32bites, founder of r/IAmA, decides to shut down IAmA, a community with over 460,000 subscribers, rather than hand it over to a new group of moderators
reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ju5cf/goodbye_iama...Posted Aug 25, 2011, 6:17 PM UTC
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reddit.com
And nothing of value was lost. Unless you value a trillion celeb ama requests.
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I cannot agree - just like everything that has a very large userbase, it had (I guess still has) it's good moments among the piles of shit in between.
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But look how long ago that was. Most celebrity AMAs are people jizzing their pants over them.
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I liked K.A. Applegate as well. Don Lemon was just recently. Brooks Brown was interesting. Trailer Park Boys. At least two verified astronauts/kosmonauts.
I rarely hang around in IaMA, but I do check out some of the high scoring posts. It's occasionally interesting, occasionally shit.
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Sometimes they work, though.
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And that's the logic that made it shitty. If it worked once, we should try it constantly.
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Good.
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I going to have to go aganist the hive and agree with you on this one. AMA was a nothing but a spamfest. At any given time easily half of the posts were pure fiction, and whenever you would try to point out the inconsistincies and outright lies in their stories, you'd get downvoted to hell. People would stick their fingers in their ears and scream "lalalalalala" to not be told something they want to hear is a lie. "I don't care if it's fake, it was a great discussion," is a common opinion. I'm sorry, but I do care if the guy claiming he overheard a Fox News exec admit he was owned by the GOP was real or fake. I want to know if the celebrity everyone is fawning over is actually her, not some fat man with photoshop. It's nothing but a subreddit for trolls and English majors.
Even verified posts were fake. It's become nothing but a place to test your writing skills on idiots, or advertise your latest book or movie.
It's not like IAMA posts will go away, they'll just go to a new subreddit. Start fresh. It just got too big too fast, and the only way to fix it is to kill it and start over.
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I'm jumping on this bandwagon also. This should be r/bestof.
As subreddit size increases, quality decreases. It is known. I would love to see this happen with other bloated subreddits. A better, fresher subreddit will inevitably come out of the rubble. Until it too needs to be taken down.
Personally it doesn't effect me because I unsubbed from r/IAmA pretty early on in my Reddit career.
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I am going to go ahead agree with you and say that it is completely irrelevant that you're correct.
It was nearly half fiction. But what exactly do you suggest be done about that? Moving to a new subreddit is stupid. You're not weeding out the problem. It's just some bizarre security-by-obscurity argument. There is no solution other than biting your lip and doing what you can in the subreddit to be as vigilant as possible as mods and community members. Other than that the only thing that needed actual fixing was the verification process.
Both of those things should be remedied inside the subreddit. Starting from fresh is just a bonehead move.
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Aggressive moderation. Suspected fake? GTFO, delete.
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Exactly.
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IamA has been a hive of shit-slinging, money-grubbing and outright fabrications for some time now. This should be in bestof, sorry.
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I hope he comes to his senses and de-mods himself instead of acting dictatorial. IAmA is a great sub-reddit despite its obvious shortcomings.
Edit:Tried to see if somebody submitted a request in r/redditRequest take over the subreddit. There are a very dirty underbelly of reddit which I never knew existed :(
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Regarding that link, I had no clue people actually cared that much about a link sharing website. People take this whole reddit "community" entirely too seriously, especially since it's become one of the most popular websites on the internet. Maybe back when it was fairly niche it would have made sense, but not anymore.
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Totally agree. The only time I had seen something remotely similar to this on reddit was during the public lynching of Saydrah. Today is the day I lost my reddit innocence.
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Somehow I've managed, despite using Reddit virtually everyday for years, to completely avoid having these things really show up on my radar, save for after the fact. I guess that means I subscribe to the right reddits.
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Same here. I have been here for almost 3 years and I avoided all that stuff until today :(
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there's a certain clique who like the power games of communities like SA and 4chan, and want to export that here. Provided they keep their bullshit in their bullshit subreddits, it doesn't affect the rest of us.
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Well that's the thing that several people have pointed out; demodding himself and letting someone take over the sub reddit would have been ok. Instead he's just saying a massive "FUCK YOU!" to everyone who has subscribed over the years.
Simply distancing himself from the community and leaving it wasn't enough, he had to push the knife in one more time and keep it there.
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He loves the attention I assume, a normal person would have either just closed it down without starting that thread or, when people react like maniacs, give it to someone else and demodded himself. Instead he's sticking around dragging it out.
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...and nothing of value as lost. Seriously, that sub was over run with attention seekers and scam artists. For every post worth reading there are dozens of bullshit ones that are either fake or simply boring.
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Damn, some people take Reddit way too seriously. I find the entire situation hilarious.
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BY DELETING THIS SUBREDDIT YOU'RE INFRINGING ON MY RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH AND CONTRIBUTING TO THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR E-COMMUNITY
YOU'RE LITERALLY WORSE THAN HITLER
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That one is basically dead in the water because the one and only mod deleted his/her account. That means there's no one to check the spam queue, no one to monitor reports, and no one to fix/change the CSS.
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it has two mods, look lower on the right side of the page.
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You're right. I saw the created by [deleted] and somehow glossed over the mod box directly below it. Still, it's a moot point because the policy there is "no requests, no celebrities."
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Seems like the guy cracked. It seems like a month ago, he trying to appease the demand for verification, and was asking for help modding.
I guess it just got to be too much for him. I hope he just assigns a new mod.
Verification shouldn't be such a huge issue. There should just be a big ol' "BELIEVE AT YOUR OWN RISK" banner at the top of the subreddit, like they do for craigslist.
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r/IAmA is such a terrible subreddit compared to how it was even a year ago, so I must say I can definitely sympathise with 32bites.
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Just really sad.
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holy shit, halt the presses!
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I certainly haven't been this devastated since the local mall shut down Orange Julius and Hickorey Farms.
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Why haven't the admins already intervened and demodded him?
Edit: Yes, downvote an honest question. Good boy, Reddit.
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Because that's not how reddit works.
When you create a reddit, you are the owner of that reddit. And unless you do something insanely retarded like adding people as mods that have been banned by the admins several times, they aren't going to intervene.
From the r/trees FAQ;
Originally everyone used to hang out at r/Marijuana. One day the mods issued a new set of rules about what belonged in the subreddit, and encouraged the mellow stoners to report any of their compatriots who broke them. That didn't fly with the peaceful people, and one of the mods (Sabbetts) resigned, leaving only b34nz. B34nz started banning anyone who A) pointed out what an ass he was, and B) discussed starting a new community. Upon investigation, people realized that b34nz was an asshole racist islamophobic dick. Numerous "new" weedits were created in the aftermath, but only trees stuck. And thus, here we are today.
r/marijuana is still there, despite the mod being a complete tool.
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Admins don't interfere with subreddit drama.
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That's a bad policy to maintain unilaterally. I'm sure that r/iama, being one of the largest subreddits, creates a significant amount of ad revenue; not to mention the fact that its creator has singlehandedly degraded the Reddit community by removing an established center of discussion.
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agreeing with this, in this instance. once your subreddit reaches the point where it has half a million subscribers, and becomes one of the default subscriptions for new accounts, it's a bit different. at this point the admins will have to take some action, either removing r/iama from the default subs, or sticking another/temporary mod into r/iama. if they're going to do anything, the latter would make more sense so as not to cause any disruptions etc.
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Too big to fail, eh?
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One thing I will say about this: I was blissfully unaware of any redditors' NAMES before this incident. I had no idea of who the heck 32bites or andrewsomethingorother was. The only redditors' names I sorta remember for sure is Saydrah, I_can_draw_that(?), and reaction_on_my_nub(?)
I like reddit being one anonymous, gelatinous mass. I do not like the fact I now am aware of a few more redditors and their personalities.
I don't know what this says about me.
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Creator of TIL here. Can I have it?
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I think the best lesson from this is if you create a subreddit.
Make a sock puppet account for moderation, that way you don't have to worry about butt hurt assholes attempting to stalk you when you do something that goes against the banality
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Then we create a new one
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lets just move on without him and his BS you want in? lets do it!
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And a side note, his comment replies are predictably being downvoted to oblivion despite their obvious importance to any conversation about the matter.
Update: the huge backlash has apparently persuaded him to restart r/iama under new management, and speaking of bad behavior, he had this to say:
Perhaps proving his reasons for doing this?
I think he has a point in his OP, it has become a crapshoot of a subreddit.
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So? Why not just let people remove it from their frontpage if they want to?
Most reddit users are probably unaware of the frontpage feature. They are defaulted to joining IAmA and so it remains. One of my main problems with the site is that it takes a while to figure out what the fuck is going on, since subreddits take up a very minor amount of page space and are very easily overlooked, plus you have to go out of your way and put in a lot of queries to find the less common (<10k subscribers) subreddits.
32bites is the creator and primary mod of the subreddit. It is his "baby" since birth, he has seen it grow into something hideous of late due to it being a defaulted subreddit, so it is ultimately his choice to kill it and preserve it to what it is now, rather than what it will eventually turn in to. (circlejerk 2.0)
Do I agree with him? Not necessarily. I think more mods and stricter posting rules would have helped a lot, but he sees it as having gone past any point where it can be saved.
while people aren't following reddiquette, thats not really a legit reason to shut it down. reddit is supposed to be for the community. he created a community, and while many will claim he has the right to take his ball and go home, it is unfair to that community that would like to keep it going.
you make reddit what you want. if he or anyone else feels like iama isn't worth it, then they should unsubscribe to it. simple as that. by barring the name, you aren't fixing anything. people can just go start another one somewhere else. but the point of keeping that name is because everyone there has already decided they find value in that community.
instead of him just demodding himself and taking it off his front page, he decided it was better to make everyone else have to find a new place to continue the community. it's selfish and immature. he complains that it was too much of a burden for him to mod, yet he removed all the other mods and ignores the cried of everyone else volunteering to take his place. he thinks that he is the only one who can do it right. it's arrogance of the highest order.
tl;dr, the community is what it is, if they want to keep on doing their thing, he should let them and just walk away.
Sometimes you just have to cut the head off the monster, though.
why? if people enjoy it, why can't you just let them enjoy it?
I don't understand why everybody just doesn't go to another subreddit. Did 32bites make IAmA what it was or was it the posters?
I even made my own subreddit that could take its place. Maybe one day I will advertise it.
IAmA was one of the default subreddits and had nearly a half million subscribers. Because of the huge audience there were often a lot of celebrities and businesses interested in doing AMAs. Without that huge audience no other AMA subreddit will have a remote chance at having those huge really cool AMAs for a long time.
He's part of the community. He started the subreddit. It's his to dismantle. That's how Reddit is meant to be.
Yeah, good call, but I could see the same thing happening in a lot of subreddits.
Yep. I would like to thank the OP for posting that here otherwise I would have missed it.
Well, whenever someone pisses off Reddit, this happens. It's not specific to IAMA.
Eh, normally I would agree with you but in this case his posts are of no importance because there is no conversation. He didn't put closing or altering the subreddit up for debate, he made an entirely unilateral move. Basically his posts are irrelevant and add nothing to the conversation because he ended all conversation on the subreddit.
Edit: There's a hilarious irony in the commentless downvotes to a dissenting but on-topic counterpoint to the OP's message of "follow the upvote/downvote protocol".
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