Victoria Taylor's firing & the 2015 AMA blackout (‘AMAgeddon’)

Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) was Reddit's director of talent and the human engine behind its flagship 'Ask Me Anything' interviews. She helped celebrities, authors, scientists, and public figures verify their identities, prepare for sessions, and navigate the format, and she was widely credited with turning AMAs into one of Reddit's signature cultural products and a mainstream press fixture. Crucially, she served as the trusted liaison between Reddit's corporate staff and the unpaid volunteer moderators who actually ran its largest communities.

On or around 2 July 2015, during Ellen Pao's tenure as interim CEO, Taylor was abruptly dismissed with little explanation to the moderators who depended on her. Accounts of the reasons varied — later commentary, including remarks attributed to former CEO Yishan Wong, pointed to disagreements over the direction of AMAs and a push toward a video format championed by leadership — but to the volunteers, the most striking fact was that a critical point of contact had vanished overnight without warning or a transition plan.

The response was swift and dramatic. The moderators of r/IAmA set the subreddit private, and within roughly 24 hours more than 1,400 other subreddits — including many of the site's most heavily trafficked communities — followed in solidarity, an event users christened 'AMAgeddon'. The blackout was less about Taylor as an individual than about long-simmering grievances: poor communication from Reddit's staff, inadequate moderation tooling, and a sense that the company neglected the unpaid workforce on which it depended.

The protest crystallized mounting anger at Reddit's leadership and became a focal point for criticism of Pao, who had already drawn controversy over earlier policy decisions. Hundreds of thousands of users called for her removal. Pao apologized publicly for the company's failures to communicate with and support its volunteers, but the pressure proved decisive: she resigned as interim CEO on 10 July 2015, and co-founder Steve Huffman returned to lead the company shortly afterward.

AMAgeddon was, in retrospect, a dress rehearsal. It was the first time Reddit's volunteer moderators demonstrated at scale that they could take large portions of the site dark, and the template it established — coordinated, simultaneous blackouts as leverage against management — would be deployed far more dramatically in the 2021 Aimee Challenor protest and the 2023 API revolt.