Reddit is an entertainment, social networking, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system. Many of Reddit’s most popular chat rooms have been shut in protest over the sacking of popular employee Victoria Taylor.
Ms. Taylor oversaw the “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) section of the site that interviewed celebrities, politicians, and other newsworthy figures.
About 100 chat sections, or subreddits, that together have millions of readers are believed to have been shut.
Reddit’s only comment about the issue has been to say that it did not talk about “individual employee matters”.
The protests were led by the volunteer moderators of the AMA section, which said in an explanatory posting that they needed Ms. Taylor’s to keep the subreddit functioning. Ms. Taylor helped organize guests for AMAs and worked to verify that people due to answer questions were who they said they were.
There had been no explanation of why she was suddenly sacked, said the administrators.
The closures have snowballed and have made large sections of the site unreachable.
There have been suggestions that Ms. Taylor was sacked following an AMA with American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson.
Many people have pledged to abandon the site for rivals such as Voat and Frizbee.
Reddit is one of the most widely-used sites on the web with more than 7.5 billion page views a month.
Read more at BBC
