Parts of Reddit switched of over dismissal of Victoria Taylor
Reddit is going through a midlife crisis it seems. The marriage of convenience between the unpaid volunteer mods and the Reddit admins seems to be hitting the rocks and they need a sound marriage counselor to undo the damage. As of now many sections of Reddit have been locked down as key subreddits are being made private in protest of the alleged firing of Reddit’s best known and most loved administrator, Victoria Taylor.
Reddit users earlier reported that Taylor who goes by Reddit handle of /u/chooter and is Reddit’s Director of Talent and key administrator was apparently fired without notice, leaving one of the site’s most popular subreddits called the Ask Me Anything  in jeopardy. Taylor oversaw the administration of the Ask Me Anything subreddit (/r/IAmA), a section that allows Reddit users to engage in a real-time Q&A with famous personalities such as Bill Gates and President Obama
Taylor’s sacking has not gone well with the Redditors and they have started a thread called AMAgeddon, protesting over her alleged sacking. All this while Reddit admins have switched IAmA subreddit’s settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page.
However the AMAgeddon didnt stop there and has since spilled over into other reddits like /r/askreddit, /r/videos and/r/gaming all of each have millions of subscribers. By the end of the day these pages were also made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.
Since being made private, a message from the moderators on the IAmA landing page now reads, “Due to internal administration reorganization at Reddit, /r/IAmA has temporarily been made private by the moderators. We will be using this time to restructure our process for AMAs.”
Moderator of the /r/technology subreddit Gilgamesh has since posted to explain the take-down.
At approximately 5pm UTC, 1pm EST, on Thursday the 2nd of July, 2015, the moderators of /r/IAmA took their subreddit, which is one of the default set, private. This means that only a very small number of people (consisting of the moderators of /r/IAmA, as well as any pre-approved users) could view and post to the subreddit, making it for all intents and purposes shut down…
The mods of /r/IAmA had just found out that without prior warning, /u/chooter, or Victoria, had been released from her position at reddit. They felt that they, along with the other subreddits that host AMAs, should have been warned beforehand, if only so that they could have someone or something in place to handle the transition.
Key Reddit user and moderator Karmanaut joined the chorus of dissent saying the departure came without warning.
“Today, we learned that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from her position with Reddit,” Karmanaut wrote. “We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed.”
Reddit which is owned by Conde Nast and the reddit community forms the core of its success. The website, which turned 10 years old in June, is one of the world’s most popular online destination for links and discussions on almost any topic under the sun.
