a default subreddit for many years, thus all new users would get subscribed to it (I think defaults have been gone for some years now, but subscriber inflation already happened)
- duckmysick 3y ago
  > If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago. Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.

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.
- bnralt 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 does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base. The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find). None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case. Everything you're saying actually corroborates OP's claim.
1024core 3y ago
> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.
- bnralt 3y ago
  If the sub is experiencing substantial user growth isn't that an indication that the sub is doing well?
  - TremendousJudge 3y ago
    No, /r/IamA was a default subreddit for many years, thus all new users would get subscribed to it (I think defaults have been gone for some years now, but subscriber inflation already happened)
duckmysick 3y ago
> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago. Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.