Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
I think in the early days volunteer moderators were necessary because you wouldn’t want a paid employee dictating the content and direction of a community sub that was created by users. That’s what made reddit special back then. Now that it has a high user volume it’s taken on a life of its own and the company feels they can move forward without those volunteers. I think it’s a mistake but time will tell.
Volunteer moderators actually makes sense for the vast majority of boards. I would still prefer much stricter training requirements, but the unofficial board for a youtuber is not corporate reddit’s problem (until they start becoming a haven for white supremacists, I guess)
But I was always under the assumption that the ama board was corporate. It is very high profile, used as part of reddit PR, and often interacts with the kind of people who have lawyers on retainer.
The ama mods doing this for free were insane. But holy shit