I don't think the bad taste has much to do with him not being able to divulge things about the situation. Everybody understands they don't need or can't comment on the reasons why Victoria was fired. That's just common sense. Of course everybody is curious, but unless the reason is something that directly affects the userbase and the IAMA-system, it's fine to not disclose any of it. It might likely be something that concerns Victoria's privacy as well.

I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:

"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"

Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).

Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.

But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.

I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.

I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.

One last thing:

> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.

I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.