I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community.
I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS:
> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.
You applaud them on a PR strategy that is akin to dictatorships all over the world denouncing opposition as "terrorists" and criminals?
The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.
The notion of group responsibility for individual actions is insidious, because it's too easy to mount a circular-logic based offense and also because it leads to humanity's favorite game, us v. them.
Humans aren't really individuals, though they labor under the illusion of such.
They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you.
When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self.
One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).
That's fairly cynical, and I don't have that experience at all, and I do not agree with you, and I do not know of any evidence backing a single one of your statements.
This wasn't an accusation of group responsibility. In fact, they specifically state in their announcement that
> Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.
Like any popular site, Reddit attracts everything from enlightened discussions to 4chan-level casual trolls (and worse). Pointing out the issues with threats and indicating that the community could be better without individuals who would publicly threaten the life of another person seems very reasonable to me.
I have no problem with the notion that those running reddit suffer from extreme cognitive dissonance over this issue. They've been acting in extremely odd ways for some time now.
Actions like the banning of subreddits for the actions of a few bad actors belie the notion that this is how you and they describe it.
No, it isn't. Given that there was no blatantly illegal content involved, there are only two possible reasons for not treating these two subreddits the same. Either the admins are a) clueless nitwits who don't know what's going on with their own site, or b) sympathetic to one but not the other.
Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?
If you're in my house, I'm going to hold you to a much higher standard than "not blatantly illegal". If you resent Reddit doing the same, well, the Internet isn't lacking for dank underbellies.
> Because that's what the admins have basically said, by their actions.
Nope, the Reddit admins just haven't closed those subreddits yet. But they will. They've closed the child porn subreddits, they've closed the revenge porn subreddits, they've closed the hate groups that bleed out into the larger internet. r/coontown will be closed, too. It hasn't yet, which is a shame, but if you read into that fact that the reddit admins approve of it, then be prepared to be disappointed in a few months when it gets closed, too.
I probably sound more vested in the issue than I am. I probably also sound like I'm piling on with unhelpful feedback at a difficult time. I don't intend either -- I'm just a bit perplexed at why some forms of controversial, hate-oriented, and/or immature speech are considered OK on Reddit while others aren't.
Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that.
Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems:
1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community.
2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place.
3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product.
If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely unsuitable for the next crisis which will require yet another made up explanation.
This isn't responsive to anything I said. It's a response to a different comment that says "they should only get rid of all toxic communities, not just some of them."
Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon.
The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.
I agree that they're changing their policy, and that it has been—and always was going to be—a painful process. But the failures of their original policy get splashed across the Internet every few months. So they can either stick their head in the sand, pretend it's not the problem it always has been, and watch their community get turned into the world's largest bastion of hate speech, or they can fix their mistakes and clean house. Are they doing a good job? Not particularly. I don't think they really know how. But they'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully meanwhile not fucking everything else up, too.
The subreddit was filled with photographs that were either a) creepshots taken off the street without the subject's permission and b) friends-only Facebook posts shared with the public without the subject's permission (which is a violation of Facebook's TOS).
Then, on top of that, they were harassing imgur staff members for enforcing their ToS.
CoonTown, as disgusting as it is, wasn't doing that, at least not in the sheer volumes of numbers FPH was. Most of that sub consisted of making racist statements about news articles and misinterpreted statistics.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Was anything happening in FPH illegal? If not, then there's no rational basis for treating it any differently than any other hate-oriented subreddit.
If there were in fact some legal concerns, then I stand corrected.
Reddits stated policy was to remove harassment (and harrassing subs). So fph harrassed users and broke that policy. Coontown, while also racist and imo worse, stays in its box, doesn't brigade, doesn't target specific people, and generally just says racist stuff about news articles and posts memes.
Fatpeople hate was banned for brigading - for actions not ideas - because fatpeople hate would link to real world people and real world profiles and thousands over users would visit and vote and hundreds of users would leave harassing messages.
Ellen got so much shot for the "we're banning actions not ideas" quote (in this thread even) yet here's an example of it being used - leaving absolutely vile subs live because they don't brigade and banning subs when they do brigade and she's getting shit for that too.
They did, but I don't think most people realised that FPH brigaded because the details didn't make it into the news and weren't mentioned in the admin response. So for anyone who didn't dig deeply into it themselves, it looked like the admins had just banned it at random. Then rather than explaining it, the admins made a bullshit PR non-statement about how they were "banning actions not ideas". Really badly handled.
The first rule of reddit is unsubscribing from all the default subs and searching for the ones most relevant to your interests.
The day I discovered I could do that quickly made Reddit my favorite site on the web (/r/NFL, /r/homeimprovement, /r/television, etc).
I'd love to see a discovery feature similar to that of Pinterest built into the signup process that algorithmically signs new users up for subreddits most related to their interests.
Augh, seriously, I just followed a link from Google through Pinterest and they made me connect facebook and choose categories to read an actual link that I found in a search engine.
I used Pinterest some in the early days, but I'll avoid like the plague, now.
The worst part is all they did is intercept the search result for someone else's website and force me to give them all sort of marketing data they can sell in order to get it.
Absolutely - television can be an art to enjoy, just like a great film, piece of music or painting. Sure there's plenty of trash, but the good stuff is so worth it.
> The first rule of reddit is unsubscribing from all the default subs and searching for the ones most relevant to your interests.
But isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure in their curation or moderation?
How does a si but isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure of their curation and moderation?
this comment and other comments you've posted make me believe that you're really ignorant.
"I'm convinced that there is a highly vocal group (of young men, most likely) that are hell-bent on breaking Internet communities and even corporeal communities with their grotesqueries. And when they're challenged, they howl "but you're censoring my free speech!""
why do you think that internet communities need to be so heavily moderated?
From the "PR" that treats the community as "a coherent block":
"Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful."
I don't think it gives the impression of organization at all. Rather the opposite: it gives the correct impression (unlike in the case of terrorists and criminals) that quite a large number of unconnected people were actively participating in attacks on Pao to some extent or other, rather than it being a smaller organized subgroup of the community, which frankly wouldn't be as bad.
There is always a large number of unconnected people participating in attacks. At any moment in time, there are paid chinese trolls appealing to unity and the party on topics from smog to foreign relations. Some of them, chance has it, are in active discussions with trolls from other governments.
Simply put, you will find trolls and people writing death threats wherever you look. These people do not exactly discriminate.
Most of the individuals that do death threats are doing it because they think that their peers would approve. The community effect is very powerful and sometimes the community deserves blame.
As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. I have no idea whether Ellen was a capable CEO, but the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally (through other news articles and here on HN) was absolutely appalling.
I've been a heavy reddit user for 8 years and I did not know about this until I read about it in the New York Times. It's really a small subset of the reddits that were touched by the entire ordeal.
It completely and totally dominated /r/all for days, even weeks. /r/all is an aggregate of the most popular posts for the entire site, so I disagree only a small subset were affected. Maybe in number of subreddits, but the subreddits that were affected are absolutely gigantic.
Isn't that what you get when going to the site while not being logged in?
(I echo the comments that say that Reddit has great subreddits like /r/Haskell and it's easy to mis all of this when you are just subscribed to a few subreddits.)
I'm not subscribed to any of the default subreddits; I imagine very many long-time users are the same way. I never read /r/all precisely because it's an aggregate of posts on subreddits I don't care about.
In particular, I'm subscribed to no general-purpose or wide-purpose subreddits. A few city/geographic subreddits mentioned it in passing, but, like, /r/programming or /r/nycbike or /r/radicalchristianity are going to treat any post about it as off-topic. You can't just post an advice animal about it, or request IAmAs from everyone involved, or say that today you learned whatever-it-may-be about Ellen Pao, or what have you. Nor can you do this about any other topic, which is why I bother to read these subreddits.
I browse /r/all occasionally to get out of the bubble of the subs I'm subscribed to. And sometimes there is a popular post in an obscure subreddit that I've never heard of before and get that gets me to subscribe.
I think you're misunderstanding what the commenters in this subthread are saying. It's not simply that I don't want to see FPH. I also don't want to see advice animals, documentaries, creepypasta, or jokes. I have nothing against these as forms of content, it's just not what I visit Reddit for.
And even among technology, I have no interest in seeing things about Ruby or Go. Again, it's not that I dislike the languages, it's that they're not professionally relevant to me at the moment so it's not what I visit Reddit for.
So what we need is some way for subreddits to be tagged with their own content: /r/rust about Rust, /r/python about Python, /r/sandersforpresident about Bernie, etc., and some /r/all equivalent that just matches what I'm interested in -- which is exactly what https://reddit.com is for me, right now. I don't need /r/all to be fixed; I have no interest in even seeing "all technology" or "all religion" or "all presidential candidates".
As I mentioned last time this was on HN, me three.
I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent.
On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page.
I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.
First is realizing that there are technical solutions. Some people say "you don't want technical solutions to social problems" but the fact that subreddits have no protection against brigading at all is a serious design flaw with reddit[1].
Second is some way to require subscription for some period of time for votes to appear or to count. The CSS-hack stuff was silly, and as someone who has been on reddit since its first year, I have never seen the CSS-side of reddit because I never turned it on.
One of the big complaints from the blackout was the complete lack of tool support and this is an example. Reddit tried to paper over the technical shortcoming with rules and social hacks but once different reddit communities who didn't like each other realized there was a way to attack each other they did so.
[1] to be fair I wouldn't have realized it either if I was in charge of the subreddit design
The problem is some of the worst parts of reddit love to leak into the innocent, fun sections. My first experience with /r/fatpeoplehate was because one of the trolls started harassing a poster in /r/adventuretime who just wanted to show off an awesome hat she made.
It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.
I find it telling it was negative a majority of the time. Usually "mods" get +1'd just for being mods (common on many forums). It shows, to me at least, that what she said rarely was supported by the community.
I completely and utterly disagree with this opinion, and furthermore find it dangerous for what it suggests - specifically, the idea that a large group of anonymous people can do anything but fall prey to their collective impulse.
I would argue that decisions of large bodies of anonymous people are historically and demonstrably inaccurate, misleading, nearsighted, and wholly terrible for not only the decision they're making, but also the good of the body itself.
Groups of people, at a sufficient capacity, are simply some of the worst, most base, and utterly abhorrent things to exist on this planet, and claiming that the disapproval displayed by the group calling itself "Reddit" is "telling" would be, to say the least, a misstep.
I'm confused how having a negative karma on Reddit is not a sign that people on Reddit find you disagreeable. It's a metric designed to showcase one's agreeability or disagreeability. If more people agree with you than disagree with you: karma will largely reflect that. If it's consistently negative, people consistently disagree with you.
Having a trend over time allows for a better judgement as karma is a metric that can change drastically over time. A generally disagreeable person can have a huge spike in positive karma but that doesn't mean they're liked overall. So it helps that the chart shows as far back as 2013.
A slow overall increase with several downward trends means you're generally agreeable but have a controversial opinion (opposed to the "collective group mentality"). A slow overall decrease with an upward trend now and then means you're generally disagreeable and occasionally say something the community agrees with.
Her karma over time tells me that she's generally disagreeable with a few moments that brought her from "negative" to "neutral" and that before the subreddit bans her popularity was spiraling downwards, hit a full catalyst, and the apology was rather well received.
If her karma was overall positive and only trended negatively in light of the subreddit ban and the Victoria mishap - it'd be telling of a very different story. The fact that it's been consistently negative is telling of the larger picture.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. We have decided that no one is more trustworthy to pick our leaders than large bodies of anonymous people.
Actually we ended up proving that democracies are pretty sticky - it is hard to go from a genuine democracy to a dictatorship, both because people don't like to lose power but also because if a significant group becomes unhappy with the way things are going they will get enough political power to change things within the current system.
In fact I don't know of a true democracy (defined here as a democracy where no group is excluded, where votes are counted fairly and where each person who wishes to do so can vote for whatever he wants) that has since transitioned into anything else.
None of this, of course, means that democracy is a good system, merely that it is sticky.
Two points -- what you're describing is a republic moreso than a democracy, and those are pretty sticky indeed.
Reddit is also not a democracy -- it's a series of benevolent dictatorships, where the content is decided on by anarchistic vote, but can be controlled ultimately through a supreme leader, empowered by the virtue of their age (the oldest member of the subreddit gets to decide the content of that subreddit).
Democracy works not because it provides a means of putting people into power, but because it provides a bloodless means of removing them.
In the past, factions went to war in order to take absolute power. When they achieved it they would destroy all rivals and enforce strict conformity. They would try to avoid the necessity of constant fighting to hold on to their position by employing various means to cement their legitimacy in the minds of the ruled. One of these was the idea of an aristocracy which had an inherent right to rule. Another was harnessing religion to declare that the rulers held power by divine right, making rebellion a sin. Regime change would only come about through violence.
In a democracy the competing factions can bide their time in the anticipation that they can get into power again. Because of that, they do not feel compelled to use violence to seize power, and by the same token, violence does not have to be used to suppress them.
An interesting side effect of democracy was the relaxation of the need for absolute conformity. This facilitated social mobility, commerce and the flourishing of literature and scientific exploration, all of which would have been seen as subversive and dangerous to the status quo in the older way of doing things, and consequently, rigorously suppressed.
Is it, really? I mean, beyond Winston's quip, what empirical evidence do you have to support that?
Democracies have been known for only a few brief periods of human existence. They emerged for a few hundred years, in a very limited sense, in one city-state within Greece, 2500 years ago. And then disappeared until just over 200 years ago, with some spread since.
Fewer than half the people on Earth today live in democracies (though it's close: 48%), only 12.5% live in full democracies. Far more live in autocratic regimes than any other of the forms measured by the Democracy Index: 37.6%.
The fastest growing economy in the world is solidly autocratic: China. Despite the claims of the benefits of both democracy and capitalism, many critical advances have come from countries which lacked one or both institutions: Nazi Germany developed jet aircraft and missiles, Communist Russia was the first to orbit satellites and put man in space.
I'm not opposed to democracy. But it seems it's got a few challenges as well.
Yes democracy has its problems as well, that's the entire point of that famous quip. Which countries would you most want to live in and how many of them are democracies Nazi Germany accomplished some impressive things, but they were the exact opposite of good government. A clear majority of countries are either actual democracies or pretend to be, because of a near worldwide consensus that democracy is the best option we have.
So: when did "democracy" become an overt policy goal? And how?
(There's a story there. It's interesting.)
There are numerous states that have functioned quite well that _weren't_ (or aren't) democracies.
Nazi Germany was, in fact, a democracy. Hitler stood for election in Germany's presidential elections of 1932. While he didn't win a majority of the July vote (none of the _six_ candidates did), he was appointed chancellor following a series of inconclusive elections.
A concern of mine is whether democracy brings wealth, or wealth democracy. Causality's arrow is sticky.
It shows to me that she was dogged by misogynists and MRAs excited by the discrimination lawsuit, from the start of her Reddit tenure through to the end.
In a similar fashion, if Barack Obama posted something like "Mom and apple pie are both great.", it would be downvoted by his political foes and upvoted by his political allies. That should not be taken as an indication that "the community" opposes or disagrees with his viewpoints on Mom and apple pie.
I see a lot of comments like yours claiming that the hate was only because she's a minority. I get the feeling such people find it unacceptable to dislike a woman or a black/Asian person regardless of what they did.
I disliked her for
* Firing Victoria, who took AMAs to the next level. I enjoyed them a ton.
* Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"
* Treating the community with disdain and contempt, while not understanding how reddit works at all. She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive. If these people are unhappy with her and leave, then the passive majority (such as myself) will follow them to wherever they go.
But no, I'm probably a misogynist and a racist who hates Ellen Pao because she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, amirite?
>Firing Victoria, who took AMAs to the next level. I enjoyed them a ton.
The Victoria specific AMAs tended to be short, done on the phone where she types responses, and oriented around'My new movie is out Friday don't miss it' instead of a conversation. I prefer the raw format myself.
>Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"
I'm personally only familiar with the banning of /neofags because I know people who were targeted and harassed by that reddit. It was clearly banned for the behavior of the mods in the reddit, and not for content, as evidenced by other reddits with much worse content not being banned at the same time.
>She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive.
Incorrect. She did some of the best ones. The ones with Bill Murray and Sean Bean really stick out in my mind as being really great. You couldn't see either of them, but thanks to her you could make out inflections, emphasis and character. It was like hearing them talk, rather than having them type. Either way, regardless of what you think I loved the AMAs that Victoria assisted with, and so did a whole lot of other people. Pao took that away from us, and you're saying that we shouldn't criticise her for that?
> That this became the battle-flag to pitch-fork
He was almost recovered. He would have rejoined work in a month, but she rejected that. That reddit was so benevolent to him was thanks to hueypriest and Yishan Wong. She reversed this policy. Now you're saying its appalling that people are criticising Pao because Yishan and hueypriest were so nice.
> What does this even mean?
It means that the people most engaged with the site (top submitters and moderators) were unhappy with her. The site depends on these people for quality content This was written in really simple English, I don't see what your trouble with understanding it was.
I feel like you were in the flow of a "point-by-point takedown" and had to say something about the last line, but that left you looking pretty silly by the end.
>He was almost recovered. He would have rejoined work in a month, but she rejected that. That reddit was so benevolent to him was thanks to hueypriest and Yishan Wong. She reversed this policy. Now you're saying its appalling that people are criticising Pao because Yishan and hueypriest were so nice.
While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years being paid while too sick to work. He got an extra full year of insurance.
He never had a move date scheduled. He was "2-3 months away" and in his AMA when asked where he was working today? He said he still wasn't feeling well enough for full time work - this was 5 months later. "Sorry, we can't keep waiting, we need someone who can do the job immediately."
So yes it is appalling that this became the reason to be furious, while treating an employee better than he would be treated at 99% of other companies in the US. In a reasonable universe the story would have been: "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly."
I'm curious about your first two points -- are you privvy to information about those firings that the general public is not privy to? Because the general public, for legal reasons, is not privy to most of the information surrounding those firings, and it strikes me as interesting that you have an opinion related to them despite not having any information.
* I resented that she fired Victoria, because I liked Victoria and what she brought to reddit. I didn't speculate on why she was fired at all. But let me speculate a little now - it wasn't for performance reasons judging by what every single person who has worked with Victoria says.
* I relayed what the employee in question said about it on reddit. If its a question of trusting what he says or what Pao says, I'll err on the side of the former, because of the duplicity that Pao has exhibited in recent months.
Some griefers did key on that. But overall, she was perceived as opposing free speech, which is a core value for numerous (maybe even most) Reddit users.
FWIW, harassment isn't free speech, even when you're talking about the government, and aside from basic decency, the company could be responsible, esp if it facilitated people actually following through with threats.
It is unreasonably acceptable for death, rape, and other threats to be used as a form of outspoken criticism online, and as an outspoken critic, I don't appreciate being lumped in.
Note that this is a chart of per-comment karma, not a trend of her total karma. Thus explaining the sheer cliff between a largely-downvoted comment and a largely-upvoted one.
Honestly I'm so disappointed that Reddit's management allowed such a crappy culture to evolve in their forums for so long. I remember signing on in 2010 and just feeling really uncomfortable browsing any of the major subreddits. Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
The Reddit founders had very strong ideas about censorship and freedom of speech, and so as a matter of principle, they refused to censor subreddits unless the latter were breaking the law. As far as growth goes, this was probably the right choice, as a lot of Reddit's userbase came from previously marginalized groups who now had a forum for their interests on the Internet.
Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site.
Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.
a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here.
Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.
Haven't been around here long, but this place seems to me to be much better than reddit for what I'm looking for. To each his/her own, I guess, but so much of reddit was such utter and total shit for so long that the enjoyment evaporated.
That wasn't what was said, though. It wasn't particularly coherent, but it was a comparison between two prominent figures in two prominent online forums.
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that both sites have an element of sociopathic and downright evil people influencing the culture. And reasonable people can still disagree about the level of accountability for the actions and inactions of Pao and Graham.
There are plenty of details that don't line up well when making that comparison, but I read the comment as intending to illustrate all the hyperbole around Ellen Pao. There are a lot of people on the Internet talking past each other this week.
Hard to explain objectively; I think the things that turned me off to reddit back then (now it's more mainstream) were people's willingness to assume tons of knowledge of topics they didn't really know about, the general white, upper middle class male from the burbs tastes of things like r/music and other cultural subreddits. It felt like walking into a videogame fraternity and realizing I didn't belong there.
That's a highly subjective opinion...but it's how I felt. r/shitredditsays probably captures a bit of what made me uncomfortable.
There's certainly a white fraternity feel in a lot of reddits, so I can imagine how people can feel disconnect to it. But /r/shitredditsays, well... I was subscribed to it for some time, and the posts themselves do a good job at noticing really bad behaviour on reddit sometimes — but then I discovered the comments there, and I must say, it feels like half of the users of this sub are trolls who pretend to be THE worst strawmen feminists/SJW (I hate this term, but since we're talking about strawmen, I think it fits) ever. Just saying.
The SRS sidebar makes it pretty clear that the whole SJW façade is exactly that: a façade. They obviously have legitimate complaints but hyperbolise everything to poke fun at it.
On IRC plenty of people who cry about getting a ban or K-line are ridiculed and told to go elsewhere. There is drama there as well, but it's a smaller and less exposed thing.
>Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
He wasn't dealt with. He deleted his account in a frantic and futile attempt to avoid exposure.
Violentacres/Violentacrez (had to block him twice) set himself up as king of the reddit underworld. The admins cast a blind eye to his antics, and in return he prevented the raw sewage from gushing onto the clean streets of the reddit front page.
He was a troll from the start, and deliberately so, even in his choice of username which he had stolen from a popular blogger at the time. This illustrates the kind of brinkmanship that was his trademark - it is not quite impersonation to steal someone else's anonymous handle, but it is not quite ethical either.
His one good point was that he kept the other reddit trolls busy via interminable (literally) troll-fights.
The special icon was subreddit CSS added most likely by himself. Give me five minutes and a subreddit and I'll make your username 72px. The admins didn't bless him with a flag at any time.
It's a common meme that violentacrez was "special," had some kind of sway with the admins beyond any other moderator, received instruction from the admins that was unique and not the usual ban threats that many subs get in modmail, and so on. Most people who say these things heard it from someone else, because the actual story is that he was barely tolerated. He even says so himself in your linked thread.
I don't get the elevation of violentacrez to something special. I see it a lot (friendly with the admins! The admins asked him to help with creepshots! it's all over this thread) and I don't get it. He was a power mod. So are hundreds of others. There are a bunch of Reddit yarns that put the Kubrick lunar landing to shame; some of them are making an appearance in this thread.
I meant that the reddit admins didn't 'deal with' Violentacrez. Chen doxxed him, destroying his career, despite the full knowledge that Violentacrez had innocent dependants who would also be hurt badly. If Violentacrez deserved to be 'punished', then whatever punishment was meted out should have fallen exclusively on him.
>It doesn't become 'exposure'.
Bad choice of words. I intended the term in a literal sense, not a judgemental one. It was revolting how Chen made Violentacrez crawl in the false hope he could salvage some part of his livelihood.
>...when people you like do it.
I dislike the people who doxxed Violentacrez very much. I disagree with the use of doxxing as a tactic.
> Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
The admins asked violentacrez to help with the /r/creepshots. Later history got rewritten to say that he had created it, maybe to throw him under the bus.
I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?
> the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally... was absolutely appalling.
I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).
Not sure what the downvoting is all about - let's hope you never get cancer. The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit:
> The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit
It looks like Dacvak deleted his own posts: "Edit: I've removed this post. All future discussions regarding this subject will be between me and reddit."
>I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).
That employee got cancer in 2012. He got a salary for almost two years while too sick to work, of the total three years he was at the company. Four months of that salary undo Pao. Then he got an additional full year of health coverage when they finally couldn't wait any longer to fill his position. He was never well enough to even move to the Reddit officers, which was the plan when they hired him in 2012.
That's not just not despicable, it's laudable, and it's better than how you'd be treated at 99% of companies in the US. And somehow this became twisted by the furious mob into a story about a vicious CEO firing someone for having cancer?
(Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick. Although ironically in this case this employee didn't even qualify for that since he got sick before he was at the company for 12 months.)
That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is appalling. Seriously appalling.
There's no mob here. If anything, most people seem unfamiliar with this episode.
> Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick
Except where one qualifies for protection under the ADA [1].
> That's not just not despicable, it's laudable
There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao. My overall view of the situation, and likely this goes for others, is in how it was ultimately handled, where Pao said one thing to the employee then did another, more than once. I can see a situation where this could have been handled openly and candidly, with humanity, but that's not what happened.
Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'. Not knowing what would have happened, Pao could have addressed the uncertainly in an honest way, but instead she chose to lie to and then fire the employee. I'm not a one man mob, and I respect your difference of opinion, but that to me is despicable.
>There's no mob here. If anything, most people seem unfamiliar with this episode.
Top post on multiple reddits, various random threads upvoted to /all, brought up in this thread by multiple people as a reason the CEO was despicable.
>There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao.
While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years of paid time while he was unable to work. Also under he he got an extra year of medical insurance.
>Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'.
He was supposed to move to the office in 2012. He was never well enough to do so. At the time he was finally let go, he still didn't have a move scheduled. He was still 2 to 3 months away from being able to to start the job. Note his woolly timelines, especially in his followup comments, where 5 months later he was still not ready for full time work.
Changed your mind is not lying, "Sorry, we actually need to someone to start this job immediately, we can't keep waiting."
All this is giving him the most charitable reading of his posts, a post he made at the height of rage at the CEO filled with obvious dog meat like: "Does anyone know of any Reddit alternatives?" "I don't know anything about why Victoria was fired, but he's some speculation as to why she was fired." Etc.
So yeah, I find it despicable that people find this despicable, that comments all across the internet are calling her 'human garbage' and whatnot for treating an employee better than 99% of other companies would have. It's absurd. The story should have been, "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly!"
At last, a voice of reason in hundreds of pointless comments.
Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censorship.
If your version of free speech means allowing anything to be said anywhere, I don't want it. The principle of free speech I subscribe to is allowing anyone a place such that those who want to listen, can. In essence, to prevent one party silencing a communication between two other parties. Reddit need not be that place.
That's a good definition. But even that approach will fail when those with power define the "place such that those who want to listen, can" to be so small that nobody can find it. An example is the so-called free speech zones at some colleges that are small designated spots far from earshot of the entire campus population.
Nor was anyone forced to listen. I find the default subs pretty low quality, so I stopped subscribing to them years ago. So the only things I read about were the books, video games and programming languages I like. If you had a different experience, then I sympathise with you, but don't go reading a thread filled with utter crap and then claim that someone forced you to listen.
As I've said in another subthread, Reddit is not a single community, but rather numerous communities. All users are free to listen to what they like, and to not listen (or even block) what they don't like. It's rather like Usenet, with a Reddit account being equivalent to a news server account.
As I understand it, the founding fathers cast it more as "freedom to listen" rather than freedom of speech.
And it's certainly understandable that Reddit has no wish to be associated with certain speech, but that comes with troubling implications as well. For example, do they not then appear to support whatever they do not ban if we know that whatever sufficiently offends them gets the ban hammer?
For another example, take Google removing Confederate flags. I personally hate that damned flag and would be perfectly happy to join others in burning one to express my feelings about it, but I'm loathe to go around removing them. Please understand that I'm perfectly happy if a few get taken down where they appear that some governmental branch was endorsing it.
But at the same time, that's not quite the same as when Google goes about removing them. Sure, they are free to do as they wish, I have to wonder why Google doesn't do the same for Nazi symbols? Surely they don't support Nazis, but it's hard to make a case for not giving the Nazis the same treatment. They're at least as evil, right? So what explanations are left to us for the disparity? That Nazis don't offend googlers as much? That doesn't seem like a likely reason, but just what's left?
And in the end, where does that leave us? The problem is, I don't think that train of thought has an end, and that's what makes me uneasy. After we remove everything offensive, what's left? It's not like we'll have things that don't offend anybody, so at some point it becomes a matter of choosing which people are okay to offend and which people are not okay to offend.
In the end, I just want to get along with everyone. I don't like the thought of living in a society where everything becomes a matter of whether you are one of Us or one of Them and that's where we appear to be heading.
Thankfully, the various non-Nazi uses of the swastika appear to be the most popular, but you can find plenty of Nazi items. I dislike the meaning of both symbols, so I have a hard time imagining any logic where it's okay to sell one of them but not the other.
They probably also sell the soviet flag, copies of Das Capital etc. Equally horrible but for the other side.
Also side note: reading Mein Kampf doesn't make you a nazi, indeed if more people had read it back in the day somebody might have stooped that little corporal.
Oh, then you're right, this is definitely less okay. I was under the impression that they just stopped delivering them from Walmart (or wherever) via Shopping Express, rather than special-casing the search results.
I guess the argument one could make is that the confederate flag is more dangerous and relevant today, but I don't really buy that.
Occam's razor suggests this is just an easy PR grab. They get a few headlines in mainstream tech press for free, and very minor backlash from "free speech nutjubs" as the only downside.
Reddit is legally allowed to censor all they want. Some people, especially people younger than me, like a version of the world where somebody smoothes off the rough edges and hides unsightly things. I think it feels too much like Disneyland.
Reddit spent years building a freewheeling culture. Pao decided to impose standards on that, and her guiding principles weren't well articulated. In the end, it was a really bad copy of Disneyland, and the fact that the effort failed was no surprise.
I'm not sure the company really knows what happened, given that they think they've given their users what they asked for, but they're also telling their users that they're spoiled kids.
> Pao decided to impose standards on that, and her guiding principles weren't well articulated.
I think you nailed it there. I'm not a Reddit user, but from what I have read there never seemed to be clear set of guidelines that were evenly enforced by the Reddit staff.
I'm often weirded by the freedom of speech argument in non critical contexts. These persons life aren't at risk because they can't express opinions, isn't that what is meant by FoS ? not just a free card to be able to let yourself loose in public.
I have no solution, but far too often FoS ends up a noisy non-discussions.
ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
This thread is very interesting and I deeply appreciate the comments people are making, including FoS, fear to comment on FoS, etc.
I personally respect freedom of speech, except hate. For example, HN strongly discourages attacking another member personally (eg. calling someone else idiot). I consider this a reasonable limit on freedom of speech, but concepts and opinions should be fully open for discussion (eg. pro/anti evolution etc). If the discussions are respectful, then anything should be allowed.
I believe Political Correctness has done more harm than it does good. It has created an unhealthy focus on skin colour, reproductive organs, etc to the point of lunacy. Many people struggle to look past superficial features and seem to lost the ability to make reasoned judgements. Any criticism of a woman gets you labelled a misogynist, regardless of how incapable she is. This continues to undermine the credibility of women that are truly capable in their own right. I'm currently managing a team of women. They all got there on their own merit. I would not hire a woman for the sake of political correctness or because I was bullied by a feminist journalist (as is quite common these days). The women in my team were not selected based on their gender - they were selected based on their talents and attitudes. They were available and capable.
This whole Ellen Pao incident made me think about the validity of comments on sexism and racism that are floating around the net. Compare the attitudes towards the criticisms of Steve Ballmer vs Ellen Pao. One of these individuals contributed to the significant growth of Microsoft, the other didn't manage to achieve much that stands out. Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not. The major difference (other than Ballmer's financial track record for Microsoft) is their genders. Political Correctness has driven the need to blindly defend women, no matter how incompetent they may be. The hope is that this behaviour will help "women's rights". I view it as doing the exact opposite ... "jobs for the girls".
It saddens me that we seem to be more sexist, less tolerant and more willing to defend incompetence an an attempt to promote rights for selected members of society.
On a side note, I dislike the term "women's rights". Is it so hard to represent "people's rights"? I believe one of these reflects a destructive, prejudiced mindset and creates a bad attitude of entitlement and encourages sexism. If society said we'd defend the rights of everyone equally based on merit, the world would be a much better place.
> I personally respect freedom of speech, except hate.
The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line, you need to appoint a censor to determine what qualifies as "hate". As Christopher Hitchens asked: "To whom would you want to delegate the task to decide for you what you could read? To relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear?"
Typically this job falls to the public prosecutors. Who will make mistakes, misapply and pervert the laws. Sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with malice.
It is not just an abstract argument, it has very real consequences. Here in Finland we had a case [1] where an MP (now MEP) was convicted of hate speech for making a point about freedom of speech by asking a question along the lines of: 'Why is it ok to write that Finns might be culturally and genetically predisposed to get drunk and kill people, but not ok to write that Somalis might be culturally and genetically predisposed to rob people and live on welfare?'
These types of laws have very real chilling effects on public discourse. People are unwilling to engage in certain topics, which should be discussed, due to the fear of being prosecuted. In democracies trying to suppress or censor an idea or argument will just end up elevating them. In this case, the party to which the convicted MP belongs ended up becoming the second largest party and are now in the government. They no longer have to argue their case, they can simply implement it (and their immigration program was written by the MP in question).
Counterpoint: Censorship is awesome. It creates and shapes places that are just great and pleasant all around. Being an excellent censor is a great ability and there are sadly way too few out there who can give a clear voice (not in the sense of being one voice, necessarily, though that can also be great!) to something and be really excellently opinionated about their censorship.
I want more great censorship, not less. If it’s done by people and organisations, at least. Because that’s what we are talking about here, right? Reddit, not governments?
Censors are just editors and that job is not some inscrutable thing. It can be done and it can be done excellently.
I mean, to me this only gets tricky when we are talking about basic infrastructure, i.e. should a paper mill be allowed to refuse to sell their paper to Neo Nazis because of ideological reasons? Should a web hoster be allowed to refuse to sell to Neo Nazis?
But Reddit? That’s easy and I don’t really get what the fuss is about. Nothing would be lost at all if the admins were much, much, much more ban happy and much more pro-censorship. They should be, 100%.
It's interesting. Instead of censorships I'm fond of the idea (though experiment so far) of shaping the place with costs and plateaus. Make sensitive things possible but with a bit of effort, so only people needing and meaning it will go the distance. The other will `naturally` fall back to their comfort zone.
reddit does that actually, until you're a well known user, you cannot submit more than a few per minute, after that delays kick in, if it really was something you wanted to share, you'll come back. No censor involved.
Perhaps I'm missing something. How would you know if someone is an excellent censor (I.e. They only censor "bad" speech, and not "good" speech) if then intent is to shield you from the "bad" speech. Wouldn't you then not know what they censored?
Specifically, it seems to me that if you're shielded from seeing that they censored, then they could also be censoring "good" speech too. So the only way it seems you could ensure they weren't do this poorly or deliberately would be to allow everyone access to what they've censored. Which inversely seems to defeat the purpose of having a good censor. Now essentially nothing in censored.
Again, perhaps I'm missing something but if I'm not then I don't understand how you resolve this conundrum.
Edit: Unless you're referring to ex post facto censorship, where everyone sees the "bad" speech, and the speaker is banned for violating "community standards" To pre-emptively ban future speech. But this too still allows "bad" speech, and I suppose you also have the problem of deleting the bad speech. If it's gone, then what substantiates the ban/censorship? Because again, what if the action was either done in error, or maliciously to ban "good" but unpopular speech/speakers how would you know?
I don’t. I just accept that sometimes I just cannot know the absolute truth and that’s that.
But I do have the ability to trust people and I know when I enjoy something.
So, this all might sound very abstract, but I do know that I like the censors (they call themselves editors) working for certain newspapers I like. I trust them to make good decisions, partly just because I don’t have time to make those decisions myself.
And that’s obviously not perfect – but this whole nerd dream of provable correctness and absolute, guaranteed access to the truth all the time … it’s all unachievable bullshit anyway. Sometime you just don’t know. Sometimes you just have to live with that. I live with it and I like it.
Do you have some sort of trust issues? I mean, sometimes I’m willing to trust other people, that’s all. I don’t have to believe that everyone is evil and out to get me. So when I read a newspaper I like I have a general trust that the editors (censors) have done their job … because what else can I do? What else can you do?
I don’t have the time to sit around 24 hours by the newswire … and even then, the people writing that and reporting that … how do I know I can trust those absolutely? I can’t. That’s all.
We humans are forever doomed to not know the truth always all the time. And no one is an island and sometimes you just have to trust other people. And that’s healthy and that’s ok.
Well it's crucial that the censors are people who like you. If they didn't like you, you probably wouldn't be such a fan of censorship. That is to say, the only reason you're in favour of censorship on reddit is that you're reasonably that the censors will be people like you, which really is no more than sophisticated tribalism.
Hm … well I don’t like the censors at (insert certain newspaper I dislike here). But I don’t argue that they shouldn’t censor (edit their newspaper), I argue that they shouldn’t lie and write so much bullshit.
If I didn’t like the censors at Reddit I would do the same thing. I think that’s normal and healthy.
> The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line
The line needs to be drawn, though. As the saying goes, "Your freedoms end where my freedoms begin."
At some point, hate speech most definitely infringes upon the reader's rights. The canonical example is yelling "FIRE! FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and causing a stampede; your right to free speech doesn't trump everybody else's right to be safe.
I'd very strongly suggest you read the circumstances of * Schenck v. United States. While I also find the issue of fraudulently harmful speech a reasonable bar, the case itself concerned something rather different.
[A] United States Supreme Court decision concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense.
For some reason there is still lots of inequality in education, work and culture so some sort of change is still needed. And I really don't think you get seriously labeled a bigot just for any criticism of a minority member.
> Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not.
You mean Ballmer?
We know nothing specific and substantial about internal Reddit politics, so the cause for seeing all this hateful scapegoating can only be some kind of mass stupidity.
>> I personally respect freedom of speech, except hate.
I'm sorry. You don't respect freedom of speech then. Drawing an arbitrary line on what you (or anyone else) considers acceptable isn't free speech.
Put it this way: Things that were unacceptable in the 1950s are completely banal and uninteresting now. Things that were considered in poor taste in the past are horribly offensive now (look at Andy Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's). Are you going to be some society guardian, constantly updating what is and isn't acceptable to say as our values shift with the times
This argument is pretty easy to deflate: a defender of "absolute free speech" most certainly would not be okay with people walking up to them in the street, following them home and verbally threatening them. So, everybody has an arbitrary line.... somewhere.
I have thought much on these as common person, neither in an academic setting nor who has to deal with these issue frequently.
Lot of time I would argue with myself why can't we have everybody have equal rights ? Why we need to specially fight for rights of women and be feminists or to project the issue to broader sense, where we talk or act about any group. Personally I believe that while the ideal case as it should be is equal rights for everybody, the problem is the inequality created by negative discrimination over the ages. It is more like we are trying to correct the wrong doing over the ages by believing that a positive discrimination for the groups would offset the historical prejudice.
These are personal thoughts. Please feel free to correct.
>On a side note, I dislike the term "women's rights". Is it so hard to represent "people's rights"?
I want to pull this quote out and address it directly, because it's a valid concern with a real answer. The reason we don't represent "people's rights" is because all people do not need their rights defended. To use an analogy, think of our system for measuring the level of endangered for animals, from "Critically Endangered" to "Least Concern." Is it sensible to say, 'Well, aren't all species important to the ecosystem? Why do we seek to protect Garrulax courtoisi but not Megascops watsonii?' This is because the former is nearly extinct, while the latter is ubiquitous. The cause of "social justice" -- the oft-derided 'warriors' of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc -- is to correct years of disadvantage. It's not accurate to call, say, attempts to further women in technology as 'sexist'. In fact, that's co-opting the term to obfuscate the original issue.
Overall, your heart is in the right place -- it does seem like our attempts to further minorities comes off as patronizing (like affirmative action). But, in the end, the good that is done outweighs the bad so long as we adequately train the individuals we put forward through these initiatives such that no one believes they only 'got it because of their gender' (which to me is no different than 'got here through someone she knows' -- this is how most business seems to be done in the world!)
> These persons life aren't at risk because they can't express opinions, isn't that what is meant by FoS ?
No. That's the exact opposite of free speech. Free speech is meant to protect the most disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, foolish speech.
That's the whole freaking point - nobody wants to silence unoffensive opinions.
>ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
It is funny. Because it's the people who want silence others' free speech who repeat the "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" meme as justification for their horrible actions.
> Free speech is meant to protect the most disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, foolish speech.
No it's not. It's meant to protect speech which the politically powerful find objectionable. It's not about protecting abuse, but protecting ideas. Rebellious and revolutionary ideas, for example.
This is all a canard anyway - Reddit is not the (US) government. They get to set the rules for communication in their playground. If you don't let them do that, then you are infringing on their freedom of expression. Reddit can only say 'no' on their own systems; they don't stop you spreading whatever disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, or foolish speech in other forums.
If you want free speech the way you describe it, then you need to go to an unmoderated forum. Incidentally, on the front page of HN at the moment is a request for help in removing child porn from a web service, because the owner doesn't have enough resources to moderate it. If you ever wanted a clear example of where free speech is not meant to protect disgusting material, that's got to be it
I wished the ideal of free speech would include the ideal of being open to discussion (perhaps even the scientific method). I think many movements fail in that regard, for example it was pretty much impossible to have reasonable discussions with FPH subscribers. You were immediately downvoted when you tried to argue against it. If people are completely ignorant towards alternative, consistent points of view, they don't deserve to be listened to.
It wouldn't be the opposite of freedom (that would be suppression), but definitely a limit to the freedom we currently have in certain regards. However, we already have formal and informal rules that restrict the actions of people and forces them to follow specific practices, so it wouldn't be entirely new. In fact it would probably improve the situations at both extremes: on the one hand some taboos would be revoked (as that's also a way to avoid discussion), and you could exclude crazy and confused people who don't partake in any actual discourse.
I didn't say at all people should be open to my particular arguments, but to arguments in general.
> I didn't say at all people should be open to my particular arguments, but to arguments in general.
If it's arguments in general,
* you can't hang up on salesmen,
* you can't kick 911 conspirators off your unrelated forum,
* you can't remove most trolls,
* you can't ban homeopathy threads from /r/science,
* etc.
In general, you lose the ability to moderate conversations in spaces you own, or decide what you spend your time doing. This is, to be honest, a pretty extreme idea if taken literally.
Or you could deem salesmen, 911 conspirators, trolls and homeopathy proponents as "crazy and confused", but who decides that? How is that any more unwanted than posting critical meta commentary to /r/fatpeoplehate?
You are confusing an implication for an equivalence. I've said that those who are not open to arguments should not have a voice. From that it doesn't follow that those who argue should always be listened to.
I imagine a concrete implementation of this idea as a meme that people themselves would recognize this as a good rule and that they would consider it as a decision aid whether or not to participate in a certain group.
You're effectively just juggling the same argument. If I'm to hang up on salesmen, then I'm not open to arguments. Thus you claim I should not have a voice.
Oh, you mean it that way. Anyway, I’ve already said that it should rather applied to large movements instead of interactions of individuals. The current ideal of free speech can’t possibly realized to its fullest extent either/anyway.
I think the point is that protecting abuse is a necessary but unwanted side-effect, not that it shouldn't be protected. This matters because it helps distinguish when such freedoms need to be applied (eg. in government, not my back yard) and how it should be applied.
> It is funny. Because it's the people who want silence others' free speech who repeat the "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" meme as justification for their horrible actions.
Ugh. "horrible actions" as a description for calling people out who threaten, belittle, insult and harass other people and claim that is "protected speech".
By the way, even in a context, where the term "freedom of speech" is really adequate (so, when talking laws and government actions, for example), freedom stops where you infringe the rights of others. That's the whole point of states: To balance the natural freedoms of one person with the rights of other people, thus providing stability. Which is why you can't steal, for example. That's a freedom that had to be balanced against the rights of other people.
It's interesting to me how many reddit free speech defenders say stuff like "Free speech is meant to protect the most disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, foolish speech."
While I agree that pointless, hateful etc. speech deserves protection one word I almost never see in the reddit free speech wars is *dissent. As in "free speech is meant to protect speech that opposes or challenges orthodox opinion and conventional wisdom."
It's almost like the most vocal part of reddit gets off on being offensive for its own sake and is more concerned about the right to call fat people names rather than defending free speech generally. It does seems like they are flying the free speech flag purely out of narrow self-interest.
How many of them actually give a crap about free speech outside of their "community"? How many of them regularly downvote opinions they don't agree with, I wonder?
The obvious solution to the problem that I don't see on any of these message board sites is simply to allow users to have their own personal blacklists for blocking/filtering users whose comments they don't want to see. Personal differences aside the paid troll farms boosting the noise has really gotten unbearable on the interwebs.
That was one thing Digg had that I missed when I moved to reddit. I suspect it's a pretty resource-intensive function compared to what exists today, though.
>Reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.
We must be careful not to confuse commercial viability with government censorship. At some point, advertisers will leave a website that continues to foster vitriol/hate speech/illegal content because they do not want their brand associated with it. This is freedom of speech in action.
Sure, but people should also be free to refuse to listen to things they find distasteful, and to refuse access to people who post things they find distasteful on platforms they operate.
>...and to refuse access to people who post things they find distasteful on platforms they operate.
I tend to agree with what I think you're saying but I wonder if you realize what a controversial opinion that can be to some people. Consider the reaction to Rand Paul's criticism of the Civil Rights Act. Should one be able to operate a restaurant/business/country club that won't serve [blacks, LGBT, Muslims, whites, hispanics, cops, etc]?
This is very idealistic, though. A society works on give and take. Courtesy keeps the society stable. There ought to be some negative consequences for billowing hatred.
> I'd rather have appalling speech than censored speech
If we were talking about what's legal to publish in your own newspaper, I agree.
If we're talking about what's appropriate to force others to view by brigading with a small number of people to take over a website to use it as its own platform to harass its CEO, I disagree.
I absolutely agree with you. Free Speech is not a thing on private boards or sites on the internet. Moderation is a good thing if you want a healthy online environment and conversation.
That said, I think the moderation Pao symbolised on Reddit as a whole was a very wrong move. The Community certainly did. All the subreddits are individually moderated and the subreddits are opt-in; there's very little need for an overarching moderation of Reddit major.
Combine this with the rules for moderation being so vague everyone was asking what they actually were, and the reason given was "safety". Safety?
To me, "Safety" is a red-cloth term. It smells of the agenda used to rule the masses by fear and security, and to me Reddit is the exact opposite. But in reality, it was probably just an honest answer to Reddit's Community and investors both, that they wanted Reddit to be a safe product.
Well, nobody joined Reddit because it was "safe". It's the wild west of the interwebs, subreddits progressively darker as you find more weird stuff and you have to tell yourself "no - I don't need that" (who hasn't ventured to r/aww - darkness comes in many shades).
tl;dr Reddit is set up as a wild west with moderated towns, it is counter-productive to clamp down on everything with "safety" as the rallying cry.
> which is, a single harassment-focused group was disbanded.
That wasn't the only event that transpired. I'd venture to say things got really intense after Victoria was let go and sub-reddits accounting for 33% of visits were shut down in protest of how the affair was handled (poor communication, no transition planning). I think the disconnect between the mods and Reddit's leadership is what got Pao fired; not the shutting down of FPH.
>That said, I think the moderation Pao symbolised on Reddit as a whole was a very wrong move. The Community certainly did. All the subreddits are individually moderated and the subreddits are opt-in; there's very little need for an overarching moderation of Reddit major.
They stepped in because moderators of a banned sub was found to encourage and even directly participate in harassment of other people. And they only caved in after a. incessant complaints from the public and b. some personal threats against imgur employees who took down some images the abusers uploaded.
Free speech is between you and the government. If a company that runs a forum says it bans people for abusive comments there's nothing to do with free speech. We see with Reddit that the ugliest users are the ones that are the loudest and drown out everyone else.
You're correct, it's an ignorant argument, and I see it posted all over the place. I wish America had a better education system, because it drowns out the real conversations that should be happening around free speech.
You have the right to say whatever you want, you do not have the right to say it in my home. I'm curious as to whether or not these individuals understand this, or are just another level of troll trying to stir the pot.
Furthermore, I do have the right to say it "in public".
But, where is that "public" on the internet? I can make a website - a home - and invite other people to come visit me and listen to me ramble, or respond etc. But there is no public space, is there? And if not, should there be?
Most people don't own the homes they live in. Yet the landlord still doesn't get to tell them what to talk about over the dinner table. That's great, but imagine the government sold all sidewalks and public places to private interests, which dictated how you should dress and walk if you want to get out of your home, or to work. Should that be allowed?
Imagine getting thrown out of a mall because someone overheard and disapproved of your conversation there. Does that ever happen? I know there there is no clear line, but that there is one; e.g. if you trail other people and talk to yourself or a friend about them (especially if it's nasty and aggressive) in earshot, that's not exactly cool. But what, other than sanity, would stop all mall owners to agree that anyone e.g. declaring to like the color green should be kicked out, and to hire staff to enforce it? Would that be legal? If it was, should it be? And if it wouldn't be legal, why is that? In what ways, if at all, could or should this applied to the internet?
There are indeed public spaces on the internet, many governments and government bodies have sites that are public where you can file a petition or voice a concern.
Most people (63%) own their homes in America, and there are protections in place for people who rent. Your landlord cannot monitor you.
When it comes to the mall though, it's more a matter of scope and scale. Overhearing something in a mall affects a handful of individuals and the intent was not to broadcast. If you stand up on a table in the cafeteria and start spouting hate speech, you can and will be escorted out by security.
The internet is different, because you cannot accidentally overhear a conversation. Said anywhere on the internet, especial a place like reddit of HN, it is viewable by the entirety of internet users. So direct comparisons to the physical world will always fall short.
If you're looking for fair discussion about free speech, the US education establishment is the last place you want to look. They are completely overrun by PC moral panic, and not only real dissent and vigorous discussion representing diverse points is not welcomed, be it about free speech or any other topic, even mild critique from the friendly side or discomfort with exposure to unsettling thoughts is intolerable. E.g. see: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid
No. Free speech is a principle that any party can choose to respect. Free speech has been one of the very core values of Reddit right from the beginning, in the form of the ability to create and manage a subreddit with very minimal restrictions.
Being a platform of free speech was the single biggest reason Reddit grew to be the giant community that it is today.
Then Pao comes along and repeatedly shows that she doesn't respect free speech at all. What do you expect the users to do, other than revolt?
It's easy to brush off these incidents as the doings of "the ugliest users", but remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. History books are filled with people being silenced due to their expression of uncomfortable ideas.
I see this glib line often (that free speech is only about the government), but I don't think it's right. It's true that the First Amendment specifically requires the US government to respect free speech. But that doesn't mean the general principle applies only to the government.
For example, John Stuart Mill's utilitarian defense of free speech in On Liberty is equally applicable to private parties and specifically says society and individual people should be open to expression of views they find abhorrent. He specifically covers widespread social ostracism as well as government laws. According to Mill, free speech is definitely not just about freedom from government restrictions.
I doubt you understand the principles of free speech better than John Stuart Mill. Or if you understand his argument in On Liberty and disagree, please explain why.
As an aside, I think it's notable how Metafilter has maintained a high-quality link aggregation/discussion forum over many years through the use of community norms and relatively aggressive moderation.
That analogy doesn't account for what happens when a submission gets posted to both a "pinot" subreddit and a "sewage" subreddit, and subscribers in the sewage subreddit see the post in the pinot subreddit from the other discussions tab and "invade" the other subreddit.
Subreddits and their communities are not neatly contained in clearly labelled bottles.
>As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums.
It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong.
And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"
I'm a pretty regular user, but have unsubscribed from a number of the default subreddits. Still, there is often a feeding frenzy mentality that takes over there. The racism during Ferguson was appalling. I saw a Pao subthread where people were discussing how sexually unappealing she is. It degenerated from there. Pretty awful stuff.
Yes, the racism during Ferguson was appalling. Asian storeowners getting their stores looted and burned down, just for being Asian. White cops getting shot at just for being white. And a violent robbery suspect's family calling for a town to be burned down over phony charges of bias.
I doubt your last sentence, as I regularly use Reddit and never saw anything like the story you mention. Certainly there were bad comments in more sanely named threads, but no highly upvoted threads with that title like you mention here.
one of the craziest things about all the racism is that much of it is trolling from non-racist or not normally racist people looking to get a rise out of people. I see the same thing on YouTube and Reddit all of these troll parody accounts created by ant-social 20-somethings in an attempt to get a reaction or "shock" people.
Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.
Some of the things I see people say on the internet makes me wonder what kind of social lives those people can possibly lead while being so hopelessly devoid of any empathy.
If you are only an occasional user why are you even commenting? I'm only picking on you because you are an easy target, but I have seen a number of HN posts from people who first state that they barely use reddit, then go on to blast all reddit users as vitriol spitting losers. What do you gain from getting on this bandwagon?
Did the "community" make death threats? I didn't see any, and I don't think the average redditor would approve those. There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion. The typical upvoted comments actually consisted of valid criticism against Pao and reddit's management.
"There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion."
Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.
It's my estimation that if there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous or pseudonymous discussion comments it's very likely that a few individuals will a make death threat (which are likely not intended to be taken seriously). My point is that stating that death threats were made is not particularly interesting, as that's not a rare occurrence when we're talking about very large number of comments by very large number of people, some of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.
"Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here:"
That really is the case. Completely asinine, but if you are a public figure, the masses can be shockingly awful. There is an interesting article where Penn and Teller compare their rather large influx of death threats with Richard Dawkins[1], and from what I know, pretty much anybody in the public eye has to deal with this.
> I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS
You mean this?
> [1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.
All that opposition - strong enough to convince "Chairman Pao" to resign - reduced to death threats? All those arbitrary bans written off as a just punishment for criminal behavior? Something tells me that we haven't seen the last of "safe space" Reddit.
that's a stretch. if the intent is to create a sarcastic nick-name that compares the ceo to a dictator, "chairman pao" is going to be a front-runner not because pao and mao are both chinese but because pao and mao are only 1 letter different from each other.
You can't really reason with people once they labeled something as "racist". Convincing them that they are wrong would imply that they can't differentiate between what's racist and what's not and that's something that would affect their core beliefs.
Regardless of the intention, they ARE both chinese. So is it really a stretch to see a racist element to this nick name? It is racist by default. I'm not saying that it is a greatly offensive nickname or even unfunny, but for someone to call it racist is not at all a stretch.
but they aren't denigrating her because she is Chinese. They are denigrating her because they perceive her to be a terrible CEO, and Chairman Pao is a easy way to belittle what they see as her 'authoritarian' ways
Calling someone you disagree with racist is itself racist. People call her Charmin Pao because she moved to limit free speech, increase dictatorial control, fire those who disagree with her and generally seems like dictator in here own special little way.
Altman is not justifying the arbitrary bans (or any Reddit admin shenanigans) here, that is not the topic of this sentence.
He is talking strictly about one dangerous activity that gets offenders banned: death threats, which Ellen Pao (the human at the other end) received.
We don't know why Pao went out. We can suspect it was the backlash (more likely), or disagreements with the board [0] but we can suspect.
But that does nothing to make her opposition entirely legitimate, when at its strongest it was hijacked by namecalling, cyber-bullying, and yes, threats to Pao's life. The subset of Redditors who did this deserve to be told how shitty it is. The remaining, legitimate opposition should recognize the distinction.
Do you see another reference to the overwhelming opposition inside the user base? Anything in the vein of "the mounting opposition convinced us that there's no point in fighting our users"?
Because from what I read in the announcement, the opposition is presented as a vocal, hateful and criminal minority that should absolutely not be mistaken for the "sweeping majority" that was "incredibly supportive" of the CEO.
I understand your point. In the announcement over at Reddit, people have noted how much of a textbook PR move this is looking like, so I'm assuming the "this is why" is equally calculated and not the whole picture.
However, you're right. The two reasons are not mutually exclusive.
Maybe she left after disagreeing with the board about how to respond to the backlash. Reddit could have easily nuked every account that disrespected and/or threatened Ms. Pao. But that would have been a different Reddit.
> The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.
That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.
That's what internet anonymity does. Brings out people's true essence. You see it with road rage too. The protection of the vehicle and the quick flight make giving the finger in response to a reasonable mishap an easy answer. A "FUCK YOU" for accidentally veering into your lane. Sound reasonable?
Yeah there's a few Mother Teresas out there, but most of them are self righteous a-holes too. What a world.
Mother Teresa was a rather terrible person. She saw human suffering as a way to be closer to God and squirreled donations to her clinics away for personal bank accounts of her and her higher-class/political goons. She defended some rather evil characters and even kept a $1.25 million dollars donated to her from stolen money. When asked to return it, she simply ignored the request.
> That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.
I disagree. Some people: yes. Average person: I don't know, I suspect probably not. I've met a lot of people from different parts of the US, Canada, and around the world. A great many of them have exhibited a tendency towards genuine empathy. That too is human nature, it's not all narcissism and self-interest.
Stop using Mother Teresa as a pinnacle of good. She was a terrible human who thought suffering was good and gave people a place to suffer, not to heal.
>I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS
Anything less doesn't get heard - or it gets ignored. A certain pirate group that asked the U.N for help, was ignored, and resorted to boarding ships and capturing prisoners comes to mind.
I've known very few people who cared to have Pao as CEO since her taking the position. Anyone who gave attention to Reddit Corporate disliked her being in that position and felt her politics would get in the way (and they did). The only people who seemed to like her in that seat were those with the same ideological and political leanings as her (not a big surprise there). [0]
The fact people had to get "up in arms" and make a huge fuss about her to get her out of the position shows action should have been taken sooner, rather than later. But nobody pays attention to the quiet protests. They only give notice to the extreme.
Yes - some of the comments against her were extreme, unnecessary, and irrelevant to her position and the problems surrounding her. I saw death/rape threats, totally uncalled for. Anything less was ignored.
> I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective.
I think this was the right thing to do from a product perspective. Pao didn't really know how to use the site, and didn't ever particularly like the users. I don't know if Huffman likes the users, but one would assume that he would at least know how to use the site he helped build :)
Um, proof? The fact that she's been actually active on the site under her own account shows that clearly she knows how to use the site, so that argument alone is moot. I don't know how you can prove she didn't like the users unless she straight up said that.
She tried to share a link to a private message. That's the equivalent of my mom emailing me and saying, "Here's the picture - c:\\user\desktop\pic.jpg" - it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works.
Then everyone who replied was shadowbanned and every post was deleted. So no, she literally didn't know how to use the site.
I'll hazard a 'yes' here, based on the comments (see top comment, below). In the interest of fairness, admins can see the private links, so Pao may have just posted to the wrong Reddit, rather than doing something ridiculous (though it would look that way to anyone not familiar with admin powers).
===
kciuq1 1758 points 3 hours ago
Maybe the first priority is to learn how reddit works.
I personally think the criticism directed her way was warranted (as was that directed at Alexis, especially after his first responses), though I definitely don't think it should have taken the form it sometimes did (misogynist, racist, overly personal, overly reactive, etc).
I think the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet (though it has many positive aspects in other contexts) is wreaking havoc on our ability to debate some topics because you wind up with a situation where many people get upset about a legitimate grievance and some overly troll-y subset of those people goes overboard with their backlash and then the whole issue ends up in this very unfortunately binary "us versus them" where rational but legitimately upset people get painted with the same brush as the vocal minority of troll-y jerkwads (or alternately, they have to just excuse themselves from the debate to avoid being painted with that brush).
eg. "Gamergate" (there is an inescapable core truth to the fact that game journalism is broken, perhaps irreparably so, that got completely lost in all of the personal-level misogynistic bullshit) and this reddit situation where the community had every right to be upset at the recent moves they have been making (though to reiterate, I think some forms of the backlash were, as reddit's announcement stated, sickening).
The childish and aggressive level of communication on Reddit led me to discover Hacker News while in search of quality and informed discussion. Admittedly I also use Reddit but more and more it has become a curiosity to see how people act when they think no one will know it's them. Occasionally I also engage in rewarding exchanges there but the few loud, brash and opinionated (but not well informed) users in the subreddits I frequent do lower my level of engagement and enjoyment considerably.
I think the subreddit system is a good way of categorising content and more importantly, behaviour. People are talking a lot about misogyny but its possible to avoid all the drama if you simply subscribe to smaller, more interesting, well moderated subs. I kept up with my favourite books, video games and other interests like history without being interrupted by Pao hate.
I think HN is great too. The knowledge of some of the commenters here can be very educational.
Yes. The smaller subreddits that make up most of my subscriptions are fine (programming languages etc) but the larger ones have a very high noise to signal ratio.
There was a lot of evil stuff spewing about relating to Ms. Pao. It was pretty sad, and those people should feel ashamed of saying those things about anyone.
On the other hand, I don't think that she did a very good job managing the crisis (the first one caused by banning certain douchy subreddits, and the second one caused by the firing), which is one thing a CEO needs to be able to do.
Yeah, exactly. Also, firing someone without some kind of plan for redistributing her duties is a Management 101 no-no. Ellen Pao failed as CEO of Reddit. That has nothing to do with the 1% or whatever of Reddit users who are racists and/or misogynists. That's just the real world; you have to get past the obnoxious idiots and focus on what matters. The reason Ms. Pao was fired (let's be honest) is that she failed to make Reddit more profitable, attractive to users, and generally awesome. Not because she's a woman, not because there are people out there who don't want to see women succeed. Make money and all is forgiven. Pissing off large, meaningful chunks of your user base is not conducive to making money.
Nevermind misogyny etc., you're pointing to two incidents of unknown magnitude (because you lack the data internal to the company) among an unknown number of other things she's handled and you claim she's failed as a CEO? That is ridiculously uninformed.
Is disputing her failure a serious position? Regardless of whether or not they are the community reddit wants the company angered its moderators enough to trigger something that ended up being in the news and very visible even to those that use reddit without ever viewing comments.
Just because you don't have internal proprietary data doesn't mean you cant have a rational opinion on the matter. That is a ridiculous standard. The Victoria thing was a monumental cluster fuck in one of the most outward facing facets of the company.
Okay, and how many wins did Pao have? In your "wins and fuckups" columns that you surely made prior to the post, "fuckups" includes the Victoria thing and whatever else. What is in your "wins" column (internal company initiatives, key hires, process changes, etc.) that were appropriately weighed in order to come to your rational opinion that she has overall failed as a CEO?
If you know anything about the drama surrounding her, you know she's at least an accessory to some extremely shady business dealings. Any defense of her character falls into the same defense strategies as for W Bush. Either she is of (very) questionable moral character, or she is a somewhat decent, but hopelessly ill-fortuned dupe. In either case, hardly good qualifications for being a CEO.
Unless your assertion is that all of her wins were kept secret, and the public record shouldn't be trusted, they are very few.
Some hires and the chilling effects thing are maybe the biggest unambiguous positive developments. The subreddit banning and the salary negotiations thing were received with mixed opinion, but even if you agree with what was banned, the handling of it was questionable and seemed very rushed.
And then there was last week, which derailed the site over a weekend and made national news outlets for the whole week. A lot of details about internal dealings came to light, and none of them particularly painted reddit in a good light. There is no plausible way the amount of good shes done in the last 10-12 months outweighed the massive damage that was inflicted.
It is also worth noting that the people who do have access to a lot of internal information about the inner workings of reddit 'mutually' agreed that she shouldn't be the CEO. Undoubtedly the backlash -- some of it misguided -- played into this, but frankly a large part of being the CEO of a community-based site is PR.
Yes, most of her wins were surely kept internal because most company things are not made public as a matter of course.
No plausible way the day to day internal changes / hirings / firings that you are not privy to have had a balancing effect on this? What was your methodology in assessing the damage that the blackout caused to reddit that you used to measure against the good she could have plausibly caused in order to form your rational opinion? A cursory look at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic does not seem to indicate any lasting impact.
It is not worth noting that random employees (actually, not random: ones who' have enough of an axe to grind that they'll risk their job to break NDA) think a CEO is bad. That is the case at almost every company, small and large. Find me one where you can't find 2 employees that agree there should be a different CEO etc.
Sorry but we are looking at it from a necessarily uninformed outsider's perspective so we can't possibly have a meaningful opinion on whether she was an effective CEO.
So your entire point is that there is nothing a CEO can do, ever, that would let an outsider form an opinion on how effective they are.
And even if I was an employee; well there are always disgruntled employees, their opinion isn't reasonable either.
These are absurd arguments. By the same logic, the CEO of whole foods could hold a press conference and just go on a racist, hateful rant, and I couldn't possibly have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as a CEO.
In any event, the people I meant who did have the internal data weren't employees, I meant their board of directors.
And is it possible that a CEO is really awesome, but really really unlucky, and it just _looks_ like they are bad at their job outwardly? Sure, there is some non-zero chance of this; much like there is some non-zero chance of damn near anything.
Perfect information is an impossible ideal; arguing that a rational opinion is impossible regardless of any circumstance since we don't have access to all the information which exists would imply that no person can have a rational opinion about anything, ever.
Pretty much, yes - as much as it feels super tingly great inside to feel like you've judged the career effectiveness of that person you don't know, you really don't have much info at all, and this doesn't fall into the extreme argument of "while you know 99% of the things, you technically don't know 100%, so it's unknowable - checkmate!"
And yes, literally it is true that the CEO of whole foods could go on a huge racist rant and you could not have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as CEO. Or rather, what you want to say is "in this extreme example, this CEO is clearly ineffective", but we know of morally shitty CEOs who drive huge company growth & profits and are therefore effective CEOs.
Anyway, can you show your work that you were referring to behind your analysis of the magnitude of the damage that the recent reddit blackout did?
The traffic log you linked does show significant hits, and a very large numbers of users claimed to have de-whitelisted reddit from adblock. Terms like 'voat' and 'reddit alternative' skyrocketed in trends. I don't think this is the 'digg moment' or anything, and I doubt voat exists for any length of time, but I very much doubt investors are looking at these trends and doubting the magnitude of the damage. Reddit is only profitable if it retains users, especially if they disable ad block and want to buy 'gold'.
More substantially, if all AMA teams really are going to be running the show without official reddit support, this cuts in a couple of ways. It shows a maintained lack of faith in reddit from the moderators, and it also is going to make the logistics of AMAs more difficult. The AMAs are unique content which is a substantial draw of new users, where a ton of the work was already done by volunteers. The logistical strain is going to make for less or worse content, pick your poison. High profile guests, especially those not technically savvy, are less likely to participate without admin support being available.
Strategically, reddit almost certainly wants to be involved in this -- they want to be tightly coupled, enough that the group can't spin off their own version.
> The Victoria thing was a monumental cluster fuck in one of the most outward facing facets of the company.
The main issue (no one to coordinate AMAs) was dealt with in a matter of hours without serious consequences. The "monumental cluster fuck" image is due to hundreds of people with an axe to grind who piled up on top it, mostly with unrelated "anti-SJW" complaints.
The so-called misogynists (I'm of the opinion that much of the brutal words written about her were a large part tongue-in-cheek, deliberate over the top absurdity, not that that excuses it) are a part of reddit. You can't just say "I shouldn't have to deal with this".
Besides, these people have always been there and haven't caused any large scale problems, and they didn't when Ellen was appointed (which is when they should have started protesting, assuming you buy the misogyny charge). It was when some quite heavy handed restrictions started to be laid down with regards to freedom of speech that the uprising began to grow.
Personally, I'm glad she's gone, I much prefer reddit to be an extremely politically incorrect place. Take fatpeoplehate for instance - is it hurtful to fat people? Sure. But that subreddit can be easily blocked from your feed. Should someone have to do that? I think yes, they should, because if the new policy is to not hurt anyone's feelings, a whole bunch of content has to disappear.
Now that's just my opinion of how I want reddit to be - it is up to the owners of reddit to decide how they want it to be.
Was turning the front page of /r/all into a cesspool of hate the right way to protest her decisions? Maybe not, but honestly, what alternative is there that would have actually had any effect?
I didn't mean to take a position on the misogyny part. I just meant leaving that question aside completely, the point was woefully incomplete.
You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of why FPH was banned - it wasn't because of offensive/hateful content like /r/coontown; it was because of active off-site harassment & brigading that the mods couldn't control.
> You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of why FPH was banned - it wasn't because of offensive/hateful content like /r/coontown; it was because of active off-site harassment & brigading that the mods couldn't control.
One of us has a misunderstanding on that and I'm not so sure it's me. I'm aware of the brigading claim, but not of any widespread evidence. And even if so, then how do you defend the inconsistent enforcement of that rule amongst other subreddits like /r/srs? If you're going to use a rule to close a sub, then by god enforce that rule consistently if you want people to take you seriously.
How they treated other subs is off topic for the question of why FPH was banned. Fact is, they banned it due to brigading and off site harassment etc. Whether you are personally convinced by the evidence kind of doesn't matter. They have no onus to share it all with you anyway.
If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.
As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy. Not that I need to defend reddit's decisions, nor automatically become on their side. Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.
> How they treated other subs is off topic for the question of why FPH was banned. Fact is, they banned it due to brigading and off site harassment etc. Whether you are personally convinced by the evidence kind of doesn't matter. They have no onus to share it all with you anyway.
No evidence was given, so you don't know either.
You are correct in that they are free to do as they choose with the website they own, but not taking into consideration your userbase's opinion of your actions seems like not an optimal recipe for success. Treat your users, who produce all your content and manage the majority of your business through voluntary moderation with zero respect, authoritatively decide what is "on or off topic for discussion", and see what happens.
> If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.
Oh I'm aware of the stated reasoning, and I:
a) reject it on the grounds that it is not consistently applied. If <subreddit x> is banned because of <rule y>, but that rule doesn't apply everywhere, then it wasn't actually banned because of <rule y>, because a "selectively enforced" rule is not really a rule. They're trying to use unemotional logical reason to explain their actions, but they are not acting logically.
b) don't believe them, in part because the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech, which is most definitely a change from the original culture and spirit.
> As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy.
I'm not at all aware of the details of this but I would like to learn - is this common knowledge?
> Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.
I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background. Or, if you want to exercise your right (as the platform owner) to completely control all content, then simply state that outright. Or don't, and just continue to subtly move in that direction without discussing it, and see what happens, which I'd argue is exactly what has happened here. What happens is, your users (a significant portion at least) revolt, the story ends up being splashed through mainstream media including financial news, and before too long someone "resigns", "because their growth targets were inconsistent with management". (Do you believe that one also?)
> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.
See the 2nd FAQ
> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,
Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech". Not that you have or should expect free speech on reddit anyway etc.
>> I'm not at all aware of the details of this but I would like to learn - is this common knowledge?
> Yes, see the 3rd FAQ of the announcement post:
Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals. If a subreddit has been banned for harassment, you will see that in the ban notice. The only banned subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers is r/fatpeoplehate[2].
"When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site."
"We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected"
Agreed.
"worry for their safety every day"
Oh please.
"because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day."
Laughably, transparently false. This sounds like the thruthiness that comes from the minds of MBA's and is accepted (in public discourse) on wall street, but it does go over so well on reddit.
Look, if they want to ban "harassment", which I don't argue that fph was at least in some way, then just state the facts and ban it, it's not so hard. It is the completely unnecessary lying that fired up the outrage, imho. Just say "poking fun at fat people is malicious and we're no longer allowing it. Sorry.", and I don't think there would have been a shitstorm.
>> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.
> See the 2nd FAQ
It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass[1] individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
That in no way excuses srs. As far as I understand, brigading is explicitly a bannable offense. srs brigades. srs has not been banned. Once again, inconsistentcy & dishonesty leads to mistrust and anger.
>> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,
> Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech".
"It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time."
Now, combine that with some of the interesting commentary on "safe spaces" that we see coming out of our institutions of higher learning on a regular b...
I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, and is actually pretty reasonable. How did you determine that everyone knows this?
Sorry I misunderstood your references, makes a more sense now, but I still disagree for the reasons stated in the edit above.
> I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, so there must be something wrong with your ability to deduce things if you feel that everyone knows that.
Once a conversation reaches the point of pedantry it's generally a good idea to just stop.
The so-called misogynists (I'm of the opinion that much of the brutal words written about her were a large part tongue-in-cheek, deliberate over the top absurdity, not that that excuses it) are a part of reddit.
Today we see this on the front page:
Redditors that worked le porn industry, was there sex involved? Did you get to have sex? Sex sex sex sex sex
"Can confirm, had sex. My stage name is: Ellen pao Le edit: ayyy lepao im grill jet fuel."
Now I don't expect you to necessarily appreciate this this sense of humor, but people like Ellen and you (as far as I can tell) almost seem completely oblivious to the reality that this is humor. People have all sorts of important duties during the day, many people like to have a place to go in their downtime to participate in general absurdity free from the fucking incessant purely invented social constructs and nonsense restrictions we have to put up with in our working lives.
For example, there were many posts generally along the lines of "This cunt." linked to a photo of Ellen Pao. Personally, I find that quite funny, because it is so crude, and requires such little effort that you're taking a comedic risk even saying it. Well, not on reddit, but in standup comedy you would. Now, do you think that person thought Ellen Pao was equivalent to a vagina (or some "misogynistic" equivalent), or do you think maybe they were taking the piss?
The cultural disconnection from the real world of some people is vast, there are several jokes with a lot of truth in them about physicists, mathematicians, etc whose scientific worldview is so inconsistent with reality that it causes a normal human to involuntarily push large volumes of air in and out of their lungs in rapid sequence while contorting their face into unusual shapes.
I'm just interested in what makes people that disagree with me tick. Perhaps I'm totally wrong, it could be. But this idea that you're wrong, but I won't tell you why you're wrong doesn't sit well with me. It's not just a problem with reddit, it's a problem with planet earth.
My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.
I think unless they egregiously violate company policy or violate the law or do something which would bring damage to a company it should be up to the company to direct the fate of an officer... Not popular sentiment.
Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.
Let's say she sucked at her job. Let the org fire her. These actions were the result of thought that they needed to heed public opinion.
As if officers need to walk on eggshells. What should matter ate results rather than dictated by the winds of public opinion.
I wish the board, management, etc. in these situations would who resolve and say, no, sorry, this is our choice, we stand by it. But no, we see them capitulate to public opinion.
Sometimes that opinion does coincide with"the right thing to do" but let the company execute the right thing. Don't let the mob become your upper management.
Yes, the board could have ignored users' opinions. But users weren't just complaining about Ms. Pao. They were complaining about the policy changes ("We ban behavior, not ideas.") that she was championing. If those policy changes continue under new management, I suspect that many Reddit users will vote with their "feet". To Voat or whatever. And given that Reddit sells users' eyeballs, that will reduce revenues.
There is a difference between doing what your users tell you to do, and listening to them.
> “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -H. Ford
Users present solutions to their problems, when you listen you discover what their problem actually is. In the above case, faster more reliable transportation.
edit: Jobs was a cofounder of what is(or close to) the most profitable company in the world. He saved the company from bankruptcy and is arguably the best quality control engineer ever. Rules always have exceptions but thinking you are the exception often helps to prove the rule.
Well, this kind of looks like an egregious violation of company policy. It looks like she punished an employee for giving an interview to a famous minority politician. There has to be some company policy against retaliation on political basis.
Regarding "mob rule" this is a free country and people have a choice which website to read and to contribute to. If people want to go away from reddit that is their choice. The company that owns reddit does not need to follow reddit user wishes, but they have to face the distinct possibility that those users will leave and the consequences thereof.
You can call it mob rule, but other's can call it the matter of ordinary people exercising free choice.
> Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.
Her job was to preside over that mob. And apparently to monetize it. Pissing off that mob means she failed at her job.
In addition, not understanding that you are firing a key employee shows a dramatic level of ignorance. Reddit has so few employees that even an adequate CEO should know what every single employee is doing. This is just basic Management 101--"Know What Your People Do" or its corollary "Never Piss Off A Secretary" aka "Know Who Has The Real Power In Your Company".
Finally, from her attempt at PR positioning you get headlines like this: "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit". Really? "Fighter of sexism". Um, she fired a woman, you know? And her behavior at Kleiner was far from exemplary. Her case for sexism would have been a whole lot stronger if she hadn't appeared to be sleeping her way up the corporate chain.
Overall, the problem seems to be the same tone-deafness as so many at this level of privilege: "The rules don't apply to me. How dare these plebeians attempt to make the rules apply to me!"
That's all good -fine. If she did wrong, let the company deal with it. They hired her. But here she's been left out to dry. Totally different from Toyota where an executive smuggled prescription drugs into Japan[1] and the company stood by her --she stepped down once she understood the implications of her transgression in the eyes of Japanese law.
But this is not the company firing her --it's the internet firing her. I don't like this approach at all. management by popular opinion is not good. Imagine managing a professional sports team by popular vote --it'd be nuts.
The Reddit users are their customers. If a board has a CEO that is getting a lot of the firms customers upset (in revolt), then the board has to step in to preserve the company. Remember, they had Digg as an example of what can happen when highly mobile customers leave.
So far as an example from the automotive industry, look at Rick Wagoner from General Motors. He lost the firm $82 billion and 90% of its market capitalization while he was CEO. And the board did nothing to correct this. With their capital gone, loss of confidence by the market, they were forced into bankruptcy.
Yes, the same one. I don't have to agree with him or Ms Pao. But I cannot agree with popular putsches approach to policy. As Mr Schaubler recently said, there are rules, meaning there are processes.
But we have seen this play out many many times. Someone is accused --accused, not proven.. and the slightest whiff the company drops the person like a bad contagion. And, so now people expect this from companies. Complain enough and have someone fired. Someone said something crass while drunk 'aha!' fire them, behavior unbecoming. As if these people, unlike us, are not human and can't err. We're scared to see our ugliness in others. Oh the terrible reminder of our frailties! OMG, they were caught in a sting operation and had a rendezvous in a bathroom with a stranger! [Do the private sex lives of executives really matter? Oh but public perception, gasp!]
I don't think companies and organizations should manage by popular opinion. No one will be willing to make bold choices for fear of upsetting some base of people.
If an officers' views are contrary to the official org position, or behavior was egregious or against the law, then sure. If the organizational action simply coincides with popular opinion, then fine --but don't take action _just_ because of popular opinion --that's, to me, not right and gives away control to the whims of the moment.
> My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.
I think the line needs to be drawn more clearly than that, because we should have populist control over companies.
I'm more concerned about companies that really impact us, for example huge banks, energy conglomerates, people behind the TPP and TiSA.
But when the leader of a company who publishes the words of its' customers - a complex relationship, indeed - tries to curb some of the harmful speech of those customers, I don't think it's a reasonable populist standard to say that people supporting that speech can oppose it.
Redit isn't a community. It's a bunch of communities. Most of them, I more or less dislike, for various overlapping sets of reasons. But I support freedom of speech. Everyone is free to ignore whatever they dislike.
Also, in such communities, strong anonymity is prudent. It does protect griefers from consequences, I admit. But more importantly, it protects all users from meatspace risks.
Edit: This is an old discussion. Especially if one replaces "Redit" with "Usenet".
It will only be good if he unban the banned subreddits. If he leaves them banned it means that they did unpopular changes, laid blame on one person, remove the person but leave the changes.
She thought she could enforce her agenda onto an online community and it would all go well. Results as expected by anyone who has ever been part or observed an online community.
Ellen Pao has been CEO of Reddit for 8 months. A month or so ago, Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior. Since Pao had recently lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, aspects of the reddit community pattern-matched the occurances as "Social Justice Warrioring" and engaged in an organized hate-fest on Pao.
About a week ago, Victoria, the admin who coordinated Reddit's "ask me anything" subreddits (interviews with celebrities for the most part) was fired for unknown reasons. The optics of this were handled poorly, and the community got enraged. Since the buck stopped with Pao, and she was already weakened due to the backlash on the earlier issue, this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised, and thus untenable as CEO.
It wasn't just the 'optics'. They screwed up everything about it. They didn't have a replacement. They didn't have a transition period. They didn't have a clue how much work Victoria was doing. They didn't realize how significant she was to a number of core subreddits. They didn't realize how important those core subreddits were. They thought that none of these things mattered, and that a mere email address pointed to the rest of the reddit team could 'pick up the slack'.
They didn't just screw up the optics - they royally screwed up, and then tried to laugh it off.
> Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior
While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. If they had cleaned out all the trash at once, the community impact probably would have been minimal.
> While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior.
I think "organized harassment" here means, people form the banned subs reached out to harass people in the real life, outside of reddit. Not just posting vile stuff in a sub.
The community turned against her. To illustrate, her apology thread appears to have no further comments from her (making Pao appear aloof), but in reality she did make several mature and understanding comments in the thread, but they each accumulated thousands of downvoted and were buried. Simply put, she became a lightning rod and people's animosity toward her meant that she could no longer be effective as the executive of a community-driven organization.
In a very short period of time, a very vocal and visible part of the reddit community basically took over the site lashing out against Pao (you couldn't go there without reading about how Pao was ruining reddit). This happened once with the subreddit bannings, and then couple weeks later with Victoria's firing.
This powerful section of the reddit community's opinion of Pao is basically ruined at this point, and any further perceived transgressions on her part would no doubt lead to even larger, more damaging backlashes.
It seems the protests have had their intended effect and demonstrated to reddit's management that the community is essentially what drives the site's success (or failure) and that they need to keep this in mind when forming plans for the future. Keeping Pao on as CEO was only fracturing the community, so she had to go.
Whole situation started when reddit closed a few hateful subreddits (r/fatpeoplehate, and a few racist ones as well); a very vocal backlash came from the contingent of reddit that believes the admins have no right to 'regulate free speech'. The site was brigaded and flooded with anti-Pao posts (who they saw as their villain) which then turned to racist 'Chairman Pao' posts, posts with her and a nazi flag, etc.
After a while this calmed down.
A week ago reddit fired/let go Victoria, who was the liaison for hundreds of celebrities and reddit, often transcribing entire IAmAs (community interviews). Victoria's departure was immediate and caused a lot of planned IAmAs to be postponed or canceled, since she was the go-between (and in some cases the only point of contact).
A few major moderators were angry and posted about their displeasure at Victoria's departure and the general lack of interface admins have with moderators. This snowballed in to a 'blackout' of many major subreddits for about a day (longer for a few of the smaller ones). One of the admins posted a 'Popcorn tastes good...' comment when people asked him what he thought of the anger; which fanned the flames. The major protests died down after about a day or two, but a few subreddits spawned for the specific purpose of continuing the protest and to oust Pao. These people brigaded most posts about Pao and promoted the petition link calling for her removal. The anti-Pao rhetoric continued at full force (with the usual racist 'Chairman Pao' meme, nazi flags, posts of her photo to a subreddit called 'punchablefaces').
In summary: Pao and admins were wrong to not communicated with the moderators more, especially when it came to Victoria; the original protest had legitimate legs but then devolved in to the same 4chan-esque bile that happens any time reddit makes some sort of administrative move. That awful bile of protest is what kept the flames going which led to Pao stepping down.
1) Banning of several 'hate' subreddits especially /r/FatPeopleHate for harassment. The harassment was kind of dubious, as while they certainly weren't saying nice things, it didn't seem like they were actively doing 'raids' or doxing. At the same time several significantly worse, but smaller, subreddits remained online (gore, racism, sexism, etc) More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa...
2) Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Notably Victoria, who coordinated numerous AMAs with key people, and her removal completely cut off communications with several planned AMAs, including several that were live. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...
Both events were followed by a large amount of anti-Pao hate and general massive amounts of spammy posts for 2-3 days taking over the front page of reddit. The first instance also involved lots of new subreddits that would get banned, before another dozen would appear in an endless game of whack-a-mole.
? I thought Yishan left because he wasn't a fan of moving to SF.
e: half correct, they were in SF, moving to a new SF office but he wanted instead for the new office to be in Daly City:
"Then, when it came time to relocate from one San Francisco office to another, Wong put his foot down, Reddit sources say, and said he wanted to move the company to Daly City.
“I felt that locating an office in San Francisco proper is an incredibly difficult thing given the strains the city is facing and the high rents it imposes on employees who wish to live close to the office,” Wong said"
The harassment thing was not at all dubious: https://archive.is/wP0uB FPH was a nasty cesspit that had been leaking into the rest of Reddit for a while, going into other communities and targeting women who dared to post photos of themselves without meeting their standard of beauty.
I think this is more of a rorschach test for how forgiving a person you are toward harassment in general than it is a refutation of the presented examples. It is tedious to look at all the links, but allow me to illustrate with my interpretations of those same comments:
1) It is targeted toward the reader in second person narrative, frankly informing them that they are surrounded by people that hate them in everyday life. The tone is not sarcastic or satirical. It has literally no other purpose than directing genuinely intended emotional abuse at real people.
2) It's discussion of pictures of a specific person on reddit, who was easily found and connected to the picture. And as a rule it's easy to find the source of crossposted pics which causes them to be often, if not always, facilitate contact between hopeful harassers and their victims.
3) You seem to be claiming that posting in a thread tacitly constitutes permission for abuse and transforms harassing comments into non-harassing comments. To put it lightly, that theory stands in need of elaboration.
4) It just means you're working with a very forgiving, permissive view toward harassment.
5) See #2 and #4
6,7,8 and 9 are more or less covered by the above.
You're not disputing 10.
11) from what I can see there is a commenter asserting it was a fabrication by a troll, providing links to pages that are no longer accessible. Given the context of many willing accusers and willing apologists on all sides, that doesn't seem like much of a debunking to me.
And just as a big picture gloss, no one posting comments in those threads is mincing over those fine distinctions like we're trying to do here. They're just posting a lot of vile comments and leaving it to everybody else to debate whether it can be proven to be harassment to a degree that holds up under the most granular, forgiving analysis possible. In the cases where it's not harassment, it isn't due to anything approaching principled restraint on the part of the participants. Crossposted pics, for example, may lead to direct harassment or they may not, depending on how people respond to them. The possibility of facilitating harassment clearly isn't stopping people from going ahead and posting them, as the examples above illustrate.
Just to make sure we don't miss the forest for the trees here, that lack of restraint in and of itself is an indictment of their behavior, and should be cause for unequivocal condemnation of how community management was handled on reddit long before we even get to the point of arguing whether specific instances technically count as harassment according to this or that preferred definition.
Imagine a pub (Digg) that everyone in town went to. Everything was great until the pub decided to try to make more money by forcing patrons to sit a certain way. Everyone in town decided to boycott this pub, and then they found another pub (Reddit), that didn't have the silly monetization scheme that the Digg pub had. The influx of new patrons turned this quiet little pub in the corner of the town into the main pub in town. Everyone was welcome in this pub - sports types, gamers, geeks, fitness nerds. Everyone had their own little corner, and for a few years the pub provided the town with a place to meet up with people of similar interest, even if the interests were darker in nature.
During the last year, the pub decided to hire a new manager (Ellen Pao). The new manager wants the pub to be a more welcoming place for people of all types so she decides to ban a group of rowdy patrons. However, other patrons felt that Ellen Pao intruded on their freedom to express themselves and their own opinions in the pub, and an uprising took place. To calm the uprising, Pao decides to completely silence people who talked shit about her (shadowbans, subreddit bans), and bans out even more groups of people. Patrons were NOT happy about this situation.
Then, the managers of this pub decided to fire a very well loved employee who contributed a lot to bringing awesome guests to the pub, without letting the patrons or the other employees know about it. This made other employees of the pub very angry, as they all loved what she does for the community. To make matters worse, the managers make snide comments about the situation. Due to the previous Ellen Pao bannings and the recent firing, everyone in the pub decides to riot in whatever way they can. They also consider moving to a new pub in town (voat.co) though the pub seems to always be full.
People were angry, and they knew they have the power to completely render Reddit unpopular, just like they did with Digg. Reddit listened to the community rather than got stuck inside their own views on what the website should or should not be and the resignation of Pao was the outcome; a good PR move.
"it's basically just the regular explanation with the regular expression s/website/pub/ applied" would've sounded wittier but, joke aside, I am sorry you see it that way.
Failure to understand Non-Profit 101. If you rely on unpaid volunteers, you can't afford to enrage them. It doesn't really matter if those volunteers are right or wrong.
Yup, she did awesome Sam. Especially recently. (Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.)
I didn't even know who she was until "the last few months." Which have been a parade of increasingly-negative press and idiotic behavior. And that's from reading Reuters and the NY Times -- I don't even use Reddit.
---
Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board... “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.
>Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.
Meh. It's traditional. There's nothing to be gained from running down your outgoing CEO. Besides, they hired her, so the worse she looks the worse their own judgement looks.
Pretty much had to happen. To say that the Victoria situation was mishandled is a severe understatement. I wonder what will happen with communities like FPH and others (that have since moved to Voat). Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts?
Time will tell. IMO, the problem at hand is that reddit is still trying to make advertisers their bread and butter. And advertisers will never be overly attracted to censorship-free spaces.
Even though I may not agree with her aggressively politically-correct agenda (nor does most of reddit), I think it may have been a smart move from a business dev. perspective.
I doubt it. Garbage like FPH should have been dealt with much sooner. The reason there was a backlash about that at all, imo, is because they let it drag out too long. Reddit was the friend-parent for so long that when it finally came time to enforce some discipline, it came as a shock and felt like a betrayal.
This is why it got so messy when they got rid of FPH. They did a MISERABLE job of defining the line on what is and is not appropriate. If you're going to censor, it better be a well-defined line.
The issue is that these communities aren't frequently in the top of /r/all and causing outside issues. FPH just got too big and too obnoxious to ignore.
Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS? They seemed to hide behind the vail of harassment and not peak behind the curtain of what reddit really is. Reddits problem is they said anything goes, and then years later they saw what they created.
> Reddits problem is they said anything goes, and then years later they saw what they created
Isn't that basically what I said?
> Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS?
I genuinely do not know, but they need to find that limit, they need to be transparent about how they came to that decision, and they need to be consistent and fair about applying it to subreddits.
Like I said above, they tolerated it for too long, and then swung the hammer down hard. If you don't house train your dog for three years, and then start screaming at it for peeing on the rug, the dog isn't going to react well.
Banning a number of subreddits that you can count with the fingers on one hand, and zero users, is swinging the hammer down hard? What would be a light touch, then?
FWIW tons of users have been shadowbanned for relatively light infringements (posting about TPP on /r/news, posting negative news items about Pao on various subreddits) since the 5 sub-reddits were shut down.
> Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS?
Cynically? When they start making /r/all.
My own personal opinion is that FPH was an embarrassment to reddit because it had gained enough traction that it was visible outside of its own little bubble, so they nuked it and took a few other inconsequential subs with it to provide plausible cover that they weren't just straight up censoring FPH for the sake of the brand image.
Meh. They should have left it alone. The sub mods tried to keep people mostly contained within itself. There are bad actors everywhere. The whole thing seemed like a guilty by association thing to me.
Discussion sites (HN included) exist solely due to their users' laziness for using and/or creating better Free decentralized solutions and ensuing network effects. In exchange for this ease of use, the site inserts an epsilon of advertising and censorship. This is the extent of their value proposition.
Eventually business/legal skinjobs take over, mistake the community for an owned golden goose, and ramp up the amount of advertising/censorship. The illusion of openness is shattered. The users revolt and move to the next green pasture.
> Erm, why should there be any "discipline" at all?
Because communities need moderators. A free for all is anarchy; enough shitbags will ruin any particular community. I've moderated a small forum, and that was a headache when I just had two trolls to deal with, and I still failed at it - people left because of those two people, enough of them that the forum is basically dead now.
On a more cynical/business perspective, if enough users leave and if enough negative press is printed, your business loses money.
Sure, but the premise of Reddit is that mods can moderate as they see fit. Admins hadn't really been involved in shaping the content as much as keeping things running and legal.
You're talking as if Reddit is doing them a favor by providing them a platform. With your idea of "discipline", Reddit would never become the giant that it is today.
This ignores that advertisement is a good amount of revenue for Reddit (it took is over $8M last year from advertising)[1]. In any case, there definitely needs to exist a balance, and the announcement on Reddit makes no pretense that they'll allow any community like FPH to come back or exist going forward. Even if they didn't need to rely on advertisement, it's better for the community overall to have communities that are hurtful go somewhere else. In my opinion, if FPH etc. are fine at Voat, stay there.
Reddit would do well to hire someone with experience in the association management field. Those folks specialize in managing fractious communities such that the volunteers not only stick around, they're happy to pay for the privilege.
I will be interested to see if anything changes regarding the management of Reddit or at least the communities opinion of it. I wonder if the community will chalk this up as a win and suddenly forget all of the reasons they have been complaining which really have nothing to do with Pao in the first place.
This entire debacle and the 'communities' (the small vocal part that acted horribly) response pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for me when it comes to reddit.
With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna.
Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now).
Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.
I agree 100%. Except for certain sub-reddits, I go to reddit when I want to see what the idiots think.
There was a time when I would read a news subreddit and reminded myself that every headline should be understood exactly in reverse. I stopped doing that because it's hard to keep up the mental filter.
I'm glad that most of the communities I'm part of sat out of this mess.
The top subs I read and/or post to are /r/asktransgender, /r/ainbow, /r/comicbooks, and /r/kamenrider. None of them would've benefited from taking part in any kind of blackout (the first two of those function as support groups and any blackout could seriously hurt someone who needs help, the third is a mid-sized fandom where people care more about talking about their hobby than staging a juvenile protest, and the fourth is an extremely niche fandom so small that nobody would notice a blackout).
That article is good in that it calls out the obviously bad stuff pretty well (and some of that stuff is pretty fucking vile tbh) but it doesn't really address that a biggish minority of the users are just not that nice, take out all the porn, the trolls and the 'dank memes' and the few good subreddits and you are left with a group roughly split between 'nice enough people' and 'get the fuck away from me'.
Of course a cynic would say that reddit is just a reflection of the society we live in and that might be right but it's also a reflection of the society we live in where there are few consequences to been a complete dick (I think if you could punch someone through a computer screen reddit might be a better place).
I've been on reddit >7 years and I'd love to say that it was 'better in the old days' but honestly I don't think it was I just think I've reached a point in my life where I don't feel the need to surround myself with that crap.
I think it's unfair to compare your un-curated Reddit experience - which you admit is pretty good in a few niche subs - with your highly curated Facebook feed.
It's like saying that food in New York is awful because you reached into a trashcan and found a rancid bagel, but is awesome in Chicago because you looked up the nicest restaurant and spent $500 on a meal there.
"With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's"
Sometimes I don't recognize what y'all are talking about, and I almost want to defend reddit, then I remember: I've long since adjusted my reddit to be virtually nothing but niche. My largest is ~320,000, but it's just a "Deals" reddit. I've got two at 150,000, both very focused. And it goes down from there.
I'd hardly know this was going on except /r/blog is essentially forced on to your reddit front page.
It's just like Usenet was... subscribe to politics.vitriol.hate.anger and rec.sports.flame, and yeah, you're gonna get idiots. Subscribe to comp.lang.niche_language, get almost nothing but signal. Times never really change.
I strongly believe causality runs the other way... becoming a default reddit puts you into an Eternal September that no community could possibly survive.
AskScience is a default sub, I think, and they've survived alright. Interestingly, AskHistorians asked to not be a default sub-reddit for precisely the reasons you've given.
Maybe one of the nice things about UseNet was that you could only be signed up for a forum that you explicitly looked for? That at least forces the trolls to go out of their way to interfere with general-interest sections, not just go after them out of laziness.
What's wrong with Reddit is the "default subreddit" concept and the difficulty of subreddit discovery. Building in some form of interest based subreddit discovery would go a long way to de-emphasising defaults and (eventually) mitigate much of the vitriol.
There is also something to be said for educating users on the effects of anonymity.
I think it's a little unfair towards Reddit. Any community large enough will be taken over by trolls if nothing else for the fact that they're the ones making the most noise. Subreddits are perfect way to contain those people away from others since the majority won't be posting in niché subreddits, and those few who do can be moderated.
If anything might be a lesson on community design it might be to put up a few more "barriers" between subreddits and the general population and think about how to control interaction between them.
I am opening a bottle of champagne and at the same time answer my own question: it took 3 weeks for the community to get rid off a tyrant. Well done Reddit!
Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.
I didn't know this for HN, though I'd seen it on Reddit. Thanks for passing this along.
On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives.
On reddit, I was familiar with the saying -- "downvote isn't disagree button." Though, the current rediquette has removed that language. Compare [1] (old) v. [2] (current).
> On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives.
Unfortunately, it is a serious problem. The moment you become a dissonant voice is the moment you're downvoted into unreadability by the choir. Make no mistake, many people here have enough karma points to downvote and they are quick to react.
“Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.
What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists
I don't even use Reddit and Sam's quote was so odd it caused me to comment below (probably turning more and more grey by the moment).
In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community.
I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.
Maybe. I'm sure a large amount of redditors (maybe not majority) appreciate a well-run IAmA which manages bringing in celebrities and other big names. Pao's actions as CEO directly impacted their ability to do that.
Considering that it was Sam who brought in Ellen, what do expect him to say? if that isn't enough to warrant 'corporatespeak' over-drive, consider that Ellen really enjoys suing her employers and she still hasn't been able to completely pay her legal fees for the last case she lost.
Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?
Sam and the board are happy and pleased with her performance because she played the part of the suit pushing an over-corporate monetization-focused agenda and then eventually was offered up as a "sacrifice to the reddit ideals", and at the same time she moved the goal posts entirely so now the new CEO and board can "scale back" Ellen's initiatives but only part way, therefore simultaneously putting them in a more monetize-able position AND making them look like they are "fixing what Ellen did".
My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.
Supplemental note: I'm not saying they did this by design or that this means Ellen succeeded. The ideal outcome for her would have been to manage that negotiation and positioning herself, identifying and settling into the middle ground and coming out the other side still in charge - this didn't happen, and the turnover does not make any of the parties look good. Still, she tried and probably benefited the business-side of things in some way - the next 12 months will see whether these benefits outweigh the reputation costs.
With reddit gold most of Reddit has no problem with Reddit making money if they do it the right way. But if it means censoring content and speech and changing the community interaction that is totally unacceptable.
I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.
The job she did was sort of a phenomenon, in that someone like me who never even thinks of Reddit was reminded numerous times why that's a good thing. Most CEOs don't do that!
She walked in to a hot mess of a situation after the previous CEO resigned on the spot and kept the company from falling apart (which I thought was a live concern at the time). You try doing that some day.
It's hard to ignore the external circumstances that lead to the previous CEO resigning on the spot. Maybe not everyone needs to work in the most expensive city of all to keep a favorite pet startup in startup mode.
I imagine it's a lot easier to just have the cash and power to swap out those who threw their hearts out on the line. Big pictures obscure the small pictures of the lives caught in the meat grinder of the march of capital.
Becoming a VC has become the new beginning of the end for any humanity left in a human being.
Banning fph was a good start. "The community" is actually Reddit's number one problem. It has allowed a large contingent of hateful assholes to congregate there. If this continues the company has no future.
I suspect she pissed off a very small, but very vocal minority. Most people (myself included) don't really know or care about Pao one way or the other.
> So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.
This is believable because there have been odd business decisions under her watch, not just policy decisions. RedditMade, one of the intended revenue-generating models for Reddit, failed while she was interim CEO. Alienating /r/IAMA probably did not help.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there was more to it, and the image that she has on Reddit was certainly not helpful, but she wasn't fired because of the backlash from last week and previous, because if that was the case she would have been fired much sooner, but instead she stepped down, by force or not, because she wasn't able to guarantee good revenue for Reddit by past actions and admission of the above.
Reading between the lines and viewing her resignation in the context of what she's had to go through in the past few months, she was harassed out of the job by the user base.
I was just answering your question. Some might think that context matters. As in, what happened to Pao just comes with the job while what happened to Eich was purely personal.
From my reading, this wasn't about harassment. It was about missteps, many of them. Needless to say, her various apologies were not spurred by harassment.
Part of the user base harassed her. Part of the user base raised valid concerns about her performance as CEO in a reasonable, well-argued manner. Part of the user base did both.
Why do people here (in this HN thread) tend to pretend it's either one or the other? When you're speaking about a big amount of people, pretending like they all behave the same way is never a good representation of a situation.
It's possible to post a perfectly calm, sensible, well-argued comment in one place, and post a spiteful, obscenity-filled rant in another place (or possibly the same place), so, yes. If you want to get fancy, you can use two computers and click "submit" on both simultaneously, so, yes, you can, even for pedantic definitions of "while".
Whoa Ms. Pao went on the defensive there to present herself as the victim. And she already paints the next guy as the uncaring bastard who will only care for user growth. What's left, a lawsuit to follow soon? In any case a pretty bad way to end an admittedly fruitless employment.
Right or wrong, fair or unfair, or whatever you think about Ellen, I think most people agree that she had become personally and professionally toxic to reddit as a brand and community and even if she did a great job from here on out, it was going to be an uphill battle to restore community confidence in her as a CEO.
I personally don't believe she had the right qualifications to lead a community-driven site like reddit as it is today, but would have the right qualifications if reddit was going to start making a serious pivot to a more lucrative money making direction via commercial partnerships, advertising, etc.
Reddit may still go that direction, but Huffman won't have the same baggage weighing him down.
(note: this will also likely feed the conspiracy that her turn in the head office was a convenience for her lawsuit, now that she lost, she has no reason to stay in that position)
I agree with other comments chastising the community for the racist/sexist/whatever nature of lots of the negative comments against her. It was childish and dangerous. She had enough issues worthy of reasonable criticism that it wasn't even necessary.
Maybe I missed it, but was there ever any information on why Victoria was fired, or whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it?
From where I was sitting, it seemed like no one actually learned the full story, which might be confidential or take time to contextualize/safely explain, and everyone immediately threw it on Pao's lap and downvoted any holding maneuvers she and the rest of the staff tried to attempt. It was poorly handled, sure, but it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening. For that matter, do we even know now?
If I'm wrong, though, happy to correct my ideas here. (grammar edit)
The bulk of that 'narrative' is speculative tinfoilhattery as well so of course it fits. See all the handwringing about potential monetization of AMA without anyone ever suggesting any kind of remotely plausible revenue model for it. And again, this is something reddit have addressed directly.
All I know is I'm glad I never had hundreds of thousands of people demand to know the gory details of why I left my job. Unless Victoria wants to share it, it really isn't any of our business.
It was not made public why Victoria was fired. Neither of the parties are talking about it, so generally it's unknown.
The /r/iama mods were not upset that she was fired. They were upset that there was no transition plan in place.
> it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening
There was finger pointing because nobody knew what was happening. Functions that Victoria was performing fell through and — according to the /r/iama mods — jeopardized the functioning of the AMAs that week.
This is what many/most have overlooked. Victoria was the straw that broke the camel's back. Her firing was indicative of the lack of appreciation / recognition given to the moderator's, and was just another example of the disconnect and (perceived) exploitation of moderator time/effort without the proper support and tools.
> Her firing was indicative of the lack of appreciation / recognition given to the moderator's, and was just another example of the disconnect and (perceived) exploitation of moderator time/effort without the proper support and tools
Which long predated Pao at reddit. But even giving her the responsibility for this, nowhere is the apparent gross incompetence apparently seen by those calling so vociferously for Pao to be fired.
> The /r/iama mods were not upset that she was fired. They were upset that there was no transition plan in place.
From what I saw it was both. They shut down over the latter because it left them unable to manage things to their satisfaction, but they seemed to genuinely like her and wanted her to keep her position.
Yes, the whole thing stunk like gamergate imo. I honestly don't care about whatever minor offense pao did, I wanted her to stay just so that the vitriol and misogyny on the front page attacking her would not "win".
It's very much like GamerGate. There is an attempt to deflect an overwhelming amount of legitimate criticism by pointing to a few trolls and characterizing all of it as "racist and misogynist".
Exactly. They seem to forget that she's part of a ponzi scheme, slept with married men to get ahead, etc.
Even if it was a bunch of racist/misogynist people, you have to consider that despite the messenger, the message might be valid. That's what being open-minded means.
I don't even think people care about that stuff. The interesting accounting is on her husband's plate. The KP stuff only affected things at Reddit when Reddit started to do funny things to stories about it.
Really, her Rampart-level impedance mismatch with the community was enough.
>Exactly. They seem to forget that she's part of a ponzi scheme, slept with married men to get ahead, etc.
For god's sakes, stop it. This blatant sexism and double standards is disgusting. If Ellen were a man, never in a million years would they be expected to bear responsibility for their spouses' misdeeds or attacked for who they slept with (indeed, they'd be getting high-fived for being a "womanizer" or "stud").
Well, gamers are gamers - in games everything is permitted as long as it brings victory. Some of that attitude spills over IRL. We always try to find glitches, exploits, cheats and cheese, imbas and so on. We do so in debates and everywhere else.
Drop the sex life garbage, people go after men for their sex lives all the time. Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bob Packwood, Brett Favre, Mark Hurd all spring to mind.
Pointing out someone, who happens to be a women, is a shitty person doesn't make criticism misogynistic, and, IMHO, it's sexist to excuse them from criticism / repercussions simply because they're women.
It's a bullshit tactic. "Hey, that women pushed a car full of kids into a lake!", "Why are you such a misogynist?"
Ideologist will act like ideologists, they don't care about the facts, they care about their narrative. If the original narrative isn't strong enough they just fabricate one to legitimize their hate.
So caving in to those groups prevents nothing, it just makes things more toxic. As a tactical move, bringing in Steve Huffman might not have been the worst decision though.
> whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it?
Reddit only has around 70 employees, I would find it extremely unlikely a CEO at a company of that size wouldn't have been aware or involved in the decision (if only to rubber stamp it).
For better or worse, this is life for top executives. Example: the president of the US's popularity is correlated with the economy in spite of the fact that they have very little control over it. It's not uncommon for one executive to do something totally reasonable under hard circumstances only to get ousted anyway while the next person gets the credit for their actions.
During the KP trial I had always kept an open mind towards her arguments...until I later learned she was married to Buddy Fletcher, one of the biggest scoundrels and thieves in the investment world in recent years. The character and judgment of a person who would fall in love and wed someone like that says more than I can articulate. It's oddly reassuring to see my (and many, many others') skepticism about both her judgment and motives validated.
Everything about their saga is bizarre. Did you know that up until his marriage to Ellen, Buddy had lived as a homosexual? he was living with a partner of multiple years (Hobart “Bo” Fowlkes) and was openly gay. Not that there is anything odd or wrong about that.
It is just rather strange how these two polarizing figures came together in a union.
And then there are the KP employee reviews and other internal documents which became public as a result of the trial she lost that show Ellen Pao to be a thoroughly unproductive and toxic employee who was given every opportunity to shape up but was too busy engrossed in the internal office politics and making 'enemy lists'.
If someone made a movie about this stuff and the people involved, most would think it too unrealistic.
The article states that Buddy lived with a boyfriend, which is not the same as living as a homosexual, as he might be bisexual. Some other articles state that he was "openly gay", but perhaps those articles are slightly incorrect.
The VF article also states that Fletcher dated exclusively women while at Harvard, and that "Fowlkes wasn’t surprised that his former boyfriend had become involved with a woman."
> Not that there is anything odd or wrong about that.
I find it really strange when people talk about someone's personal life details and then say that there's nothing odd or wrong about it. Especially when right before that they say that their personal situation is "bizzare", and the reader kinda expects to learn, what is so bizzare about it.
So, why did you bring his bisexuality up in that comment?
You're guilty of making a vast assumption about the context.
What would be wrong with a marriage of political or business convenience involving no sex, if that's what it is? Obviously nothing. You've matter-of-fact labeled his sexuality without knowing either way.
I just used the word to refer to the point made in the original comment. I didn't really make any statements or assumptions about this person, and my comment wasn't even about this person at all — my comment was about the semantics of the parent comment.
One of the issues during the trial was for KP to show that she had options outside the firm and that her dismissal was not detrimental to her career.
The CEO of Reddit gig came in nicely to prove just that. Even if she was just an interim CEO. Now the actual CEO is in place, considering that she did not work out ok for Reddit.
Stop it. Woman do not somehow have to share the blame for their husbands alleged misdeeds. Seriously, this is 2015, not the middle ages where they'd burn a woman at the stake for something her husband did wrong.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadI also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS:
> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.
All in all, a good day I think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...
It is a good read.
So what. She got better than she deserved.
The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.
They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you.
When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self.
One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).
> Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.
Like any popular site, Reddit attracts everything from enlightened discussions to 4chan-level casual trolls (and worse). Pointing out the issues with threats and indicating that the community could be better without individuals who would publicly threaten the life of another person seems very reasonable to me.
Actions like the banning of subreddits for the actions of a few bad actors belie the notion that this is how you and they describe it.
If you don't have a coherent content policy -- and no sane person could argue that Reddit does -- then you're better off with none at all.
Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?
Because that's what the admins have basically said, by their actions.
Nope, the Reddit admins just haven't closed those subreddits yet. But they will. They've closed the child porn subreddits, they've closed the revenge porn subreddits, they've closed the hate groups that bleed out into the larger internet. r/coontown will be closed, too. It hasn't yet, which is a shame, but if you read into that fact that the reddit admins approve of it, then be prepared to be disappointed in a few months when it gets closed, too.
Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that.
Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems:
1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community.
2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place.
3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product.
If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely unsuitable for the next crisis which will require yet another made up explanation.
[1] http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon.
The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.
The subreddit was filled with photographs that were either a) creepshots taken off the street without the subject's permission and b) friends-only Facebook posts shared with the public without the subject's permission (which is a violation of Facebook's TOS).
Then, on top of that, they were harassing imgur staff members for enforcing their ToS.
CoonTown, as disgusting as it is, wasn't doing that, at least not in the sheer volumes of numbers FPH was. Most of that sub consisted of making racist statements about news articles and misinterpreted statistics.
If there were in fact some legal concerns, then I stand corrected.
Ellen got so much shot for the "we're banning actions not ideas" quote (in this thread even) yet here's an example of it being used - leaving absolutely vile subs live because they don't brigade and banning subs when they do brigade and she's getting shit for that too.
Pick.
The day I discovered I could do that quickly made Reddit my favorite site on the web (/r/NFL, /r/homeimprovement, /r/television, etc).
I'd love to see a discovery feature similar to that of Pinterest built into the signup process that algorithmically signs new users up for subreddits most related to their interests.
I used Pinterest some in the early days, but I'll avoid like the plague, now.
The worst part is all they did is intercept the search result for someone else's website and force me to give them all sort of marketing data they can sell in order to get it.
Gross.
But isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure in their curation or moderation?
How does a si but isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure of their curation and moderation?
How does a site like that survive long-term?
Global curation could help reddit, but the site actually needs very little of it. It can survive without main promoted content at all.
It might be better to ask users a series of questions about their interests when they sign up, and then create each one a personalized list
And people who should have had the sense to see there were vile pighumpers in their midst did not moderate their nastiness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"I'm convinced that there is a highly vocal group (of young men, most likely) that are hell-bent on breaking Internet communities and even corporeal communities with their grotesqueries. And when they're challenged, they howl "but you're censoring my free speech!""
why do you think that internet communities need to be so heavily moderated?
"Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful."
Simply put, you will find trolls and people writing death threats wherever you look. These people do not exactly discriminate.
No matter how much you dislike someone, death threats are always the wrong side of the red line.
(I echo the comments that say that Reddit has great subreddits like /r/Haskell and it's easy to mis all of this when you are just subscribed to a few subreddits.)
Because I seriously doubt it.
In particular, I'm subscribed to no general-purpose or wide-purpose subreddits. A few city/geographic subreddits mentioned it in passing, but, like, /r/programming or /r/nycbike or /r/radicalchristianity are going to treat any post about it as off-topic. You can't just post an advice animal about it, or request IAmAs from everyone involved, or say that today you learned whatever-it-may-be about Ellen Pao, or what have you. Nor can you do this about any other topic, which is why I bother to read these subreddits.
Then on r/all NSW/offensive are disabled by default (the same way NSFW is rigth now - you need to change your account settings).
Problem solved, FPH will never make it to people who don't want to see offensive staff.
And even among technology, I have no interest in seeing things about Ruby or Go. Again, it's not that I dislike the languages, it's that they're not professionally relevant to me at the moment so it's not what I visit Reddit for.
So what we need is some way for subreddits to be tagged with their own content: /r/rust about Rust, /r/python about Python, /r/sandersforpresident about Bernie, etc., and some /r/all equivalent that just matches what I'm interested in -- which is exactly what https://reddit.com is for me, right now. I don't need /r/all to be fixed; I have no interest in even seeing "all technology" or "all religion" or "all presidential candidates".
FPH being or not being on /r/all is irrelevant.
I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent.
On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page.
I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.
First is realizing that there are technical solutions. Some people say "you don't want technical solutions to social problems" but the fact that subreddits have no protection against brigading at all is a serious design flaw with reddit[1].
Second is some way to require subscription for some period of time for votes to appear or to count. The CSS-hack stuff was silly, and as someone who has been on reddit since its first year, I have never seen the CSS-side of reddit because I never turned it on.
One of the big complaints from the blackout was the complete lack of tool support and this is an example. Reddit tried to paper over the technical shortcoming with rules and social hacks but once different reddit communities who didn't like each other realized there was a way to attack each other they did so.
[1] to be fair I wouldn't have realized it either if I was in charge of the subreddit design
It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.
Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.
I find it telling it was negative a majority of the time. Usually "mods" get +1'd just for being mods (common on many forums). It shows, to me at least, that what she said rarely was supported by the community.
Am I the only one that sees this as possibly the greatest potential "turnaround" story ever created?
I would argue that decisions of large bodies of anonymous people are historically and demonstrably inaccurate, misleading, nearsighted, and wholly terrible for not only the decision they're making, but also the good of the body itself.
Groups of people, at a sufficient capacity, are simply some of the worst, most base, and utterly abhorrent things to exist on this planet, and claiming that the disapproval displayed by the group calling itself "Reddit" is "telling" would be, to say the least, a misstep.
Having a trend over time allows for a better judgement as karma is a metric that can change drastically over time. A generally disagreeable person can have a huge spike in positive karma but that doesn't mean they're liked overall. So it helps that the chart shows as far back as 2013.
A slow overall increase with several downward trends means you're generally agreeable but have a controversial opinion (opposed to the "collective group mentality"). A slow overall decrease with an upward trend now and then means you're generally disagreeable and occasionally say something the community agrees with.
Her karma over time tells me that she's generally disagreeable with a few moments that brought her from "negative" to "neutral" and that before the subreddit bans her popularity was spiraling downwards, hit a full catalyst, and the apology was rather well received.
If her karma was overall positive and only trended negatively in light of the subreddit ban and the Victoria mishap - it'd be telling of a very different story. The fact that it's been consistently negative is telling of the larger picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias
And do you know something about Victoria's firing that everyone else doesn't? Do you know why she was fired?
Including, but not limited to, "I hate this person so will downvote everything and anything they say."
Which makes you a disagreeable person if enough people hate you enough to downvote anything you say.
In fact I don't know of a true democracy (defined here as a democracy where no group is excluded, where votes are counted fairly and where each person who wishes to do so can vote for whatever he wants) that has since transitioned into anything else.
None of this, of course, means that democracy is a good system, merely that it is sticky.
Reddit is also not a democracy -- it's a series of benevolent dictatorships, where the content is decided on by anarchistic vote, but can be controlled ultimately through a supreme leader, empowered by the virtue of their age (the oldest member of the subreddit gets to decide the content of that subreddit).
In the past, factions went to war in order to take absolute power. When they achieved it they would destroy all rivals and enforce strict conformity. They would try to avoid the necessity of constant fighting to hold on to their position by employing various means to cement their legitimacy in the minds of the ruled. One of these was the idea of an aristocracy which had an inherent right to rule. Another was harnessing religion to declare that the rulers held power by divine right, making rebellion a sin. Regime change would only come about through violence.
In a democracy the competing factions can bide their time in the anticipation that they can get into power again. Because of that, they do not feel compelled to use violence to seize power, and by the same token, violence does not have to be used to suppress them.
An interesting side effect of democracy was the relaxation of the need for absolute conformity. This facilitated social mobility, commerce and the flourishing of literature and scientific exploration, all of which would have been seen as subversive and dangerous to the status quo in the older way of doing things, and consequently, rigorously suppressed.
Democracies have been known for only a few brief periods of human existence. They emerged for a few hundred years, in a very limited sense, in one city-state within Greece, 2500 years ago. And then disappeared until just over 200 years ago, with some spread since.
Fewer than half the people on Earth today live in democracies (though it's close: 48%), only 12.5% live in full democracies. Far more live in autocratic regimes than any other of the forms measured by the Democracy Index: 37.6%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
The fastest growing economy in the world is solidly autocratic: China. Despite the claims of the benefits of both democracy and capitalism, many critical advances have come from countries which lacked one or both institutions: Nazi Germany developed jet aircraft and missiles, Communist Russia was the first to orbit satellites and put man in space.
I'm not opposed to democracy. But it seems it's got a few challenges as well.
(There's a story there. It's interesting.)
There are numerous states that have functioned quite well that _weren't_ (or aren't) democracies.
Nazi Germany was, in fact, a democracy. Hitler stood for election in Germany's presidential elections of 1932. While he didn't win a majority of the July vote (none of the _six_ candidates did), he was appointed chancellor following a series of inconclusive elections.
A concern of mine is whether democracy brings wealth, or wealth democracy. Causality's arrow is sticky.
In a similar fashion, if Barack Obama posted something like "Mom and apple pie are both great.", it would be downvoted by his political foes and upvoted by his political allies. That should not be taken as an indication that "the community" opposes or disagrees with his viewpoints on Mom and apple pie.
I disliked her for
* Firing Victoria, who took AMAs to the next level. I enjoyed them a ton.
* Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl
* Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"
* Treating the community with disdain and contempt, while not understanding how reddit works at all. She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive. If these people are unhappy with her and leave, then the passive majority (such as myself) will follow them to wherever they go.
But no, I'm probably a misogynist and a racist who hates Ellen Pao because she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, amirite?
The Victoria specific AMAs tended to be short, done on the phone where she types responses, and oriented around'My new movie is out Friday don't miss it' instead of a conversation. I prefer the raw format myself.
>Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl
That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is seriously appalling:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9868887
>Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"
I'm personally only familiar with the banning of /neofags because I know people who were targeted and harassed by that reddit. It was clearly banned for the behavior of the mods in the reddit, and not for content, as evidenced by other reddits with much worse content not being banned at the same time.
>She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive.
What does this even mean, all her detractors were also the ones creating the content? Most of the reddits complained about wanting more powerful mod tools, not less control: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cuw90/megathrea...
Incorrect. She did some of the best ones. The ones with Bill Murray and Sean Bean really stick out in my mind as being really great. You couldn't see either of them, but thanks to her you could make out inflections, emphasis and character. It was like hearing them talk, rather than having them type. Either way, regardless of what you think I loved the AMAs that Victoria assisted with, and so did a whole lot of other people. Pao took that away from us, and you're saying that we shouldn't criticise her for that?
> That this became the battle-flag to pitch-fork
He was almost recovered. He would have rejoined work in a month, but she rejected that. That reddit was so benevolent to him was thanks to hueypriest and Yishan Wong. She reversed this policy. Now you're saying its appalling that people are criticising Pao because Yishan and hueypriest were so nice.
> What does this even mean?
It means that the people most engaged with the site (top submitters and moderators) were unhappy with her. The site depends on these people for quality content This was written in really simple English, I don't see what your trouble with understanding it was.
I feel like you were in the flow of a "point-by-point takedown" and had to say something about the last line, but that left you looking pretty silly by the end.
While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years being paid while too sick to work. He got an extra full year of insurance.
He never had a move date scheduled. He was "2-3 months away" and in his AMA when asked where he was working today? He said he still wasn't feeling well enough for full time work - this was 5 months later. "Sorry, we can't keep waiting, we need someone who can do the job immediately."
So yes it is appalling that this became the reason to be furious, while treating an employee better than he would be treated at 99% of other companies in the US. In a reasonable universe the story would have been: "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly."
* I resented that she fired Victoria, because I liked Victoria and what she brought to reddit. I didn't speculate on why she was fired at all. But let me speculate a little now - it wasn't for performance reasons judging by what every single person who has worked with Victoria says.
* I relayed what the employee in question said about it on reddit. If its a question of trusting what he says or what Pao says, I'll err on the side of the former, because of the duplicity that Pao has exhibited in recent months.
I hope that clears it up.
It is unreasonably acceptable for death, rape, and other threats to be used as a form of outspoken criticism online, and as an outspoken critic, I don't appreciate being lumped in.
Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site.
Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.
Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.
As I expected: downvoted for pointing out the truth. HN is terrible.
You don't think the downvotes are for this hyperbolic insult?
What is even slightly out of sorts about comparing Ellen Pao to Paul Graham?
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that both sites have an element of sociopathic and downright evil people influencing the culture. And reasonable people can still disagree about the level of accountability for the actions and inactions of Pao and Graham.
There are plenty of details that don't line up well when making that comparison, but I read the comment as intending to illustrate all the hyperbole around Ellen Pao. There are a lot of people on the Internet talking past each other this week.
Genuinely curious: why?
That's a highly subjective opinion...but it's how I felt. r/shitredditsays probably captures a bit of what made me uncomfortable.
> we
> them
Gah.
SRS are notorious for brigading and messing with peoples lives.
IRC networks are still running just fine with minimal intervention.
He wasn't dealt with. He deleted his account in a frantic and futile attempt to avoid exposure.
Violentacres/Violentacrez (had to block him twice) set himself up as king of the reddit underworld. The admins cast a blind eye to his antics, and in return he prevented the raw sewage from gushing onto the clean streets of the reddit front page.
He was a troll from the start, and deliberately so, even in his choice of username which he had stolen from a popular blogger at the time. This illustrates the kind of brinkmanship that was his trademark - it is not quite impersonation to steal someone else's anonymous handle, but it is not quite ethical either.
His one good point was that he kept the other reddit trolls busy via interminable (literally) troll-fights.
The /r/SubredditDrama posts in regards to the incident are correct as I remember it:
Part I - violentacrez: https://archive.is/7ygdr
Part II - CreepShots: https://archive.is/8AVd8
Part 2 above ends with a link to VAs alleged last comments with an alt:
http://i.imgur.com/E8fCA.png
It's a common meme that violentacrez was "special," had some kind of sway with the admins beyond any other moderator, received instruction from the admins that was unique and not the usual ban threats that many subs get in modmail, and so on. Most people who say these things heard it from someone else, because the actual story is that he was barely tolerated. He even says so himself in your linked thread.
I don't get the elevation of violentacrez to something special. I see it a lot (friendly with the admins! The admins asked him to help with creepshots! it's all over this thread) and I don't get it. He was a power mod. So are hundreds of others. There are a bunch of Reddit yarns that put the Kubrick lunar landing to shame; some of them are making an appearance in this thread.
Doxxing is doxxing. It doesn't become 'exposure' when people you like do it.
I meant that the reddit admins didn't 'deal with' Violentacrez. Chen doxxed him, destroying his career, despite the full knowledge that Violentacrez had innocent dependants who would also be hurt badly. If Violentacrez deserved to be 'punished', then whatever punishment was meted out should have fallen exclusively on him.
>It doesn't become 'exposure'.
Bad choice of words. I intended the term in a literal sense, not a judgemental one. It was revolting how Chen made Violentacrez crawl in the false hope he could salvage some part of his livelihood.
>...when people you like do it.
I dislike the people who doxxed Violentacrez very much. I disagree with the use of doxxing as a tactic.
The admins asked violentacrez to help with the /r/creepshots. Later history got rewritten to say that he had created it, maybe to throw him under the bus.
I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?
I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo...
It was on HN a while back.
It looks like Dacvak deleted his own posts: "Edit: I've removed this post. All future discussions regarding this subject will be between me and reddit."
That employee got cancer in 2012. He got a salary for almost two years while too sick to work, of the total three years he was at the company. Four months of that salary undo Pao. Then he got an additional full year of health coverage when they finally couldn't wait any longer to fill his position. He was never well enough to even move to the Reddit officers, which was the plan when they hired him in 2012.
That's not just not despicable, it's laudable, and it's better than how you'd be treated at 99% of companies in the US. And somehow this became twisted by the furious mob into a story about a vicious CEO firing someone for having cancer?
(Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick. Although ironically in this case this employee didn't even qualify for that since he got sick before he was at the company for 12 months.)
That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is appalling. Seriously appalling.
> somehow this became twisted by the furious mob
There's no mob here. If anything, most people seem unfamiliar with this episode.
> Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick
Except where one qualifies for protection under the ADA [1].
> That's not just not despicable, it's laudable
There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao. My overall view of the situation, and likely this goes for others, is in how it was ultimately handled, where Pao said one thing to the employee then did another, more than once. I can see a situation where this could have been handled openly and candidly, with humanity, but that's not what happened.
Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'. Not knowing what would have happened, Pao could have addressed the uncertainly in an honest way, but instead she chose to lie to and then fire the employee. I'm not a one man mob, and I respect your difference of opinion, but that to me is despicable.
[1] http://www.cancer.org/treatment/findingandpayingfortreatment...
Top post on multiple reddits, various random threads upvoted to /all, brought up in this thread by multiple people as a reason the CEO was despicable.
>There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao.
While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years of paid time while he was unable to work. Also under he he got an extra year of medical insurance.
>Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'.
He was supposed to move to the office in 2012. He was never well enough to do so. At the time he was finally let go, he still didn't have a move scheduled. He was still 2 to 3 months away from being able to to start the job. Note his woolly timelines, especially in his followup comments, where 5 months later he was still not ready for full time work.
Changed your mind is not lying, "Sorry, we actually need to someone to start this job immediately, we can't keep waiting."
All this is giving him the most charitable reading of his posts, a post he made at the height of rage at the CEO filled with obvious dog meat like: "Does anyone know of any Reddit alternatives?" "I don't know anything about why Victoria was fired, but he's some speculation as to why she was fired." Etc.
So yeah, I find it despicable that people find this despicable, that comments all across the internet are calling her 'human garbage' and whatnot for treating an employee better than 99% of other companies would have. It's absurd. The story should have been, "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly!"
Also, reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.
Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censorship.
Okay. But reddit isn't "those with power". reddit isn't making it illegal to do it elsewhere.
Nope, but then again, being that place is what made it grow so large in the first place.
As long as you are free to create your own community where you can say whatever you want, there is no need for any other community to listen to you.
And it's certainly understandable that Reddit has no wish to be associated with certain speech, but that comes with troubling implications as well. For example, do they not then appear to support whatever they do not ban if we know that whatever sufficiently offends them gets the ban hammer?
For another example, take Google removing Confederate flags. I personally hate that damned flag and would be perfectly happy to join others in burning one to express my feelings about it, but I'm loathe to go around removing them. Please understand that I'm perfectly happy if a few get taken down where they appear that some governmental branch was endorsing it.
But at the same time, that's not quite the same as when Google goes about removing them. Sure, they are free to do as they wish, I have to wonder why Google doesn't do the same for Nazi symbols? Surely they don't support Nazis, but it's hard to make a case for not giving the Nazis the same treatment. They're at least as evil, right? So what explanations are left to us for the disparity? That Nazis don't offend googlers as much? That doesn't seem like a likely reason, but just what's left?
And in the end, where does that leave us? The problem is, I don't think that train of thought has an end, and that's what makes me uneasy. After we remove everything offensive, what's left? It's not like we'll have things that don't offend anybody, so at some point it becomes a matter of choosing which people are okay to offend and which people are not okay to offend.
In the end, I just want to get along with everyone. I don't like the thought of living in a society where everything becomes a matter of whether you are one of Us or one of Them and that's where we appear to be heading.
They don't sell Nazi flags in their store or (afaik) let people advertise using them, so this doesn't seem as inconsistent to me as you make it sound.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nazi+swastica&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...
Not to mention copies of the Mein Kampf, etc.
Thankfully, the various non-Nazi uses of the swastika appear to be the most popular, but you can find plenty of Nazi items. I dislike the meaning of both symbols, so I have a hard time imagining any logic where it's okay to sell one of them but not the other.
We only burn the bad books, right?
Also side note: reading Mein Kampf doesn't make you a nazi, indeed if more people had read it back in the day somebody might have stooped that little corporal.
I guess the argument one could make is that the confederate flag is more dangerous and relevant today, but I don't really buy that.
Occam's razor suggests this is just an easy PR grab. They get a few headlines in mainstream tech press for free, and very minor backlash from "free speech nutjubs" as the only downside.
Reddit spent years building a freewheeling culture. Pao decided to impose standards on that, and her guiding principles weren't well articulated. In the end, it was a really bad copy of Disneyland, and the fact that the effort failed was no surprise.
I'm not sure the company really knows what happened, given that they think they've given their users what they asked for, but they're also telling their users that they're spoiled kids.
I think you nailed it there. I'm not a Reddit user, but from what I have read there never seemed to be clear set of guidelines that were evenly enforced by the Reddit staff.
I'm often weirded by the freedom of speech argument in non critical contexts. These persons life aren't at risk because they can't express opinions, isn't that what is meant by FoS ? not just a free card to be able to let yourself loose in public.
I have no solution, but far too often FoS ends up a noisy non-discussions.
ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
No
I personally respect freedom of speech, except hate. For example, HN strongly discourages attacking another member personally (eg. calling someone else idiot). I consider this a reasonable limit on freedom of speech, but concepts and opinions should be fully open for discussion (eg. pro/anti evolution etc). If the discussions are respectful, then anything should be allowed.
I believe Political Correctness has done more harm than it does good. It has created an unhealthy focus on skin colour, reproductive organs, etc to the point of lunacy. Many people struggle to look past superficial features and seem to lost the ability to make reasoned judgements. Any criticism of a woman gets you labelled a misogynist, regardless of how incapable she is. This continues to undermine the credibility of women that are truly capable in their own right. I'm currently managing a team of women. They all got there on their own merit. I would not hire a woman for the sake of political correctness or because I was bullied by a feminist journalist (as is quite common these days). The women in my team were not selected based on their gender - they were selected based on their talents and attitudes. They were available and capable.
This whole Ellen Pao incident made me think about the validity of comments on sexism and racism that are floating around the net. Compare the attitudes towards the criticisms of Steve Ballmer vs Ellen Pao. One of these individuals contributed to the significant growth of Microsoft, the other didn't manage to achieve much that stands out. Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not. The major difference (other than Ballmer's financial track record for Microsoft) is their genders. Political Correctness has driven the need to blindly defend women, no matter how incompetent they may be. The hope is that this behaviour will help "women's rights". I view it as doing the exact opposite ... "jobs for the girls".
It saddens me that we seem to be more sexist, less tolerant and more willing to defend incompetence an an attempt to promote rights for selected members of society.
On a side note, I dislike the term "women's rights". Is it so hard to represent "people's rights"? I believe one of these reflects a destructive, prejudiced mindset and creates a bad attitude of entitlement and encourages sexism. If society said we'd defend the rights of everyone equally based on merit, the world would be a much better place.
The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line, you need to appoint a censor to determine what qualifies as "hate". As Christopher Hitchens asked: "To whom would you want to delegate the task to decide for you what you could read? To relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear?"
Typically this job falls to the public prosecutors. Who will make mistakes, misapply and pervert the laws. Sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with malice.
It is not just an abstract argument, it has very real consequences. Here in Finland we had a case [1] where an MP (now MEP) was convicted of hate speech for making a point about freedom of speech by asking a question along the lines of: 'Why is it ok to write that Finns might be culturally and genetically predisposed to get drunk and kill people, but not ok to write that Somalis might be culturally and genetically predisposed to rob people and live on welfare?'
These types of laws have very real chilling effects on public discourse. People are unwilling to engage in certain topics, which should be discussed, due to the fear of being prosecuted. In democracies trying to suppress or censor an idea or argument will just end up elevating them. In this case, the party to which the convicted MP belongs ended up becoming the second largest party and are now in the government. They no longer have to argue their case, they can simply implement it (and their immigration program was written by the MP in question).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_Halla-aho#Criminal_charg...
I want more great censorship, not less. If it’s done by people and organisations, at least. Because that’s what we are talking about here, right? Reddit, not governments?
Censors are just editors and that job is not some inscrutable thing. It can be done and it can be done excellently.
I mean, to me this only gets tricky when we are talking about basic infrastructure, i.e. should a paper mill be allowed to refuse to sell their paper to Neo Nazis because of ideological reasons? Should a web hoster be allowed to refuse to sell to Neo Nazis?
But Reddit? That’s easy and I don’t really get what the fuss is about. Nothing would be lost at all if the admins were much, much, much more ban happy and much more pro-censorship. They should be, 100%.
reddit does that actually, until you're a well known user, you cannot submit more than a few per minute, after that delays kick in, if it really was something you wanted to share, you'll come back. No censor involved.
That's just an idea, but you get the point.
Specifically, it seems to me that if you're shielded from seeing that they censored, then they could also be censoring "good" speech too. So the only way it seems you could ensure they weren't do this poorly or deliberately would be to allow everyone access to what they've censored. Which inversely seems to defeat the purpose of having a good censor. Now essentially nothing in censored.
Again, perhaps I'm missing something but if I'm not then I don't understand how you resolve this conundrum.
Edit: Unless you're referring to ex post facto censorship, where everyone sees the "bad" speech, and the speaker is banned for violating "community standards" To pre-emptively ban future speech. But this too still allows "bad" speech, and I suppose you also have the problem of deleting the bad speech. If it's gone, then what substantiates the ban/censorship? Because again, what if the action was either done in error, or maliciously to ban "good" but unpopular speech/speakers how would you know?
But I do have the ability to trust people and I know when I enjoy something.
So, this all might sound very abstract, but I do know that I like the censors (they call themselves editors) working for certain newspapers I like. I trust them to make good decisions, partly just because I don’t have time to make those decisions myself.
And that’s obviously not perfect – but this whole nerd dream of provable correctness and absolute, guaranteed access to the truth all the time … it’s all unachievable bullshit anyway. Sometime you just don’t know. Sometimes you just have to live with that. I live with it and I like it.
Honestly, this comes across as "He loved Big Brother"-level creepy.
Do you have some sort of trust issues? I mean, sometimes I’m willing to trust other people, that’s all. I don’t have to believe that everyone is evil and out to get me. So when I read a newspaper I like I have a general trust that the editors (censors) have done their job … because what else can I do? What else can you do?
I don’t have the time to sit around 24 hours by the newswire … and even then, the people writing that and reporting that … how do I know I can trust those absolutely? I can’t. That’s all.
We humans are forever doomed to not know the truth always all the time. And no one is an island and sometimes you just have to trust other people. And that’s healthy and that’s ok.
Well it's crucial that the censors are people who like you. If they didn't like you, you probably wouldn't be such a fan of censorship. That is to say, the only reason you're in favour of censorship on reddit is that you're reasonably that the censors will be people like you, which really is no more than sophisticated tribalism.
If I didn’t like the censors at Reddit I would do the same thing. I think that’s normal and healthy.
At some point, hate speech most definitely infringes upon the reader's rights. The canonical example is yelling "FIRE! FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and causing a stampede; your right to free speech doesn't trump everybody else's right to be safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
[A] United States Supreme Court decision concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense.
> Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not.
You mean Ballmer?
We know nothing specific and substantial about internal Reddit politics, so the cause for seeing all this hateful scapegoating can only be some kind of mass stupidity.
I'm sorry. You don't respect freedom of speech then. Drawing an arbitrary line on what you (or anyone else) considers acceptable isn't free speech.
Put it this way: Things that were unacceptable in the 1950s are completely banal and uninteresting now. Things that were considered in poor taste in the past are horribly offensive now (look at Andy Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's). Are you going to be some society guardian, constantly updating what is and isn't acceptable to say as our values shift with the times
I have thought much on these as common person, neither in an academic setting nor who has to deal with these issue frequently.
Lot of time I would argue with myself why can't we have everybody have equal rights ? Why we need to specially fight for rights of women and be feminists or to project the issue to broader sense, where we talk or act about any group. Personally I believe that while the ideal case as it should be is equal rights for everybody, the problem is the inequality created by negative discrimination over the ages. It is more like we are trying to correct the wrong doing over the ages by believing that a positive discrimination for the groups would offset the historical prejudice.
These are personal thoughts. Please feel free to correct.
I want to pull this quote out and address it directly, because it's a valid concern with a real answer. The reason we don't represent "people's rights" is because all people do not need their rights defended. To use an analogy, think of our system for measuring the level of endangered for animals, from "Critically Endangered" to "Least Concern." Is it sensible to say, 'Well, aren't all species important to the ecosystem? Why do we seek to protect Garrulax courtoisi but not Megascops watsonii?' This is because the former is nearly extinct, while the latter is ubiquitous. The cause of "social justice" -- the oft-derided 'warriors' of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc -- is to correct years of disadvantage. It's not accurate to call, say, attempts to further women in technology as 'sexist'. In fact, that's co-opting the term to obfuscate the original issue.
Overall, your heart is in the right place -- it does seem like our attempts to further minorities comes off as patronizing (like affirmative action). But, in the end, the good that is done outweighs the bad so long as we adequately train the individuals we put forward through these initiatives such that no one believes they only 'got it because of their gender' (which to me is no different than 'got here through someone she knows' -- this is how most business seems to be done in the world!)
How far are you willing to take that? You could potentially prohibit satire.
No. That's the exact opposite of free speech. Free speech is meant to protect the most disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, foolish speech.
That's the whole freaking point - nobody wants to silence unoffensive opinions.
>ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
It is funny. Because it's the people who want silence others' free speech who repeat the "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" meme as justification for their horrible actions.
No it's not. It's meant to protect speech which the politically powerful find objectionable. It's not about protecting abuse, but protecting ideas. Rebellious and revolutionary ideas, for example.
This is all a canard anyway - Reddit is not the (US) government. They get to set the rules for communication in their playground. If you don't let them do that, then you are infringing on their freedom of expression. Reddit can only say 'no' on their own systems; they don't stop you spreading whatever disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, or foolish speech in other forums.
If you want free speech the way you describe it, then you need to go to an unmoderated forum. Incidentally, on the front page of HN at the moment is a request for help in removing child porn from a web service, because the owner doesn't have enough resources to moderate it. If you ever wanted a clear example of where free speech is not meant to protect disgusting material, that's got to be it
Saying that people should be open to your arguments privileges those ideas you yourself hold. How do you tell which arguments get such treatment?
I didn't say at all people should be open to my particular arguments, but to arguments in general.
If it's arguments in general,
* you can't hang up on salesmen,
* you can't kick 911 conspirators off your unrelated forum,
* you can't remove most trolls,
* you can't ban homeopathy threads from /r/science,
* etc.
In general, you lose the ability to moderate conversations in spaces you own, or decide what you spend your time doing. This is, to be honest, a pretty extreme idea if taken literally.
Or you could deem salesmen, 911 conspirators, trolls and homeopathy proponents as "crazy and confused", but who decides that? How is that any more unwanted than posting critical meta commentary to /r/fatpeoplehate?
I imagine a concrete implementation of this idea as a meme that people themselves would recognize this as a good rule and that they would consider it as a decision aid whether or not to participate in a certain group.
The loophole, then, is to define ideas the politically powerful find objectionable as abuse.
Ugh. "horrible actions" as a description for calling people out who threaten, belittle, insult and harass other people and claim that is "protected speech".
By the way, even in a context, where the term "freedom of speech" is really adequate (so, when talking laws and government actions, for example), freedom stops where you infringe the rights of others. That's the whole point of states: To balance the natural freedoms of one person with the rights of other people, thus providing stability. Which is why you can't steal, for example. That's a freedom that had to be balanced against the rights of other people.
While I agree that pointless, hateful etc. speech deserves protection one word I almost never see in the reddit free speech wars is *dissent. As in "free speech is meant to protect speech that opposes or challenges orthodox opinion and conventional wisdom."
It's almost like the most vocal part of reddit gets off on being offensive for its own sake and is more concerned about the right to call fat people names rather than defending free speech generally. It does seems like they are flying the free speech flag purely out of narrow self-interest.
How many of them actually give a crap about free speech outside of their "community"? How many of them regularly downvote opinions they don't agree with, I wonder?
Hah yeah because speaking up against these mobs can lead to getting DOXed. What an insane world we live in.
>Reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.
We must be careful not to confuse commercial viability with government censorship. At some point, advertisers will leave a website that continues to foster vitriol/hate speech/illegal content because they do not want their brand associated with it. This is freedom of speech in action.
I tend to agree with what I think you're saying but I wonder if you realize what a controversial opinion that can be to some people. Consider the reaction to Rand Paul's criticism of the Civil Rights Act. Should one be able to operate a restaurant/business/country club that won't serve [blacks, LGBT, Muslims, whites, hispanics, cops, etc]?
If we were talking about what's legal to publish in your own newspaper, I agree.
If we're talking about what's appropriate to force others to view by brigading with a small number of people to take over a website to use it as its own platform to harass its CEO, I disagree.
That said, I think the moderation Pao symbolised on Reddit as a whole was a very wrong move. The Community certainly did. All the subreddits are individually moderated and the subreddits are opt-in; there's very little need for an overarching moderation of Reddit major.
Combine this with the rules for moderation being so vague everyone was asking what they actually were, and the reason given was "safety". Safety?
To me, "Safety" is a red-cloth term. It smells of the agenda used to rule the masses by fear and security, and to me Reddit is the exact opposite. But in reality, it was probably just an honest answer to Reddit's Community and investors both, that they wanted Reddit to be a safe product.
Well, nobody joined Reddit because it was "safe". It's the wild west of the interwebs, subreddits progressively darker as you find more weird stuff and you have to tell yourself "no - I don't need that" (who hasn't ventured to r/aww - darkness comes in many shades).
tl;dr Reddit is set up as a wild west with moderated towns, it is counter-productive to clamp down on everything with "safety" as the rallying cry.
This is, joking or not, way out of proportion to what happened, which is, a single harassment-focused group was disbanded.
That wasn't the only event that transpired. I'd venture to say things got really intense after Victoria was let go and sub-reddits accounting for 33% of visits were shut down in protest of how the affair was handled (poor communication, no transition planning). I think the disconnect between the mods and Reddit's leadership is what got Pao fired; not the shutting down of FPH.
They stepped in because moderators of a banned sub was found to encourage and even directly participate in harassment of other people. And they only caved in after a. incessant complaints from the public and b. some personal threats against imgur employees who took down some images the abusers uploaded.
More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa...
You have the right to say whatever you want, you do not have the right to say it in my home. I'm curious as to whether or not these individuals understand this, or are just another level of troll trying to stir the pot.
Furthermore, I do have the right to say it "in public".
But, where is that "public" on the internet? I can make a website - a home - and invite other people to come visit me and listen to me ramble, or respond etc. But there is no public space, is there? And if not, should there be?
Most people don't own the homes they live in. Yet the landlord still doesn't get to tell them what to talk about over the dinner table. That's great, but imagine the government sold all sidewalks and public places to private interests, which dictated how you should dress and walk if you want to get out of your home, or to work. Should that be allowed?
Imagine getting thrown out of a mall because someone overheard and disapproved of your conversation there. Does that ever happen? I know there there is no clear line, but that there is one; e.g. if you trail other people and talk to yourself or a friend about them (especially if it's nasty and aggressive) in earshot, that's not exactly cool. But what, other than sanity, would stop all mall owners to agree that anyone e.g. declaring to like the color green should be kicked out, and to hire staff to enforce it? Would that be legal? If it was, should it be? And if it wouldn't be legal, why is that? In what ways, if at all, could or should this applied to the internet?
Most people (63%) own their homes in America, and there are protections in place for people who rent. Your landlord cannot monitor you.
When it comes to the mall though, it's more a matter of scope and scale. Overhearing something in a mall affects a handful of individuals and the intent was not to broadcast. If you stand up on a table in the cafeteria and start spouting hate speech, you can and will be escorted out by security.
The internet is different, because you cannot accidentally overhear a conversation. Said anywhere on the internet, especial a place like reddit of HN, it is viewable by the entirety of internet users. So direct comparisons to the physical world will always fall short.
Reddit is only banning subs that brigade.
No. Free speech is a principle that any party can choose to respect. Free speech has been one of the very core values of Reddit right from the beginning, in the form of the ability to create and manage a subreddit with very minimal restrictions.
Being a platform of free speech was the single biggest reason Reddit grew to be the giant community that it is today.
Then Pao comes along and repeatedly shows that she doesn't respect free speech at all. What do you expect the users to do, other than revolt?
It's easy to brush off these incidents as the doings of "the ugliest users", but remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. History books are filled with people being silenced due to their expression of uncomfortable ideas.
For example, John Stuart Mill's utilitarian defense of free speech in On Liberty is equally applicable to private parties and specifically says society and individual people should be open to expression of views they find abhorrent. He specifically covers widespread social ostracism as well as government laws. According to Mill, free speech is definitely not just about freedom from government restrictions.
I doubt you understand the principles of free speech better than John Stuart Mill. Or if you understand his argument in On Liberty and disagree, please explain why.
Subreddits and their communities are not neatly contained in clearly labelled bottles.
It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong.
And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"
Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.
Mind linking it?
http://web.archive.org/web/20150611112054/http://www.reddit....
Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.
Some of the things I see people say on the internet makes me wonder what kind of social lives those people can possibly lead while being so hopelessly devoid of any empathy.
Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.
It's my estimation that if there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous or pseudonymous discussion comments it's very likely that a few individuals will a make death threat (which are likely not intended to be taken seriously). My point is that stating that death threats were made is not particularly interesting, as that's not a rare occurrence when we're talking about very large number of comments by very large number of people, some of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.
"Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here:"
Could you refrain from sexist comments like that?
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10836833/Penn-and...
You mean this?
> [1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.
All that opposition - strong enough to convince "Chairman Pao" to resign - reduced to death threats? All those arbitrary bans written off as a just punishment for criminal behavior? Something tells me that we haven't seen the last of "safe space" Reddit.
Reddit has ALWAYS loved irreverent and even incredibly offensive puns.
Redditors would be calling her Chairman Pao even if she was well loved just for humor value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0SO8xk4b...
Altman is not justifying the arbitrary bans (or any Reddit admin shenanigans) here, that is not the topic of this sentence. He is talking strictly about one dangerous activity that gets offenders banned: death threats, which Ellen Pao (the human at the other end) received.
We don't know why Pao went out. We can suspect it was the backlash (more likely), or disagreements with the board [0] but we can suspect.
But that does nothing to make her opposition entirely legitimate, when at its strongest it was hijacked by namecalling, cyber-bullying, and yes, threats to Pao's life. The subset of Redditors who did this deserve to be told how shitty it is. The remaining, legitimate opposition should recognize the distinction.
[0] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddi...
Do you see another reference to the overwhelming opposition inside the user base? Anything in the vein of "the mounting opposition convinced us that there's no point in fighting our users"?
Because from what I read in the announcement, the opposition is presented as a vocal, hateful and criminal minority that should absolutely not be mistaken for the "sweeping majority" that was "incredibly supportive" of the CEO.
Why don't you believe her when she says it was a disagreement with the board over the future of reddit?
"We don't know" when the person in question is saying "this is why" is not very respectful.
However, you're right. The two reasons are not mutually exclusive.
That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.
That's what internet anonymity does. Brings out people's true essence. You see it with road rage too. The protection of the vehicle and the quick flight make giving the finger in response to a reasonable mishap an easy answer. A "FUCK YOU" for accidentally veering into your lane. Sound reasonable?
Yeah there's a few Mother Teresas out there, but most of them are self righteous a-holes too. What a world.
Relevant as always.
I disagree. Some people: yes. Average person: I don't know, I suspect probably not. I've met a lot of people from different parts of the US, Canada, and around the world. A great many of them have exhibited a tendency towards genuine empathy. That too is human nature, it's not all narcissism and self-interest.
Anything less doesn't get heard - or it gets ignored. A certain pirate group that asked the U.N for help, was ignored, and resorted to boarding ships and capturing prisoners comes to mind.
I've known very few people who cared to have Pao as CEO since her taking the position. Anyone who gave attention to Reddit Corporate disliked her being in that position and felt her politics would get in the way (and they did). The only people who seemed to like her in that seat were those with the same ideological and political leanings as her (not a big surprise there). [0]
The fact people had to get "up in arms" and make a huge fuss about her to get her out of the position shows action should have been taken sooner, rather than later. But nobody pays attention to the quiet protests. They only give notice to the extreme.
Yes - some of the comments against her were extreme, unnecessary, and irrelevant to her position and the problems surrounding her. I saw death/rape threats, totally uncalled for. Anything less was ignored.
[0] And her Karma tells the story. It's almost always been negative. https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png
I think this was the right thing to do from a product perspective. Pao didn't really know how to use the site, and didn't ever particularly like the users. I don't know if Huffman likes the users, but one would assume that he would at least know how to use the site he helped build :)
She tried to share a link to a private message. That's the equivalent of my mom emailing me and saying, "Here's the picture - c:\\user\desktop\pic.jpg" - it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works.
Then everyone who replied was shadowbanned and every post was deleted. So no, she literally didn't know how to use the site.
The new CEO doesn't know how to make lists. Is he going to catch shit for it?
Did you think I would be tricked by your lie?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
===
kciuq1 1758 points 3 hours ago Maybe the first priority is to learn how reddit works.
Can you cite something on this? I really doubt it's true, but if true it's devastating.
And they've officially denied shadowbanning anyone in that thread.
Do you have any proof of this? That seems highly unlikely.
I think the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet (though it has many positive aspects in other contexts) is wreaking havoc on our ability to debate some topics because you wind up with a situation where many people get upset about a legitimate grievance and some overly troll-y subset of those people goes overboard with their backlash and then the whole issue ends up in this very unfortunately binary "us versus them" where rational but legitimately upset people get painted with the same brush as the vocal minority of troll-y jerkwads (or alternately, they have to just excuse themselves from the debate to avoid being painted with that brush).
eg. "Gamergate" (there is an inescapable core truth to the fact that game journalism is broken, perhaps irreparably so, that got completely lost in all of the personal-level misogynistic bullshit) and this reddit situation where the community had every right to be upset at the recent moves they have been making (though to reiterate, I think some forms of the backlash were, as reddit's announcement stated, sickening).
I think HN is great too. The knowledge of some of the commenters here can be very educational.
On the other hand, I don't think that she did a very good job managing the crisis (the first one caused by banning certain douchy subreddits, and the second one caused by the firing), which is one thing a CEO needs to be able to do.
Some hires and the chilling effects thing are maybe the biggest unambiguous positive developments. The subreddit banning and the salary negotiations thing were received with mixed opinion, but even if you agree with what was banned, the handling of it was questionable and seemed very rushed.
And then there was last week, which derailed the site over a weekend and made national news outlets for the whole week. A lot of details about internal dealings came to light, and none of them particularly painted reddit in a good light. There is no plausible way the amount of good shes done in the last 10-12 months outweighed the massive damage that was inflicted.
It is also worth noting that the people who do have access to a lot of internal information about the inner workings of reddit 'mutually' agreed that she shouldn't be the CEO. Undoubtedly the backlash -- some of it misguided -- played into this, but frankly a large part of being the CEO of a community-based site is PR.
No plausible way the day to day internal changes / hirings / firings that you are not privy to have had a balancing effect on this? What was your methodology in assessing the damage that the blackout caused to reddit that you used to measure against the good she could have plausibly caused in order to form your rational opinion? A cursory look at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic does not seem to indicate any lasting impact.
It is not worth noting that random employees (actually, not random: ones who' have enough of an axe to grind that they'll risk their job to break NDA) think a CEO is bad. That is the case at almost every company, small and large. Find me one where you can't find 2 employees that agree there should be a different CEO etc.
Sorry but we are looking at it from a necessarily uninformed outsider's perspective so we can't possibly have a meaningful opinion on whether she was an effective CEO.
And even if I was an employee; well there are always disgruntled employees, their opinion isn't reasonable either.
These are absurd arguments. By the same logic, the CEO of whole foods could hold a press conference and just go on a racist, hateful rant, and I couldn't possibly have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as a CEO.
In any event, the people I meant who did have the internal data weren't employees, I meant their board of directors.
And is it possible that a CEO is really awesome, but really really unlucky, and it just _looks_ like they are bad at their job outwardly? Sure, there is some non-zero chance of this; much like there is some non-zero chance of damn near anything.
Perfect information is an impossible ideal; arguing that a rational opinion is impossible regardless of any circumstance since we don't have access to all the information which exists would imply that no person can have a rational opinion about anything, ever.
And yes, literally it is true that the CEO of whole foods could go on a huge racist rant and you could not have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as CEO. Or rather, what you want to say is "in this extreme example, this CEO is clearly ineffective", but we know of morally shitty CEOs who drive huge company growth & profits and are therefore effective CEOs.
Anyway, can you show your work that you were referring to behind your analysis of the magnitude of the damage that the recent reddit blackout did?
More substantially, if all AMA teams really are going to be running the show without official reddit support, this cuts in a couple of ways. It shows a maintained lack of faith in reddit from the moderators, and it also is going to make the logistics of AMAs more difficult. The AMAs are unique content which is a substantial draw of new users, where a ton of the work was already done by volunteers. The logistical strain is going to make for less or worse content, pick your poison. High profile guests, especially those not technically savvy, are less likely to participate without admin support being available.
Strategically, reddit almost certainly wants to be involved in this -- they want to be tightly coupled, enough that the group can't spin off their own version.
I don't think this damage is irreparable, but I do think it's going to take substantial work to fix. And I mean, don't take that from me, take it from them -- https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap....
The main issue (no one to coordinate AMAs) was dealt with in a matter of hours without serious consequences. The "monumental cluster fuck" image is due to hundreds of people with an axe to grind who piled up on top it, mostly with unrelated "anti-SJW" complaints.
Besides, these people have always been there and haven't caused any large scale problems, and they didn't when Ellen was appointed (which is when they should have started protesting, assuming you buy the misogyny charge). It was when some quite heavy handed restrictions started to be laid down with regards to freedom of speech that the uprising began to grow.
Personally, I'm glad she's gone, I much prefer reddit to be an extremely politically incorrect place. Take fatpeoplehate for instance - is it hurtful to fat people? Sure. But that subreddit can be easily blocked from your feed. Should someone have to do that? I think yes, they should, because if the new policy is to not hurt anyone's feelings, a whole bunch of content has to disappear.
Now that's just my opinion of how I want reddit to be - it is up to the owners of reddit to decide how they want it to be.
Was turning the front page of /r/all into a cesspool of hate the right way to protest her decisions? Maybe not, but honestly, what alternative is there that would have actually had any effect?
You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of why FPH was banned - it wasn't because of offensive/hateful content like /r/coontown; it was because of active off-site harassment & brigading that the mods couldn't control.
One of us has a misunderstanding on that and I'm not so sure it's me. I'm aware of the brigading claim, but not of any widespread evidence. And even if so, then how do you defend the inconsistent enforcement of that rule amongst other subreddits like /r/srs? If you're going to use a rule to close a sub, then by god enforce that rule consistently if you want people to take you seriously.
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Shit_Reddit_Says
If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.
As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy. Not that I need to defend reddit's decisions, nor automatically become on their side. Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.
No evidence was given, so you don't know either.
You are correct in that they are free to do as they choose with the website they own, but not taking into consideration your userbase's opinion of your actions seems like not an optimal recipe for success. Treat your users, who produce all your content and manage the majority of your business through voluntary moderation with zero respect, authoritatively decide what is "on or off topic for discussion", and see what happens.
> If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.
Oh I'm aware of the stated reasoning, and I:
a) reject it on the grounds that it is not consistently applied. If <subreddit x> is banned because of <rule y>, but that rule doesn't apply everywhere, then it wasn't actually banned because of <rule y>, because a "selectively enforced" rule is not really a rule. They're trying to use unemotional logical reason to explain their actions, but they are not acting logically.
b) don't believe them, in part because the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech, which is most definitely a change from the original culture and spirit.
> As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy.
I'm not at all aware of the details of this but I would like to learn - is this common knowledge?
> Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.
I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background. Or, if you want to exercise your right (as the platform owner) to completely control all content, then simply state that outright. Or don't, and just continue to subtly move in that direction without discussing it, and see what happens, which I'd argue is exactly what has happened here. What happens is, your users (a significant portion at least) revolt, the story ends up being splashed through mainstream media including financial news, and before too long someone "resigns", "because their growth targets were inconsistent with management". (Do you believe that one also?)
Yes, see the 3rd FAQ of the announcement post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.
See the 2nd FAQ
> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,
Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech". Not that you have or should expect free speech on reddit anyway etc.
Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals. If a subreddit has been banned for harassment, you will see that in the ban notice. The only banned subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers is r/fatpeoplehate[2].
Harassment vs Brigading: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
"When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site."
"We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected" Agreed.
"worry for their safety every day" Oh please.
"because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day." Laughably, transparently false. This sounds like the thruthiness that comes from the minds of MBA's and is accepted (in public discourse) on wall street, but it does go over so well on reddit.
Look, if they want to ban "harassment", which I don't argue that fph was at least in some way, then just state the facts and ban it, it's not so hard. It is the completely unnecessary lying that fired up the outrage, imho. Just say "poking fun at fat people is malicious and we're no longer allowing it. Sorry.", and I don't think there would have been a shitstorm.
>> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.
> See the 2nd FAQ
It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass[1] individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
That in no way excuses srs. As far as I understand, brigading is explicitly a bannable offense. srs brigades. srs has not been banned. Once again, inconsistentcy & dishonesty leads to mistrust and anger.
>> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,
> Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech".
http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-its-not-...
"It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time."
Now, combine that with some of the interesting commentary on "safe spaces" that we see coming out of our institutions of higher learning on a regular b...
> Which is a blatant lie, as everyone knows.
I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, and is actually pretty reasonable. How did you determine that everyone knows this?
> I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, so there must be something wrong with your ability to deduce things if you feel that everyone knows that.
Once a conversation reaches the point of pedantry it's generally a good idea to just stop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro
Then go here and click some links - notice anything?
https://www.reddit.com/r/shitredditsays
I believe that tends to violate site rules.
Ah, here's where the change was proposed: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/p0yaf/meta_...
Seems like this is vote manipulation
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_vote_c...
"Don't edit the CSS of your subreddit to willfully mislead users."
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_vote_c...
Remember I wrote:
The so-called misogynists (I'm of the opinion that much of the brutal words written about her were a large part tongue-in-cheek, deliberate over the top absurdity, not that that excuses it) are a part of reddit.
Today we see this on the front page:
Redditors that worked le porn industry, was there sex involved? Did you get to have sex? Sex sex sex sex sex
https://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerk/comments/3cxzd0/redditor...
Top comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerk/comments/3cxzd0/redditor...
"Can confirm, had sex. My stage name is: Ellen pao Le edit: ayyy lepao im grill jet fuel."
Now I don't expect you to necessarily appreciate this this sense of humor, but people like Ellen and you (as far as I can tell) almost seem completely oblivious to the reality that this is humor. People have all sorts of important duties during the day, many people like to have a place to go in their downtime to participate in general absurdity free from the fucking incessant purely invented social constructs and nonsense restrictions we have to put up with in our working lives.
For example, there were many posts generally along the lines of "This cunt." linked to a photo of Ellen Pao. Personally, I find that quite funny, because it is so crude, and requires such little effort that you're taking a comedic risk even saying it. Well, not on reddit, but in standup comedy you would. Now, do you think that person thought Ellen Pao was equivalent to a vagina (or some "misogynistic" equivalent), or do you think maybe they were taking the piss?
The cultural disconnection from the real world of some people is vast, there are several jokes with a lot of truth in them about physicists, mathematicians, etc whose scientific worldview is so inconsistent with reality that it causes a normal human to involuntarily push large volumes of air in and out of their lungs in rapid sequence while contorting their face into unusual shapes.
I'm just interested in what makes people that disagree with me tick. Perhaps I'm totally wrong, it could be. But this idea that you're wrong, but I won't tell you why you're wrong doesn't sit well with me. It's not just a problem with reddit, it's a problem with planet earth.
My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.
I think unless they egregiously violate company policy or violate the law or do something which would bring damage to a company it should be up to the company to direct the fate of an officer... Not popular sentiment.
Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.
It's almost like she just sucked at her job and the public backlash and getting fired were both predictable consequences of that fact.
As if officers need to walk on eggshells. What should matter ate results rather than dictated by the winds of public opinion.
I wish the board, management, etc. in these situations would who resolve and say, no, sorry, this is our choice, we stand by it. But no, we see them capitulate to public opinion.
Sometimes that opinion does coincide with"the right thing to do" but let the company execute the right thing. Don't let the mob become your upper management.
> “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -H. Ford
Users present solutions to their problems, when you listen you discover what their problem actually is. In the above case, faster more reliable transportation.
edit: Jobs was a cofounder of what is(or close to) the most profitable company in the world. He saved the company from bankruptcy and is arguably the best quality control engineer ever. Rules always have exceptions but thinking you are the exception often helps to prove the rule.
Regarding "mob rule" this is a free country and people have a choice which website to read and to contribute to. If people want to go away from reddit that is their choice. The company that owns reddit does not need to follow reddit user wishes, but they have to face the distinct possibility that those users will leave and the consequences thereof.
You can call it mob rule, but other's can call it the matter of ordinary people exercising free choice.
Her job was to preside over that mob. And apparently to monetize it. Pissing off that mob means she failed at her job.
In addition, not understanding that you are firing a key employee shows a dramatic level of ignorance. Reddit has so few employees that even an adequate CEO should know what every single employee is doing. This is just basic Management 101--"Know What Your People Do" or its corollary "Never Piss Off A Secretary" aka "Know Who Has The Real Power In Your Company".
Finally, from her attempt at PR positioning you get headlines like this: "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit". Really? "Fighter of sexism". Um, she fired a woman, you know? And her behavior at Kleiner was far from exemplary. Her case for sexism would have been a whole lot stronger if she hadn't appeared to be sleeping her way up the corporate chain.
Overall, the problem seems to be the same tone-deafness as so many at this level of privilege: "The rules don't apply to me. How dare these plebeians attempt to make the rules apply to me!"
But this is not the company firing her --it's the internet firing her. I don't like this approach at all. management by popular opinion is not good. Imagine managing a professional sports team by popular vote --it'd be nuts.
[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/19/us-toyota-executiv...
That's a really bad example to cite because managers and coaches quite often do get fired when the fans start getting too angry.
So far as an example from the automotive industry, look at Rick Wagoner from General Motors. He lost the firm $82 billion and 90% of its market capitalization while he was CEO. And the board did nothing to correct this. With their capital gone, loss of confidence by the market, they were forced into bankruptcy.
But we have seen this play out many many times. Someone is accused --accused, not proven.. and the slightest whiff the company drops the person like a bad contagion. And, so now people expect this from companies. Complain enough and have someone fired. Someone said something crass while drunk 'aha!' fire them, behavior unbecoming. As if these people, unlike us, are not human and can't err. We're scared to see our ugliness in others. Oh the terrible reminder of our frailties! OMG, they were caught in a sting operation and had a rendezvous in a bathroom with a stranger! [Do the private sex lives of executives really matter? Oh but public perception, gasp!]
I don't think companies and organizations should manage by popular opinion. No one will be willing to make bold choices for fear of upsetting some base of people.
If an officers' views are contrary to the official org position, or behavior was egregious or against the law, then sure. If the organizational action simply coincides with popular opinion, then fine --but don't take action _just_ because of popular opinion --that's, to me, not right and gives away control to the whims of the moment.
I think the line needs to be drawn more clearly than that, because we should have populist control over companies.
I'm more concerned about companies that really impact us, for example huge banks, energy conglomerates, people behind the TPP and TiSA.
But when the leader of a company who publishes the words of its' customers - a complex relationship, indeed - tries to curb some of the harmful speech of those customers, I don't think it's a reasonable populist standard to say that people supporting that speech can oppose it.
Also, in such communities, strong anonymity is prudent. It does protect griefers from consequences, I admit. But more importantly, it protects all users from meatspace risks.
Edit: This is an old discussion. Especially if one replaces "Redit" with "Usenet".
About a week ago, Victoria, the admin who coordinated Reddit's "ask me anything" subreddits (interviews with celebrities for the most part) was fired for unknown reasons. The optics of this were handled poorly, and the community got enraged. Since the buck stopped with Pao, and she was already weakened due to the backlash on the earlier issue, this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised, and thus untenable as CEO.
Edit: corrected tenure
They didn't just screw up the optics - they royally screwed up, and then tried to laugh it off.
While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. If they had cleaned out all the trash at once, the community impact probably would have been minimal.
I think "organized harassment" here means, people form the banned subs reached out to harass people in the real life, outside of reddit. Not just posting vile stuff in a sub.
could you elaborate on this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
This powerful section of the reddit community's opinion of Pao is basically ruined at this point, and any further perceived transgressions on her part would no doubt lead to even larger, more damaging backlashes.
It seems the protests have had their intended effect and demonstrated to reddit's management that the community is essentially what drives the site's success (or failure) and that they need to keep this in mind when forming plans for the future. Keeping Pao on as CEO was only fracturing the community, so she had to go.
http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
After a while this calmed down.
A week ago reddit fired/let go Victoria, who was the liaison for hundreds of celebrities and reddit, often transcribing entire IAmAs (community interviews). Victoria's departure was immediate and caused a lot of planned IAmAs to be postponed or canceled, since she was the go-between (and in some cases the only point of contact).
A few major moderators were angry and posted about their displeasure at Victoria's departure and the general lack of interface admins have with moderators. This snowballed in to a 'blackout' of many major subreddits for about a day (longer for a few of the smaller ones). One of the admins posted a 'Popcorn tastes good...' comment when people asked him what he thought of the anger; which fanned the flames. The major protests died down after about a day or two, but a few subreddits spawned for the specific purpose of continuing the protest and to oust Pao. These people brigaded most posts about Pao and promoted the petition link calling for her removal. The anti-Pao rhetoric continued at full force (with the usual racist 'Chairman Pao' meme, nazi flags, posts of her photo to a subreddit called 'punchablefaces').
In summary: Pao and admins were wrong to not communicated with the moderators more, especially when it came to Victoria; the original protest had legitimate legs but then devolved in to the same 4chan-esque bile that happens any time reddit makes some sort of administrative move. That awful bile of protest is what kept the flames going which led to Pao stepping down.
1) Banning of several 'hate' subreddits especially /r/FatPeopleHate for harassment. The harassment was kind of dubious, as while they certainly weren't saying nice things, it didn't seem like they were actively doing 'raids' or doxing. At the same time several significantly worse, but smaller, subreddits remained online (gore, racism, sexism, etc) More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa...
2) Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Notably Victoria, who coordinated numerous AMAs with key people, and her removal completely cut off communications with several planned AMAs, including several that were live. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...
Both events were followed by a large amount of anti-Pao hate and general massive amounts of spammy posts for 2-3 days taking over the front page of reddit. The first instance also involved lots of new subreddits that would get banned, before another dozen would appear in an endless game of whack-a-mole.
Let's be perfectly honest here: that was Yishan's thing. He announced that change and set it into motion before he resigned.
e: half correct, they were in SF, moving to a new SF office but he wanted instead for the new office to be in Daly City:
"Then, when it came time to relocate from one San Francisco office to another, Wong put his foot down, Reddit sources say, and said he wanted to move the company to Daly City.
“I felt that locating an office in San Francisco proper is an incredibly difficult thing given the strains the city is facing and the high rents it imposes on employees who wish to live close to the office,” Wong said"
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/11/14/yishan-wong-leaves-red...
Unofficially, he was burned out, and he used that as his excuse to quit.
(the new office was probably why he wanted everyone to relocate to SF, so everyone could come work at this huge new office he wanted for the team)
1) not targeting nor contacting anybody; not harassment.
2) discussion of another reddit post is not harassment. there was a single comment made on the post which could be considered harassing.
3) victim willingly made comment. in addition, said victim is against the banning of subreddits.
4) I have no idea how this could be considered harassment.
5) see #2
6) you can not harass a dead person
7) see #1
8) see #6
9) see #1
10) AN ACTUAL INSTANCE OF HARASSMENT! A single instance of harassing behavior does not define an entire community.
11) The entire incident was a fabrication by a troll.
1) It is targeted toward the reader in second person narrative, frankly informing them that they are surrounded by people that hate them in everyday life. The tone is not sarcastic or satirical. It has literally no other purpose than directing genuinely intended emotional abuse at real people.
2) It's discussion of pictures of a specific person on reddit, who was easily found and connected to the picture. And as a rule it's easy to find the source of crossposted pics which causes them to be often, if not always, facilitate contact between hopeful harassers and their victims.
3) You seem to be claiming that posting in a thread tacitly constitutes permission for abuse and transforms harassing comments into non-harassing comments. To put it lightly, that theory stands in need of elaboration.
4) It just means you're working with a very forgiving, permissive view toward harassment.
5) See #2 and #4
6,7,8 and 9 are more or less covered by the above.
You're not disputing 10.
11) from what I can see there is a commenter asserting it was a fabrication by a troll, providing links to pages that are no longer accessible. Given the context of many willing accusers and willing apologists on all sides, that doesn't seem like much of a debunking to me.
And just as a big picture gloss, no one posting comments in those threads is mincing over those fine distinctions like we're trying to do here. They're just posting a lot of vile comments and leaving it to everybody else to debate whether it can be proven to be harassment to a degree that holds up under the most granular, forgiving analysis possible. In the cases where it's not harassment, it isn't due to anything approaching principled restraint on the part of the participants. Crossposted pics, for example, may lead to direct harassment or they may not, depending on how people respond to them. The possibility of facilitating harassment clearly isn't stopping people from going ahead and posting them, as the examples above illustrate.
Just to make sure we don't miss the forest for the trees here, that lack of restraint in and of itself is an indictment of their behavior, and should be cause for unequivocal condemnation of how community management was handled on reddit long before we even get to the point of arguing whether specific instances technically count as harassment according to this or that preferred definition.
Imagine a pub (Digg) that everyone in town went to. Everything was great until the pub decided to try to make more money by forcing patrons to sit a certain way. Everyone in town decided to boycott this pub, and then they found another pub (Reddit), that didn't have the silly monetization scheme that the Digg pub had. The influx of new patrons turned this quiet little pub in the corner of the town into the main pub in town. Everyone was welcome in this pub - sports types, gamers, geeks, fitness nerds. Everyone had their own little corner, and for a few years the pub provided the town with a place to meet up with people of similar interest, even if the interests were darker in nature.
During the last year, the pub decided to hire a new manager (Ellen Pao). The new manager wants the pub to be a more welcoming place for people of all types so she decides to ban a group of rowdy patrons. However, other patrons felt that Ellen Pao intruded on their freedom to express themselves and their own opinions in the pub, and an uprising took place. To calm the uprising, Pao decides to completely silence people who talked shit about her (shadowbans, subreddit bans), and bans out even more groups of people. Patrons were NOT happy about this situation.
Then, the managers of this pub decided to fire a very well loved employee who contributed a lot to bringing awesome guests to the pub, without letting the patrons or the other employees know about it. This made other employees of the pub very angry, as they all loved what she does for the community. To make matters worse, the managers make snide comments about the situation. Due to the previous Ellen Pao bannings and the recent firing, everyone in the pub decides to riot in whatever way they can. They also consider moving to a new pub in town (voat.co) though the pub seems to always be full.
People were angry, and they knew they have the power to completely render Reddit unpopular, just like they did with Digg. Reddit listened to the community rather than got stuck inside their own views on what the website should or should not be and the resignation of Pao was the outcome; a good PR move.
-- Top Comment on that thread
Now, if Victoria is coming back too - that's would be 200% right move for reddit!
I didn't even know who she was until "the last few months." Which have been a parade of increasingly-negative press and idiotic behavior. And that's from reading Reuters and the NY Times -- I don't even use Reddit.
---
Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board... “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.
Meh. It's traditional. There's nothing to be gained from running down your outgoing CEO. Besides, they hired her, so the worse she looks the worse their own judgement looks.
Time will tell. IMO, the problem at hand is that reddit is still trying to make advertisers their bread and butter. And advertisers will never be overly attracted to censorship-free spaces.
Even though I may not agree with her aggressively politically-correct agenda (nor does most of reddit), I think it may have been a smart move from a business dev. perspective.
I doubt it. Garbage like FPH should have been dealt with much sooner. The reason there was a backlash about that at all, imo, is because they let it drag out too long. Reddit was the friend-parent for so long that when it finally came time to enforce some discipline, it came as a shock and felt like a betrayal.
Isn't that basically what I said?
> Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS?
I genuinely do not know, but they need to find that limit, they need to be transparent about how they came to that decision, and they need to be consistent and fair about applying it to subreddits.
Like I said above, they tolerated it for too long, and then swung the hammer down hard. If you don't house train your dog for three years, and then start screaming at it for peeing on the rug, the dog isn't going to react well.
Cynically? When they start making /r/all.
My own personal opinion is that FPH was an embarrassment to reddit because it had gained enough traction that it was visible outside of its own little bubble, so they nuked it and took a few other inconsequential subs with it to provide plausible cover that they weren't just straight up censoring FPH for the sake of the brand image.
Discussion sites (HN included) exist solely due to their users' laziness for using and/or creating better Free decentralized solutions and ensuing network effects. In exchange for this ease of use, the site inserts an epsilon of advertising and censorship. This is the extent of their value proposition.
Eventually business/legal skinjobs take over, mistake the community for an owned golden goose, and ramp up the amount of advertising/censorship. The illusion of openness is shattered. The users revolt and move to the next green pasture.
Because communities need moderators. A free for all is anarchy; enough shitbags will ruin any particular community. I've moderated a small forum, and that was a headache when I just had two trolls to deal with, and I still failed at it - people left because of those two people, enough of them that the forum is basically dead now.
On a more cynical/business perspective, if enough users leave and if enough negative press is printed, your business loses money.
1: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/
With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna.
Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now).
Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.
There was a time when I would read a news subreddit and reminded myself that every headline should be understood exactly in reverse. I stopped doing that because it's hard to keep up the mental filter.
I think the problem is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September - reddit is mostly made up of stupid and bored teenagers.
The top subs I read and/or post to are /r/asktransgender, /r/ainbow, /r/comicbooks, and /r/kamenrider. None of them would've benefited from taking part in any kind of blackout (the first two of those function as support groups and any blackout could seriously hurt someone who needs help, the third is a mid-sized fandom where people care more about talking about their hobby than staging a juvenile protest, and the fourth is an extremely niche fandom so small that nobody would notice a blackout).
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-...
Of course a cynic would say that reddit is just a reflection of the society we live in and that might be right but it's also a reflection of the society we live in where there are few consequences to been a complete dick (I think if you could punch someone through a computer screen reddit might be a better place).
I've been on reddit >7 years and I'd love to say that it was 'better in the old days' but honestly I don't think it was I just think I've reached a point in my life where I don't feel the need to surround myself with that crap.
It's like saying that food in New York is awful because you reached into a trashcan and found a rancid bagel, but is awesome in Chicago because you looked up the nicest restaurant and spent $500 on a meal there.
Sometimes I don't recognize what y'all are talking about, and I almost want to defend reddit, then I remember: I've long since adjusted my reddit to be virtually nothing but niche. My largest is ~320,000, but it's just a "Deals" reddit. I've got two at 150,000, both very focused. And it goes down from there.
I'd hardly know this was going on except /r/blog is essentially forced on to your reddit front page.
It's just like Usenet was... subscribe to politics.vitriol.hate.anger and rec.sports.flame, and yeah, you're gonna get idiots. Subscribe to comp.lang.niche_language, get almost nothing but signal. Times never really change.
But in the end, the result is the same.
Maybe one of the nice things about UseNet was that you could only be signed up for a forum that you explicitly looked for? That at least forces the trolls to go out of their way to interfere with general-interest sections, not just go after them out of laziness.
There is also something to be said for educating users on the effects of anonymity.
If anything might be a lesson on community design it might be to put up a few more "barriers" between subreddits and the general population and think about how to control interaction between them.
It's safe - I know all the people we can still have arguments but they are well behaved ones.
Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.
On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives.
On reddit, I was familiar with the saying -- "downvote isn't disagree button." Though, the current rediquette has removed that language. Compare [1] (old) v. [2] (current).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette?v=08ebd986-6459-11e2... [2] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
Unfortunately, it is a serious problem. The moment you become a dissonant voice is the moment you're downvoted into unreadability by the choir. Make no mistake, many people here have enough karma points to downvote and they are quick to react.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
edit: yeah, the downvote threshold system was bumped up ~1 year after PG's comment.
What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists
In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community.
I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.
Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.
Not in the slightest, the majority could not care less about this ruckus and think those agitators are idiots.
Those people are a small, but vocal, minority.
Not everyone is obsessed with celebrity culture.
Yishan Wong was also a CEO (prior to Pao) having been an engineer at facebook. His tenure was also controversial although not as much as Pao.
Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?
http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit
My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.
I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.
Becoming a VC has become the new beginning of the end for any humanity left in a human being.
I suspect she pissed off a very small, but very vocal minority. Most people (myself included) don't really know or care about Pao one way or the other.
> So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.
This is believable because there have been odd business decisions under her watch, not just policy decisions. RedditMade, one of the intended revenue-generating models for Reddit, failed while she was interim CEO. Alienating /r/IAMA probably did not help.
edit: i figure u re saying one was harassed more than the other?
Why do people here (in this HN thread) tend to pretend it's either one or the other? When you're speaking about a big amount of people, pretending like they all behave the same way is never a good representation of a situation.
Wait, what? You can raise "reasonable" concerns while harassing someone? Harassment makes raising "valid concerns" not well-argued or reasonable.
Yep. You can write two paragraphs of well-articulated critique and then write something like "this bitch should die and rot in hell" in the end.
I personally don't believe she had the right qualifications to lead a community-driven site like reddit as it is today, but would have the right qualifications if reddit was going to start making a serious pivot to a more lucrative money making direction via commercial partnerships, advertising, etc.
Reddit may still go that direction, but Huffman won't have the same baggage weighing him down.
(note: this will also likely feed the conspiracy that her turn in the head office was a convenience for her lawsuit, now that she lost, she has no reason to stay in that position)
I agree with other comments chastising the community for the racist/sexist/whatever nature of lots of the negative comments against her. It was childish and dangerous. She had enough issues worthy of reasonable criticism that it wasn't even necessary.
I think this is a good thing for reddit.
From where I was sitting, it seemed like no one actually learned the full story, which might be confidential or take time to contextualize/safely explain, and everyone immediately threw it on Pao's lap and downvoted any holding maneuvers she and the rest of the staff tried to attempt. It was poorly handled, sure, but it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening. For that matter, do we even know now?
If I'm wrong, though, happy to correct my ideas here. (grammar edit)
There's no way to know whether it's correct or not, use your best judgement. Pao denying anything brings nothing to the table.
The /r/iama mods were not upset that she was fired. They were upset that there was no transition plan in place.
> it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening
There was finger pointing because nobody knew what was happening. Functions that Victoria was performing fell through and — according to the /r/iama mods — jeopardized the functioning of the AMAs that week.
Which long predated Pao at reddit. But even giving her the responsibility for this, nowhere is the apparent gross incompetence apparently seen by those calling so vociferously for Pao to be fired.
From what I saw it was both. They shut down over the latter because it left them unable to manage things to their satisfaction, but they seemed to genuinely like her and wanted her to keep her position.
Even if it was a bunch of racist/misogynist people, you have to consider that despite the messenger, the message might be valid. That's what being open-minded means.
Really, her Rampart-level impedance mismatch with the community was enough.
For god's sakes, stop it. This blatant sexism and double standards is disgusting. If Ellen were a man, never in a million years would they be expected to bear responsibility for their spouses' misdeeds or attacked for who they slept with (indeed, they'd be getting high-fived for being a "womanizer" or "stud").
Pointing out someone, who happens to be a women, is a shitty person doesn't make criticism misogynistic, and, IMHO, it's sexist to excuse them from criticism / repercussions simply because they're women.
It's a bullshit tactic. "Hey, that women pushed a car full of kids into a lake!", "Why are you such a misogynist?"
So caving in to those groups prevents nothing, it just makes things more toxic. As a tactical move, bringing in Steve Huffman might not have been the worst decision though.
Reddit only has around 70 employees, I would find it extremely unlikely a CEO at a company of that size wouldn't have been aware or involved in the decision (if only to rubber stamp it).
"It happened on her watch."
It is just rather strange how these two polarizing figures came together in a union.
For more info and details see:
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletch...
And then there are the KP employee reviews and other internal documents which became public as a result of the trial she lost that show Ellen Pao to be a thoroughly unproductive and toxic employee who was given every opportunity to shape up but was too busy engrossed in the internal office politics and making 'enemy lists'.
If someone made a movie about this stuff and the people involved, most would think it too unrealistic.
I find it really strange when people talk about someone's personal life details and then say that there's nothing odd or wrong about it. Especially when right before that they say that their personal situation is "bizzare", and the reader kinda expects to learn, what is so bizzare about it.
So, why did you bring his bisexuality up in that comment?
You're guilty of making a vast assumption about the context.
What would be wrong with a marriage of political or business convenience involving no sex, if that's what it is? Obviously nothing. You've matter-of-fact labeled his sexuality without knowing either way.