Reddit hosts a global strike by moderators

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    Today has already been christened as “2015 Reddit Blackout”. At the time of this writing, almost 300 sections are in private mode and cannot be viewed by ordinary users. Among them are sections such as / r / art, / r / askreddit, / r / funny, / r / gaming, / r / iama, / r / jokes, / r / movies, / r / music and / r / videos . To make it clear the scale of the blow on reddit - the number of subscribers to these sections is estimated in millions .

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    So what happened?


    To understand what happened, you need to go back a little back in time, in November 2014, when Ellen Pao took the post of interim CEO (pictured above). She was distinguished by the fact that almost immediately after coming to this post she canceled all individual agreements on wages under the pretext of eliminating gender inequality between employees. However, for Pao this is not the first scandal on this basis - just for the same reason, in 2012, she sued her past employer.

    The next step, which glorified it on the entire Internet, was made in June 2015 and consisted of blocking 5 sections (the largest of which was / r / fatpeoplehate with 151 thousand subscribers) for reasons of "hatred of certain categories of people." All messages of indignant users were deleted, and some users received the so-called shadowban - a ban in which the user does not see that he is banned, but all his messages are automatically deleted. Many users took what was happening as a violation of the main principle of reddit - the content of the site was created and moderated by users, and this led to the creation of a petition demanding that Pao be removed from his post. To date, more than 18 thousand people have supported this proposal.

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    Will be back today


    The point of no return occurred today, when the reddit management decided to quietly and without any warning to users and moderators dismiss Victoria Taylor(pictured above), which was involved in organizing and conducting the so-called AMA - the one on reddit, in which users could ask questions to other users, most often stars, various politicians, scientists, etc. As a result, sections such as / r / iama, / r / science and others were left without planned AMAs, since apart from Taylor, no one else had access to AMA members. The moderators of the / r / iama section, angry at the fact that the reddit administration did not consider it necessary to notify them in advance about these changes, decided to set the lock on the partition until the reddit administration explained its actions. Other sections that Taylor helped conduct the AMA did the same.

    Perhaps everything would have gone quietly and peacefully, but the number of blocked sections grew very, very fast - someone wanted to support the decision of colleagues, and someone used this as an opportunity to express dissatisfaction with the reddit policy regarding moderators and their requests. As an example, many cite the complete ignoring of requests to somehow improve partition management tools.

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    What's next?


    The situation is still developing. As I wrote above, about 300 sections are still blocked for users, but judging by the latest information, the reddit administration says that “it has heard the voice of the moderators and is ready to improve communication between the administration and the moderators” and asks to unlock it.

    The administration still prefers not to name the reason for Victoria Taylor’s dismissal.

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