All good things must come to an end, and that may also include Reddit. The super influential social news site has been in a slow-motion meltdown for the past three weeks, sped up by the recent unexplained firing of Victoria Taylor, a popular staffer who managed the site's prominent Ask Me Anything (AMA) program.

The AMA head's firing led to hundreds of popular sub-boards being temporarily closed, and now to a 160,000-signature petition demanding the resignation of Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, whose chilly, anodyne statements throughout the controversy have only served to further anger the unpaid moderators who make up most of Reddit's actual workforce.

Pao is clearly the wrong woman for the job right now, but Reddit's problem goes much higher than that. Pao and her bosses at Advance Publications, one of the world's largest media companies, are acting like Reddit is run by their employees, who will follow their instructions because they're paid to do so. But it isn't.

The lack of public explanation around Taylor's firing is exactly how a corporation would act to its employees. Companies often don't or won't tell you why your co-workers have left, and expect you to suck it up.

But Reddit is entirely dependent on the volunteer labor of a huge number of contributors who are only there because it makes them feel good. The Reddit administration's actions, right now, are not making them feel good. And the Reddit management seems confused by this.

Just as Reddit's administration desperately needs to connect with its users on an emotional level, all of Pao's statements over the past few days have been in heavily lawyered, bloodless corporate-speak. I'm going to pull out some key words here: aligned, incorporating, coordination, transition. These are not words you use when you want to give people the good feels, especially in communities that like to use phrases like "the good feels." Maybe Pao would be a decent CEO of a traditional organization, but if you're rallying social troops, you need to be a politician with a sense of your audience, and she's proving to be a poor one.

The Reddit leadership's utter tone-deafness is imperiling its attempts at improving the site, too. If Reddit is the "front page of the Internet," it could and should crack down on the vile harassment, racism, and general awfulness that lurks around the edges of the site. The Dylann Roofs of the world may be able to find a place on the Internet, but it shouldn't be on the front page. They should know that society does not accept them.

But Reddit's admins can't do that without the faith of the site's users, and that seems to be a coin Advance has run out of. An attempt to shut down some harassing boards last month, which I cheered, has been mismanaged like everything else recently, neither expanding, being truly enforced, or even being properly explained.

It's Like Admiral Adama Said
We've seen this happen before, many times. It never happens in quite the same way, but the themes are usually the same: company tries to remix or alter a successful community site, they change the critical pH balance that made it successful, and so it dies. Digg died of a botched redesign. There are a lot of reasons MySpace failed, but Fox prioritizing monetization over user experience was definitely one of them.

This is the 21st-century variant of a very old publishing les