The protests were led by the volunteer moderators of the AMA section, which said in an explanatory posting that they needed Ms Taylor to keep the sub-reddit functioning. For as of yet unknown reasons, it seems the powers that be at the message board site have fired Victoria Taylor, the guiding voice behind the /r/IAmA (ask me anything) threads, which have experienced great success with a wide variety of guests from president Obama to that guy with two cocks.
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An online petition calling for the resignation of Ellen Pao, Reddit’s interim CEO, has attracted more than 130,000 signatures, growing rapidly in the past two days since the dismissal of a key administrator at the community-curated news site.
The protest follows another “Reddit revolt” that took place in June when the site chose to ban some sub-reddits it said were involved in harassing and abusing people in real life. Her dismissal as director of talent sparked a “Reddit revolt”, in which about 300 subreddits, or discussion areas, on topics including gaming, science, history, and cinema were shut down by their moderators.
“Now it’s on us to act, to use Reddit to create a dialogue to better keep our community and our base informed”, he told Time. A jury in March rejected her claim, but Pao has said she intends to appeal the verdict.
Several weeks ago, Ellen Pao lost her gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital company. “Most of the community is made up of thoughtful people, and they can appreciate what we all do, even if we don’t always agree”. A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, “a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top”, has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground…Action must be taken to prevent Reddit from being further run into the ground.
That is what users signing the petition say Pao – who has offended some by cracking down on trolling – does not do.
When the petition surpassed 100,000 signatures on Sunday, its creators posted an update noting that Pao and chairman and site co-founder Alexis Ohanian had issued apologies via comments and interviews via news outlets.
“The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so”.
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Taylor’s departure is not the only complaint many in the Reddit community have about Pao’s leadership abilities, Reddit moderator Gilgamesh explained in an online post.
