BackHow the firing of a popular staffer sent reddit into a tizzy
The first signs of reddit's recent crisis emerged on 2 July, when it fired Victoria Taylor, its director of communications
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The revolt, it would seem ,is over. At least for now.
On Thursday, in a post on reddit’s popular r/IAmA (Ask Me Anything) subreddit, its co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Steve Huffman proposed a new content policy, which sought to clamp down on everything from spam to bullying or harassment and “anything illegal" and other activities which have come to highlight the popular discussion forum’s dark underbelly over the years.
Reddit’s proposed clean-up act comes on the back of a rather troubled fortnight, where the site saw a massive user revolt, triggered by the sudden firing of its employee Victoria Taylor.
The revolt, led by reddit’s (unpaid) volunteer moderators and users, led to its interim CEO Ellen Pao’s resignation on 10 July. Pao was appointed to the post in November 2014 after its CEO Yishan Wong resigned. Pao’s stint as CEO saw reddit make several changes to its community policies with a strong focus on battling harassing behaviour and abuse, with recent changes coming in May this year. Earlier in February, reddit also clamped down on “revenge porn".
The very next month in June, Pao herself became a target of continued criticism and abuse by reddit’s users after the site banned five subreddits for harassment. The redditors’ (a popular term for reddit users) rebellion led to calls for Pao’s resignation, as users took to online petitions. The controversy also saw Pao being compared to Hitler and the Islamic State for reddit’s actions against trolls.
While Pao rode the storm rather well, with mainstream public support and praise for her decisions, that in many ways was just the start of a revolt that would lead to her eventual resignation.
The first signs of reddit’s recent crisis emerged on 2 July, when it fired Taylor, its director of communications. Taylor, a former publicist, joined reddit in 2013, from Los Angeles, where she worked with entertainment PR company ID PR. At reddit, Taylor was responsible for facilitating interviews with celebrities and other well-known personalities through its ‘Ask Me Anything’ or AMA feature. Taylor, who went by her reddit username /u/Chooter, was also influential in making these AMA interactions attract mainstream attention. More importantly, she was considered to be the bridge or the point person between reddit’s moderators (mods) and the site’s management. Taylor was also seen as the go-to person by the mods to report cases of harassment and abuse.
The reasons for her firing were not announced, and are still unclear, though in a post, Wong suggested that reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian was responsible for firing Taylor. He wrote, “He had different ideas for AMAs, he didn’t like Victoria’s role, and decided to fire her."
Taylor’s firing did not go down well with reddit’s moderator volunteers. It triggered a revolt of sorts, with many moderators voicing their discontent over what they thought was an unfair dismissal. Some like /u/karmanaut, an AMA moderator, wrote, “We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed."
“What followed was, as redditors called it, the AMAgeddon!" The Daily Beast reported. “Redditors inundated the site with posts, pictures and memes of Taylor, declaring 2 July 2015 by its new name, AMAgeddon. Within 24 hours, over 1,400 subreddits had bee set to private by mods in solidarity, effectively silencing reddit’s most trafficked channels, including major community hubs with several million subscribers like /r/AskReddit, /r/Funny, and /r/pics," the report added.
Other popular subreddits like r/videos, r/gaming, r/science, r/history and r/movies were also set to private, The Verge reported. Many users also took to reddit’s competitor, the Switzerland-based Voat, which saw its servers crash during the subreddit shutdown.
In a response to her firing, Taylor wrote in a post, “...this weekend wasn’t about me. It was about you. And if I know one thing about this community, it’s that you’ll continue making your voices heard. And that’s an inspiration...."
Pao later apologised in a post, writing, “We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we haven’t always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit."
Her apology didn’t quite salvage her rather nebulous relationship with redditors. For the users, it was the perfect time to call for her head, and they did, constantly referring to her as a “clueless bitch" on Twitter and reddit.
She eventually resigned from reddit on 10 July, but before she left, Pao highlighted the vicious campaign against her in a post. She wrote, “In my eight months as reddit’s CEO, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly on reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity."
She urged her critics to remember that “...I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity." Later in an op-ed for The Washington Post, titled “The trolls are winning the battle for the Internet", Pao wrote, “I, along with several colleagues, was targeted with harassing messages, attempts to post my private information online and death threats. These were attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence. In the battle for the Internet, the power of humanity to overcome hate gives me hope. I’m rooting for the humans over the trolls."
After Pao’s resignation, reddit co-founder Huffman returned to the helm as the site’s CEO, a post he left six years earlier. Huffman and Ohanian founded reddit in 2005, before it was acquired by publisher Conde Nast in 2006. Huffman’s return to reddit at a time when the site is facing its worst crisis, has been likened to Steve Jobs coming back to Apple in 1997.
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