Reddit is an entertainment, social networking, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site’s pages. It was founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005.
Victoria Taylor started working as an employee of Reddit in June of 2013 in the role of Director of Communications. She was responsible for managing Reddit’s popular ‘Ask Me Anything(AMA)’ interviews and a key to-go person for moderators, was let go today. Reddit confirmed her departure to TechCrunch but said it “doesn’t comment on individual employee matters.”
Due to the firing of Victoria Taylor, approximately 75% of reddit goes dark today. Some of the subreddits are made private by its moderators. Watch the live discussion about the /r/IAmA fallout.
See the list of subreddits suddenly going down.
The list includes popular subreddits such as
/r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/funny, /r/Books, /r/science, /r/Music, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos, /r/gadgets, /r/todayilearned, /r/Documentaries, /r/LifeProTips, /r/Jokes, /r/pics, /r/Dataisbeautiful and /r/movies
the moderators of this subreddit have set it to private. you must be a moderator or approved submitter to view its contents
As per reddit discussion “Why was /r/IAmA, along with a number of other large subreddits, made private?”
What happened?
At approximately 5pm UTC, 1pm EST, on Thursday the 2nd of July, 2015, the moderators of /r/IAmA took their subreddit, which is one of the default set, private. This means that only a very small number of people (consisting of the moderators of /r/IAmA, as well as any pre-approved users) could view and post to the subreddit, making it for all intents and purposes shut down; any other redditors would just see this page. Just after that, a thread was posted to this subreddit, asking whether anyone knew why it had happened. /u/karmanaut, top mod of /r/IAmA, responded with an explanation of why they took the subreddit private.
Why was /r/IAmA made private, then?
The situation was explained here by /u/karmanaut: the mods of /r/IAmA had just found out that without prior warning, /u/chooter, or Victoria, had been released from her position at reddit. They felt that they, along with the other subreddits that host AMAs, should have been warned beforehand, if only so that they could have someone or something in place to handle the transition. /u/karmanaut went on to say that many of the mods affected by this do not believe that the admins understand how heavily /u/chooter was relied upon to allow AMAs to go smoothly – something which is outlined below. Without her, they found themselves in a difficult situation, which is exemplifed by what happened today:
We had a number of AMAs scheduled for today that Victoria was supposed to help with, and they are all left absolutely high and dry. She was still willing to help them today (before the sub was shut down, of course) even without being paid or required to do so. Just a sign of how much she is committed to what she does.
As a result of this, the mods therefore took /r/IAmA private, stating their reasoning as follows:
for /r/IAMA to work the way it currently does, we need Victoria. Without her, we need to figure out a different way for it to work
we will need to go through our processes and see what can be done without her.
Why did she leave reddit so abruptly?
The short answer: no-one, excluding a select few of the administrative team, knows precisely why /u/chooter was removed as an admin, and that will almost certainly continue to be the case until the admins get their house in order: both parties are at being professional in that they aren’t talking about the reasons why it occurred.
Updated Saturday, July 4, 2015.,
After few hours, subreddits are back to public view and the popular subreddit /r/IAmA/ has posted a message saying “Welcome Back!”
You may have noticed that /r/IAmA was recently set to “private” for a short period of time. A full explanation can be found here, but the gist of it is that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from Reddit and the admins did not have a good alternative to help conduct AMAs. As a result, our current system will no longer be feasible.
Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by /u/kn0thing. She was a pillar of the AMA community and responsible for nearly all of reddit’s positive press. She helped not only IAMA grow, but reddit as a whole. reddit’s culture would not be what it is today without Victoria’s efforts over the last several years.
We have taken the day to try to understand how Reddit will seek to replace Victoria, and have unfortunately come to the conclusion that they do not have a plan that we can put our trust in. The admins have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new ‘team.’ This does not bode well for future communication between us, and we cannot be sure that everything is being arranged honestly and in accordance with our rules. The information we have requested is essential to ensure that money is not changing hands at any point in the procedure which is necessary for /r/IAmA to remain equal and egalitarian. As a result, we will no longer be working with the admins to put together AMAs. Anyone seeking to schedule an AMA can simply message the moderators or email us at AMAVerify@gmail.com, and we’d be happy to assist and help prepare them for the AMA in any way. We will also be making some future changes to our requirements to cope with Victoria’s absence. Most of these will be behind-the-scenes tweaks to how we help arrange AMAs beforehand, but if there are any rule changes we will let you all know in a sticky post.
We’d like to take this moment to thank Victoria for all of her work on thousands of AMAs. Her cheerfulness, attitude, work ethic, and so many other attributes made her the perfect person for this job. We mods truly feel that she is irreplaceable. Thanks for everything, /u/Chooter, and we wish you the best of luck going forward.
Thank you all for your patience during this debacle (and for the hundreds of messages of support!), and we hope to have many interesting AMAs for you all in the future. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below! Additionally, a former admin has asked to do an AMA about his experiences with Reddit, and you can ask him questions about the inner workings of the site as soon as his AMA goes live here.
Reddit CEO Ellen Pao commented about the firing of Victoria Taylor,
“The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so. We do value moderators; they allow reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time. 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. We are also making changes to reddit.com, adding new features like better search and building mobile web, but our testing plan needs improvement. As a result, we are breaking some of the ways moderators moderate. We are going to figure this out and fix it.”
