Reddit Fired Moderator Victoria Taylor and All Hell Broke Loose: Yeah, so, Reddit has mostly gone dark. Not in the sense that anti-Internet freedom government entities have nefariously blocked all or most of the site — nothing like that. No, Reddit’s current predicament is user-generated.
As BuzzFeed‘s Ryan Broderick reports, major subreddits were suddenly rendered private by their moderators on Thursday night. That’s because Reddit fired Victoria Taylor, who’s popularly known on the site as u/chooter. Taylor, who worked as Reddit’s director of communications, helped the r/IAMA subreddit — which has conducted incredibly popular Q&A’s with presidents and criminals alike.
As moderator “karmanaut” explains, “we learned that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from her position with Reddt. We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed.” No particular reason was given for Taylor’s termination, and while such information is relevant only to Reddit’s in-house staff, that it happened so abruptly and without any communicated warning to the r/IAMA mods is what pissed off karmanaut.
So they made r/IAMA private, rendering it unreadable to all but a few users. To make matters worse, several other popular subreddits followed suit.
Unsurprisingly, Redditors assumed Taylor’s firing was another unpopular part of interim CEO Ellen Pao‘s plan, so they filed a Change.org petition calling for her resignation. As of this writing, it has 15,750 signatures of the required 25,000.
