By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
A massive revolt involving millions of Reddit users rocked the popular forum platform Friday as high-level moderators shut down extremely popular sections of the site in a protest against its leadership.
The chaos began when moderators of several popular “subreddits” — pages focused around a specific topic, some of which have millions of readers – made their pages private. That shut the pages off from new users and the Internet at large – including Google searches – thus starving Reddit, which calls itself “the front page of the Internet”, of inflowing web traffic and advertising revenue.
The protest included at least seven of Reddit’s most popular forums that cover topics like movies, videogames and viral videos. Many of these subreddits have more than 7 million subscribers apiece.
Protestors claim they are shutting down key parts of the service because of the abrupt firing Thursday of Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s well-liked director of talent. Taylor was known mostly for her work in leading the site’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) forum, which centered around celebrities, politicians and other influential people answering questions posed by users. While many AMA subjects were celebrities like actress Amy Poehler, U.S. President Barack Obama and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have also participated.
By Friday afternoon, several of the darkened pages started to reappear. Still, members of the AMA forum published posts criticizing Reddit.
“The admins [Reddit employees] have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new ‘team,’” according to a post on the AMA subreddit welcoming back visitors. “This does not bode well for future communication between us, and we cannot be sure that everything is being arranged honestly and in accordance with our rules.”
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote in a post that the company received the protesters’ message “loud and clear”, adding that “the communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically”.
