@goodNews4U's comment on 'AMAgeddon: the surprise firing of Victoria, the AMA coordinator led to backlash and a blackout across Reddit'

I stole this from... well... my own SRD post on the matter. I changed some things (like changing NP links to WWW links) and a couple of other minor formatting edits

Sit down here. Comfortable? Let me grab the popcorn. Okay, here we are. Let me tell you about a tale. This takes place in time where drama growing massive was not an uncommon sight. However, this... this... was different. We had never saw it coming. The Fattening was big enough, but we had thought we had reached the peak. Could the drama explode farther? Surely, there could not be something more massive than this?

But less than a month later, we found out that we were wrong, very much so. Reddit fired Victoria Taylor, leading to a firestorm that swept across all of reddit, leaving no subreddit unscathed in it's wake. This is... AMAgeddon.

It all started, when /r/IAmA, a subreddit dedicated to hosting "Ask Me Anything" sessions, had received a moderator mail saying that Victoria, who usually helps with many AMAs, was not available.

Because /r/IAmA would have large problems if it were to continue, they shut their subreddit down in order to sort their problems out. This was unprecedented, but still the calmest part of the largest drama wave ever on reddit.

In the hours following this, /r/science, /r/books, /r/music, /r/AskReddit and ~~almost all of the 100~~ 17 of the defaults would shut their doors, each with a similar message. Screencap of IAmA when it was private.

Many speculation happened over the nature of the firing, and some think that the Jesse Jackson AMA had something to with it, but this is unconfirmed. /u/ekjp (Ellen Pao), however has said that this now-deleted Quora post had nothing to do with it.

Tensions between the mods and the admins and the users and the admins would run high, with almost all admin posts on the issue were downmarseyd to oblivion, back, and back into oblivion again.

Edit: /u/jbranscum reminded me that I left out a very important part of this. And so, I have edited the OP to show you that these indeed were dark times, that /r/sexypizza had gone private. This is when we knew we truly had something different coming here.

/u/kn0thing makes a highly downmarseyd remark in SubredditDrama about the whole situation, which had sparked off a drama comment chain, to put it mildly. A subreddit, /r/popcorntastesgood, has been formed around it.

All was buttery, until...

/u/Dacvak, a former reddit admin, did an IAmA once the subreddit came back up made a claim saying that he was fired because of his cancer. This caused round 2 of the dramawave in SubredditDrama, and caused more buttery goodness all across the site.

The popcorn kernels would continue to pop in /r/pics, /r/videos and /r/todayilearned when they reopened, with users upmarseying everything and anything that had to do with Victoria. A reddit server was also aptly named that. Also, in this time, /u/kickme444's firing had come to light with [a post to /r/SecretSanta][

/u/kn0thing publicly responds in the Upmarseyd newsletter. I have copied-and-pasted the response here:

So. Things were… eventful this week. To put it mildly.

It started on Thursday when we let go one of our employees, Victoria Taylor, who had helped coordinate AMAs for the last couple years.

I can’t publicly comment on why we made this decision, but I can talk about the way we handled it—we screwed up. Victoria worked extensively with the moderator teams in /r/IAMA, /r/books, /r/science, and more to make sure AMAs went smoothly, and when she left, we didn’t have a great process in place to handle that transition and didn’t communicate it to those mods very well.

The mods of /r/IAMA, concerned about how things would work moving forward, temporarily shut down the subreddit. Many more mods, also upset by our failure to provide proper cowtools and support, followed suit. As you may have noticed, Reddit looked pretty different from normal for a while.

There’s a much more in-depth overview of what happened in /r/outoftheloop.

We’ve received the message, we’ve talked with a lot of moderators, and we’re going to get better. We know we’ve done a pretty terrible job at communicating. We know a lot of things on the site don’t work as well as you—and we—would like. We know there are a lot more issues and that the community as a whole is pretty unhappy with us right now.

I know apologies and promises feel empty right now, but that’s all I can give—with the additional promise that we really do mean it. We’ve recently hired a product manager for the community team who is working on new cowtools. We’re actively working on brigading. We’re figuring out solutions to improve modmail. But it takes time to make these changes, so they won’t be here tomorrow. But they will be here.

We’re sorry. And we’re going to do better. In the meantime, there were a lot of other really cool things that happened on Reddit this week, and we’d still like to share them with you below.

Edit: I've gotten word that the admins have responsed to this! /u/yishan weighs in here in the announcement thread here.

We were the chosen ones, dramanauts. We had fought, argued, popped popcorn, and yet, we made it. We have survived. We may never know Victoria's secret, but we will have emerged victorious in the end.

#Notable threads

Relevant SubredditDrama threads will be nearer to the end of the thread.

Thread | Description

-|-

Why has R/IAmA been set to private? | Original OutOfTheLoop question asking why the subreddit was set to private. Comments are now locked.

Why was /r/IAmA, along with a number of other large subreddits, made private? | OutOfTheLoop recap thread, explaining a lot of who Victoria was, and why subreddits went private.

A complete synopsis of the reddit blackout from the perspective of a pics mod. | Synopsis of what happen from the point of view of an /r/pics moderator

Welcome Back! (/r/IAmA) | Modpost describing what will be happening in the future in regards to AMAs in this subreddit.

The Recent /r/Science Shutdown. | Modpost about shutdown of /r/science.

[Mod Post] The Timer | AskReddit modpost about "The Timer"

We hear you, let's talk (x-post from /r/DefaultMods) | Initial admin response to the shutdown (there have been comments and more communication since then)

Dear reddit, you are starting to suck. | /u/qgyh2, a notorious user for being a moderator of multiple large subreddits makes a post to /r/self showing his discontent with how reddit is run. Drama inside.

AMAgeddon tracking | A full list of which subreddits went private during AMAgeddon

Leaked /r/science modmail conversation and mod response | This is a discussion between the moderators of /r/science, and reddit admin /u/kn0thing over frustrations about the event. This is outdated, and not currently relevant to the state of affairs, but I have included it, because it did become a point of discussion at one point.

Reddit abruptly fires AMA liason Victoria in the wake of the Jesse Jackson AMA. /r/IAmA mods, left hanging by the admins, have turned the subreddit private. | /r/circlebroke discussion about the event. Contains some bickering, but I didn't see anything too big at first glance

/r/IAMA is suddenly forced private; Victoria removed from her position at Reddit | /r/conspiracy discussion, with an appearance of /u/raldi

IAmA has gone private with no notice due to one one of its top moderators being fired from reddit | /r/subredditcancer discussion

[META] i got reddit's ama's shut down because of the Jesse Jackson ama | /r/ShitRedditSays post, with lots of drama all over the entire thread.

We apologize | Official admin response to AMAgeddon