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Reddit, the popular online message board, faced a huge protest from the site’s moderators after Victoria Taylor, company’s director of Talent, was sacked.
Taylor was also facilitator of Reddit’s famous Ask Me Anything (AMA) features, which has seen participation from many well-known personalities like Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates, US President Barack Obama to name a few.
Her sacking resulted in ‘moderators’ of sub-reddits (topics like technology, art, etc and are controlled by moderators who are self-appointed) holding the site hostage with shutdowns. The protest meant that many of these sub-reddits went private and thus other users were locked out. According to The Verge, some of the sub-reddits that went private were: r/videos, r/gaming, r/AskReddit, r/science, r/history, and r/movies.
The crisis on Reddit, which is one the world’s most popular social media sites, meant that interim CEO Ellen Pao had to step in and apologise over the firing. Pao was quote by the BBC as saying, “Our community is what makes Reddit, Reddit and we let you down yesterday. I want to apologise for how we handled the transition yesterday. We should have informed the moderators earlier and provided more detail on the transition plan.”
The issue it seems was not just about Taylor’s firing. As The Verge notes, one reddit moderator Gilgamesh wrote, “As much as Victoria is loved, this reaction is not all a result of her departure: there is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits…”
Later Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian also apologised to the Reddit community after failing to placate them that Taylor’s firing would have no impact AMAs on the site. He wrote on the site, “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.”
Ohanian added that the community’s message “received loud and clear.” and that “the communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically.”
The Reddit founder also wrote, “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.”
Ellen Pao also wrote on Reddit, “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.”
She added that the company was building “better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and reddit awesome…We are going to figure this out and fix it.”
It appears that almost all the sub-reddits are now back online and the message of the protestors appears to have been heard by Reddit’s Admins.
