Even if you grant one through four, the role of AMA facilitator is incredibly monetarily important for Reddit, and also incredibly politically important for Reddit as a platform. Victoria was their one paid control of AMA. The mods (as we saw) are volunteers and answer to nobody. Reddit's management isn't dumb, they know that.
(Speculation one also seems somewhat unlikely given that, for instance, /r/coontown is still around. They'd be an obvious scapegoat if you wanted to curry favor with Jackson or with the Twitter folks who were already saying that Reddit was racist. And they're far less valuable to Reddit than an employee was.)
What they could have done, if they really wanted, was to trump up some charges against the AMA mods (perhaps for not moderating that AMA well) and replace some or all of the mod team. That would have placated Jackson, or Twitter, or Pao's self-image, or whomever, while cementing control of AMA in the future. Reddit continued to have an employee involved in running AMAs, and she could have been pressured into keeping AMAs reflect the message Reddit wants to send.
So even if someone (Jackson, Pao, someone else at Reddit) felt like Something Needed To Be Done in response to that AMA, it's far from obvious that firing someone would have been a response that occurred to them. What we're assuming here is not just poor decision-making blinded by ideology / political exigency / whatever, but poor decision-making in the face of other, obvious, obviously better options. That's what makes it so hard to believe.
We know that Reddit already implemented a move-or-get-fired policy. We know that Reddit is bad at handling employee termination (and lots of companies are, to be fair). We know that, fairly recently, Reddit terminated an employee for not moving, and handled it very abruptly, too, without contacting the subreddit they were assigned to work with. "Management decided to fire the employee for standard company-politics reasons, and did a bad job of it" seems perfectly within reason.
Or, you've generated Scenario Five: Reddit wanted to remove a mod in connection with the Jackson AMA, Victoria refused to cooperate, they fired her instead.
But I would definitely agree that what looks like conspiracy generally turns out to be stupidity.
(Speculation one also seems somewhat unlikely given that, for instance, /r/coontown is still around. They'd be an obvious scapegoat if you wanted to curry favor with Jackson or with the Twitter folks who were already saying that Reddit was racist. And they're far less valuable to Reddit than an employee was.)
What they could have done, if they really wanted, was to trump up some charges against the AMA mods (perhaps for not moderating that AMA well) and replace some or all of the mod team. That would have placated Jackson, or Twitter, or Pao's self-image, or whomever, while cementing control of AMA in the future. Reddit continued to have an employee involved in running AMAs, and she could have been pressured into keeping AMAs reflect the message Reddit wants to send.
So even if someone (Jackson, Pao, someone else at Reddit) felt like Something Needed To Be Done in response to that AMA, it's far from obvious that firing someone would have been a response that occurred to them. What we're assuming here is not just poor decision-making blinded by ideology / political exigency / whatever, but poor decision-making in the face of other, obvious, obviously better options. That's what makes it so hard to believe.
We know that Reddit already implemented a move-or-get-fired policy. We know that Reddit is bad at handling employee termination (and lots of companies are, to be fair). We know that, fairly recently, Reddit terminated an employee for not moving, and handled it very abruptly, too, without contacting the subreddit they were assigned to work with. "Management decided to fire the employee for standard company-politics reasons, and did a bad job of it" seems perfectly within reason.