- Reddit has fired an employee called Victoria Taylor for unknown reasons
- She was best known for arranging celebrity 'Ask Me Anything' interviews including question sessions with Barack Obama and Bill Gates
- The reaction saw more than 300 of sites 'subreddits' shut down in protest
- CEO Ellen Pao and co-founder apologized about lack of communication
Message
board site Reddit has apologized to its users after many of its most
popular subsections were taken down in a 'revolt' over an employee's
firing.
Volunteer
moderators who work with paid administrators to run the site's
discussion threads turned many of the 'subreddits' dark after the
Thursday dismissal of communications director Victoria Taylor.
She
is best known for running the website’s popular ‘Ask Me Anything’
interviews, where celebrities take part in question and answer sessions
with the site's users.
Sudden
news of her firing led moderators of the question and answer subsection
IamA to close down their thread, followed by a slew of others who said
that Taylor was the only site administrator who ever communicated well
with them.
Ellen
Pao, the interim CEO of the site that receives more than 160million
regular visitors a month, said Friday night that 'I’m sorry we let our
community down yesterday' and pledged better dialogue with moderators.
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Administrators of the online
discussion board website Reddit have apologized after popular sections
of the site were inaccessible on Thursday and Friday because moderators
turned threads private (pictured) in protest of an employee's firing
Victoria Taylor, pictured, was
employed as Reddit's Director of Communications in June 2013. Since then
she had become the main point of contact for all celebrity interviews
run on the popular Ask Me Anything subreddit, until her unexplained
dismissal
More
than 300 message boards had been taken down by moderators during the
'revolt' including discussion boards for 'funny', 'pics' and the popular
Ask Me Anything interviews, according to the New York Times.
Celebrities
who have taken part include Bill Murray, Channing Tatum, Bill Gates,
Tim Berners-Lee, Julian Assange and even Barack Obama.
Moderators,
some of whom have recently been feuding with administrators, quickly
lashed out after Taylor was let go with seemingly little to no
communication.
Unconfirmed reports have suggested she was fired for differences of opinion on how to take the site forward.
Reddit
is split into various ‘subreddits’ where people with similar views or
interests gather to discuss and share stories and opinions.
The
result was that the administrators who run these subreddits set their
sections private, which prevents anyone from accessing them.
R/IAmA has more than 8.5 million subscribers /r/funny has almost nine million and /r/askreddit also has about nine million.
In
a blog post on a subreddit called /r/OutOfTheLoop, one of the
moderators of /r/IAmA - known on the website as karmanaut - expressed
their dismay at the decision being taken.
‘Today, we learned that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from her position with Reddt,’ they wrote.
‘We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed.’
Many
of the website's moderators - who volunteer freely to run the site -
are annoyed not only at the firing of Taylor, but at the lack of
communication they have been given.
‘The
way the admins failed to communicate with AMA's mods and left them
without a way to contact the people that were going to do them
illustrates the disconnect between admins and the moderators they depend
on,’ said a post on the popular /r/todayilearned subreddit.
Reddit functions through individual
discussion boards called 'subreddits', more than 300 of which were shut
down during the protest
Reddit’s co-founder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, attempted to calm the situation in a number of posts on the website.
‘We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community,’ he wrote.
‘I'd
really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because
I know r/IAmA thrived before her and will thrive after.’
And in a longer post, he revealed that they would ‘work out a plan for going forward’.
Many subreddits began going back online Friday.
Ohanian's message was followed by a statement from Pao later that evening.
'I
want to apologize for how we handled the transition yesterday. We
should have informed the moderators earlier and provided more detail on
the transition plan,' she said according to Gawker.
'We
are working to make improvements and create the best experience for our
users and we aren’t always perfect. Our community is what makes reddit,
reddit and we let you down yesterday.'
Interim
Reddit CEO Ellen Pao (left) and co-founder Alexis Ohanian (right) both
issued statements after the controversy promising better communication
between moderators and their team
She said that Kristine Fasnacht would take over the liaison role between Reddit administrators, moderators and users.
Taylor
has not returned requests for comment, though she posted on Twitter
Thursday, 'Thank you to everyone for their good wishes and support. Love
you guys'.
In response to a questioner on Reddit, she did not offer explanation for her firing and said that she was 'dazed' and plans to stay in the PR field.
It
is not the first time the website has courted controversy; earlier this
year Pao, came under fire for banning five controversial subreddits.
One, known as /r/fatpeoplehate, was an area where people posted vile and hurtful comments.
However, the website faced a huge backlash as a result, with many critical of the censorship.
Thank you to everyone for their good wishes and support. Love you guys
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