AMAgeddon: Reddit mods are locking up the site's most popular pages In protest

vivaoporto writes: As reported by The Independent, CNET, The Register, TechCrunch, The Verge and PC World 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/gadets — 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 that “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."

A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with the insight by the site's own members about the whole situation.

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