Victoria being fired is basically the last straw in what has been close to a year of friction between the people who volunteer to provide and manage reddit's content (the moderators) and the people who profit off of their work (reddit the corporation).
This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.
Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that one of the IAmA mods went "It's been a good run, I'm shutting it down?")
So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.
Volunteer moderators are an extremely common feature of forums all over the internet. The only forums I know of that have paid moderators are forums for specific companies and their products.
This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.
Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.