Reddit has a global strike of moderators

Today already managed to christen as "2015 Reddit Blackout". At the time of this writing, almost 300 sections are in private mode and can not be viewed by ordinary users. Among them are such sections as / r / art, / r / askreddit, / r / funny, / r / gaming, / r / iama, / r / jokes, / r / movies, / r / music and / r / videos . To understand the scale of the blow to reddit - the number of subscribers to these sections is estimated at millions of people.

So what happened?

To understand what happened, we need to go back a little in time, in November 2014, when Ellen Pao took over the post of interim CEO (in the photo above). She distinguished herself by the fact that almost immediately after joining this post, she canceled all individual wage arrangements under the pretext of eliminating sexual inequality between employees. But for Pao, this is not the first scandal on this ground - just for the same reason, in 2012 she was suing her past employer.
')
The next step, which glorified it all over the Internet, was made in June 2015 and consisted in blocking 5 sections (the largest of them was / r / fatpeoplehate with 151 thousand subscribers) for reasons of “hatred towards certain categories of people”. All messages of outraged users were deleted, and some users received the so-called shadowban - ban, in which the user does not see that he is banned, but all his messages are automatically deleted. Many users perceived what was happening as a violation of the main principle of reddit - users create and moderate site content, and this led to a petition demanding that Pao be removed from his position. To date, more than 18 thousand people have supported this proposal.

Back in today

The point of no return occurred today, when the reddit management decided quietly and without any warning for users and moderators to dismiss Victoria Taylor (pictured above), who was organizing and conducting the so-called AMA - reddit topics, in which users could ask questions to others users, most often stars, various political figures, scientists, etc. This led to the fact that such sections as / r / iama, / r / science and others were left without the planned AMA, since besides Taylor, no one else had access to the AMA participants. The moderators of the / r / iama section, having been angry that the reddit administration did not consider it necessary to notify them in advance about these changes, decided to set a block on the section until the reddit administration explained its actions. So did the other sections, which Taylor helped conduct the AMA.

Perhaps everything would go quietly and peacefully, but the number of blocked sections grew very, very quickly - someone wanted to support the decision of colleagues, and someone used it as an opportunity to express dissatisfaction with the reddit policy regarding moderators and their requests. As an example, many cite a complete disregard of requests to somehow improve the tools for managing partitions.

What's next?

The situation is still evolving. As I wrote above - about 300 sections still remain blocked for users, but judging by the latest information, the administration of reddit states that “I heard the voice of the moderators and is ready to improve communication between the administration and the moderators” and asks to remove the lock.

The administration still chooses not to name the reason for the dismissal of Victoria Taylor.