Internet users who awoke Friday and tried to get their daily dose of reddit encountered some difficulty this morning, as an online protest that began Thursday afternoon continued at full boil. Many of the site’s "subreddits"—sections of the site dedicated to discussion of specific topics—have been set to "private" by their moderators, meaning that instead of links and pictures, visitors instead see something like this:
The site's "darkening" is being led primarily by its volunteer moderators. The first subreddit to go dark was the extremely popular /r/IAmA, the place where reddit’s famous "Ask Me Anything" question-and-answer chats are held with notable personalities. These chats, referred to as "AMAs," were typically facilitated by a full-time reddit employee named Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter on reddit). According to this post by /r/IAmA moderator /u/karmanaut, Taylor had been "unexpectedly let go from her position at reddit" some time on Thursday.
In his post, /u/karmanaut explained that Taylor was integral to the AMA process—assisting with scheduling, wrangling celebrity agents, and often going so far as to actually type responses from celebrities who aren’t familiar with reddit’s interface—so her termination threw the operations of /r/IAmA into chaos. The site's moderators are unpaid volunteers with real-world jobs, and without the full-time staff support Taylor supplied, the moderators said they wouldn't be able to keep the daily scheduled AMAs flowing. While they attempted to figure out what to do, they took the entire /r/IAmA subreddit offline (interrupting an in-progress AMA with mathematician Edward Frenkel).
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment