The firing of a high-ranking Reddit employee on Thursday rubbed some of the social news site s moderators the wrong way and in protest they shut down hundreds of popular topic threads on the website.
Moderators set certain sections of the site known as subreddits for topics such as gaming, funny content and more to private on Thursday and Friday, preventing users from accessing about 300 discussions.
Victoria Taylor, Reddit s director of talent who also oversaw the site s Ask Me Anything Q&A community, was dismissed from the company on Thursday. A Reddit spokesperson said that they do not comment on employee matters.
By Friday, parts of the site were still inaccessible but starting to go back up after 10:30 a.m. and some of the moderators released statements about why they shut down the subreddits for hours.
While her departure mainly affected subs that host AMAs, it spoke to a bigger issue the mods have been dealing with for a long time; this was just the straw that broke the camel s back. In the recent months, mods have been getting increasingly upset over the admins not keeping us or the users in the loop as much as we believe they should have, wrote the site s moderator for the Ask Me Anything subreddit.
Reddit CEO Ellen Pao and founder Alexis Ohanian also posted statements, apologizing to the site s moderators.
The bigger problem is that we haven t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so, Pao wrote.
Ohanian wrote that he takes full responsibility for how they handled Taylor s firing and should have released an announcement and contacted the site s moderators.
Your message was received loud and clear. The communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically. We will work closely with you all going forward to ensure events like today don t happen again, he wrote.
Reddit has about 160 million monthly users.
Photo Credit: Screenshot of a subreddit that was inaccessible to the public on Friday.
