AMAgeddon

About

AMAgeddon is a name given to the mass adjournment of many subreddits on the social news aggregator site Reddit following the firing of Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter), the community's director of talent responsible for coordinating AMA interviews, in early July 2015.

Background

On July 2nd, 2015, it became known to the Reddit community that Victoria Taylor (aka /u/chooter), the talent coordinator for r/iama, had been fired for unknown reasons. Much speculation claimed that she was in disagreement with the management in regards to commercial decisions Reddit was attempting to make, including the creation of a video AMA format. A more detailed summary of the episode can be found in a post titled "Why was /r/IAmA, along with a number of other large subreddits, made private?" the /r/OutOfTheLoop subreddit.

Notable Developments

Subreddit Blackouts

After learning of Victoria being fired, the moderators of /r/iama changed the settings for the subreddit to private because it is nearly impossible for the subreddit to operate without Victoria. /u/karmanaut explained that "Tl;dr: for /r/IAMA to work the way it currently does, we need Victoria. Without her, we need to figure out a different way for it to work" in this post here. This, effectively blacked out one of the most popular subreddits on the site. Soon after r/iama went private, the mods of other popular subreddits began privatizing their sections of the site as well. At the height of the blackout, more than 300 different subreddits with more than 5,000 readers were either privatized or locked, including many with hundreds of thousands of readers, including /r/science, /r/sports, and /r/dataisbeautiful. (A full list is available here.) At least one subreddt, /r/CrappyDesign, permanently shut down as part of the protest.^[13]

Reasons for the blackout vary between subreddits but there has been a general consensus that moderators were not being given proper tools or being valued by Reddit's admins. An unknown amount of Redditors flocked to Voat.co during this blackout in protest, which caused its servers to overload and go down for about a day. Nearly all rage toward these events has been directed at reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao (aka /u/ekjp).

During the blackout, several subreddits did not go private, but rather, showed support in different ways. Subreddits such as /r/listentothis closed off new discussions. The subreddit /r/timanderic was handed over to 4chan's /pol/ board and subsequently vandalized, shown below. The subreddit /r/Blackout2015 was created to contain discussion of the blackout as well as subsequent protests against the Reddit administrators.

In addition, on July 3rd, 2015, the top 100 posts in /r/all were all about the Victoria Taylor situation or the Reddit Blackout as a whole, and as of July 4th, 2015, posts are being upvoted to the front page for having the name 'Victoria' anywhere in them even when completely unrelated. Additionally, references to Voat and how everyone should go to Voat are being upvoted to the front page. Posts are also saying Ellen K. Pao is misogynistic, in reference to a gender bias court battle she lost against her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Before the court battle she was offered nearly a million dollar settlement but refused, and Ellen K. Pao had to pay $276k dollars to Kleiner Perkins to cover costs for successfully defending itself. The news on this lawsuit is available here on Reuters and archived here in The Wall Street Journal. Ellen K. Pao has commented on the blackout and the departure of Victoria, saying "the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours;" which in the 48 hour timeframe included Victoria's departure and the privatization of subreddits, and this information is available here. A petition calling for her to resign on change.org has also surpassed 200,000 signatures and can be viewed and signed here. Ellen K. Pao's account /u/ekjp is also under questioning by the reddit community for extreme vote manipulation which if true would be violating Reddit's rules. This questioning can be viewed here and here.

The subreddit /r/blackout2015 received over 10,000 subscribers in fewer than 11 hours. Alex Ohanian, the CEO of Reddit, admitted that the firing was handled incorrectly and that the mods should have been notified, claiming that "your message was heard loud and clear" and that he would like the blacked out subreddits to return to live as soon as possible.

Blackout Censorship and Related Firings

Victoria was fired which is what caused the Blackout to begin with, but that is not the only related Reddit firing under Ellen K. Pao's leadership. As of July 3rd, 2015, Jokes are being made about the censorship by Ellen K. Pao and admins all across Reddit. An AMA by a fired employee of Reddit named Dacvak explaining how he was fired due to cancer was deleted by Dacvak along with all his replies. The AMA has since been archived and is viewable here. Another reddit worker that was fired is redditor kickme444, creator of the r/secretsanta subreddit and the redditgifts Twitter page. The subreddit will have to find a way to go on without him as of this post he made. He has since been removed from the subreddit and his firing is said to be a result of him voicing concerns over Reddit's leadership.

Respected, admins /u/chooter (Victoria Taylor) and /u/kickme444 (Dan McComas) from Reddit.

Reddit has now begun automatically censoring any posts in /r/Pics with the name 'Victoria' in it as evidenced here. This goes directly against the Reddit's stance in favor of free speech. /u/krispykrackers is an admin for that subreddit and was mentioned on July 3, 2015, in co-founder Alex Ohanian's response to the subreddit blackout here, Alex specifically saying "u/krispykrackers, a well-trusted employee and community member, is now going to be point person for moderator issues. This should help alleviate the immediate pain, and we'll continue to evaluate how it's working going forward." With this information it is likely that the admin /u/krispykrackers had a hand in the auto-censorship. Another mod for /r/Pics by the username /u/solidwhetstone stepped down as mod in addition to closing down their own rather large subreddit /r/crappydesign which had over 180k subscribers. The reason for doing both these things was in specific protest of Reddit's treatment of Victoria and also the auto-censorship of /r/Pics posts with the word 'Victoria' in them. /u/solidwhetstone's reddit post regarding this is available here.

News Media Coverage

The protest was covered by many notable news outlets, including Gizmodo, Forbes, Buzzfeed News, CNN, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, WIRED Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]}

About three months before the blackout on March 30, 2015, breitbart.com was also noting some issues with Ellen K. Pao, one quote being "but admonishing her staff for helping victims of road accidents was just one aspect of Pao’s sociopathy and selfishness." That news story can be viewed here.

Search Interest

External References