Because there’s no community driving it to be better.
Way back in ye olden times of Reddit, when enshittification hadn’t quite set in yet, there were a lot of AMAs by people who were out there just looking to talk. Sometimes they were famous people who had projects going on, sure, but there still wasn’t that sense of ‘I am here to talk about nothing but my project’. They might tell funny stories, give actual useful information about getting into their career fields, or answer interesting questions about their project.
Sometimes it was more random. “I am a [specific and unique job]” or “person who had [unique life experience]. AMA”. Even with planned and scheduled AMAs, there was a sense it was truly off-the-cuff and spontaneous. In fact, that was the general sense of the site still - a bunch of people there to chat, not just to “raise visibility” for a project of choice.
There are a lot of opinions about why and how this changed, and there are probably a few inflection points that can be named. But the broader answer is that individuals and companies recognized an opportunity to get free advertising, and used it - and nobody was there to stop them. Nobody wanted to step up and say “Hey, we’ve noticed a lot of AMAs which seem to be purely for advertising purposes. Stop it.”
And - I’ll stress - this is not a Reddit-unique thing. Any community can die or be coopted if they’re not managed. Reddit just happened to have a large enough audience to make it happen.
Because there’s no community driving it to be better.
Way back in ye olden times of Reddit, when enshittification hadn’t quite set in yet, there were a lot of AMAs by people who were out there just looking to talk. Sometimes they were famous people who had projects going on, sure, but there still wasn’t that sense of ‘I am here to talk about nothing but my project’. They might tell funny stories, give actual useful information about getting into their career fields, or answer interesting questions about their project.
Sometimes it was more random. “I am a [specific and unique job]” or “person who had [unique life experience]. AMA”. Even with planned and scheduled AMAs, there was a sense it was truly off-the-cuff and spontaneous. In fact, that was the general sense of the site still - a bunch of people there to chat, not just to “raise visibility” for a project of choice.
There are a lot of opinions about why and how this changed, and there are probably a few inflection points that can be named. But the broader answer is that individuals and companies recognized an opportunity to get free advertising, and used it - and nobody was there to stop them. Nobody wanted to step up and say “Hey, we’ve noticed a lot of AMAs which seem to be purely for advertising purposes. Stop it.”
And - I’ll stress - this is not a Reddit-unique thing. Any community can die or be coopted if they’re not managed. Reddit just happened to have a large enough audience to make it happen.