PLoS, the open-access science publication, was putting on an excellent series [1]. Given Victoria's role in that, her loss puts that significant scientific outreach in jeopardy. A sad casualty. It was fantastic to see the front-lines of cutting edge research getting asked, answering, and otherwise motivating a lot of really interesting public discussion. Even if they repost all that old discussion (all those links on the blog currently don't work), it won't be trivial to fill Victoria's role in the upcoming AMAs, if they hold them at all.

[1] http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2015/06/update-on-plos-science-we...

If you look at the backlash of the community on the subreddits coming back online, you can see how it was a mistake to involve the immature community of reddit into that moderator/admin tension.

> Due to an unexpected Reddit administrative personnel change /r/science is temporarily private so that we can resolve the situation, our apologizes for any disruption this may cause.

The doublespeak is weird. If it's a protest, say so. There's no direct relation between the employee getting fired and a subreddit that is not focused on celebrity PR going dark.

You've picked the wrong example here though. /r/science has hosted many AMAs in the past, so they are directly impacted.

> Can't /r/science keep on functioning

Clearly the people best suited to answer this question do not think they will be able to do what they have been doing.

Clearly that can't be true. That subreddit is still valuable without AMAs. The people in charge just can't bring themselves to be honest with their users. Look at the re-opening announcement and spot the blatant lies and half-truths:

> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing, we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the inconvenience to the community.

> The comments in this thread will be locked.

They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked the comments. Father knows best.

dealing with rescheduling all future AMAs can suck up a lot of volunteer moderator time. Time that would otherwise have to be spent moderating the sub.

So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a reason to shut down the sub temporarily

Many large subreddits are going private to force the admins to respond.

I think that a clearer answer for @stefantalpalaru would be that the making /r/science private is the moderators of /r/science sending a message to the Reddit admins. They probably don't feel like grandstanding to the public over the issue. People that care about Reddit drama already know what's going on via other avenues.

They may just want to send a message to the admins without a formal declaration of war.

/r/Science also does AMAs.

They didn't go private to protest. That action simply cascaded into a large protest.

They wanted to force a response from the admins since they weren't getting anything from them.