Downvoted

Starting last Friday, much of the popular social news site Reddit was essentially shut down as the volunteer moderators of more than 265 subreddits froze their pages in protest of the firing of Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of talent and head of its Ask Me Anything interview page, Wired reports.

By Saturday, more than 100,000 people had signed a Change.org petition calling for the firing of Ellen Pao, Reddit’s interim CEO, Luke Graham reports for CNBC. At the same time, most of the site’s major subreddits were back to normal, reports Dante D’Orazio for The Verge. The protest prompted quick apologies from Pao and the site’s cofounder and chairman, Alexis Ohanian, speaking to Matt Vella of Time magazine.

“This is an attempt by a community to stay a community despite perceived attempts by the business underneath it to commercialize it,” writes author David Weinberger, of the Reddit seesaw.

Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson looks at the turmoil at Reddit and wonders if it doesn’t portend the rise of “an entire decentralized media platform” powered by the blockchain.

In Slate, software engineer David Auerbach argues that the Greek crisis and referendum vote yesterday “is a bold, imperfect and high-velocity form of mass democracy made possibly only through the internet.” Really? For years, capital has fled countries thanks to deregulated currency controls and high-speed trading and no one, as far as I know, has seen fit to blame the internet for THAT feature of international economics. Now an elected government calls a referendum on a critical economic decision and it’s the internet’s fault? (Apparently, to Auerbach, because Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party have used YouTube and Twitter to keep the public informed about their negotiations with Greece’s European creditors, this shows the internet is responsible for the high-stakes nature of the conflict.)

The Italian spyware company Hacking Team, which sells its services to oppressive governments and police agencies around the world, has been hacked, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports for Motherboard.

It’s no longer the “Meerkat Election.” Now it’s the “Selfie Election,” according to Jeremy Peters and Ashley Parker’s amusing report in the New York Times on how retail presidential politics has adapted to the mobile phone. (I don’t get it—aren’t these people supposed to be “Meerkating” their encounters with candidates?)

“There’s really not a lot out there as far as membership organizations,” Don Black, the former Klansman who runs the racist website Stormfront.org, tellsMichael Wines and Stephanie Saul of the New York Times for their in-depth feature on online hate groups. Black adds: “But there is a huge number, I think more than ever, as far as people actively working in some way to promote our cause. Because they don’t have to join an organization now that we have this newfangled internet.”

A long list of Obama campaign and administration alumni are ending up in San Francisco, Edward-Isaac Dovere reports for Politico.

Jemima Kiss of The Guardian reports on a Spanish town of 3,500 whose tech loving mayor, Jose Antonio Rodriguez Salas, has put every town worker on Twitter and is pushing all the residents to do the same, saying it is helping run things far more efficiently and responsively.

Wired’s Alessandra Ram profiles Christopher Wood and Connect4Life, an initiative he co-founded with the LGBT Technology Partnership and Institute that provides mobile phones with unlimited talk and texting to organizations working with homeless gay teens to help them connect to vital services.

Gigabit fiber internet is coming to 22 rural towns in western Massachusetts, which have joined together in a government cooperative called WiredWest and raised $34.5 million in bonds for the project, Jason Koebler reports for Motherboard.

The New York Daily News editorial page blasts Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council for moving to cap Uber’s growth, saying that “from a traffic perspective, a few thousand new cars in Midtown and downtown…is a tablespoon in a lake.”

Parsing the question of whether Uber drivers are employees or independent contractors, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker says, “The real problem here is that Uber drivers don’t quite fit either of the traditional categories….We’d do better to create a third legal category of workers, who would be subject to certain regulations, and whose employers would be responsible for some costs (like, say, reimbursement of expenses and workers’ compensation) but not others (like Social Security and Medicare taxes).”

Revenue at OpenGov, a civic tech start-up that makes it easier for local governments to track, digitize, and share their financial data, is growing rapidly, its CEO Zac Bookman tells Heather Somerville of the San Jose Mercury News. In 2014, it was nine times higher than in 2013. Palo Alto, the first city to use the software, paid $15,000 to start and now pays a licensing fee of $4,000 a year.

The editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, George Stanley, used his 4th of July column to lambaste twelve Republican legislators for sneaking a change into the state budget bill that “would blow up Wisconsin’s long, proud history of open government and access to public records.”