Hundreds of sections of Reddit, a popular online message board, were unavailable Friday in what appeared to be a protest by many of the site's moderators after the abrupt dismissal of a high-ranking company employee.
The move affected nearly 300 individual discussion areas -- so-called subreddits that focus on individual topics like technology, art and business. Subreddits are generally moderated by self-appointed members of the community, not official Reddit employees. The shutdowns, which began Thursday evening, appeared to expand rapidly Friday.
They began shortly after Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, was dismissed Thursday afternoon.
The company has not given a reason for Taylor's dismissal. But the day before she had moderated a question-and-answer session on Reddit with the Rev. Jesse Jackson in which a discussion of racial issues grew clamorous.
A Reddit spokesman declined to comment. Taylor did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Reddit is usually one of the highest-trafficked sites on the Internet, with more than 160 million regular monthly visitors. It is ranked the world's 32nd-most-visited site by Alexa, a Web traffic analytics site.
By the afternoon on Friday, a number of subreddits slowly started coming back online.
Taylor, who had been at the company for two years, was one of the most visible employees of Reddit and handled many of the celebrity question-and-answer sessions that have elevated the site beyond an Internet niche to a platform that draws attention from mainstream media outlets.
Reddit's 2012 interview with President Barack Obama, for example, was linked to by dozens of news websites, including The Guardian and The New York Times.
After news of Taylor's dismissal was made public, moderators for the "Ask Me Anything" subreddit -- one of the most highly trafficked areas of the site -- shut it down in a signal of discontent to Reddit's official employees. One by one, other subreddits followed suit.
Hundreds of messages supporting Taylor appeared.
"The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria," wrote one user, who goes by the username Karmanaut.
"We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed," the user also wrote.
Some users drew pictures depicting the former employee as a superhero from the popular comic book V for Vendetta.
Aside from inconveniencing regular readers of the site, the closings are likely to impinge on Reddit's advertising business for as long as they are in effect. Reddit sells large, targeted advertising campaigns that run at the top of individual subreddits.
The events come at a particularly inauspicious time for Reddit, which only a week ago celebrated its 10th anniversary. Last year, Reddit raised $50 million in venture capital and planned to use the money for hiring and refining the advertising business.
As a private company, Reddit does not disclose its revenue. But the site has been valued at roughly $250 million, according to a recent disclosure by its lawyers. Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, still owns a majority of the company and retains a board seat.
The company has had its problems during the past year. Yishan Wong abruptly resigned in November as Reddit's chief executive after a dispute with the company's board of directors.
Reddit also has taken steps to combat harassment on and off its site, moves that many members of the community complain have stifled the principles of free speech upon which the site was founded.
There has also been tension between factions of the Reddit community and Ellen Pao, the company's interim chief executive, whom many Reddit users blame for imposing the anti-harassment policies. An online petition asking Pao to step down has garnered more than 13,000 signatures.
Reddit users have also questioned Pao's ability to lead the company while dealing with major matters in her personal life. For nearly two years, Pao was embroiled in a well-publicized discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm. Pao lost that case in March.
In an online Google document Friday addressed to the management of Reddit, volunteer moderators have asked for better communication between official staff and community members, as well as improved software tools for community management on the site.
Pao then posted a response to that document.
"We do value moderators; they allow reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities," she wrote. "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."
A Section on 07/04/2015