AMAgeddon: Reddit Mods Are Locking Up the Site's Most Popular Pages In Protest

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) 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." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

Comments

Re:Indeed

[PopeRatzo]

biased

Or, you know, they could just learn how to behave a little bit. If you want Reddit to be a KiA septic tank, don't cry when someone decides to have you pumped out just because it's stinking up the neighborhood.

Re:Indeed

[drinkypoo]

You're talking to grown adults.

[citation needed]
On the occasions on which I have visited reddit, I have seen very little evidence of that.
When a reddit thread is posted to the outside world, it's usually so that we can all point and laugh.

There isn't anything wrong with our behaviour, nor are we the "MRA/Republican/Stromfront/Rascist/Misogyo-nerd" strawmen you and your authoritarian friends constantly paint us as.

Perhaps those are just the people who post the most.

It's getting tiresome to have the open, free, principled sites and communications networks we built being labeled as "septic tanks" by the likes of yourself;

If they didn't have so much shit in them, they wouldn't smell quite so much like septic tanks.

We are not burning down the bridges we have built to the future just because you have found a half dozen trolls making cruel jokes in the darkest corner of the web.

You didn't build anything. Reddit built something and you infested it, and now it's sinking into the usual commercial quagmire and you're fleeing like the rats you are. It was never anything to you other than a resource that someone else provided and from which you could benefit.

That's fine, actually, just don't kid yourself.

There are 2 billion people online, we built this network for them,

Who is this "we"? You don't even have a name.

and we will not turn around and hand it over to your feelings, your agendas, or your petty lust for power.

It's not yours to control. You're just the product. You are now being prepared for consumption.

You people are the creationists of the internet, and you are not taking us back to the stone age.

You people are the rednecks of the internet, and YEEHAW I GOTS MY FREE SPEECH BUT DON'T KNOW WHERE TO POINT IT.

Re:Indeed

[squiggleslash]

(Third attempt: reposted due to abusive moderation. Interesting how the moderation on virtually everything I post that's anti-harassment these days proves my point. What has happened to tech? What has happened to Slashdot? If I'd posted a year ago that a bunch of female devs would be suffering harassment up to and including rape threats and worse in an attempt to prevent them from speaking about problems they encounter, I'd have been laughed out of town. Now it's happening a significant number of people on Slashdot actively support that hatred campaign and are doing everything they can to silence anyone who opposes it.)

This little loaded troll is +5 Insightful? The one that calls a harassment campaign that's trying to silence women (and other minorities) in tech and their supporters through threats of violence "free minded geeks", and those who oppose them "authoritarian" and "apologists for censorship"? Because constant threats of violence is somehow pro-free speech, and encouraging people to evaluate games, highlighting problematic aspects, and encouraging developers to produce more interesting work is pro-censorship?

There are countries out there that welcome the "MRA/Republican/Stormfront/Racist/Misogyno-nerds" (a fairly decent description of a campaign of relentless online terror against women, blacks, and left wingers) and others that make up your little cesspool - the countries that support the kind of terror you inflict on those who refuse to kowtow to your demands. An Iranian actor just had to apologize for tweeting support for the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling. Russia continues to push the bar as far as imprisoning gay people for being gay in public. Saudi Arabia punishes women for invading your traditional male space by, you know, driving and stuff.

Those are countries you guys would love. Why don't you fuck off there, and let the rest of us enjoy a diverse community in which people don't get rape and death threats for criticizing the Hitman video game?