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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is not a campaign to bring her back personally.

Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.

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> As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter

It absolutely matters. If it was something egregious and for cause, the company probably wouldn't have a choice but to terminate her on the spot. There are a lot of scenarios where they also wouldn't be able to disclose why she was terminated. If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened. They could have been scrambling as much as the community was.

Now, I hope that's not the case because I like and respect Victoria. And the way people like Alexis "Popcorn" Ohanian commented suggests that this really was a case of Reddit's admins not giving a shit about the community. But to my knowledge Victoria herself has not commented on the reason for her dismissal, so it's hard to know whether Reddit had a choice about how to transition.

Anyway my point is the circumstances around the termination do matter in evaluating the way the company acted.

If a single person is necessary for maintaining one of the most important parts of your website, you need a plan to handle their absence. It doesn't matter if she was fired, or if she quit, or got hit by a bus. A single person leaving your company should not be able to cause a breakdown of this scale.

> If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened.

>Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all.

What if she did something really bad and was fired on the spot? How could they "have a plan in place" for a situation like that?

It would take only a few minutes to come up with a simple last-minute backup plan (pick an employee to temporarily handle Reddit<->AMA, mods communication, and then tell the mods about it). That would be enough to give Reddit enough time to sort out something more permanent.

Jumping to conclusions aside, wouldn't they communicate that?

You should always have some kind of plan for what to do if key employees get run over by a bus.

The problem seems to be that reddit didn't have a plan for when the users started believing it wasn't a bus at all, but a conspiracy.

Well, that's the point of a contingency plan. Where I work, we have an emergency evacuation plan. They don't only start coming up with that plan when the building needs to be evacuated. They have it in place in case they need it.

Their backup plan was to email immediate issues to ama@reddit.com, but that didn't satisfy the nerd rage, so the users had to go into nuclear mode.

Ok, but that doesn't answer all of the communication points. They had an email set up (despite being a communication platform, but if that's how they needed it, ok) and then they didn't tell the mods what that meant. Are they each supposed to send a question about everything they thought Victoria was going to be doing over the next month to that email?

Sure? Questions go there, then the person will follow up with whatever human replies and act appropriately. People leave companies all of the time unexpectedly, the world ending drama made it hard for most people to take seriously. Any immediate issues could have been handled with some speedbumps, if the mods were willing to act reasonable and proceed forward.

But they didn't tell anyone this plan until way too late, so it failed. It's not even clear that they came up with that until the site was deep into the protests.

they didnt communicate the back up plan to anyone that would have needed it. In fact details of the backup plan only surfaced some 12-24 hours after the sacking and the subreddits going dark. SO whether there was a backup plan in place prior to this occurring is difficult to say for certain, that they have one now is not in dispute.

If you read the modmail leak from elsewhere in this thread it didn't satisfy mods who were trying to pick up the pieces either

Nothing short of an immediate team of people to replace her, and an entire site revamp to address their issues was going to calm any of their rage.

One person in, one person out?

As long as her replacement was engaged this whole mess probably wouldn't have happened.

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