The thing that is kind of strange, but not surprising, to me is that the thing that they're using as justification for this is the firing of one of the admins, but these people don't know why that admin was fired, and also don't know who did the firing. Is Reddit the company primarily controlled by Ellen Pao or does she have managers that help her and therefore responsible for this kind of stuff?

I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't like is that Reddit is not what it used to be in that it's a "free for all" because it's now more business oriented, meaning that Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community. They don't see past the fact that someone that supported them was fired and see the reality that these things happen, and it sucks, but it's a reality of a business. As an aside, if the moderators had such a problem with what was going on, they should have been much more vocal about it and raised flags before instead of acting like children and throwing tantrums by making subreddits private (I call it a tantrum because they made it private for like 12-24 hours, most of that time during the US night where there's not as much traffic).

I'm not saying Ellen Pao is the best person for this job, and while I don't have super high opinions of her, I don't believe all the stuff Reddit says about her either, and she's being vilified for something that could have been completely out of her control. If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of. But given they've raised a lot of money recently I'd guess she doesn't seem to be doing poorly to the shareholders/investors, or at least isn't doing a piss poor job.