The revolution began today, on Reddit, as the site's army of free laborers rebelled against its paid management by shutting down some of the most important parts of the website.
If you tried visiting r/IAmA, r/AskReddit, r/funny, r/Books, r/science, r/music, r/gaming, r/movies, or hundreds of other subreddits, you were greeted by a message that they were now "private."
The moderators of those subreddits, mostly unpaid volunteers who work long hours to enforce the rules, ban trolls and generally keep Reddit running, were pissed. So they flipped the switch to make those subreddits private, effectively making Reddit go dark for several hours.
Those subreddits are open to the public again (tentatively, it seems), after Reddit apparently promised to address their concerns. So what they hell were the moderators so mad about?
As Forbes reports, (paid) administrator Victoria Taylor, who was in charge of organizing I Am A… Ask Me Anything (r/IAmA), was unceremoniously fired. It's still not clear why, but what is clear is that many moderators relied on her. She was the one who wrangled the celebrities for their AMAs and made sure that it was really them (and not their publicists pretending to be them) answering your penis questions.
It's rumored that Taylor was clashing with her bosses over their commercialization of the AMAs, including the introduction of video AMAs, which she was apparently against.
According to a thread on r/OutOfTheLoop, r/IAmA shut down first and the other subreddits followed, either because they were counting on AMAs for their own subreddits, or just to show solidarity.
None
Many of the subreddits went public again without even acknowledging why they'd disappeared in the first place, but r/gaming posted a thread saying they "got a promise from the admin team to better the situation."
So Reddit is back to normal, but for how long? Now that the moderators know they can basically hold the most popular parts of Reddit hostage to get their way, can this really be the end of the revolution?
Maybe just to be safe you should go ahead and get your fill of anus-related f'ups, life-ruining secrets and "the button" right now.
