I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.

It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.

> I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.

It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base.

The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find).

None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.

> It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that.

The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case.

Everything you're saying is consistent with OP's claim.

> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there

That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.

If the sub is experiencing substantial user growth isn't that an indication that the sub is doing well?

No, /r/IamA was a default subreddit for many years, thus all new users would get subscribed to it (I think defaults have been gone for some years now, but subscriber inflation already happened)

> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure.

It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago.

Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.