Reddit faces yet another user revolt, mods shut down several top subreddits

An insurrection is underway on Reddit, one of the largest websites on the planet. The juggernaut network which maintains thousands of open groups -- called subreddits -- dedicated to news, science, technology, entertainment, and sports among others is facing a backlash from moderators of many top subreddits over the company’s decision to fire Victoria Taylor, one of the key figures over at Reddit’s extremely popular AMA subreddit.

Victoria Taylor joined Reddit in 2013 as its director of communications. As several moderators bring to our attention, Taylor headed AMA’s celebrity sessions. She relayed users’ questions to high-profile figures and transcribed their responses to the website. Her sudden and unexplained departure has left moderators with a feeling of betrayal.

In the last 24 hours, several of subreddits have switched their accessibility from public to private as a mark of respect for Victoria as well as their collective anger towards the company. The subreddits that are offline include r/IAmA, r/movies, r/askreddit, and r/music. Some subreddits including r/books, and r/science have come online since, though a vast majority are still protesting.

The other reason moderators are miffed at Victoria’s departure is even more understandable: they don’t know how to do any more AMAs without her. You see, as moderators mention here, Victoria was the only line of communication they had to get in touch with the admins. It’s crucial because, as we have seen in a handful cases in the past, and from my personal experience as well, it is darn too hard to get a response from Reddit admins.

“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 (hence taking IAMA private to figure out the situation)”, writes the moderator of IAMA who goes by the username karmanaut. “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”.

Reddit is yet to explain why it let go of Taylor. But the company’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian apologized to mods for the way it “handled communicating change to the AMA team this morning." He further notes that the company has received the message “loud and clear” and requested moderators to uplift the shut down from their respective sections.

Meanwhile, Ellen Pao, Reddit's interim CEO also shared her views in a comment, which has since been deleted. "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.

"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".

It may take a while before things get back to normal as several moderators -- unpaid volunteers -- think that their work isn't being appreciated by the company, and their voice is never heard.