Reddit returns, CEO promises changes, mods wary

"The bigger problem is that we haven't helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so," Pao wrote. "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."

On a post entitled "Welcome Back!", a mod explained why the IAmA sub was closed to most for a bit. The message also notes that the breakdown between the mods and the administration is still not fixed.

"We have taken the day to try to understand how Reddit will seek to replace Victoria, and have unfortunately come to the conclusion that they do not have a plan that we can put our trust in," according to the post. "The admins have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new 'team.' This does not bode well for future communication between us, and we cannot be sure that everything is being arranged honestly and in accordance with our rules."

The Reddit uprising kicked off yesterday afternoon when the moderators of /r/IAmA took the subreddit private. That means that only moderators and a small pre-approved group users could view the subreddit's content. The rest see a locked page.

That initial shut down was, according to the top mod of the subreddit, done because when Taylor was let go, it "pulled the rug" out from under the moderators who relied on her to run the popular Ask Me Anything sessions.

Over the course of the day, other moderators began taking their subreddits private, not out of an inability to run the subs, but in protest of Taylor's sudden departure and what it meant from a larger perspective.