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.
Sacked Reddit employee Victoria Taylor speaks out http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33787004
She posted as u/chooter
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.
Not that hot a take. It also maybe misses the point: those AMAs pull in tons of clicks and comments. Reddit wants interactions to show advertisers.
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.
Yeah, haven’t clicked on an AMA in years. They used to be good, but the last couple of years it wasn’t worth it
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?
