BBC News: Reddit in uproar after staff sacking

Reports of Taylor’s dismissal started surfacing late last night and news that major subreddits were switching to private – rendering them inaccessible to users – in protest swiftly followed. “Reddit is a great site with an even more unbelievable community, however it is frustrating to volunteer time to run a large subreddit and have questions go unacknowledged by the people running the site”. They include some of the site’s most popular threads, such as r/movies, /r/todayilearned, r/AskReddit, /r/technology and r/gaming.

After the abrupt dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was a communications director and the main facilitator of Reddit‘s popular “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) section, yesterday, volunteer moderators turned off forums for gaming, science, history and movies.

“The admins didn’t realise how much we rely on Victoria”.

Reddit has never been a stranger to controversy, whether they did something for the right reasons or not.

“We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed”, it reads.

Victoria was a popular figure in the Reddit community, with her having conducted several high-profile Reddit AMA sessions including the subreddit’s two most popular interviews ever, with Barack Obama and a man with two penises (because Reddit).

We’re prepared to help coordinate and schedule AMAs.

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. The problem there is that Victoria wasn’t just one of the few ways Reddit moderators were able to stay in touch with celebrities that were scheduled to have AMAs – she was the only person.

Others believe Reddit’s new goal is to make more revenue, and by banning some of the murky parts of Reddit it will give the company a better advertising portfolio.

Reddit co-founder and government chairman Alexis Ohanian advised Reddit that he can be coping with AMA requests for now, and that the AMA subreddit would proceed to “thrive” after the departure of Taylor.

It’s that lack of communication more so than the firing itself which seems to have triggered this mass “shutdown” by subreddit moderators.

“Your message was received loud and clear”, Ohania wrote. “As a result, we will need to go through our processes and see what can be done without her”. “We will work closely with you all going forward to ensure events like today don’t happen again”, he wrote . There are nearly 10,000 active subreddits at this point, and numerous ones with over 5000 subscribers have gone dark.