TL;DR

Ellen Pao continues to alienate the Reddit community by firing a prominent and well-loved administrator.

Body

As we all know, Pao has been making great strides to alienate Reddit users through her aggressive implementation of groupthink policies thinly disguised as "anti-harassment" rules. Less than a month ago, fatpeoplehate and other smaller offending subreddits were deleted for being misaligned with Reddit's new "inclusion" policy, and while the actions perpetrated by Pao against the community have so far only been against controversial subreddits, she has now successfully pissed off a large percentage of the default subs by firing a popular administrator.

Victoria Taylor was a officially "Director of CommunicationsTalent" but her day-to-day job largely involved organising the large number of celebrity and public-figure AMAs that reddit hosts. Other admins and mods have been quoted in the mainstream press as saying that her role in organising these efforts were invaluable; in other words, she was a key supporter of quite a few subreddits' administration efforts. Yesterday she was fired for unknown reasons, although it is suspected that it was in relation to Pao's new policy of relocating reddit employees to the California office; Taylor worked from New York. This move has been attempted previously with Marissa Mayer (yahoo CEO) attempting to force work-from-home employees to congregate and ended in disaster. Another theory is that it is related to the disastrous Rev. Jesse Jackson AMA - see https://archive.is/oCji7 for evidence.

In response to the loss of Taylor's support (and a general belief that the admins of reddit are ignoring and otherwise disrespecting many subreddit moderators), a swathe of default and popular subreddits have shut themselves down in protest, causing a likely massive loss to Reddit's bottom line. Events and facts will likely fall into place over the next few days, but as it currently stands some of the biggest subreddits including iAMA, funny (the most popular subreddit), pcmasterrace and many others have made themselves private and even more are currently debating whether to join in. Way to go on understanding the company you run, Pao. Heck, even our good friends over at TheBluePill have closed their doors.

All this goes to show that Pao's attempts to force change upon Reddit without first understanding its nature are going to cause serious repercussions in the long run. Radical feminists know no bounds in their solipsism and belief that they know the right thing to do in all circumstances and this is just the latest example that will likely lead to one of three things: the complete revamp of Reddit as a community platform to match Pao's exclusive far-left vision, the destruction of Reddit as a company, or Pao's ousting. I know which I'm rooting for.

Further reading:

https://archive.is/pYotS

https://archive.is/ZCx3q

Final Thoughts

I don't know if this will be the final straw that breaks reddit, but if it is I hope you've all signed up for the TRP backup at Puerarchy.com: reserve your username and join the mailing list from the links in the sidebar to make sure that if there are any issues that break TRP, you have access to its new home.

Edit: Further reading from comments

  • Theory that VT was pushed out for dissent: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png (courtesy of /u/jimmybrite)

  • For a live feed of the protesting/deleting, go to /r/pics and click "new" - a massive stream of anti-Pao images are being posted and quickly deleted by admins. This is censorship at work.