Reddit Goes Dark as Users Revolt

If your website lets go of its Director of Communications, do you think that the users would protest, taking down some of the most popular content on your platform in response? That's what's happening on Reddit, the self-described 'front page of the Internet'.

Reddit has apparent laid off its Director of Communications Victoria Taylor. And much of the community is in revolt, with some of the most popular content on Reddit, including its Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews section, and other popular sections like Gaming and Movies, going private in response to the removal of Taylor, who was key to the AMAs.

The best way to think of Reddit is as a collection of bulletin boards, each one dedicated to different topics. These boards - or subs - allow you to post links and discuss them, and users can upvote links to make them more prominently visible, or downvote them until they go away. And the site essentially functions because of two types of users - admins, who are paid Reddit employees and work on more than just community content; and mods, who are unpaid members of the community who engage with the content on a daily basis, and play a very important role in keeping subs on-topic, keeping discussions moving, and generally, keep Reddit going. Taylor was an admin, but one who was very popular amongst the mods, and her sudden removal, which wasn't communicated to the mods first to help them plan a transition, is being seen by many as proof of how little Reddit's leadership understands its community, and has led many mods to make their subs private.

(Also see: Reddit Turns 10 - Do You Know the Front Page of the Internet?)

One of the most well-known subs - particularly amongst people not on Reddit - is called r/IAmA. On r/IAmA, you saw frequent appearances by celebrities such as actors, musicians, and even politicians like US President Barack Obama, who showed up and answered any and all questions from the Reddit community.

The sub has gained tremendously in popularity over the last couple of years, coinciding with the hiring of Taylor, who went by the handle u/chooter on Reddit. She had been an active Redditor before joining the company, and kept up her engagement with the company even after joining. Her job involed (according to an AMA she held last year) dealing with media and press relations, and general communications planning internally and externally (such as app launches) and working with organisations to help them understand how Reddit works and engage more with the community.

But the role that most users on the site saw u/chooter engaged in was the celebrity interactions on r/IAmA. Victoria from Reddit, as she was generally introduced in most of the celebrity posts in this sub, would meet the celebrities and help them answer questions, sometimes transcribing answers over the phone and at other times, sitting with the celebrities in person - and there were a lot of celebrities who came for AMAs in the last two years. This meant that the users could tell that a celebrity was really answering questions for one thing - before Victoria joined, there were some instances where PR agents of celebrities were the ones answering questions - but having an admin involved also meant that any questions or support that was needed to keep the AMA moving smoothly would be easy to get from Reddit. But also, Taylor, as u/chooter, also never stopped engaging with the community. If you go to her user profile, you can see her taking part in conversations about rescue cats, songs with unfortunate lyrics, miniature frog species, and the animorphs TV show.

In short, Taylor was a part of the community she was managing, and her removal has prompted many mods to to feel betrayed by the company. They feel that Reddit should have talked to the mods, so that they could have worked out a transition - AMAs planned for today now feel left high and dry without u/chooter and that's why they decided to make r/IAmA private.

As a result, some of the most high profile subs on Reddit, including r/Art, r/AskReddit, r/books, r/gadgets, r/gaming, r/IAmA, and r/TodayILearned have all gone private. As one of the mods of r/Science put it, Victoria was the only line of communications that the mods had with Reddit. Questions about analytics for example were only answered through her, and without her, the community that has worked hard to create engaging content gets left in the cold.

Reddit founder Alex Ohanian also responded to comments on this thread, saying that while Reddit does not comment on specific employees, he would himself be there to help manage AMA requests. He added though that he knew the problems could be solved because r/IAmA thrived before her [Taylor] and will thrive after.

Well known mod u/Karmanaut immediately responded to this though, pretty much rubbishing Ohanian's claim that IAmA thrived before Taylor, and it's worth reproducing in full:

To be honest, this is just wrong. I don't think you were still involved with Reddit when we started getting very very popular and had a regular stream of celebrity AMAs incoming. We didn't have the ability or resources to walk them through it, or to schedule AMAs, or provide any other form of support.

/r/IAmA limped along without her. We managed to move from fire to fire and had some truly poor quality posts from people who didn't understand Reddit or what the AMA format was all about. Woody Harrelson, of course, is the prime example. Another would be the fake Emilia Clarke AMA that blew up and everyone thought was real until her manager personally contacted us to tell us that it was wrong. And it translates into bad press for Reddit when that happens.

The subreddit is going to continue to grow by what, 7 or 8 thousand users per day? By saying that we're returning to the pre-Victoria status quo, you're admitting that you're shooting us in the leg but still expecting us to run the same speed. We can't do that.

Reddit has been facing backlash from the users who feel the company has been too high-handed with the community for a while now; it often gets dismissed because the outrage centres on the banning of hate groups or preventing the distribution of illegal pornography. This time though, the users have a cause to rally around that won't offend the majority, and this could actually be a real problem for Reddit. It's pretty much the perfect time to get some inputs from a media expert and learn how to better communicate about what's going on. Too bad Reddit fired the person whose job that was.