Why did this apology come out today and not before Pao spoke to news outlets about this topic? Why wouldn't you try to talk to your upset users quickly and directly?
If you note her account's history, you might notice that every single one of her contributions has been mass-downvoted, including earlier responses on the matter. Downvoted content gets hidden. There's an ongoing voting war over the submission itself, with only 61% upvoting. That's way, way low for reddit.
Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.
Brigading and associated behaviors are at the core of many of Reddit's more significant problems. They were among the rationales for the idiotic Search rewrite over the weekend (since then an option to revert has been provided).
I think Reddit's existing moderation system's outlived its usefulness.
I had the same experience with my account https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain, where we essentially force you to pay for ads, to (add) justify your voice time and space, if you are unpopular.∫
Does anyone else find it interesting, if not as a legal-rational process, that a community-builder and or er community-leader is unable to be heard and read because of that lack of logy?
Given the concerns over lack of communication, I wonder if that was the right move. I can see how hard this would be to manage on-site communications with everyone mass-downvoting anything from /u/kn0thing or /u/ekjp though, so I certainly don't have any better ideas.
At the very least, he could have posted beforehand to say "we'll get back to you about this on Monday."
Also, I don't understand the excuse about downvoting as a reason for not saying anything. If she says something worthwhile people will pick it up and link to it. So far, much of the reason they are getting downvoted is that they aren't saying anything meaningful. This thread was an exception.
I suspect that's the case. I just wanted to highlight that she's actually addressing these questions (which is an excellent step forward from a few days ago).
I would say it's a good start. Where she goes from here will be what matters. If she goes silent in the weeks and months ahead it will be clear this was just damage control. If she regularly engages the community, as she should, then she'll be on the right track.
See Zuck and his regular 'town hall meetings' on his public news feed. She does nothing like that. The only times we hear from her are when she has an announcement or is forced to respond to heavy criticism.
Given all the timing, a Monday site announcement, rather than someting buried over the weekend, is sensible.
It would have been preferable if Pao hadn't shot her mouth off to The New York Times over the weekend, with some spectacularly inept remarks cocerning her company and Reddit users.
But timing of this announcement isn't something I'd criticise her for.
As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power trip who didn't want to step away because that would be relinquishing some sort of internet "status." When did it get so complicated?
I don't think Reddit management (or anyone who's familiar with online communities in general) is worried about the mod 'chair' sitting empty. However, I think they are worried about the kind of person they have running large sections of their website. They've had moderators get caught favoring racist ideologies, sell access to large subs, general icky stuff that Reddit doesn't want happening. Then there's the ability of mods to simply "turn off" huge sections of the site to blackmail the owners. I think the incentive for the management to avoid that is obvious.
The current 'set' of mods are, as far as I can tell, saying: "We're pretty good at this, we're doing our best, but we're gonna get fed up eventually - the next set may not be so cooperative." I think that's a reasonable position to take in their situation, and is a position Reddit management would do well to pay attention to. It's a lot easier to create a environment where good mods stay and eject the ones you dislike than to conjure up smart, dedicated, hard-working people who don't demand a paycheck.
Reddit is not the first site that struggles to keep the paid employees and volunteer moderators happy. There are countless other examples which have had various outcomes.
> Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked.
Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people would feel great about.
>It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them...
But they still are part of the backbone. No single mod is, but the ever changing group of mods as a whole are very important. Cease all moderation and what will eventually happen? Some self moderation by means of the voting system will keep everything from going completely crazy, but smaller communities could be crushed. Consider how making twox default would've worked if there were no mods.
To be clear, I meant the current unionized group of mods who staged the major sub strike in that statement. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be moderators.
This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the failures directly. Just look at the language in the post...
"We screwed up."
"We haven’t communicated well..."
"we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..."
This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.
A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.
Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during Yishan's tenure?
If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.
Actually that's the typical corporate apology. The whole team gets the blame when you're playing the blame game! However CEOs and executives like pushing shit downward.
Employee vs CEO is a big difference in status and the type of apology to write.
I guess they had a look to the key performance numbers at Reddit after the blackouts, and finally understand that Reddit with new regime control kills popularity, sub-reddits going black can cause a pretty visible dip in the visitor stats. I guess this happens when you move from community driven to profit driven with a site like Reddit.
I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation.
As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.
Disclaimer: I have been a moderator on a website of slightly less than a million registered users from 2003 to 2008 so I have my heart on the moderator's side.
The moderators of Reddit actually have very legitimate issues and are bringing points that need to be addressed. Moderators of websites as big as reddit should be managed correctly and supervised. They should also have a line on communication with the administrators of the website for issues such as this one.
They should also receive proper tools needed to ensure that their work is done correctly and in a timely fashion.
Reddit's moderators have even greater responsibilities than moderators of more normals websites have. Their efforts on this point should be rewarded or at the very least recognized. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.
Some subreddit are ecosystems that are bigger, better staffed and more organized that a lot of websites out there.
To say openly that moderators and content creators are simply creating a ruckus out of nothing and should be ignored is biting the hand that feeds you. Those people are people of passions, and people of passions will hate quickly and move on to a better suited ecosystem even faster.
The firing of that employee was only the bottlecap blowing out from all the pressure. She also ended up a martyr to push the strike into the mind of regular users. Otherwise, she is barely related to what happened on reddit recently.
There are certainly legitimate complaints to be made about how Reddit empowers the volunteer work of moderators, but that is the least of the complaints that are clogging the site right now. There are three major objections being raised loudly and repeatedly:
1) Moderators, who provide a huge portion of the value of the site, are treated with disrespect by the organization.
2) An employee whose availability was useful to a few major subreddits was dismissed without warning, leaving those subreddits in the lurch, which is emblematic of the above disrespect.
3) Ellen Pao is CEO.
These are presented in decreasing order of relevance to the actual problem, and increasing order of urgency to those driving the discussion.
Pao needs to do an AMA. A small number of users is upset at her stance in favor of diversity and against sexism, and because she's historically refused to directly engage a community that's gotten used to having direct access to movie stars and presidents, those few have been able to convince many more that she's a cold bitch and doesn't deserve respect. She needs to be on the front page all day gracefully responding to the revolting things being said about her so that normal users can remember that she's an actual person and not an anonymous force of nature advancing evil in the world.
It is sadly too late. On such a crisis, you need to react and react fast. You or your public relation team must be ready to leap and be as transparent as possible. You need to have someone on call for such situations.
The minute that employee was fired and the pressure was building up, they should have reacted by saying (as much as legally possible) why she was fired. The internet is used to transparency. Then, they should have explained how Reddit, as a community, will move on. Meanwhile, the moderators should have been aware of what was going on since the very beginning and the administrators of the website should have relied on them to control their respective communities.
Firmly affirm the current situation, then firmly affirm your plan for the future.
They should have addressed the fears of the users. Users who are known to be very afraid of order and who will quickly pick up a mob mentality.
Instead of reacting quickly, the community was completely ignored and free to be scared. This resulted in making a meme of hating the CEO of Reddit. By meme, I mean that definition: "an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means".
It is too late to change this. Once the internet makes a meme out of something, and that meme catch, is it contagious and there is nothing you can do about it.
They then apologized. By apologizing, you are taking the blame in the eyes of everyone.
Ellen Pao will never be seen with respect by the Reddit community from now on. Instead, she appear to be an incompetent leader who is unable to deal with crisis.
> A small number of users is upset at her stance in favor of diversity and against sexism
Uh. What?
First of all, Ellen Pao's stances against sexism and pro diversity are suspect. She used them as a reason as to why she was fired, and sued her former employer. She lost. Miserably.
Her husband is also an allged ponzi scheme fraudster.
Whatever Ellen Pao may deserve, sympathy is not it.
> She needs to be on the front page all day gracefully responding to the revolting things being said about her so that normal users can remember that she's an actual person and not an anonymous force of nature advancing evil in the world.
yes but since his mea culpa the community is not holding it against him.
One of the mig issues people have with Ellen Pao is that her first responses on the issue were to the NYT, Buzzfeed etc and not directly to her own users.
>One of the mig issues people have with Ellen Pao..
Bullshit, that's just the newest thing they've loaded their blunderbusses with - and is less than days old. It isn't why they've been calling her a cunt and hitler, and asking for her to be fired or killed for months.
yes it is a recent thing however look at the "we apologise" thread and it is the topic of the top voted comment. People care about it.
The cunt/hitler thing all relates to the banning of r/fph and the reasoning behind it. Her statement to the effect that reddit was not a free-speech site but a safe place was the originator of most of the hatred. Reddit always championed itself as a free-speech site and it was the users that came and stayed for that reason that felt betrayed by her personally.
No, it's even older than the FPH banning. It's pure tabloid misogyny, and has been increasing steadily since here appointment.
FPH's banning and the Victoria thing have certainly turned up the volume of it, as the hate-squad hold up each new issue (and with the Victoria episode, finally an issue that raised valid concerns) as more proof that they'd been right to harass her for months.
Really? If it was around before fph then it was very low key and it would have been because of her lawsuit because prior to fph that was all we really knew about her. But that doesn't mean that the hate was unfounded, her behaviour as portrayed by her own admission at trial, was shitty and as a jury decided she was not discriminated against, she was just a shitty person trying to play the victim card. People didn't want her associated with something (reddit) that they care about.
It is nothing to do with misogyny that is just a handy wall to hide behind because she is female. If it was misogyny then why the uproar over a female member of staff being fired?
If her accusers were shown to be female it would become a our her race. End of the day she is disliked because of her actions and behaviour, her gender and race have nothing to do with it.
I couldn't care less about Pao. I think the attitude and actions of Ohanian (who is, after all, the person who fired Taylor) has been pretty much the antithesis of helpful during this debacle.
Reddit and Redditors, as with HN and its participants, are diverse and contain multitudes.
I moderate a couple of modest subs and have participated on Reddit, generally positively, for three years. Pao hadn't impressed me hugely, though I didn't find her behavior strongly negative. The FPH situation was handled and communicated poorly, but from what I understand, was sound (the banning was based on violations of site rules, not specific expressed opinions).
Pao's personal legal issues have certainly been a distraction, and while I've not obsessed over the case and related issues, she, and her husband, seem to have an interesting history and set of problems.
The blow-up over Taylor was different: it concerned directly trust between Reddit and a small number of very crucial moderators -- /r/IAMA's mod team is 23 users, but the are the gatekeepers to one of Reddit's most valuable features (not one I use much myself, FWIW). The specific roster of complaints from IAMA and other subs affected were on point and material.
The response from the larger Reddit community has varied: some was legit, some expressions of outrage over real or imagined past offenses.
My own views of Pao took a sharp downward note at that point. David Frum and Asher Wolf, neither of whom are pimply-faced teenage boys, both make great observations:
I agree with every single thing you've written here. My only point was that the Victoria situation was not at all the reason the hate-squad (who issue death-threats instead of talking about the issues) started hating on Pao - it's just another bullet in their misogyny gun.
The mods/subs going dark is another thing, and was not at all addressed by my original comment.
Is it a given that responding to the community is the proper role for a CEO? I can envision a configuration of reddit corporate structure where there is a responsive, deeply involved, and powerful "head of community" position who would respond to the community in these situations, while the CEO does more traditional CEO stuff like talking to investors and press (among other things). The problem seems to me to be that they don't appear to have that "head of community" position. Indeed, it seems that /u/chooter had become that person de facto, perhaps without the company's leadership realizing it, and seemingly without the necessary internal sway.
maybe not, but this is a social media site, where those in charge have always engaged with the users through the site. kn0thing, jedberg, spez etc all did, Yishan did and so users can be forgiven for expecting Pao to follow suit. To avoid that and go to Buzzfeed, which is a reddit petpeeve just because they take a good portion of their content from reddit and dont give atribution, well it doesnt take the CEO of a social media site to work out how that will pan out.
A key role of the CEO is in addressing key constituencies and stakeholders: investors, business partners, customers, employees. And in Reddit's case, the people who do much of the heavy lifting in managing the forums, and in participating in discussions on the site.
There are limits to how much time you want to dedicate to any one constituency. But yes, when you've got a problem with your mods and users on a mod-and-user-centric company, you talk to the mods and users.
I would say that the CEO's key role is more to make sure that key constituencies and stakeholders are addressed as effectively as possible, not necessarily to address them directly themselves. Sometimes it is actually more effective to delegate that job. Having said that, it certainly seems to be the case that the closer a constituency is to the core competency of the business, the more likely it is that they should be addressed directly by the CEO, and I buy the argument that moderators and heavy contributors should be the core competency or reddit.
> Is it a given that responding to the community is the proper role for a CEO?
No, it isn't.
Ellen Pao being at fault for everything is a meme spawned by the Gamergate/MRW/anti-SJW crowd. The recent mishandling of the fatpeoplehate ban and then the lack of communication about letting Victoria go have just fanned those existing flames.
If the CEO was some boring old white man, nobody would be calling for his head like this, nor would they be the best person to be publishing apologies.
i think you are comparing the reddit CEO to some bluechip company like Apple or IBM. It isnt anything like them, they produce no goods, their users are their product and more so their moderators. They are a social media company, if you cant deal qwith social media on your own site how are you supposed to be trusted with a social media site?
If the CEO was some boring old white man and he had done the same thing then yes his head would be called for. You are trying to make this an issue of her gender and her race when it is nothing to do with that.
FUnnily enough one of the reasons that she inspires such dislike is because she played the victim of sexism card and then after a trial she was found to have no case. And actually what came out of the trial was the truth about her self-serving behaviour. The trial documents make it very clear that she was no angel, she was sexist toward other females, she hads an affair whilst married, with a married man, and then blamed that on the other person all the while there were text messages and emails showing she was as much to blame as he was.
Coupled with all of this her partner is currently facing a lawsuit on a case of fraud. Stuff like that pisses people off and with reddit there are a lot of users that care a lot about the site, they care about how it is perceived and they see her as detrimental to the site in part becuase of her behaviour as CEO but also due to her behaviour prior to becoming CEO which has been well reported regardless of her reddit position.
Reddit has had several CEOs, which the typical user rarely knew by name.
The idea that the CEO of Reddit has anything to do with the average user's experience has come about very recently, and I believe it's being propagated by the fatpeoplehate crowd (she sure affected their experience).
The mishandling of IAmA seems to have been done by Alexei Ohanian, but he's not being photoshopped onto Hitler.
> Reddit has had several CEOs, which the typical user rarely knew by name.
I have to say that is wrong. Yishan Wong was the CEO before Ellen Pao. He posted on the site often, he made a bunch of announcements on the site as CEO. Users were well aware of who he was. Prior to that reddit was under CondeNast publications and whilst the CEO of conde nast may not have been well know the admins such as kn0thing, spex, jedberg etc were all well know active users on the site from its inception. There has always been communication between admins with the users through the site.
>The idea that the CEO of Reddit has anything to do with the average user's experience has come about very recently
Again this is wrong. In terms of CEOs Yishan Wong engaged users this when he joined. This was not something that has come about in the last 6 weeks as a result of r/fph being banned.
>The mishandling of IAmA seems to have been done by Alexei Ohanian, but he's not being photoshopped onto Hitler.
Again this is wrong. Ohanian (kn0thing) certainly got involved in the immediate aftermath. I presume because they thought it would be accepted more easily by users if he said it rather than Ellen Pao saying it. He made a faux pas at one point and took some flak for it, but he understands reddit and he had some serious goodwill in the bank so he leveraged that and things are looking peachy for him now. But there is no indication that he was to blame for the AMA mishandling at all, his role appears to be cleanup.
"Several" was the wrong word, I guess, because they weren't CEOs before Yishan. Anyway, I still dispute that the typical user knew Yishan Wong by name.
As for Ohanian (kn0thing), I'm thinking of a screenshot of modmail I saw, which was the main primary source I've seen about how admins screwed this all up. Not sure how to find it again, as it was deep in a thread and Reddit's search is not great, but the gist of it seemed to be that (a) he personally had plans for big changes in how AMA would work, and (b) he was oblivious about how these changes would affect moderators, particularly those organizing an r/science AMA with Stephen Hawking.
>If the CEO was some boring old white man, nobody would be calling for his head like this, nor would they be the best person to be publishing apologies.
You mean like Brendan Eich? (CTO, but still)
Or, as long as we're talking about online megacommunities, how about moot of 4chan? He stepped down as the owner of 4chan half a year ago and people are still mad at him.
Go listen to the live Q&A moot did at the end. Yes, all eight hours of it. All community managers should strive to be at peace with the world as moot was. He truly understood his community and understood that no matter what he did, there'd still be people hating him.
I have to wonder how many of these issues are the result of poor allocation of limited resources.
Reddit runs on a shoestring for an audience that big, and still loses money. As I understand Victoria's position, a full salary went to hand-hold celebrities during AMAs. That's a lot to spend for a portion of the participants in one subreddit (I don't think every AMA got that support).
Given limited resources, that meant that a salary's worth of resources were not available to help pay a software developer who could be working on better mod tools--which would benefit every mod on the entire site.
That might be the entire story behind Victoria's dismissal: reallocating money from hand-holding to software development. Which is more in line with the typical Silicon Valley tech company way of doing things. Facebook and Google and Twitter spend a lot of money for software development, so they don't have to spend much on hand-holding.
> It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.
Reading Pao's post, it looks like that was part of their decision. Since the value primarily comes from the users and mods, let them organize and run the AMAs from now on. Then the company can use that money to make better software.
Note: this is my own speculation based on public stuff I've read.
it was not just one subreddit though. She orgamised a lot of AMAs on a lot of subreddits. r/IAMA was the main one, but she did a lot for r/books, r/science etc. Specifically if you look at r/science AMAs these tend not to be for the people to shift their latest product or raise awareness of their charity but to impart knowledge onto the public. TO explain current news stories usually with the people that ran or worked directly on the project. So it was not spent solely on the participants of one subreddit. However it was also her work that helped provide more credibility to the format. Things like the barack obama AMA were major factors in driving people to the site. And you only have to look at how the morgan freeman or woody harrelson AMAs went to get an idea of how a poorly managed AMA could quickly become a PR car crash. Having Victoria protected both the site, its users and the AMA guests by giving them someone who knew the process, what would and what would not work.
>Since the value primarily comes from the users and mods, let them organize and run the AMAs from now on
This is not what they have proposed. They have set up a team to deal with AMA issues. So now there is a team where there was once a single point of contact with direct responsibility. They dont want to concentrate on software they want to monetize the site. AMAs are one of their best features for doing that, it brings in advertisers, page views, recognition, credibility etc so that they handled the whole thing so poorly reflects badly on management.
Advertising revenue is under $10 million per a link provided earlier today from Merideth Paterson.
I don't know about other revenues (Gold, ??).
$50m/64 gives $781,250 per employee. At $200k/yr spend per employee, that's about a four year run time. How much above or below that depends on revenues, growth plans etc.
Celebrity AMAs are the biggest way Reddit gets media exposure. I would think investing in making them run smoothly would be a high priority for Reddit.
Yes, unless you could automate "Contact courteously celebrities, explain everything, answer questions, and guide them.", it should be money very well spent for Reddit.
I know you are trolling, but people legitimately are asking this question so I will respond.
>I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.
>they're
>they
Reddit is 160 million people because it is a huge online community. Calling them children and referring to them as a contiguous unit of alike individuals is laughable. So there isn't a straight answer why some subset of 160 million people are angry but a lot of them are for various reasons.
>I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired
Brendan Eich was way more qualified to run Mozilla than Pao is to run reddit. He was really fucking good at his job and is one of the smartest engineers in tech. He couldn't effectively do his job and had to resign. It doesn't matter if the backlash was fair, it was impacting the company negatively. Pao is not the right person to run reddit, hasn't made great decisions, is followed by personal scandal and is generally detested by the community(which is reddits product). She has to step down whether you feel slighted about it or not.
Calling people emotional children and upset kids is just flame inducing. Maybe that person wasn't actually trolling but it was obvious crafted to illicit an angry response.
Don't you think you're being a bit premature in your assessment of Pao? She's an interim CEO who's been on the job mere months. Shutting down the subreddits she did needed to happen in order for reddit to be viable long-term. This latest issue is just about disaffected male teenagers looking for a reason to get mad at the new female CEO. It's so transparent and so pathetic.
I'm curious about something - do you feel like the obvious bigotry in your statement is justified? It's almost entirely unlikely that you have any real demographic information about the people you are slagging, never mind any actual knowledge of people's reasoning, so from my POV, your statement is borne of pure prejudice. Care to convince me otherwise?
You have no idea what bigotry is. It's possible to criticize the actions of a group of people without being prejudiced and my assessment is based on actual posts and comments that I've read over the past week. Seeing what kinds of content is upvoted gives you a sense of the overall sentiment and it's hard to rationalize the vitriol of the user base in response to this particular event.
Interesting opening sentence in your reply. I didn't bother reading past it since starting with an insult like that is as good an excuse to ignore your thoughts as I need. Thanks for making it easy!
Please, both of you and everyone else, follow the HN guidelines when commenting on this site. That means replying civilly and substantively, or not at all. This is the rule here, irrespective of how wrong or provocative another user may be.
> This latest issue is just about disaffected male teenagers looking for a reason to get mad at the new female CEO
> It's so transparent and so pathetic.
I just don't find it obvious that it is because she is a woman. I also didn't realize it was only socially mal-adjusted male teenagers who are calling for her ouster. 200K people signed the petition to find a new CEO. Why do you think this is just angsty women hating teenagers?
It's also not "obvious" due to the fact that this whole uprising started with the firing of a female employee. If this demographic of over 160 million users is in fact made up of largely "women hating teenagers", why would they get so riled up and defend a woman that lost her job? It just doesn't add up.
What's obvious here, is people trying really hard to frame almost every bit of internet drama possible into some kind of gender war. It's just disingenuous and disgusting.
Which doesn't list any actual specific grievances, but does mention the completely irrelevant gender discrimination lawsuit she was involved with? The one that supporters are signing with openly misogynistic and racist slogans and nicknames? The one that's full of duplicate signatures and obviously fake names? That's the petition you're talking about?
Let's not forget the genius of not wanting someone who will "sue her way to the top". To the top of what...reddit? She's already the CEO. Whoever wrote that pretty much explicitly dislikes her for the gender discrimination lawsuit and has little to say about her job performance.
Really, it's right out of the men's rights playbook: Pretend everyone always gets by on merit alone and anyone disputing that fantasy must be trying to cheat their way through life.
Why do you think this is some sexist conspiracy? She lost the lawsuit against KPCB, she tried to blackmail them by threatening appeal and it does speak to her job performance. She was dismissed because she didn't have:
“the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player.”[0]
Many people seem to cling to the trope that women are being oppressed and intentionally singled out. This isn't one of those cases. Why do you think it is?
According to the trial, Pao slept with a married colleague and then tried using it as leverage for the next few years. It's ugly but certainly a relevant aspect of Pao's character.
Strange, I've never heard anyone make that claim before nor can I find it in any write ups of the case.
That she slept with a married man is public record but "used it for leverage" doesn't seem to have been part of the testimony. I'm afraid you may have been duped by a person with an agenda to make Pao look bad.
Victoria being let off ruined a lot of currently planned AMA's - because she played such a huge part in it all.
It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person.
With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase. AMA's on Reddit are a pretty huge deal. It's a large part of Reddit's popularity - such that even the POTUS has had an "AMA" on Reddit. So when you disrupt how they work and give absolutely no word as to why the person who played such a large part in many AMA's being scheduled, planned, and hosted: you're going to step on a lot of toes.
I read one story of a person flying to New York for an AMA. He had to change his plans and work with the person planning the AMA to schedule different interviews or sightseeing on his time because the AMA was cancelled due to Victoria being let off. That's a loss of a person's time and money with no explanation being given for why someone who was performing their job suddenly wasn't tasked with the job. I'd be pretty peeved myself. Luckily the man was very understanding it was outside of the moderator's control with Victoria being let off, but I imagine some mods aren't as lucky with their scheduled AMA's.
To me it seems clear that they've decided to dislike Ellen ( they have sub dedicated to portraying her as Hitler, for fucks sake). So whenever her administration makes a mistake their reaction is going to be bloody murder.
Yeah firing the woman without a backup plan for the scheduled AMAs or whatever else was going on was a mistake. But what does someone have to do in order to be fired in that manor? Are we to assume that Reddit didn't understand the woman's daily duties and what affect her immediate/un-planned absence from the company would be? We don't know why the woman was let go, could had been worth the potential of missing a few scheduled AMAs (or even this backlash).
regardless of the reasons for the firing there definitely did not appear to be a backup plan in place with regard to her AMA responsibilities.
A plan has appeared now and they seem to be portraying it as being in place prior to the firing but it seems haphazard and if it was in place it was not communicated to the people who would need to use it (AMA mods) in time for it to prevent any disruption.
Given how open Reddit's structure is (in the sense that it gives non-employees strong moderator rights and works to make them feel part of the community), are they treading untrodden ground in walking the tightrope between keeping the community in the loop and respecting the right to privacy of their employee?
Maybe Victoria was let go because the big mean American tech industry is full of misogynists and she's another casualty in the culture war. Or maybe she was let go because Reddit can't afford to pay her. Or maybe she was let go because she profoundly screwed the company over. The fact of the matter is that the privacy door swings both ways (protects the company, but also protects the employee). We don't know and we don't have a right to know---neither do the moderators.
But that aspect of right to know is traditional. In an ecosystem with so many (essentially) volunteer staff members, perhaps the traditional rules can't be cleanly applied. I suspect the sift-out of this situation will teach people much about how to operate heavy-volunteer corporations.
> With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase
No it doesn't, and in most cases the company is protecting the privacy of the individual being fired. Can you imagine if she were fired for something like sexual harassment and reddit we're telling the world all of the dirty details? In all likelihood, saying nothing is what they should be doing.
AMA worked fine before all the organization and planning of celebrity appearances. If you're a celebrity or politician or whatever, just hop on, make a post, message a mod for verification or post something to twitter and have at it. The only reason it became so ridiculous is because the mods themselves wanted to feel important, like they were "running" AMA. If some "important" person can't use the internet, then don't do an AMA or find someone to help you. Why there needs to be an employee and all this formality is beyond me...
She's not very likable. You don't see down voting like this for Alexis, Yishan or, elsewhere, PG and SamA. She still speaks more in MBA-ease like "providing tools" and "listening to users" and "communicated poorly", etc.
And the person fired was by most accounts a well-liked, very visible, performing employee. Dismissing someone like that with very little care was horrific management.
Edit: I don't know why I included Alexis since he also comes off pretty smug and user-hostile (e.g. "popcorn time").
I've met a lot of people I'd consider 'success' focused individuals in the Ivies, I suspect if I met her I'd consider her in the same group.
There is a focus on a narrow definition of success that is more important than anything else. How that success is accomplished doesn't matter, just that it is. The behavior is surprisingly irrespective of traditional intellect or competence, it's pure focus and drive. It also is not about doing anything well per se, it's just about gaining stature.
I don't know if it maps perfectly to narcissism because there is a huge effort component that is not requisite to being a narcissist but is ever-present in the group I'm trying to describe.
This level of backlash being related to sexual orientation is a ridiculous claim. You should be ashamed. It's unfounded comments like yours that builds opposing communities against real issues.
I dont think that is true. I have used reddit for quite some time, probably since 2006. I have no personal animosity toward her however I dont think she is the right leader for reddit. And I say that as a user, not an owner, shareholder, employee etc. My reasons are because I like they way the old reddit operated. The reason that I say that is because when I started using reddit the free speech ethic was proudly trumpeted. This was around the time of the DeCSS key event that started the downfall of Digg.
Even up to as recently as 2012 Yishan Wong was reaffirming reddits commitment as a free speech platform. This was around the time of the r/jailbait takedown. But really that was the beginning of the end, r/jailbait was shut down because of illegal content being posted. I never saw definitive proof of that and I dont think any was offered. This was about the time that there was media interest in reddit (and to be fair r/jailabit was one of the more embarassing links that could and did show up on a google search for reddit). So it went and with it the start of a slippery slope of censorship began.
After r/jailabit (which the majority of users agreed with) there was the fappening, again a lot of users agreed, but all these agreeable users were relatively new, they were here for cat pictures and memes. They didnt care about reddit as a free speech platform because their interests were not affected. Then we arrive at r/fatpeoplehate being banned. This went because of 'harassment'.
Now we are at a stage where reddit is going to be kept clean and media friendly. It is not a free speech site (and I dont need to hear about free speech does not have to be protected by a businesss, i know that) even though it started off like that and it attracted a lot of users like that and those users built the communities that make reddit thrive.
I dont post that often anymore, i very rarely submit content anymore, I am not as attached to my accounts as I used to be. I am looking for alternatives because the site has changed so much (and so has the userbase) that the content it now has is no longer as relevant as it once was and this is only going to continue under the current leadership, and once a certain point is passed there is no getting it back. If she went now it may be retrieveable, if she lasts another 6-12 months in her position then it may not be.
You're making this far too personal. Reddit is and was a shitty business; afaik, they lost money every year at least through 2012 (Yishan released not raw numbers but a graph showing expenses > revenue).
Reddit has to change: at some point, they will either make money, become a billionaire's hobby or vanish. That's completely separate from the fact that certain people were happy to host jailbait and stolen celebrity titty pics and others are ashamed to be associated with people who do and/or support the former.
Ellen has little do with any of the above except her current remit to make reddit into a functioning -- that is, profitable -- business. But any ceo will have that task.
Yes it is not a profitable business, that is not my concern or that of its users. If reddit went under tomorrow and disappeared from the web, users would find a new site (voat.co, some other reddit clone, it doesnt matter) and congregate there.
Are they allowed to monetise their site? Yes of course they are. However there is a fine line between monestising a social media site and killing it. Just look at Digg, they tried to give to much power to superusers and sites that gained traffic from them. Result the users left in droves so that they werent spoon fed corporate shit. It went from a valuation of $150m to being sold for under half a million. It will never regain what it was, diggs are no longer even measure don the site.
The same thing could happen to reddit. The CEOs job is to monetise the site, but if you kill the site you can not monetise it. This is why reddit needs a CEO that the users like. If ellen pao fucks up the monetisation in such a way that it alienates users they will not be forgiving. If the users like a CEO and the CEO fucked up then they are more likely to forgive and remain redditors than if they hate the CEO and the fuckup is the straw that breaks the camels back.
my contention -- perhaps not clear enough -- is a ceo the users like will be unable to monetize reddit. After all, ceos the users liked failed for what, 9 years running: 2005 to 2014?
A successful CEO would, if it is possible be able to monetise the site without destroying it. Yes the standard box of tricks could not be applied, so a good CEO would work out how to do it without using examples from their MBA classes.
The management of reddit means they have only really had 2 CEOs, prior to that they were a subsidiary of CondeNast. The previous one leaving rather unexpectedly although by his own volition.
They're unpaid contributors to very general interest content, of course it's going to be full of low quality submissions and commenters. Hell, even blogs on general entertainment and "news entertainment" subject matter are full of catty assholes for paid writers. That's just the territory of targeting a wide audience on the internet, and you sorta have to accept it for what it is, because it isn't changing anything soon.
The worst thing you can do is let that behavior poison the well for you. There is always going to be someone who shares your opinions but you don't like their reasoning or the way they choose to share their reasoning. You don't want other people to write your ideas off because some people that agree with you are assholes, so extend the same courtesy to people you don't agree with.
I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.
Yes, you can. There is more than one answer, and 10x more people that are just into bandwagon shouting than thoroughly articulating their positions, but that doesn't mean you can't find it. It means you don't want to try.
>As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired.
Supposedly she helped with setting up a lot of IAMAs as well as fighting to keep their integrity up (i.e. identifying when an actor's agent was posing as that actor as part of a marketing ploy). Even if you really liked IAMAs and what I've heard is completely true, these are benefits you wouldn't directly notice. It is like the average computer user feeling slighted by the Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or the average voter feeling slighted by the TPP. These have nasty effects, but they are not at all direct in the harm they cause, and as such people do not feel slighted even when they have been.
No one has publicly said why she was fired. We only know it happened rapidly. It happened shortly after a Jesse Jackson AMA that went way off the rails, but that could be coincidence.
Is it speculating or finding out the truth that would do harm in your opinion? Her firing is at the very center of a very public controversy - why should it be a secret?
Victoria is most likely legally barred from speaking out, so the facts would need to come from third-party witnesses.
One look at the completely irrelevant second sentence of the petition to remove her [1] should tell you everything to know about why users are actually angry at her. This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.
Reddit has harbored toxic subreddits for long enough that they've nurtured a huge user base of racists and misogynists. It's a demographic crisis and it apparently doesn't take much to incite these mobs. These vocal and active users hated Pao before she became reddit CEO and these events were entirely predictable.
It doesn't take a misogynist or a racist to be upset to see a well-liked person fired abruptly, especially with no apparent cause. There is a lot of stored-up discontent with the way Reddit is run, some of it even goes back to when Yishan was CEO. It's a fool's errand to try to please all of such a huge userbase, but Pao seems to have been able to unite some very unlikely factions against her.
You say there is no apparent cause, but you're not privy to the details and have no right to be unless you were a reddit employee working closely with her. It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing, regardless of the position and company.
The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice to people who depending on the fired person. That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.
Strictly speaking that's correct. Here in the real world, Reddit might weigh more carefully how their operational decisions have affected actual operations, as opposed to continuing to operate as if they have total control of every aspect of Reddit.
>It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing
Of course it is, but keeping silent won't stop the speculation. Something tells me that decorum isn't the reason for Reddit's silence. I suspect they are merely worried about exposing themselves to the possibility of a lawsuit. In that light, it may have been better to come up with a more creative way to move /u/chooter out of her role.
>The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice to people who depending on the fired person.
That is one of the legitimate complaints about /u/chooter's firing. Like it or not, it is perfectly legitimate for anyone, especially Reddit mods and users to have and express an opinion about Reddit and their operations. That's kind of what Reddit is, a place for people to express opinions; I am not sure how that aspect escaped the notice of management. And, yeah, Reddit also dropped the ball by not having a contingency plan for /u/chooter's departure and they probably don't have contingency plans for other employees in critical roles.
>That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.
That's because the firing of /u/chooter was just the catalyst that began the release of a lot of pent-up discontent.
What was the pent-up discontent about? Removing awful subreddits? I still can't come up with any good reasons why people are so angry. Some moderators should be mildly peeved, but that's about it.
Lack of moderation tools, unresponsive admins, accusations of shady conspiracy stuff (payola, censorship, etc), there is other stuff. I don't care to list it all but you should look into it if you want your arguments to be taken seriously.
>Removing awful subreddits?
As has been related to you many times, that is a recent issue.
She has no clue that the "vocal minority" is the one that creates the content that the majority consumes. She comes across as aloof, as if she's just playing out the role of the CEO without really understanding the soul of Reddit. Of course, the vitriol poured out by some of the users is misogynistic, but the larger backlash is really because of the way things were handled by the company.
In the comment thread of the OP, she clarifies the "vocal minority" as referring to the people obsessed with her.
> I assume you’re referring to the NYT quote. I want to clarify the quote's context. The reporter asked about the people who are posting and commenting really negatively about me, not about the mods and content creators. That's what I was referring to when I talked about them being a vocal minority. I do understand that the site is built on the content and voting, and I know that we and the community owe a lot to our mods and core users. —/u/ekjp, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
You could say the same about Twitter's hosting individuals who espouse toxic views. I believe that Reddit essentially wants to be a Twitter for communities (as opposed to individuals), in that they aren't interested in guiding the moral ethos of its userbase (beyond removing illegal or harassing content). So, honest question, would you apply your criticism to Twitter? (and if not, why not?)
I don't use Twitter, so I have no idea. But each company, despite their freewheeling public images, has a right to dictate how their services are used. If that means adopting a stronger stance on these toxic elements in order to improve their user experience (and attractiveness to advertisers), it's probably best to do it.
Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
You're right, but it doesn't matter whether they're "beholden" to it or not, they're the consumers and they're telling the market that they want a platform with transparency and where speech is protected. It's just supply and demand, so if there are signals that reddit isn't satisfying what its market demands, how exactly is reddit immune from your average market forces here? It's a popular site, sure, but so were digg and myspace. Just because users have certain expectations of a site, that the site itself may or may not have actually promised, does not make the site immune from competition.
So in reality, it's not so much about users feeling entitled to anything, it's that reddit seems to have been getting complacent about what it feels it needs to deliver to stay relevant to its content producers and power users (which are the main drivers of a site like that).
Companies can dictate how their services are used all they want, but that doesn't mean they have an automatic right to remain successful/profitable/relevant, especially if how they went about dictating their terms hurt their PR (whether reasonably or not).
We can imagine all we want, but that's up to the markets to decide, not you, advertisers, or anyone else. Advertisers just want to have an audience they can make money off of. If reddit scares away what it's trying to sell to advertisers because it's ideals aren't aligned with its product/userbase, then it deserves to be disrupted by competition.
It's not like we live in a dictatorship where we can easily designate what is/isn't appropriate for a site like reddit to be successful. If a competitor to reddit finds itself being more successful by hosting things like TheRedPill and CoonTown, then so be it, that's how the market works.
> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
And yet, when those non-"beholding" users revolted, Pao apologizes to them, instead of continuing to ignore them.
> imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
Exactly, they are merely "pretty open" and can change the rules as they see fit. Like I said, any belief that all speech should be protected on reddit is false.
Every company has a right to dictate how their services are used but they don't have a right to keep their "freewheeling public images" if they do a lot of dictating.
No, you're right- they don't care about that at all. They're mad that the administration are cracking down on abusive subreddits like "fat people hate" and all of the revenge porn subs that got shut down last year. They're pretending to care about the Victoria thing because it's more socially acceptable.
And you know this because you interviewed the hundreds of thousands of discontent reddit users I presume?
Generalizations are fun, but they don't make the greatest arguments.
Not all users that were upset at the /r/fatpeoplehate ban were subscribers to that sub, and not all subscribers to that sub were partaking in harassment I presume (which is a reasonable assessment based on the subscriber numbers and the usual ratios of participation in online communities).
So taking all that into account, even if this is in fact the main demographic of disgruntled users, that still has nothing to do with misogyny. If it were true misogyny, they likely wouldn't even be using a female employee as their martyr. I really don't understand what distorting contexts and stretching the truth to frame things in terms of sexism is supposed to accomplish, but it's certainly not proving any points.
Reddit screwed up, and it's CEO's decisions clearly affected an influential and vocal part of the community, to the point where it's now open to competition from sites like voat. There's enough business mishaps and silliness in all this to explain everything, I don't see how shoehorning misogyny into it adds anything of value.
> This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.
If the Reddit CEO were male AND their "failed lawsuit" were also about a dishonest attempt at smearing the name of innocent companies and people - like cowards and people without principles do - then I bet you the outcry would be the same.
Good people hate liars, and there's no coming back from playing the victim and seeking compensation unjustifiably.
I won't quote here but search for the points made by celticninja. It's incredible that we allow women to get away with so much that we even forget to acknowledge that liars and unprincipled narcissists come in all shapes and colors. Don't hate the gender, hate the (lack of) principles.
Wow. I really didn't expect this type of shill comment on HN. I mean, I know YC has a vested interest in Reddit but this comment is just awful. Perhaps you should look into what real issues exist within Reddit before saying everyone who doesn't think favorable of EP is an angry "child".
I've been on reddit for a few years, but never really took in how toxic the community is until I started following this. I cannot for the life of me understand how seriously people take that site and the things that go on there. It's like middle school lunchroom politics.
HN is small and heavily weighted towards programming-related types. You don't see that kind of behaviour widely upvoted in the smaller programming-related subreddits either.
I'm a heavy Reddit user who steers well clear of the default-sub cesspits, and I basically never see it.
She's apologizing for the firing, not her existence. Reddit would seem to prefer having her apologize for an irrelevant lawsuit and then resign because the lawsuit conflicts with the personal beliefs of an ever-growing contingent of bitter, young males.
Now, imagine what's going to happen as these angry users leave for somewhere else. They're going to take their attitude with them, and the admins of that future site are going to have to deal with the same exact mentality.
Communities that suffer schisms like the one reddit is working itself into don't fare well. You can't build a healthy community out of a mindset like "well, we aren't THEM". This has happened time after time, and I've been on both sides of the problem, sometimes as a user, sometimes as the admin.
The community is what you make it and who you enagage with. You see a shit community because you probably dont get involved in anything other than the default subreddits. You read the r/funny comments and see LCD comments for karma, that is a shit part of reddit I agree, but it is just a part of reddit it doesnt represent the whole community.
The reddit community just gets cherry picked depending on the view you want to put across. 'Bad Guys' - find an appropriate reddit, e.g. r/picsofdeadkids, or r/hangniggers or just go to r/SRS and choose a topic, sexism, racism etc, choose a particualarly vile comment from a single user and then say look this is representative of reddit, what a hive of scum and villainy.
'Good Guys' - go to r/randomactsofkindness or r/randomactsofpizza, or any local subreddit like r/oregon and find a heart warming story of a user sending another user a new laptop when theirs was stolen right before finals, or turning up with money for a hotel when a guy and his kid get stuck in a new city at night after a football game, or any of a hundred other amazing things that people do for one another just because they are a user of the same site.
Generalising like you have and saying you cant even get an answer about why they are upset is evidently trolling or laziness on your behalf as anyone with 10 minutes could find out the reasons behind the dislike of Pao just by reading the r/announcements and the user comments that go along with them.
With regard to Victoria, she ran the AMA's and was very popular with redditors. Think of it like a sports team cutting a really popular player, without offering an explanation. The fanbase would be really unhappy about that. And this is what reddit does when it's unhappy about something.
The Ellen Pao stuff is complicated, she does have some fault for being the one who made unpopular decisions and the way she managed the process (particularly extremely poor communication) but in general I agree that she gets way too much criticism from the community. She's very unpopular for a bunch of things that are not actually her fault (like people who incorrectly think she censors reddit).
Imagine you're a freshman in college. You join a club and make friends with the people there. Quickly, the club becomes the center of your social life as you make friends with other people there and most of your time, formally or informally, revolves around the club.
As you get older, the club changes as old members leave and new members come. In two years, you feel like things are "going downhill", but just try to do your part a little better, and while you don't feel like you can have any effect on the larger portions (like the big introductory events) you have a little social circle that enjoys what you do, and you focus on making that the best place it can be.
However, when you're a junior, the leadership of the club starts changing rapidly. In six months there are two club presidents, each less liked than the last. Because of the way the university is structured, it would be very difficult to start a new club, or to get members of the previous club to come to the new club, and you've built up a lot of credential within the organization that will evaporate if you leave.
You're in a difficult situation now. You've invested a lot in this community. But top-down changes, possibly combined with normal drift over time, make it look like this community is going downhill. Suddenly, you feel like your little social circle will become an island in a hostile place rather than a part of a bigger organism.
>As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen
A casual X of any Y has no real reason to feel strongly about changes in Y. If I casually played golf, I wouldn't care if the rules changed. If I casually wrote iOS apps, I wouldn't care if Apple took a bigger or smaller cut. If I casually participated in politics, I would be unconcerned about changes that people who are above the level of casual are quite concerned with.
Deciding that because you do not feel personal investment with communities on reddit you are somehow above the "children" who do is misinformed. If you are a casual user you have no reason to be invested and no reason to care.
But to someone who feels close to a community that happens to live on reddit, these changes are scary. All of a sudden the administration team of reddit isn't the friendly, startup-vibe-having, tight-knight team of nerds that do cool april fools pranks and sometimes leave witty comments in pun threads. The Reddit admins have become depersonalized, and lately, they have been making changes that are very intrusive into the site. Whether you agree with those changes is immaterial. The fact is Reddit has moved from a mostly hands-off admin stance to a more hands-on one.
It's impossible to summarize this in a straight answer, because the fundamental reason why people are so upset over this (you are right that they are minor events -- only in the context of the larger reddit/community relationship do they become significant) is mere fear of change, and of the unknown. I think Redditors are very aware of the precarity of their communities. They don't want to lose them, but they think they might now, more so than they used to.
I hope this gives you a better idea of why Redditors might be upset. It's important to remember that every time we can't think of a likely true motivation for someone's actions, that is our own ignorance of human psychology, not a signifier of irrationality on the part of the person we observe. It's easy to write this off with bigotry or ageism, but that doesn't bring us closer to the truth.
I tend to (maybe unjustly) associate the Reddit community as being the Gamergate community.
I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.
No, the hate comes from a frivolous lawsuit, terrible policies, terrible management and overall terrible CEO. None of that has anything to do it with video games, SJW or her being a woman.
Kanye West is an amazing amazing figure, and a really interesting personality. If all you know about the man are his misplaced frustrations that manifest themselves in public ways, then you really don't know the guy or the influence he's had on millions over a decade.
He's produced greatness, but not only that, he's done so consistently. He's made some missteps along the way but if you really dig deep and watch his interviews over the years you'll start to understand the person he is.
People are very interesting, and it's so easy to characterize public figures in these black and white ways and dismiss their work, but it's far more difficult to truly understand the person, their motivations, and their frustrations.
I've watched hours and hours of Kanye interviews, listened to days and days of his music, and watched him grow as a person as he progressed through his legendary career. It's truly incredible.
I think there's something be learned from Justin Bieber as well, whose music I don't like and whose fanbase I dislike even more.
People are fascinating, you just have to dig deeper to find those parts, and put forth effort to learn something from other people. Even those people you don't like.
but you can legitimately dislike someone, Kanye is incredibly conceited. I appreciate his music (well first 4 anyway) but his attitude sucks. Even at glastonbury he was stopping the performance to tell the crowd they were witnessing the greatest rock star ever. That just isnt true and if he actually believes it then he is making more of an idiot of himself.
You dont decide you are the greatest rock star, the people do, and they discuss it for a long time before they come to that conclusion. You need to be compared to historical greats to even come close. The only person I see talking about Kanye in that way is Kanye.
I should not need to wade through hours of footage to see him portrayed in a favourable light, if he acts a dick when he knows he is being watched/recorded/broadcast then it is a safe assumption to make that he is generally a dick.
I've actively avoided digging "deeper" into the ego maniac that is Kanye West, but I do enjoy pointing out that he tried to rip off Aphex Twin by lifting a sample and not paying for the usage rights. Kanye is quite an inspiration though, in that if he can get ahead in this world with the limited talents and acidic presence, then there's hope for other, better people to achieve influence. I mean, it's not really difficult to find a snippet of music, loop it, add a beat that sounds like it came pre-programmed on an MPC, and claim to be a production genius, but it definitely takes some hubris.
There were a few components associated with this recent upheaval.
- Earlier that week, reddit modified the search function which (though I don't know the details as I am not a mod and really don't care) apparently affected or limited the moderators' abilities is some negative manner.
- The banning of harassing subreddits, though none of the lurkers cared at all and the majority of active users did not care, left a sour taste in many users' mouths.
- The firing of that employee apparently greatly affected the ability to facilitate the most popular subreddit on the website, as well as a few others.
When the mods of IAMA closed shop for a while due to the third issue, the powder keg exploded, leading others who disliked the treatment of mods and those who irrationally hate the reddit CEO to make a hullabaloo for eight hours.
Frankly, I deleted my reddit account due to this. Not for any dislike the CEO or a desire to stand up for mods' rights, but rather because I genuinely do not care about the drama anymore and would rather focus my attention on more important things[1] and more interesting topics[2].
It's crazy to me how poorly this whole recent "revolt" was handled. The only thing of value to Reddit Inc is the community, so you think they would be more proactive about everything, that they would be hiring more community managers rather than firing key ones. Is this their Digg moment? Probably not, but how many more fuckups like this can they make before the users leave for good?
I've cut Pao a lot of slack in the past, but this makes her look like she has no idea what she's doing. No communication for days? Speaking to outside reporters before speaking to her community? It makes no sense to me.
She did, in fact, attempt to reply to early discussions on Reddit but she was downvoted into oblivion (e.g. -5500+ down votes) and she wasn't ever going to be heard, no matter how relevant or important her discussion was. So she probably thought it was smarter (and would get better exposure while the community cools down a little bit) to communicate with Buzzfeed et. al.
Yeah, I've heard that, and that's crazy too. The community actually has a veto on communications from the CEO? Absolutely nuts. They couldn't just hack the backend to give her a billion upvotes?
Much of this controversy is driven by the community's loss of trust in the site's administration. Do you think the tactic you suggest would be constructive toward rebuilding that trust?
Faking upvotes, no. But that wouldn't be necessary if they had an actual communication channel in place ahead of time. Which they would if they really understood the value of the community and what it takes to manage it.
This is the first thing I've seen from Ellen Pao that looks like a step in the right direction. There area few challenges she faces at reddit that I don't envy. It is an unfortunate consequence of her lawsuit that she gained enough notoriety to be disliked by a portion of the male cohort of reddit. She is now in the awkward position of both trying to address real problems with the site that have gone unaddressed for a long time and mitigating the damage that her personal brand is causing by being associated with the site.
Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her interactions with the reddit community.
Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people leave.
I feel bad for Pao on a personal level, but I feel like she is too divisive to be an effective leader of a site like reddit. All people deserve respect though and should not have to put up with hateful personal attacks.
I think mainly this underscores the need for the internet to evolve. Sites like reddit and twitter are too important to be controlled by a single for-profit entity.
We need distributed systems that respect anonymity and privacy that prevent censorship.
We also need the ability for groups to form where content can be curated.
I think there are a number of projects in development that have potential. It will be interesting to see where things go.
well, the harassment standard is worded in such a way that's it's purely subjective, so I predict the continuation of inconsistent application of the policy.
also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies are a serious mistake.
on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all popcorn-munching entertainment to me.
They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.
No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them.
But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).
This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing.
Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.
> No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them.
Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's 'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of the users.
I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they don't have control over their community.
This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.
Social sites really aren't easy to monetize without pissing off your users. MySpace imploded, Twitter still isn't profitable, Google backed off'ish from Plus, etc... I think Facebook is one of the few that seemed to successfully monetize a free social site.
I think the issue is that Pao (et al.) genuinely don't understand their community. That's the major source of the friction. Consequently, they can't figure out a realistic plan to build a healthy business around it. They seem to manage to piss a large percentage of their community off with every minor change they try to make. It's a bit sad because it's a huge community.
Possibly Aether (http://getaether.net/) might be something like what you have in mind.
So you are saying they should have spun it and presented the moderator in bad light? Yes, they are allowed to fire her, but so is the community allowed to vocally disagree with the decision and other terrible management that has gone far enough on Reddit.
Not exactly : that employee was the sole line of communication for the most popular part of the site.
The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became.
The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening.
They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins.
So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting.
Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Aside from the protest over the weekend, over 150k people (non-moderators) signed a petition to have Ellen Pao removed as CEO. That doesn't seem like a tools issue.
> Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
But out of Reddit's entire user base how many are actually pissed off enough to go someplace else? Let alone how many are actually pissed off over this or other politics around Reddit and mods. I'd have to imagine the number is very small.
The entire userbase doesn't matter that much. The majority of reddit users don't contribute any decent content.
Keeping the minority of users that are actually producing content happy is what they have failed to do and is the real risk - if there's nothing to look at, the rest of the userbase will follow the content somewhere else.
Honestly, the much bigger issue was that they didn't tell anyone she was let go!
The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?".
That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.
That's not really a logical reason to be upset since we don't know the reasons behind her termination. Even if it was a heartless business move, that's still not a very good reason for all the crazy levels of anger directed at Pao. She might be bad at her job, but a lot of it was way over the top.
What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit?
edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.
What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job.
The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
I'm sure this happens a lot. But I'd have expected more of an effort to gain the trust of the users, which would seem to me to be an important element in all this.
Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense.
> The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO.
I have a hard time attributing recent events directly to Pao, though with her being CEO I guess ultimately the buck does stop with her.
> I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
That could well be the case (though I fail to see the connection), but that still does not explain why she was initially picked and that's what my question is about. I can't imagine it was just a roll of the dice.
A lot of this conversation assumes we all know what the role of Reddit's CEO should be. But we probably don't: the title means radically different things in different organizations.
It seems from easily available evidence that Reddit's core business challenge was taking a runaway successful online community and reliably monetizing it. If the CEO role at Reddit was primarily responsible for dealing with that problem, it's not surprising that the kind of person who filled it might not be congenial to message board nerds. The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.
The knee-jerk response to this obvious point is that someone brought in to monetize a community could easily damage it by being tone-deaf or compromising it in pursuit of profit. But most of the things Reddit Inc did to damage its community predate Pao, often by many years.
This is the stuff I think about when people point out that Pao was a terrible CEO for Reddit Inc because she didn't know how to send a private message.
How does any CEO get selected?
I'd imagine it has something to do with knowing the right people.
I wouldn't necessarily blame Pao entirely for what transpired, but it works both ways. Nadella, for instance, has been attributed with many of the positive changes that occurred recently within Microsoft. Was he single-handededly responsible for all of these positive changes? Hardly.
Human beings are poor at grasping complex and sometimes chaotic systems. Hence we concentrate our emotions on a single target. The amount of vitriol in this instance may or may not be warranted, but I'd hope that someone who took the job title of CEO was prepared for it.
I keep getting the sense this is some major inside-baseball stuff getting played out in public because moderators and admins on Reddit have giant megaphones. The complaints seem reasonable, the responses seem reasonable, but almost none of it has any impact on users of the site.
The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever.
Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech.
It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.
This is just a testament to how most MBAs are incapable of seeing past the blinders that were put on their eyes in B school. Anyone who's been in Silicon Valley long enough will have seen this in many other forms (I know I have), although perhaps not as high profile as this one.
The success of Reddit is directly attributable to high profile subs (/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/AMA, /r/ListenToThis, etc.) and less visible but still well run subs that cater to more niche interests/topics (/r/MakeupAddiction, /r/PersonalFinance, etc.). Those subreddits would not exist without the thousands of man hours put in by moderators who are volunteers (modulo a few exceptions, such as Victoria). Anyone who has moderated an internet community knows how much sweat, effort, time, and pain go into maintaining a high quality community, and how crucial it is to keep your moderators happy and make them feel like their effort is valued.
The fact that the people running Reddit do not seem to realize that is a perfectly valid reason for the user base to be angry. A lot of Silicon Valley executives like to think of their company+product as some neat little money making machine that sits in a vacuum and that they can tweak and modify as they like. But the reality is that building a community platform like Reddit is very different from running a sausage factory. You can run your sausage factory in to the ground, and the sausages won't complain (the workers might, but the US does a pretty good job at avoiding that through strict control on labor unions). But when you start shitting on Reddit, the users will complain and protest - after all, you might control the code and the servers, but the community as a whole has contributed much more than you have to the end product.
You can't separate "reddit" and "the community" like some commenters here are doing. This dualism makes no sense - reddit and its community are the same thing. You can't have the thoughtful, well run threads on /r/AskScience without the dumb jokes on /r/funny.
Ellen Pao and friends do not seem to grasp those subtleties (this apology is just damage control), and it lead to the complete disaster we are seeing right now. This isn't rocket science - in fact the Reddit community is quite predictable. Any Reddit user would have been able to tell you how the community was going to react to these actions. The fact that Ellen Pao has some shady connections (her husband not being in jail because he has enough money is a good first example) is just more fuel on top of the fire. This was extremely easy to predict, and the fact that the Reddit leadership seems to be completely clueless about it is a very bad sign for things to come. The reddit community didn't have a problem with kn0thing, yishan, and others because they were first and foremost reddit users and know how to interact with the community. It's not the case for the current people in charge.
The community has every right to be up in arms. And if you think that the Reddit community is shit and don't spend time there, like some commenters here state, then what makes you feel like your input has any sort of relevance?
This isn't a technology or management fiasco - it's a political debacle. At a community interaction level, it's not very different from taking someone with arbitrary credentials and putting them in charge of a country they're completely unfamiliar with in the hope that they're going to make that country a peaceful democracy. It just doesn't work - you need the leadership to come from the community for it to have any lasting chance.
Your opening potshot at MBAs detracts from the meat of your comment, which contains at least two important insights: (1) the Reddit "product" and community are inseparable; (2) to manage a community you must understand the community, which almost always requires participation in the community.
Looking past the vitriol towards Ellen Pao, this seems to be primarily due to a history of miscommunication between moderators, who feel they should have more power and better ways to handle the communities they support, and the admins of Reddit. While I think that there are definite issues on both sides -- I'm not a moderator, especially not of a big subreddit, so I don't know how disrespectful or how much the admins ignored the moderators requests, so my perspective is of an outsider -- I really feel like this is all just a temper tantrum that the moderators handled poorly, potentially purposefully. The users by and large did not need to know that Victoria was fired, and it's a shame that the moderators 1) let that information out, and 2) by letting it out, effectively let it be used as a base for a parade against Ellen Pao. It can't be argued that the moderators didn't/couldn't know this would happen because this kind of shit happens on Reddit all the time, and the more vocal parts of the community will cling to their dislike of Pao with this.
I think that the admins should have handled it better, for sure -- they could have at least given the moderators that relied on Victoria's help the heads up of, "hey, we are going to transition to a new community manager, for the time being X, Y, and Z are going to occur," but the backlash from the community and that the moderators are effectively using the community for their own gains instead of trying to handle it internally is a pretty bad reflection on how the community is structured as a whole. All I can think of is that this is basically 4chan and social media combined.
This post regarding the apology is fairly new, with a lot of points and comments. Yet it has already sunk to page 2. I assume that reddit-related posts are given a negative weighting of some kind on HN, of late?
Serious question about my use case and opting for a substitute: I use reddit to learn and interact with a community about my interests or things that I want to learn. Reddit has been fantastic for this and about 75% of the time the users of specific communities are great resources that I really can't find anywhere else.
Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that drama around and within reddit is ruining this - all I want to do is learn and engage - it's impossible now to avoid it. Any alternative that keeps the quality high and the format similar without all the ugly dramatics?
Maybe it was laziness, but till now I've been expecting good things from companies backed by YCombinator. Ekjp and kn0thing are eroding the brand value of YC.
As someone who moderated a large forum (not a subreddit) of >100,000 users (with ~15,000 active users at peak and rarely dipping below 3,000 users at inactive times) a large part has to do with community.
The difference decent moderation can make in a large community can vastly impact a community. There's a lot of networking that happens because of it. I was an extremely well-liked moderator who would take over "dying" sections of the forum. I was even given the nickname "The Lifegiver" because any board put under my control would go from 10 posts/week to 100s of posts/day. I made a lot of friends whom I still talk with to this day, nearly a decade later. That is what made being a moderator worth my time.
As to what jeletonskelly commented in response to you - no. There isn't always someone willing to "fill the shoes". The boards I was left in charge of were dead precisely because nobody wanted to fill the shoes. Many members of those communities were asked if they wanted to be "promoted" to moderate their board: they always declined the position. Sometimes a board is dead and nobody knows how to solve it or what it would take to revitalize it. Not everyone is a leader.
Moderators who are bad with community management have their lives turned to hell. Death threats from users who dislike your actions, dealing with community drama (having to mediate between two users in an argument without pissing either side off), dealing with 'staff' drama (mods who disagree with how another mod handled something usually) is not worth "being in power" or any "ego trip" you get from the position.
Moderators are not too far off from the founding administrator when it comes to forums (or subreddits): They enjoy the community and want to help have a part in the creation of the community.
Every good moderator I've dealt with has always put the community before anything else.
It's when money does get involved that moderation and administrative decisions become questioned. The decisions are no longer What is best for the community? but What is best for my account balance?
Do you have children? Pets? Do you charge them for giving them a hug? Do you go out for a beer with friends? If so, do you charge them for your time?
"Fuck you, pay me" is about not letting people demand your professional skills for free or letting payment slide because [excuse]. It's got nothing to do with voluntary contribution.
Exactly. Just walk away and make it someone else's problem. Someone is always there to fill their shoes. I suspect that being a "mod" boosts one's internet ego and letting go makes you just a "pleb user" again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato... http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420...