/r/EliteDangerous on Reddit is currently Private

[Loriath]

If you visit the EliteDangerous community on Reddit, you will find it is marked as private. This is part of a protest by the entire reddit Mods community for the removal of a key member of their staff. So if you are wondering whats happening, its a protest and not permanent.

[de Carabas]

A protest against Reddit?

[ZATZAi]

It should be back on by tomorrow, most of the various Reddit subgroups are only doing the protest for a 24 hour period.

It was a protest against the Reddit administration by the all volunteer moderator community. It started when a Reddit admin named Victoria was fired with no notice. The protest is not simply because she was fired, but because Victoria was how all the AMA were done. So when they have a celebrity or President Obama come on and do a Q&A with the Reddit community, it's all arranged through Victoria. They either work with her over the phone or go to her at the Reddit office in New York. She doesn't actually run the AMAs, she just puts them in touch with the moderators of the subgroup the AMA is to take place on, and verifies the person's credentials (So people can't pretend to be someone famous for example).

Without Victoria it is very hard to police the people doing AMAs to ensure they are who they say they are. I mean you think just anyone can call the President at the White House to arrange a Q&A session? When Reddit fired Victoria with no notice and no planning they left all the AMA sub-reddits in a lurch. They even had AMAs planned for that day and today that they could no longer do because they either couldn't get in touch with the people or had no way to verify they were who they said they are. Also keep in mind a lot of these people are not tech heads, and Reddit can be a confusing beast for new people, Victoria would help with that.

So unfortunately there was no one else assigned by Reddit to help facilitate these AMAs. No communicated from Reddit with the volunteer moderators about this or what was going to happen going forward, and no response from inquiries from said mods. This coupled with ongoing issues with Reddit where the admins had not been helping moderators to deal with abuse, brigading and the like (Especially after the /r/FatPeopleHate banning and the subsequent fallout) was the straw that broke the camels back. The mods felt the Admins were putting more and more work on their volunteer force in the form of growing controversies since the new CEO joined and now they were taking away the only point of direct contact and support between the Reddit Admin and Moderators (There was no one else that did this).

Thus the larger AMA reddits /r/iAMA, /r/Books, /r/Science etc decided to close their pages for a 24 hour people. These are default subreddits and thus highly visible. If you don't have a Reddit account to customize what you see, or even if you do, these are the pages you tend to see and now they would be blocked off. A lot of smaller reddits joined with the bigger ones, many even had hastily put together votes to decide if they should. Almost everywhere people were saying to go dark in solidarity because it seemed the only way to get the admins to notice that things were not ok and something had to be done. Not something about Victoria being fired per-se' but that the Admins need to get more involved in their community and stop being so hands off and actually communicate with their user base and help where needed.

After many hours the admins did respond, they were being hit where it hurt them the most (They're wallet) by these closures. They have promised more support and nominated one of their staff to be the new liaison to the community moderators. Not all the various sub-reddits have heard this news yet (This all happened very fast, plus people sleep ya know). It can be expected that the various reddits, including /r/elitedangerous will re-open in due time.