The social message board Reddit has been shut down from within
Hilarious cat video emporium Reddit or as it is also known ‘the front page of the internet’ has gone completely dark in response to the sacking of a key employee who worked on the popular sub-Reddit ‘ask me anything’.
Reddit is one of the most influential websites in the world. Most content that you see on the internet is produced via Reddit. In fact, the website has over five billion page views per month.
The employee, Victoria Taylor was the Director of talent for Reddit and was responsible for liaising between people of interest and the websites moderators.
In response, moderators of some of the biggest sub-Reddit’s have listed their particular domains as ‘private’. This means that subscribers are unable to see any of the new content or contribute to discussions. A gigantic part of the website has just suddenly disappeared overnight.
The message on the AMA board currently reads
“Due to internal administration reorganization at reddit, /r/IAmA has temporarily been made private by the moderators. We will be using this time to restructure our process for AMA’s.”
The blackout has spread like wildfire through the site. Here is a list of some of the sub-Reddit’s that have seemingly gone rogue.
- /r/askreddit
- /r/books
- /r/cooking
- /r/dataisbeautiful
- /r/diy
- /r/documentaries
- /r/funny
- /r/gaming
- /r/iama
- /r/music
- /r/videos
and most importantly /r/lazycats !
The news has come as a massive shock to the Reddit community with many contributors adding their two cents to the debate:
REDDIT IS SELF-DESTRUCTING. This site is such a trainwreck. It's being run into the ground at full speed.
— Guscraw (@guscraw) July 2, 2015
The site has been facing calls for a re-shuffle, with some experienced users claiming that the site has lost it’s edge to the new era of BuzzFeed style click-bait articles and the endless production line of cat videos.
Will this change signify the beginning of the end? Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how Reddit picks itself up from this.