Remember when you were in your first raiding guild, and it was nothing but drama from start to finish on your guild forums because no one had invented social media yet? Fast-forward to today, when Reddit is the global equivalent and the drama continues.
Apparently provoked by the firing of the Reddit employee responsible for AMAs (ask-me-anythings), the AMA sub locked its doors, leading to an avalanche of subs going private to protest the way Reddit’s admins communicate and do business. They’re calling it chootergate. I’m sorry.
Relevant to our interests: /r/gaming, /r/mmorpg (back up now), /r/swtor (back up), /r/wowcomics, /r/gaymers, /r/skyrim, /r/elitedangerous, /r/elite, and /r/finalfantasy are all currently hidden, but most of the bigger MMO subs (WoW, Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, Elder Scrolls Online, WildStar, Diablo III, etc.) are fine at the moment. If you care about topics other than gaming, you’re even more screwed; /r/science, /r/books, /r/music, /r/history, /r/art, /r/movies, /r/videos… yeah, they’re all locked too.
The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so. We do value moderators; they allow reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time. We hired someone to product manage it, and we moved an engineer to help work on it. We hired 5 more people for our community team in total to work with both the community and moderators. We are also making changes to reddit.com, adding new features like better search and building mobile web, but our testing plan needs improvement. As a result, we are breaking some of the ways moderators moderate. We are going to figure this out and fix it.
