Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

> Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority?

sort of, they def have power within their own space and can bargain collectively. People hate Pao for many reasons. She is changing the culture (not single handedly) but with special interests. There are social justice/politically correct views being handed down from the company thus removing certain subreddits and restricting topics. Various other interests like moderators and users oppose these changes. That is what I meant about special interest. Many communities within reddit are hostile to one another and have sort of been playing a proxy war. Although, gun to my head, i think many of the people that would happily trade insults with one another, have slowed for now to unite against Pao/Corporate Reddit.

> critical mass is pretty ambiguous.

yeah i was qouting another poster. I think it is just enough people to generate quality content and discussion and cycle through enough depth to not let everything go stale.

> I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators.

4chan had a coup d'état of sorts recently where many moderators and janitors were purged from the board. Moderation became much more strict and many were part of the social justice movement. They banned threads such as #gamegate briefly and some of the culture of the boards changed.

Also people are spreading to 8chan, wizchan, krautchan and irc further sharding out the culture that created many of the things that we regard as "internet culture"

> "a load bearing wall in the house of AMA has been removed" - Knothing

That is a quote by karmanaut not kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian). The comments by kn0thing have been in some cases just fuel for the fire.

Victoria is literally the only member of the Reddit team, besides the CEO, who I actually know the first name of. Out of all the terrible PR stuff that reddit has gone through lately, this is literally the worst. It's pretty hard to get that upset about banning fatpeoplehate but firing Victoria is pretty much like punching a kitten.

The comment I replied to was trying to say that this isn't about the firing, and is about the process of limiting free speech and restricting subs in a non-transparent manner. I see none of that in the /r/askscience post.

It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the moment:

1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.

2. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even if AskScience's mods are professional scientists, they're still volunteer AskScience mods.]

The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits. In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints. You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're doing an awful job on the other.

By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1 (including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits) may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.

I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.

(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)

The JJ angle has already been removed as the reason for dismissal. (Besides, Victoria is known, adored for actually being able to type down what the person doing the AMA sounds like --see Jeff Glodblum AMA).

See here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png

I suspect that this had much more to do with the one thing that a management team is more interested in: money.

- AMAs are (or were?) probably one of the most visited subs on Reddit - AMAs readers are often on pages for hours - AMAs are on reddit-domained pages, so the "real estate" is valuable and "in-house"

If there was a management idea to "tweak" the AMAs to monetize it and Victoria thought it would not be true to the community, and spoke up, it would be easy to see why they would sack her.

This is much more likely to be the cause than capturing the typing down an AMA guest comments in the cadence they have been provided.