Someone requested this in a moderately polite manner so here.

A few things:

First, I have absolutely never been paid to submit any link to Reddit. I have submitted my own blog posts to Reddit. I have submitted other people's blog posts who I know to Reddit. I have submitted stuff that people I know make money from to Reddit. This has been at all times entirely at my discretion by my choice. If that were ever a condition of my employment I'd quit on the spot, and I have turned down well-paying writing work because they wanted that to be a condition. I can't say I've never submitted a link just because I wanted the karma, but I've never submitted anything because I wanted money. When I submit stuff from AC it's because I spend a lot of time on that site looking for gems among the crap, and when I find one I genuinely like I share it, uncompensated.

Secondly, what do you love to do? If someone offered you a job not just making money doing what you love, but making that thing a little better for everyone else, would you take it?

Here's what I do: I contact people who are spamming social media sites and fill them in on basics like, "Dude, read the terms of use. You're allowed to submit your own work, but not all the time, not just that, etc." I talk to people who approach sites like Reddit wanting to get something from it without giving anything first, and I tell them they don't get something for nothing and they need to be adding value to a community before they ever think of asking for anything from it, even a few clicks. I ask them to stop using those sites if they can't commit that time to giving back to the community first.

As for why, because AC is a company working very hard to rehabilitate what was a well-deserved image as a spam factory. That was AC at one time, but that's no longer what the site is, and people spamming their AC links really get in the way of the campaign to point that out. I have never been asked to do anything remotely "black hat" or unethical by AC.

I'm not sure why he hasn't mentioned it, but HueyPriest spoke to me on the phone a couple of days after I was hired at AC and we talked about what I'd be doing. He offered to help me by providing some data Reddit has collected about how web traffic actually improves when you stop paying based on hits. In fact, the only part of this that really disappoints me is that the admins haven't spoken up even to prevent people from harassing me in real life, much less to make clear that they've always known exactly where I work and what I do and had no problem with it.

As for what else I do: I write about how to market web content without spamming. People have accused me of "teaching people to hide their spam." If spam is "anything someone makes money from," okay, fine. But I don't think that using a website exactly as it's intended, entirely within the terms of use, is spam. There are going to be marketers on the Internet as long as money and the Internet exist, and I'd rather they be the type who aren't disruptive and who make money by providing something people genuinely like.

I also do a bunch of loosely related stuff, such as managing some contests on Twitter, recruiting people who actually write well to AC and giving them assignments that pay decently, writing tutorials on how to use the site, giving input on site design, working with a group of users who are helping to make our forums a friendlier place, etc.

Also, I have no fucking clue about SEO anything, so if you guys still feel the need to trash me, please leave that out. I can speak the vocabulary a little bit, but if you asked me to optimize a website for search, I'd know about as much about that as I do about database administration or XHTML.

But what I do at work has about a 1% relevance to me being on Reddit. I use it to find AC spammers and try to get them to stop, but mostly I'm goofing off on company time as much as anyone else. It falls under the umbrella of "keeping up with social media trends" so nobody gives me a hard time about it, but I spend a lot of at-work time on Reddit that I shouldn't.

I don't work 24 hours a day, but I've been here up late nights trying to help people with their relationships more often than I haven't (that's my real passion, but I'm not interested in doing it professionally--too many therapists ruin their own mental health). I've been here on the weekends making arrangements so the Reddit Travelers had what I hope was one of the best months of their lives. I've been here working to get press coverage for the Secret Santa project because KickMe wanted some and he deserved whatever he wanted for setting that all up. I've been here in the evenings sifting through massive spam queues and helping people verify their AMAs when I could, I guess, be playing videogames or killing kittens or raping midget clowns or whatever it is that pure evil people do in their spare time.

Also, being a moderator has done absolutely nothing for any submissions of anything that's my own work or AC's work; I moderate mostly self-post only reddits or very small reddits, with the exception of pics and comics, and nothing I submit that's mine or anyone else's that I know is a pic or a comic. Well, I guess that's not true, I think I submitted a picture of my cat once or twice, through imgur.

Now, finally: I've had reporters calling me wanting me to talk about how horrible Reddit is and how its admins tacitly encourage people to harass its users in the offline world. I told them to get bent and that Reddit is a great community, warts and all. But I am disappointed in you. I've never participated in the "reddit is going downhill!" panics, but there's a first time for everything so I will say this: There was a time when the majority of Redditors were people who could think critically and who didn't abandon all rationality at a drop of blood in their e-water. If you guys want to harass me, fine, but the community that I first fell in love with isn't one that would have harassed my family.

Edited to Add: I would have loved to speak this openly about my job earlier, but I didn't want to give my name--if I was a Jane Smith, sure, but there's only one person in the world with my name, and I had an inkling of the kind of thing Reddit might be capable of. I didn't think you'd gone this far down the 4chan road, but I knew the process had started a bit.

EDIT PLEASE READ

This is getting so huge and the downvote brigade is after my responses to such a degree that someone skimming this will never see them, so I'm going to add a couple FAQs here that I feel should be addressed:

• "Saydrah, your LinkedIn is full of fail!"

Yeah. It is. I have no really good excuse for that except that I posted it when I was first hired, before I'd talked to my boss and explained that what AC needs is an image makeover, not more traffic. I forgot all about it until the first time someone on Reddit found it, at which point I felt like editing it would look like a "coverup" and cause drama. When I first was hired at AC, I expected that I'd be helping contributors get involved with social media on the right foot from the start--I didn't realize so many already were involved and were spamming. That quickly became apparent. I do recruit people to write for AC who have an established online following and will bring their fans to AC. That's a win-win: Better quality writing on AC, and the writer gets paid.

• "Saydrah, you shouldn't be a mod!"

That's really up to the people I moderate with. If I step down I might make more drama and more work for them. Believe it or not, I spend a couple hours a day sifting through spam and reported queues here. I never asked to be a moderator of any subreddit. I've always been added by creators or other moderators because they wanted me to contribute. I offered to resign from Iama during the MMM thing and was asked not to. If I go, that puts more work on others. If I stay, that might bring drama. Whatever they want me to do. I don't get anything other than intellectual satisfaction from the time I spend moderating, so it'd be no great loss to be asked to step down, but if it were my decision I'd stay; I don't really think that a campaign of offline harassment of a person and their family should be given any reward.

Another Edit:

This was at the bottom of the thread.

It seems to me that Saydrah could have easily solved this at any time by simply pledging to avoid conflicts of interest - by promising not to use her moderator's role to suppress any articles that compete with ones that she has a monetary influence in, nor to push her own to the top.

I thus promise, with this and any future account. In fact I'll go a step further and state that I will refuse to submit anything related to me or my employer to any Reddit I moderate. I don't think I've done so in the past, though there might be one or two exceptions I've forgotten about. Henceforth I promise that will never happen.

Hopefully my last edit to this text box:

So, I finally checked my private message inbox. I didn't want to earlier--I figured it would just be hate mail. I finally did check it, and I'm glad I did. I am overwhelmed by the people who took time to send me supportive messages. I've tried to reply to everyone and thank them individually, but I have to go home now and I'm only up to "10 hours ago." There's hate mail, too, but there are people who took a few minutes out of their busy days to tell me that something I said or did here in the past helped them or made them smile. That means more to me than I can express in words.