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Why Is Reddit On Strike?

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This article is more than 8 years old.

If you’re one of Reddit's 160 million monthly visitors, chances are you’ve noticed something strange with the site over the past day. A widespread moderator protest has broken out, and many of the default subreddits have been changed to “private,” meaning almost no one can see them.

For a site that gets billions of pageviews a month, it’s a pretty drastic situation to have many of its most major attractions shut down from /r/funny to /r/gaming to /r/videos and many, many more. It’s like getting to a theme park and having half the rides closed, and users are wondering just what on earth is going on.

For the long answer, turn to Reddit itself, where a post in /r/outoftheloop explains all the drama in excruciating detail. I’ll try to sum it up in a more succinct fashion.

All of this was sparked by the dismissal of Reddit communications director Victoria Taylor, known as “chooter” on the site, who was instrumental in conducting many of Reddit’s high profile “ask me anything” interviews in /r/IAmA. Public figures from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Channing Tatum to Barack Obama have done interviews on the site, and Taylor is often instrumental in coordinating those, including setting up times, verifying the celebrity is who they say they are, and showing them how to use Reddit (which can be an enigma to the unfamiliar as an oppressive wall of text).

No reason has been given for Taylor’s dismissal, and within the bounds of professional courtesy, neither Taylor nor Reddit is talking about why she was let go. But that hasn’t stopped the moderators of dozens of subreddits from crippling the site in protest. Much of is in support for Taylor herself, but /r/IAmA in particular has been somewhat thrown into the lurch with Taylor's sudden and unexpected departure, and they're left scrambling to figure out how to orchestrate AMAs that were already on the books without her help.

The movement also reflects a larger issue that has pervaded Reddit for a while. Moderators, who are unpaid volunteers who manage sometimes enormous communities within their subreddits, feel like Reddit as a company treats them with less respect than they deserve. Among the list of grievances is the fact that third party moderation tools are often leagues better than anything Reddit itself has developed for them to use. Moderators are also reportedly upset about Reddit’s recent changes to search functionality, which have taken a bad system and made it even worse.

As a frequent user of the site, this is beyond strange to see. Reddit is no stranger to drama, but the mass-disabling of some of the biggest portions of the site is something I’ve never seen before. Reddit has drawn the ire of its community before when it “censored” some of its darkest subreddits like /r/fatpeoplehate or /r/jailbait in an effort to clean up its “anything goes” image, but nothing like this has happened to date.

The front page is currently flooded with pictures of Victoria Taylor, with users sharing stories about how nice or accommodating she’s been. It does seem a bit strange that Taylor has become the martyr of this situation without anyone protesting actually knowing why she was let go.

Yes, Taylor seems like she was indeed a very competent employee and well-liked by the community. But isn’t it at least possible that she did something that made her dismissal justified? I don’t want to speculate about what exactly that something might be, and I shouldn’t speculate because we literally have no solid information about what took place. If this was an issue where say, Taylor spoke up about some prickly community issue and was let go, I could understand why the moderators might react like this. But to shut down the site based on a situation where no one actually knows the full extent of what happened seems pretty reactionary. But again, it’s Reddit, not always the most logical of places.

Moderator frustration boiling over after years of neglect by Reddit corporate makes a bit more sense. I have no earthly idea how unpaid volunteers find the time or energy to manage these sprawling communities, and if Reddit isn’t doing everything to support arguably their greatest asset in the form of free labor, changes definitely need to be made. But again, better mod tools and redesigned search don’t seem like the most provocative of issues either.

All of these factors have combined into a storm that has effectively hamstrung the site, at least the most well-known sections of it. More niche subreddits, places I’m more likely to visit on my beat /r/games, /r/hearthstone, /r/destinythegame and so on, remain up, often with mods posting messages about how they want to stay out of “Reddit drama.”

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t grabbing popcorn like the rest of us. More to come.

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