Krishna Bahirwani explores what happened after Reddit decided to fire Victoria Taylor
Reddit is in a state of chaos and revolt, after one of it's most popular employees, Victoria Taylor was fired. The company hasn't officially revealed what the reason for the termination was and hence Reddit's moderators responded with a massive protest by shutting down more than 265 subreddits. Victoria said that she was "dazed" by the termination and would "hopefully" continue in the Public Relations field.
Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit's co-founders and the company's current chairman posted "I apologize. First, I'm sorry for how we handled communicating change to the AMA team this morning. I take responsibility for that. We should have made a post to r/DefaultMods announcing the transition and contacted the affected mods teams right after it happened and clearly articulated how there would not be a disruption with scheduled AMAs and those communications would now happen via AMA@reddit.com as we find a full-time replacement.
That said, I would like to accomplish two things immediately:
Get the blacked out subreddits back online
Your message was received loud and clear. The communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically. We will work closely with you all going forward to ensure events like today don't happen again. At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it's time to get Reddit functioning again. I know many of you are still upset. We will continue to work through these issues with you all, but redditors don't deserve to be punished any further over an issue that is ultimately between Reddit and the moderators.
Work out a plan for going forward
In the short-term, we will use this forum to discuss how we will improve being a moderator on reddit. I'll personally be in here asking and listening. There are a couple of changes we can make immediately to improve our relationship:
lu/krispykrackers, a well-trusted employee and community member, is now going to be point person for moderator issues. This should help alleviate the immediate pain, and we'll continue to evaluate how it's working going forward.
lWe will continue to dedicate resources to AMAs specifically to help manage the workload. Moderating AMAs are a uniquely heavy burden because it requires a lot of coordination between the external guests and the moderators, and Reddit will always be involved. Our process won't be perfect overnight, but we will refine it over time with the moderators (especially r/IAMA, r/science, r/books the most prolific communities for AMAs).
Longer term, we are building tools to help you all do your jobs more effectively (anti-brigading and better modmail/tools are already in progress). We will build these with your input and incorporate more transparency. We have many ideas, and we would like to hear yours. We will keep you all in the loop as our plans crystallize into actual tools."
""Suddenly" was how it seemed when a bunch of main subreddits were locked, but now the locks are coming in a cascade. I guess this is going by AMAgeddon and Victoria Day." said a post by one of Reddit's users.
Although indirectly connected with Victoria's termination, the petition against Reddit CEO, Ellen K. Pao has crossed 125,000 signatures.
"My paranoid side thinks that they want total control over iAMA, in order to put forward only the questions that they want and delete anything that goes against their interests. " said a top comment by a Reddit user, pointing out the possible link between Victoria's termination and the CEO.
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