Update - July 10th: A week after Reddit moderators shut down many of the most popular forums on the website in protest of the firing of Victoria Taylor and administrative mismanagement, Ellen Pao has stepped down as CEO of the company, to be replaced by Steve Huffman, a co-founder and the original CEO of Reddit.
Pao was the target of widespread contempt by Reddit’s user-base during the shutdown of the website, and a Change.org petition to have her removed as CEO received more than 200,000 signatures in the days following the protests.
On Monday, Pao issued a formal apology to Reddit users, admitting that the management team had “screwed up” and “haven’t communicated well” with the websites moderators, which appears to have quelled some of the anger towards her, but proved to be ultimately futile in securing her position in the company.
An account of the Reddit shutdown follows below.
July 3rd report
After the termination of Victoria Taylor, an employee at Reddit and a popular moderator for the subreddit r/IAmA — which features frequent Q&As between celebrities and the website’s users — the subreddit’s moderators set it to private, essentially shutting down one of Reddit’s most popular channels.
“Today, we learned that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from her position with Reddit. We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed,” a moderator for r/IAmA wrote on Thursday. “Before doing that, the admins really should have at least talked to us.”
Administrators refuse to comment on why Taylor was fired, although a deleted Quora post from a manager at Reddit indicates that Taylor pushed back against proposals to commercialize r/IAmA by adding video Q&A sessions.
