Biography
Victoria Taylor, known on Reddit by the username chooter, was the company's director of talent and its chief coordinator for the popular 'Ask Me Anything' (AMA) interview program. In that role she served as the principal liaison between Reddit's administrators and the volunteer moderators of r/IAmA, vetting guests, verifying identities, and producing high-profile sessions. Among the figures she helped bring to the platform were President Barack Obama, Bill Murray, Snoop Dogg, and hundreds of other public personalities, making her one of the most visible and trusted staff members among the site's moderator community.
On July 2, 2015, Reddit abruptly fired Taylor without advance notice to the moderators who relied on her. Reporting at the time linked the dismissal to disagreements over the commercialization of the AMA program, including a push toward a video AMA format that some accounts said Taylor had resisted. Because she was removed without warning, volunteer moderators of r/IAmA were left without the support they needed for scheduled interviews, including an imminent session that had been arranged with physicist Stephen Hawking.
The firing triggered an event nicknamed 'AMAgeddon': moderators set their communities to private in protest, and within about a day more than a thousand subreddits had gone dark, including major hubs such as r/AskReddit, r/funny, and r/pics. The blackout silenced some of the site's most-trafficked channels and became a flashpoint for broader moderator grievances about Reddit management's treatment of unpaid volunteers and lack of communication.
The revolt rapidly escalated into a referendum on leadership. A petition demanding the resignation of interim chief executive Ellen Pao gathered more than 200,000 signatures within weeks. Pao apologized to the community for the company's poor communication, but on July 10, 2015, just over a week after Taylor's firing, she resigned and was replaced by co-founder Steve Huffman. Taylor herself largely declined to discuss the specifics of her departure publicly, though she briefly spoke to the press; she later moved on to other media work. The episode remains a landmark example of the tension between Reddit's corporate ambitions and the volunteer labor that sustains its communities.