AMAs have been a mess since they fired Victoria. Seeing how they’ve handled the TPA fiasco, it wouldn’t surprise me if that decision was pure ego.
The users liked her. The guests liked her. She became more popular than the remaining founders, so they booted her and ruined AMAs in the process. Unforced error.
That whole time period on Reddit was such a cluster. Ellen Pao gathering all the hate for firing Victoria when it was Ohanian (and probably Huffman) pulling the strings the whole time. Pao knew exactly what her job as the fall-girl was and ran with that money once it was over.
The Pao scapegoat move was so transparent. Like everything else Reddit does, it’s amateur hour. There was a time they were good at running a content aggregator. As corporate leaders, they suck out loud.
my hot take is that AMA's haven't been good for literally years, and that most celebrity AMA's are terrible and nothing more than cheap advertising for whatever their latest project is.
And it was a really easy way to provide value to your existing users while also attracting and perhaps retaining new users. Instead they fired Victoria. Shoulda known back then. Shoulda known along the way multiple times.
Shoulda, coulda, woulda. But at least now I finally see them for what they are - arrogant, out of touch, and actual outward disdain for the users.
Short term thinking: apps cost us a lot of money per year, let's claw some of that cost back.
Long term thinking: hiring enough people to moderate all of the popular subs that will now have no moderators will cost us tens of millions of dollars over future years just in salaries, not to mention more IT ops, HR and the other stuff that comes with growing a headcount.
It's going to be really sad to see Reddit collapse under its own stupidity :(
Ya know, I was thinking about it, and the only really good content in AMA was when things went horribly wrong. The AMAs that went smoothly were actually kinda meh. So that being said, this might actually be a net win for Reddit in the short term. Everyone loves to watch a trainwreck... ain't that right, Spez?
Back when Victoria was running the show, there were so many great AMAs. So many amazing scientists would do them, and as a chemist it was great seeing so many high profile scientists there. That all went away
Really, this is all f-u/spez had to do in his AMA. That, and avoiding the SA on a minor question is all he had to do, and the idiot couldn’t avoid opening his mouth. I love that @christianselig had audio tapes. Totally a baller move. He is rightfully upset, but I hope he goes to bed at night appreciating how bad he dunked on Reddit and f-u/spez.