Internet users who awoke Friday and tried to get their daily dose of reddit encountered some difficulty this morning, as an online protest that began Thursday afternoon continued at full boil. Many of the site’s "subreddits"—sections of the site dedicated to discussion of specific topics—have been set to "private" by their moderators, meaning that instead of links and pictures, visitors instead see something like this:

The site's "darkening" is being led primarily by its volunteer moderators. The first subreddit to go dark was the extremely popular /r/IAmA, the place where reddit’s famous "Ask Me Anything" question-and-answer chats are held with notable personalities. These chats, referred to as "AMAs," were typically facilitated by a full-time reddit employee named Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter on reddit). According to this post by /r/IAmA moderator /u/karmanaut, Taylor had been "unexpectedly let go from her position at reddit" some time on Thursday.

In his post, /u/karmanaut explained that Taylor was integral to the AMA process—assisting with scheduling, wrangling celebrity agents, and often going so far as to actually typing responses from celebrities who aren’t familiar with reddit’s interface—so her termination threw the operations of /r/IAmA into chaos. The site's moderators are unpaid volunteers with real-world jobs, and without the full-time staff support Taylor supplied, the moderators said they wouldn't be able to keep the daily scheduled AMAs flowing. While they attempted to figure out what to do, they took the entire /r/IAmA subreddit offline (interrupting an in-progress AMA with mathematician Edward Frenkel).

Snowball

Other moderators soon joined the conversation, and the focus of discussion broadened beyond wondering why Taylor had been let go without any attempt by the reddit staff to coordinate some kind of AMA process handoff with the moderators. Conversation soon moved on to more general dissatisfaction among the moderators with how reddit’s administrators (employees) deal with its moderators (unpaid volunteers).

Shortly afterwards, in a show of solidarity with the moderators of /r/IAmA, the moderators of /r/science took their subreddit private. They were followed over the course of several hours Thursday evening by almost a third of the site’s huge "default" subreddits, including /r/AskReddit, /r/Books, /r/TodayILearned, /r/Videos, /r/History, /r/Gaming, /r/Movies, /r/Music, and others. Each subreddit that went private reduced the content available to be shown to reddit users, and with the default subreddits each having between five and eight million subscribers, this affected a high percentage of visitors.

The initial responses from reddit were somewhat pithy, with reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian snarkily saying, "Popcorn tastes good" when asked about the community reaction (Ohanian apologized for the remark a few hours later). Further comments explained that reddit was changing its AMA process and had established a new e-mail address for moderators and AMA subjects to communicate with the administrators. If anything, this seemed to fuel the discontent, and a live thread with news about the latest subreddits going dark sprung up Thursday evening. As of publication time, the thread is still going, with about 1,200 viewers (an updated list of private subreddits can also be seen in this post).

De-escalation

This morning, Ohanian posted the first official response acknowledging the blackout, saying that the message "was received loud and clear" and asking that the private subreddits be restored "immediately." The post also explained that reddit would in the short term re-work its process for engaging with moderators, in addition to making sure that appropriate resources are dedicated to supporting AMAs (which are often major publicity sources for reddit, as when President Obama did one in 2012).

No mention was made about the reasons behind Taylor’s sudden departure—not surprising, considering that most companies don’t talk publicly about employee separation. Taylor herself was unable or unwilling to comment, answering at one point that "you guys know what I know" when asked about her departure.

As of this morning, several of the downed default subreddits are back online (including /r/science), and with Ohanian's post, reddit wants to move things quickly back to normal.

Update: reddit CEO Ellen Pao has posted a response to the blackout:

The bigger problem is that we haven't helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so. We do value moderators; they allow reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time. We hired someone to product manage it, and we moved an engineer to help work on it. We hired 5 more people for our community team in total to work with both the community and moderators. We are also making changes to reddit.com, adding new features like better search and building mobile web, but our testing plan needs improvement. As a result, we are breaking some of the ways moderators moderate. We are going to figure this out and fix it.

Update 2: And now the post quoted above has been deleted, though it still exists on Pao's user page.

Update 3: The post hasn't been deleted—just downvoted into invisibility.

Disclaimer: Ars and reddit are ultimately owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications. Despite this, Ars has no inside knowledge of the workings of reddit. Or Wired. Or Vogue, in case you were wondering.