Moderators of Reddit AMAs Stand Down Amid Protests

Scott Mendelson
·2-min read

The Reddit moderators who have run the AMAs (short for “Ask Me Anything”) are ceasing those popular online Q&As, effective immediately. The move, detailed in a mod post written on Saturday and shared below, is a protest against Reddit’s application programming interface (API) monetization changes.

It is not the first time these have used the popularity of the AMAs to protest Reddit. In 2015, the r/IAmA mods put the subreddit in a virtual 24-hour lockdown over the firing of Victoria Taylor who had written an opinion piece in The New York Times about “critical changes” made “without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site.”

This comes just after Minecraft developer Mojang said it will stop sharing official updates via Reddit.

r/IAmA has more than 22 million subscribers, so the subreddit offers a potentially large-scale promotional platform. However, without the (unpaid, volunteer) moderators working with celebrities and VIPs, it’ll be more difficult to trust that the person doing the AMA is who they claim to be.

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In the statement, the IAmA mod team says it will cease the following activities in the future, “effective immediately”:

“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.”

As previously reported in TheWrap, moderators were locking subreddits to cause a “blackout” on Reddit that rendered it partially unusable, in protest to new policy changes wherein small-time third-party application (app) makers will now have to pay hefty fees to utilize Reddit’s API for their apps to function.

The r/IAmA subreddit initially refrained from joining the blackout that began on June 12, because they didn’t feel that such action would make an impact. The subreddit moderators will now do the bare minimum to keep the subreddit going, namely removing spam and enforcing rules, but nothing else.

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