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Reddit's 'ask my anything' moderators issue first statement, say company's refusing to work with them

reddit
reddit

(Flickr/Veronica Belmont)

The moderators of Reddit's popular "Ask Me Anything (AMA)" Q&A thread just issued their first statement, blaming the company's admin staff for not providing enough information related to former AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor's controversial dismissal.

The thread is back up now and the moderators (who are volunteers) say they will run AMAs without the help of admins (Reddit's paid staff members).

The AMA thread was set as "private" following Taylor's departure on Thursday. Hundreds of other Reddit communities also went dark, in a move largely seen as a revolt against Reddit. Taylor was a beloved member of the community, and her sudden departure upset a lot of moderators.

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"[Victoria] was a pillar of the AMA community and responsible for nearly all of reddit's positive press. She helped not only IAMA grow, but reddit as a whole. reddit's culture would not be what it is today without Victoria's efforts over the last several years," the statement read.

It continued: "The admins have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new 'team.' This does not bode well for future communication between us, and we cannot be sure that everything is being arranged honestly and in accordance with our rules."

The statement says the moderators will no longer work with the admins going forward and that it will take AMA requests privately through their own email address.

You can read the full statement below:

You may have noticed that /r/IAmA was recently set to "private" for a short period of time. A full explanation can be found here, but the gist of it is that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from Reddit and the admins did not have a good alternative to help conduct AMAs. As a result, our current system will no longer be feasible.

Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by /u/kn0thing. She was a pillar of the AMA community and responsible for nearly all of reddit's positive press. She helped not only IAMA grow, but reddit as a whole. reddit's culture would not be what it is today without Victoria's efforts over the last several years.

We have taken the day to try to understand how Reddit will seek to replace Victoria, and have unfortunately come to the conclusion that they do not have a plan that we can put our trust in. The admins have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new 'team.' This does not bode well for future communication between us, and we cannot be sure that everything is being arranged honestly and in accordance with our rules. The information we have requested is essential to ensure that money is not changing hands at any point in the procedure which is necessary for /r/IAmA to remain equal and egalitarian. As a result, we will no longer be working with the admins to put together AMAs. Anyone seeking to schedule an AMA can simply message the moderators or email us at AMAVerify@gmail.com, and we'd be happy to assist and help prepare them for the AMA in any way. We will also be making some future changes to our requirements to cope with Victoria's absence. Most of these will be behind-the-scenes tweaks to how we help arrange AMAs beforehand, but if there are any rule changes we will let you all know in a sticky post.

We'd like to take this moment to thank Victoria for all of her work on thousands of AMAs. Her cheerfulness, attitude, work ethic, and so many other attributes made her the perfect person for this job. We mods truly feel that she is irreplaceable. Thanks for everything, /u/Chooter, and we wish you the best of luck going forward.

Thank you all for your patience during this debacle (and for the hundreds of messages of support!), and we hope to have many interesting AMAs for you all in the future. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below! Additionally, a former admin has asked to do an AMA about his experiences with Reddit, and you can ask him questions about the inner workings of the site as soon as his AMA goes live here.

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