One week.
That’s how much time passed between the Reddit protests—during which unpaid moderators effectively paralyzed the website by shutting down many of its most popular forums—and the resignation of the company’s CEO, Ellen Pao.
The protests were instigated by the firing of Victoria Taylor, a Reddit employee that worked closely with the moderators on the Ask Me Anything discussion discussion areas (in shorthand, “IAmA”), where celebrities often engage in questions and answers directly with Reddit users. It’s one of the most successful discussion areas on Reddit, regularly drawing in between 20 and 30 million views per month.
The Ask Me Anything discussion area was shut down by its moderators on July 3 to protest Taylor’s removal. Moderators for many other discussion areas, who had gradually become resentful of being neglected by the Reddit staff, did the same in solidarity with the Ask Me Anything moderators.
Scarcely a day later, the protesters disbanded, most of the closed discussion areas were re-opened, and the front page of Reddit was no longer filled with posts denouncing Ellen Pao, whom Reddit’s user-base naturally held responsible for Taylor’s removal, but the damage had been done; more than 200,000 people had signed a Change.org petition to have her removed as CEO, and a mass migration of the website’s user-base appeared imminent unless a drastic measure was taken—and it was.
