So I was doing my usual half-asleep 11pm scroll through Reddit last Thursday, the one where I tell myself I'm "catching up on the front page" and actually just fall down whatever hole is open, and a bunch of my usual stops were just... gone. Not banned-gone. Private-gone. That little padlock icon, "this community is private," nothing to see here.
Turned out it wasn't just me. A big chunk of the site's most-subscribed communities (AskScience, TIL, pics, gifs, History, IAmA, a bunch of the big ones) went private within about the same few hours on July 2nd. Mods coordinated it. Some outlets were calling it "AMAgeddon," which is a dumb name but I get why it stuck.
The short version, as far as I can piece together: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor, who ran the AMA program (the actual person who lined up celebrities and scientists and astronauts and whoever else for those Ask Me Anything threads), and apparently did it with basically zero warning to the mod teams who relied on her. One AMA that was already scheduled and promoted got left stranded because the person coordinating it was suddenly not there anymore. Mods who'd been asking for basic tooling and communication from the admins for years, stuff like a working mod mail, actual moderation tools that don't feel like they were built in 2007, some kind of consistent line to the people running the company — took it as the final straw and started shutting communities down in protest.
And look, I get the mod frustration, I really do. I don't moderate anything myself, I'm not important enough for that, but I've lurked in enough mod threads over the years to know the tooling complaints are not new and not exaggerated. Reddit's back end has felt held together with tape for a long time. If you've ever tried to do anything more complicated than approve or remove a post you know what I mean.
What I found kind of funny, in a not-actually-funny way, is how much of my daily internet routine quietly depends on unpaid volunteers keeping a for-profit company's most popular pages from turning into total garbage. Ellen Pao's been running things as interim CEO since Yishan Wong left last year, and from where I'm sitting as just some guy who reads the site at night, it feels like a company that hasn't figured out who it wants to be yet. Big enough that a blackout by mods makes actual news, still scrappy enough internally that firing one coordinator apparently blindsided the volunteers who depended on her.
Anyway. Most of the subreddits I actually check came back within a day or so, though a few of the bigger ones stayed dark longer as a statement. I did notice I filled the gap by just… checking Twitter more, which is its own kind of depressing, since Twitter in July 2015 is not exactly a calm place either.
One small thing that bugged me through all of this: half the news coverage I read treated it like Reddit was going to collapse or something, breathless "is this the end of Reddit" headlines. It's not the end of anything. It's a community site where the people doing the actual day-to-day work of making it usable got annoyed at management, said so loudly, and the lights flickered for a day. Sites survive that. What it actually tells you is how thin the staff running the place must be if a few thousand volunteer mods walking off the job for 24 hours is even noticeable at the company level.
I don't have some grand takeaway here. I just think it's worth remembering, next time a site feels effortless and full of good stuff, that there's usually an underpaid or unpaid person somewhere keeping the spam and garbage out, and that person can just stop. And apparently did, for an evening, while I was trying to read about something dumb before bed.
Back to it, I guess. Front page's mostly normal again as of writing this.