Reddit co-founder and chairman Alexis Ohanian (/u/kn0thing) has issued an official statement regarding the day-long "Reddit Blackout" that transpired from July 2 to July 3. Most of the subreddits that went private have already been restored for public access.
Thousands of subreddits were set as "private" by their moderators last July 2 after news of Victoria Taylor's dismissal without prior warning from the company spread through the reddit communities. Through his recently posted newsletter, the chairman summarized what sparked the shutdowns.
"It started on Thursday when we let go one of our employees, Victoria Taylor," Ohanian explained, but he did not state the reason for Taylor's dismissal.
Reddit is an entertainment, social networking, and news website that allows registered community members to submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it an online bulletin board system.
Taylor, who then served as the Director of Communications for Reddit, is well-loved and highly-appreciated by moderators of the reddit communities. One of her main work designations is facilitating the "Ask Me Anything" subreddit (/r/IAmA) where celebrities and other high-profile personas from various fields make themselves available for queries from reddit users. "Victoria worked extensively with the moderator teams in r/IAMA, r/books, r/science, and more to make sure AMAs went smoothly," Ohanian specified in his newsletter.
Karmanaut, a well-known community moderator, shed light on Taylor's issue last Thursday through this post. He stressed how much the New York-based moderator meant to the community and the role she had played in securing successful AMAs.
"The vast majority of scheduling requests go through her, and she ensures that we have all of the standard information that we need ahead of time (date, time, proof, description, etc.) and makes it easier for the teams that set up AMAs on both ends." He then concluded: "We will need to go through our processes and see what can be done without her."
Most view Taylor's sacking as a catalyst, if not a spark, that set the whole community on fire. Prior to the incident, moderators already had issues with the Reddit staff. Gilgamesh, another well-known moderator within Reddit, noted that there was already a feeling of administrators not respecting the amount of work put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers that secured the maintenance of 9,656 active subreddits; the staff's disregard for and lack of communication with volunteers have further fuelled such feelings.
On his newsletter/official statement, Ohanian apologized: "We're sorry. And we're going to do better. In the meantime, there were a lot of other really cool things that happened on Reddit this week, and we'd still like to share them with you below."
When earlier asked on what he was going to do about the issue during the heat of the subreddit shutdowns, Ohanian replied: "Popcorn tastes good." In the same thread, he wrote, "Yeah, it's a shame that the mods that turned the [r/IAmA] community private, but so it goes."
The Reddit co-founder received so much backlash for his "smug" remarks. The post currently stands at 5095 downvotes.
