This was my main takeaway from the article. Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash, but it sounds like she had nothing to do with Victoria's firing.
> Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash
What changes to "hate speech rules?" Reddit still allows hate speech. What they curtailed were subreddits who existed primarily to harass people both on and off the site (e.g. other Reddit users, YouTubers, game streamers, people with public Facebook profiles, random members of the public, the entire Imgur staff, several Reddit admins, you name it).
That's why whenever this topic gets brought up people link to e.g. racist subreddits which still exist today, and then ask "well, why was XYZ banned, if those aren't?!" while entirely ignoring the fact that the banned subs were banned for HARASSMENT, not for having controversial opinions.
Subs still exist with the same controversial opinions as those who got banned. The difference is that the mods in the ones which survived actively follow Reddit's rules and don't harass innocent people. The mods on the banned ones were actively involved in the harassment and frankly should have been banned.
I agree, they should have and should continue to be banned. It still caused controversy. Yes, their reasoning is that these subs have users that leave their cesspools and harass other people.
> What changes to hate speech rules? These changes
You linked to a page titled: "Removing harassing subreddits" that talks about harassment and doesn't contain the term "hate speech." Can you clarify why you think this has anything to do with hate speech rather than harassment?
On the other hand, the CEO of a company should at least be vaguely aware of personnel changes that would affect strategic parts of their business. And AMAs are definitely strategic to Reddit.
The question then becomes whether Pao didn't know about it because she wasn't paying attention to her business, or because Ohanian and/or other parties deliberately hid the information from her until after the proverbial stuff had hit the fan. I'd consider the latter a fireable offense, but YMMV.
How do you know she didn't know about it? And what level of involvement do you expect a CEO to have in personnel decisions of random departments? You think Tim Cook hears about even 1% of the people Apple fires, or that Craig Federighi can't fire a senior manager directly below him on the org chart?
From what's been said publicly by principals in the story, we know that Ohanian had taken the AMA section into his personal portfolio. By the way: that by itself is weird: the chairman doesn't usually have an operational role in the company, among other reasons because it's a conflict of interest. Regardless of who he was, he had ownership of the department Victoria Taylor worked in. In most well-managed companies, that makes hire/fire his prerogative, and coordination of personnel changes his responsibility.
When people screw hire/fire up and cause disruption, the CEO normally fires or demotes them, and gets extra careful about future promotions and delegations to keep there from being a pattern of poor decisions about delegation. Here, neither thing was allowed to happen: Ohanian is effectively unfireable, and Pao wasn't given a chance to not delegate more stuff to him.
>You think Tim Cook hears about even 1% of the people Apple fires, or that Craig Federighi can't fire a senior manager directly below him on the org chart?
I'm sure that she doesn't have to approve every dismissal, but there's a pretty big difference between Apple and Reddit. Last I heard Reddit only has a few dozen employees. I'd expect the CEO to know most of them by name.
They have a page listing their employees, and there are more than 65 of them. That is way past the point at which VPs can hire/fire without the CEO intervening. And this wasn't a VP: it was Pao's boss.
> what level of involvement do you expect a CEO to have in personnel decisions of random departments? You think Tim Cook hears about even 1% of the people Apple fires, or that Craig Federighi can't fire a senior manager directly below him on the org chart?
Apple has what, 45,000+ employees? Reddit has around 70. (Assuming https://www.reddit.com/about/team/ is accurate, at least.) So I'm not sure how the the one is even remotely comparable to the other.
Moreover, my point was about key personnel, not all personnel. I don't expect Tim Cook to know or care if J. Random Genius at the Genius Bar in Tucson is about to get canned. I do expect him to know if, say, Jony Ive is about to get canned.
In other words, a CEO should at least have a cursory understanding of the status of anyone in the business who could throw it completely off track if they were hit by a bus. Given how much of its future Reddit has pinned on AMAs, and how completely non-functional the AMAs became when Taylor was fired, she would seem to have been a member of the bus brigade. Which to me at least would imply that (1) Ohanian should have known that firing her was a risky move, and (2) he should have informed Pao of that before pulling the trigger if she didn't understand it already.
Of course, if the management structure is already divided up into little fiefdoms that the CEO has no effective control over, none of this matters much.
Ohanian was installed as chairperson at the same moment Pao was elevated to interim CEO, and at that time, in an unusual move, given "marketing and community building" as his operational portfolio. That, by the way, is something Ohanian has himself said more than once.
What you are now suggesting is that, having had AMAs delegated to her boss, the charismatic founder of the company, Pao should have micromanaged the operation of AMAs and prevented Ohanian from terminating Taylor.
This strains credibility.
I think we all think Taylor was a "key employee" because of the drama that happened after she was let go, but that very few of us would, in Pao's shoes, have known Taylor was so operationally critical. Even if we had, I think all of us would have found it difficult to override a decision Ohanian personally made about a division of Reddit he was personally managing.
That's so odd that Ohanian was allowed to be chairman of the board, as well as be an employee, I can't imagine having to dance around that situation of having to manage someone who effectively has the ability to manage you. If the 'rumors' are true, he's effectively running the company from behind the scenes. Which is weird? Or is this type of situation normal?
The backlash was centered around the lack of communication and heads up to the mod teams.
We don't know if it was "she needs to be fired right now, immediately" or if it was "she is not a part of future plans". If it's the former then you can put the blame on Alexis but if Pao was not being pressured to fire her immediately then she could have in theory worked with the mod teams before letting Victoria go.
Frankly, if the mod teams were this disrupted by a single employee's departure, that's at least partially their own fault.
If she'd been hit by a bus or she'd had a personal/family emergency (hell, upcoming AMAs would've been potentially problematic even if her laptop just got stolen), they'd have been just as fucked - and no one to whine at.
They failed miserably at disaster planning. They got very lucky they could shove the blame off on someone else.
They cared enough to throw a giant temper tantrum, they could've cared enough to have a Google Doc with the contact info of upcoming AMA participants. I really don't have much sympathy for them on this one.
And yet he has never received the sort of backlash or vitriol that Pao has. I've always been up and down about how much gender and sexism has played a part in all this, outside that it a "small" minority of Reddit is influenced by it. But the idea that while not always popular but Alexis always seems to get a pass from the Reddit community (at least compared to how Pao was treated) is really telling.
> I'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?
Yes and no. Yes there should be outrage directed at him but the buck ultimately stops with the CEO and the firing was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I have not doubt Alexis shares some of the blame but Pao had failed the moderators and the community at large in other ways and her leaving was probably best for Reddit.
The Board is the CEO's boss, and he is the leader of the board, I think it's pretty straight forward. I guess I'm not sure of what you mean by he is also 'below' her on the org chart? Regardless of whatever responsibilities he held at Reddit that might be below the CEO that never changes the fact that he is Executive Chairman of the Board, which should completely clear up any ambiguity of authority.
EDIT: Thanks for clearing up this those comment links. But, my original sentiment still stands in terms of the power dynamic being clear. Just because in some capacities he is under her doesn't diminish his ability to influence her firing/hiring. If anything being in that position could prompt him to take action as a board member because he didn't like decisions she made in his role working under her. And I think Alexis mentioning that is him trying to divert attention away from the real power he actually has.
This is very similar to one of the reports swirling before. If true, it is pretty awful for Alexis to keep letting Ellen Pao take the hit for it. There are other reasons that people dislike Mrs. Pao, but she doesn't need this final straw if it is truly Alexis' straw to bear.
well, letting any moron (even high placed/influential one) to fire your employees is a sign of really bad CEO. Not that i expected any different from Pao given her previous tenure at Kleiner. She seems to constantly search what a&& to kiss and constantly kisses the wrong one (because there can't be a right one :)
It is the nature of the role of CEO that you're going to take the heat for all company decisions. That's one of the justifications for their outsized compensation. Greater risk = greater reward. No one is forced to be CEO and being an executive essentially means you live your life on the line every day. It's not for everyone.
There was another thread on this earlier today and I think my comment there is applicable here too...
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Yishan seems to love to do stuff like this. While I personally find it interesting, it also seems pretty unprofessional. Some issues with this particular comment:
1. Yishan no longer works at Reddit so I don't think he can be considered an authoritative source for what happened.
2. Yishan appointed Pao so isn't unbiased when discussing her.
3. The CEO's job is to represent the company. The chairman's job is to appoint the CEO. The outcome of events seems correct even if what Yishan says is true.
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> It is the nature of the role of CEO that you're going to take the heat for all company decisions. That's one of the justifications for their outsized compensation. Greater risk = greater reward. No one is forced to be CEO and being an executive essentially means you live your life on the line every day. It's not for everyone.
I rather doubt that Ellen Pao's job description included "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them."
We don't actually know if that's what happened, this is based on a potentially disgruntled opinion of a former CEO.
Secondly, "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them." is almost the precise definition of what the CEO role is. You represent the whole company for better or worse. You are the face of the company.
Why wouldn't it be "fire employees whose bad decisions are reflecting badly on the company, even if those employees are also on the board of directors"?
Isn't the Chief Executive Officer's job to ensure that the company actually performs its mission? I'd actually assume that the CEO's role varies significantly from company to company.
Where are you getting such precise definitions from?
IIRC, it was also known from the beginning that the r/ShitNiggersSay et al. were banned, not for being offensive, but for doxxing people in violation of Reddit's few explicit rules. Once the mob locks on target, inconvenient little details like that tend to vanish.
It was known, but oddly not widely known. During the r/jailbait shutdown, Reddit was more successful in getting the word out about exactly where the line was drawn.
This time around many users claimed that it was the beginning of a clean-up campaign instigated by Pao. I don't know if the administrators failed to get their message across or if they were simply out-shouted by the mob.
Well the only explanation provided in the FPH round is that they were being shut down for "behavior not ideas". That's more of a "trust us, we did this for the right reasons" to me.
Literally the very next sentence after the words "behavior not ideas" was "Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals," later followed by "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." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
This is exactly what I was talking about. The truth is right there, up front and easy to access, but you'd rather uncritically believe the voice of the mob.
Interesting. I had a strong feeling this whole 'censorship' controversy was bullshit manufactured by trolls, especially given the very trolly nature of the banned subs.
Except /u/kn0thing reported Ellen according to a former SVP, /u/kickme444 who was the other employee getting fired that started this whole thing [1]. Additionally, Dacvak was fired by Ellen for having cancer proving Ellen was making the personnel decisions. His comments were deleted due to a non-disparagement clause but could be found here [2].
Just doesn't make sense. Sure, quickly eliminate someone's role, but why immediately fire the person? Why not even try to transition the person to a new role? Was she employed as an independent contractor?
Reddit clearly has both plenty of money, and plenty of work to be done. This explanation doesn't add up at all.
Alexis Ohanian has long been a proponent of viral marketing and native advertising on reddit. It's a very common thing for companies and movie stars to do AMA's in order to promote whatever they're working on. I'm willing to bet Ohanian wanted to make AMA's of this sort pay to play if they already weren't, which led to some friction with Victoria. (Of course this is only a theory.)
He's the chairman of the board. A lot of things are his call. I'm just saying, that call made the CEO's job especially difficult. Keep that in mind if you're ever tempted to say "the buck stops with the Reddit CEO."
Reddit isn't Twitter or Facebook where a post on the wall is fine. Reddit is a discussion platform which requires a bigger time commitment.
Having the goal to have celebrities / famous figures be part of the reddit community seems rather naive. Given the time commitment, it would seem that the pool of potential AmA's would dry up. Also, having Victoria do the leg work would seem familiar to celebrities who would view it as normal to have an event handler.
> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
If this isn't a joke, he and a ton of other people are going to be sued into the ground for this. If it is a joke, then he and a ton of other people are going to be investigated and possibly sued anyway.
He's talking about actions he says he committed when he was CEO. He could get himself, Sam Altman, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman all sued for fucking over Conde Nast (i.e. their own shareholders).
Yishan was a member of the PayPal mafia and started working as an eng director at Facebook in 2005, so it's very likely he has F-U money already. This is someone actually exercising the "F-U" part.
I also don't really see what there's grounds to sue on - pretty much all of business is based on taking advantage of undervalued assets and changing control of them so they can be better utilized. Framing it as a long con won't make any friends at Conde Nast, but all the moves at Reddit have (to my knowledge) been by-the-book, legally.
It's interesting that people criticized Pao for not being very engaged with the Reddit community (she was famously dinged for not knowing how to send a private message). Yishan Wong's repeated indiscretions show the downside of having Reddit's CEO also be an active Redditor.
I don't necessarily agree. I think his actions show the downside of having a nincompoop as a CEO. I think the fact that he was an active redditor is circumstantial.
I mean, he went on reddit and had an argument with a former employee after that no remote work fiasco.
"Downside" depends on which side you're on. From the perspective of an ordinary Redditor, Yishan forthrightness and transparency has probably been quite refreshing. From the perspective of the board, I bet they very much appreciate Ellen Pao's professionalism and silence.
Reddit is basically a society of 36M people now, roughly the size of Iraq. If it were a country, it'd be the 36th largest, bigger than Canada, Venezuela, and Taiwan. r/IAmA alone has 8.6M subscribers, r/AskReddit has 9M.
The biggest challenge of a leader is aligning interests. Many of those "citizens" are not aligned with the board, and are not even aligned with each other. It's no wonder that they keep burning through CEOs. Yishan may have been more aligned with the Reddit userbase (although even then, a good portion of the site hated him) and clashed with the board, while Ellen tried to please the board and ended up pissing off the whole userbase.
How did Pao piss off the userbase? What are the charges on her indictment?
* She was CEO at a time when Alexis Ohanian terminated Victoria Taylor. But Ohanian was the chairman of the company, Pao's immediate superior. And the circumstances of Pao's accession to CEO didn't leave much time for the company to sort the problems of an operational chairman out: Pao was brought in as interim CEO at the same time as Ohanian was installed.
* She was a principal in a high-profile gender discrimination law suit against a giant venture capital firm where she previously worked. One wonders what this had to do with her tenure at Reddit, but it leads off the popular petition for her ouster.
* She presided directly over the termination of David Croach, who had leukemia. Croach claims he was terminated because he was unable to perform his job as community manager, and that he was unable because he was required to work from San Francisco --- a policy created by Yishan Wong. Reddit, through a spokesperson, disputed the veracity of Croach's story. We don't know why he was fired, but it seems like we do know that he was not --- as Pao's critics are very, very fond of saying --- simply fired "for having leukemia".
* She is married to Buddy Fletcher, who presided over a failed hedge fund and is accused of impropriety. This too is prominently recorded in the petition for her ouster, and, like her lawsuit, has little to do with her operational role. She is also accused of having deleted posts critical of her and her husband, but admins at Reddit later clarified that she not done that --- which makes sense, since we're talking about someone who couldn't even figure out how to send a private message on Reddit.
* She presided over a policy that banned the FPH subreddit. Reddit "free speech" advocates are very fond of suggesting that Pao was cracking down on objectionable speech at Reddit, and doing so selectively, so that white power subreddits were left to stand while FPH was banned. Of course, this leaves out the fact that FPH was banned for harassment, not for hosting hate speech.
What am I missing?
I don't know that any of these summaries are dispositive. Maybe the FPH issue is more complicated than I realize. Maybe Croach's termination really was mis-handled (if he was fired simply for having leukemia, he has a very straightforward legal case against Reddit).
I only ask that we do not accept uncritically the notion that Pao placated the board at the expense of Reddit's community.
Question: How comfortable are you with well-upvoted and -participated-in discussion threads -- like the one we are participating in here -- suddenly dropping out of visibility on a community you contribute to in a matter of minutes, without explicit explanation and behaving other than how you might expect from the published details of the local ranking algorithm and official moderation policies, as this one has?
Your answer to this question might relate to the "popular" perception of the leader of reddit in the past ~year, whether honestly and solely earned by them or not.
Very. I have pet issues that I'll participate in, but HN is not a forum for resolving the tech industry's controversies.
To me, the most important moderation goal for HN is ensuring that members remain collegial and capable of discussion, even though we wildly different backgrounds and experiences.
"Hot" controversies --- Reddit is one, most political stories also --- can harm that goal. People get nasty in them. If dropping hot stories off the front page reduces nastiness, I am all for it.
Reddit is not HN. I have no idea how Reddit should be moderated. I try to minimize my participation on Reddit, because it's not moderated in a way that I find compatible with how I want to interact with people. That doesn't make Reddit evil, just, not for me.
(I am a semi-avid consumer of the "good" stuff on Reddit, though).
Fair enough, I appreciate your perspective. Here is an attempt to communicate my own, as someone "closer" to Reddit:
For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal.
To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.
The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing.
It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small.
One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit.
But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.
For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken.
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The main thing is (the perception that):
Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.
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To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage.
Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao. Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intent to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".
In the end, I very strongly suspect that the problem is much deeper and probably well beyond any control of the central management. If there were a way to, I would put money down on the prediction that the Reddit crisis, a direct continuation of the exact same crisis that's currently associated with Ellen Pao, will continue.
To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.
Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions.
To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat.
Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.
As much as I like these drama threads (I get to enjoy them while viewing myself superior to those who watch the Kardashians), and I like seeing reddit have problems purely for the lulz-factor, such threads are typically low quality. It's not like we have a great discussion about how to manage online communities. Some of the comments are even spreading obviously incorrect rumors.
Same applies to "political" issues, like antigay CTOs, or nearly every gender related thread. It'd be great if there was a way to get high quality discussion, I'll settle for just burying the crap. Even if it's fun and ostensibly relevant.
Has nothing to do with events and everything to do with attention and loyalties.
In an online community - just as in a real-life community - you can always tell who is actually invested in the community and who is using it for their own purposes. Take a look at the reception that Starfighter got on HN vs. the one that a random promotional post on the New page [1] gets. A lot of this is because you and Patrick have both invested in HN - you post about things other than ones directly related to your business.
Yishan made a lot of unpopular decisions when he was CEO at Reddit as well, but the community outrage was blunted because he was, to some extent, seen as "one of us" and the tone he took when communicating with Reddit was "Yeah, Reddit is a business, I have to make some unpopular decisions, but I care about the site just like you, and I've been a Redditor for years." The mistakes Pao made aren't all that different, but she's given very little latitude for them because the Reddit community views her as an interloper, a corporate CEO brought in who doesn't really understand the product.
It'll be interesting to see how Steve & Alexis do now that they're back at the helm. They have immense cultural capital by virtue of being the founders, and so far I think they've managed it well with their public comments. But the Reddit userbase (suspicious as always) is going to be watching them to see "Is Reddit being managed for my benefit? Or is it managed for the benefit of shareholders, and I'm just a product being bought and sold?"
Discovery from the lawsuit makes her out to be extremely unsympathetic. There's the accusation that Yishan hired her so she'd have a good title going into the trial. People probably react negatively to contributing to a related venture. By supporting reddit, perhaps they feel they're belong her, in some minor way. (Like buying DVDs supports bad copyright laws by giving money to companies that lobby for such rules.) Or maybe it's just mob "justice" if they view her as a crook.
There's also the "no salary negotiation" thing, which is either offensive to women, men, or workers depending on the argument.
It doesn't seem fair that Alexis isn't getting as much flak. It'd be cool, for the popcorn value, if reddit starts a backlash against him.
Edit: And wow, a lot of reddit users really take themselves seriously and think reddit's really Changing The World. So the CEO's more like a political position, where you get judged on irrelevant-to-the-position criteria.
> She was CEO at a time when Alexis Ohanian terminated Victoria Taylor.
The Reddit userbase was very much under the impression that it was Pao's decision to terminate Taylor, not Alexis'. Pao was acting CEO, ordinarily that would be a CEO's decision, not the board's, and Alexis never really took responsibility for the termination except for one vague comment which most people took to mean that Alexis was responsible for the termination after all.
The timing of the termination was unfortunate, because it followed immediately after an AMA with Jesse Jackson in which some of the comments Taylor would have forwarded to him were pretty inflammatory. Initial suspicion on most of the site was that Pao terminated Taylor because of that AMA, which fit nicely into the narrative of Pao that much of the userbase had been building.
> She was a principal in a high-profile gender discrimination law suit against a giant venture capital firm where she previously worked. One wonders what this had to do with her tenure at Reddit...
Reddit has two different very vocal groups on it that have slightly overlapping opinions: the MRAs and the anti-SJWs (whatever they call themselves, I dunno). Both groups see any attempt to make a gender discrimination or racial discrimination claim as worthy of ridicule.
According to their story -- and this was stated outright in a lot of high-score comments before the Taylor termination, as the KP lawsuit was unfolding -- Pao is an untalented woman who was using her gender as a weapon against an innocent business in retaliation for being fired, while also attempting to rescue the financial disaster that her husband-in-convenience-only was facing. (Their words, not mine.)
So, to them, they see their worst nightmare helming one of the few sites online where they can all congregate semi-freely.
> She presided directly over the termination of David Croach, who had leukemia. ... he was not --- as Pao's critics are very, very fond of saying --- simply fired "for having leukemia".
Right, but "he was fired for reasons we don't understand and we should all get on with our day or maybe find some other cause to be upset about" doesn't play nearly as well as "Feminist SJW fired an employee because he had leukemia".
Reddit is not exactly a pillar of intellectual discourse.
> She is also accused of having deleted posts critical of her and her husband...
Context matters: this is all happening around the same time as the tail-end of things like "Gamergate" and the whole Hugo Awards mess thing. In that context, the Reddit mass would easily imagine Pao as some kind of SJW version of Rupert Murdoch, where she wouldn't have to understand the workings of the site to make her desires known to the people who could remove content she didn't approve of.
> She presided over a policy that banned the FPH subreddit. ... FPH was banned for harassment, not for hosting hate speech.
Several people pointed that out at the time, but they were mostly drowned out by the outrage. This was the lynchpin that really made the Pao-is-a-social-justice-warrior narrative work.
And -- and I'm a little sick to my stomach for taking this position -- FPH wasn't the only sub that was banned, and there were other subs on the site that were guilty of harassment of some form or another (an oft-mentioned one is SRS), and some of the other banned subs didn't seem to be guilty of harassment.
Setting down anything resembling a sane and consistent policy on what is and isn't allowed behavior on Reddit has been one of its weaknesses for years now. Every time Reddit doesn't communicate clearly enough with its userbase to make sure all the gaps are filled in, the userbase responds by coming up with about the worst possible story that could feasibly fit what they think they're seeing.
There was also the sudden termination of the employee behind the redditgifts site and the hu...
1. Up until recently, it was not know that Ohanian was behind the termination. Users naturally assumed it was based on a decision by Pao since Pao had seem to make other decisions (fph, etc)
2. It speaks to her character. She has an affair with a married coworker and the sues for a very specific amount (see point 4)
3. According to posts by Croach, Pao agreed to let him keep his job and then rescinded the next day. we may never know the truth on this.
4. "Failed hedge fund" is one way to put it, lol. The guy is accused of running a ponzi that steals from firefighters pensions. He apparently owes a bunch of money for legal fees and the Pao lawsuit conveniently requested this amount (this might be a coincidence). However, the bans are well documented facts (http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/35uyil/transp...). Of all the comments in the thread, only the Pao\Fletcher ones received bans. If pao didnt personally click the "shadowban" button, it seems pretty clear she ordered them.
5. They may have technically been banned for "harassment" but the messaging was clear from Pao herself: "Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to have authentic conversations and share ideas and content on an open platform". It seems reddit users really hates "MBA speak" about "authentic conversations" when someone on the site is censoring authentic conversations about subjects the admins dont agree with (see point 4)
Yes, there are millions of reddit members but the comparison to a country stops there. It's not like people are making their income in the Reddit Country, just spending some time.
Nit-picking here: Prior to 10 days ago, Yishan had been making about one post per month for the preceding six months or so; not what most would call an active redditor.
I just remember that prior to this, Yishan also commented publicly on Reddit about the reasons for terminating a different employee, which struck me at the time as a profoundly undisciplined and --- candidly --- dumb thing to do.
"Is this a joke?" is the wrong question. Yishan believes this is what happened. Rather, the question should be "is Yishan's perception of the events what actually happened?"
Remember, Yishan is biased. He quit under fire from the board, and is a big fan of Ellen Pao. That doesn't make him wrong (or right); just biased.
My suspicion is that Victoria was terminated for entirely legitimate reasons unrelated to the operation of /r/IAmA. She was a valuable employee and community member, and I don't believe the Reddit administration is foolish enough to remove her just because they wanted to modify (and possibly monetize) the format of AmAs. Much of the Reddit community frequently forgets that Reddit is a business (owned by a multinational media conglomerate, no less) that sometimes needs to make business decisions.
I don't think the community forgot Reddit is a business, I think it's the other way. Reddit's management forgot that the community is a huge part of what makes Reddit successful and if you go against them, you're not going to have a fun time.
That's why they kept bringing up the situations with mod tools, lack of communication, and so on.
The Reddit community is not the customer. They're the product. It's just like Facebook or Twitter or any other social media website. Think about the real, cold-blooded economics of it. Reddit can afford to piss off the community, because, even if a small number of people leave, there will still be plenty to view advertisements and the controversy and publicity may even drive more traffic. Sure, moderators can take subs dark and post long rants against the Reddit staff, but ultimately, most people WILL keep visiting the site.
Reddit (the company, not the community) is NOT your friend and has no obligation to the community. Just like every other social media company out there, their fundamental goal is to make money, and serving the community isn't always aligned with that interest.
Not really. Reddit users - the ones that view the advertising - are the product. The community mods are the ones that ensure there is content to make it worth coming to the site in the first place. Without that community people will stop coming to the site.
>but ultimately, most people WILL keep visiting the site.
Which is why Digg is considered a such a success today right? Sure, the community is the product, but there is a breaking point where you end up losing the community.
>The Reddit community is not the customer. They're the product.
Yay, this meme again. What a silly oversimplification. Of course reddit users are customers of reddit. Reddit does not exist without their continuing visits. Their ability to create meaningful content is part of the product, along with how reddit the site actually functions. But they are in no means not customers nor the only part of the product.
I'm surprised how often people on reddit say this, given what happened to Digg.
Customers pay for services. Advertisers are customers. The only sense in which most redditors are customers is that they pay for internet access. So (assuming you watch TV), just as you as a TV watcher are a client of your TV company and the TV advertisers are clients of the TV networks you watch, you as an internet user are a client of your ISP and internet advertisers are clients of the websites you visit. There are exceptions, when users end up paying websites directly for services or products, but this is usually how the "free to visit" internet manages to sustain itself. I wish it wasn't like that, I want to search for ads not have them delivered to me.
Repeat after me: Reddit is not a content provider. Your Cable/TV company buys content and resales it to you. Reddit does not buy content. The content of Reddit is provided by, moderated by, and upvoted by the users. You can treat them like a consumer, but it is at your own peril as they quickly wander off to other sites. Social sites like Reddit do not fit nicely in to the little boxes businesses like to make when predicting profits.
Oh, I think I must have miscommunicated something. I was comparing Cable/TV companies to ISPs and TV networks to websites. I agree that Reddit is not comparable to a Cable/TV company. As in, end users are customers/clients of Cable/TV companies and ISPs because they pay them money, but they do not pay TV networks and websites. Further, advertisers are customers/clients of TV networks and websites but they are not clients of Cable/TV companies and ISPs (generally speaking).
The only significant claim I'm making is that social media users are not customers/clients unless they are giving money to the websites. Mostly it's advertisers giving the money.
Also, I know that the content of social media websites is both created and consumed by users, but nevertheless the social media companies operate those websites, store and process the content, and provide the content created by everyone to everyone. This doesn't make the users into customers however, because they still aren't giving money to website. An analogy would be a TV show where the creators just gave the show to the network for free, and then watched it at home. Or maybe, a news station that films people's real lives and then uses that to sell ads.
As for Hacker News, we are also not the customers. Maybe you could argue that investors are customers, since HN is a promotional vehicle for YC. But, that's kind of murky.
I think you're confused on how Reddit works. People visit Reddit because of the huge amount of content being posted, and reposted, on the site. A very small percentage of the userbase does that. If that small percentage of posters move away from Reddit a very large percentage of the 'silent majority' will follow them. Reddit has a hold of nothing. There is little cost to moving to a new site. With Facebook you will lose your personal contacts that you likely know by name, with Reddit you only really know most people by aliases. Popular things like AMAs and Ask(whatever) work because of mods working for free. Good luck keeping that going by pissing your mods off. Reddit is somewhat lucky because the lack of competitors in the sphere because it is difficult to monetize the user without driving the user off.
No, they're the suppliers, but pissing off suppliers can be just as bad as pissing off customers, particularly if there's no other supplier easily available. You can't just pick up the phone and find a new source for 35 million people to provide you with free content.
> Reddit's management forgot that the community is a huge part of what makes Reddit successful and if you go against them, you're not going to have a fun time.
The community around /r/askscience or /r/askhistorians perhaps. The community around /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, and /r/creepshots probably not so much.
> Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006, and the team moved to San Francisco.
> On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.
Condé Nast is essentially a share holder, not an owner. They do not have a board seat. They have no voice. They have no avenue for influence. Like, at all.
> My suspicion is that Victoria was terminated for entirely legitimate reasons unrelated to the operation of /r/IAmA.
If so, I really don't understand why there hasn't been an official justification yet. So much of the rage could have been defused by a prompt and earnest explanation of why she was fired. The fact that that hasn't happened seems to imply that the real reason would only make people angrier.
Perhaps it was for a reason that both parties want to remain confidential?
If she was terminated for cause, Reddit has no obligation to reveal what that cause was, and neither does she. Leave them be, it's not really any of our business anyways.
I don't understand why people seem to believe that if they just keep angrily asking about it, the company will divulge the reason for Taylor's severance. It is extremely atypical for companies to reveal why they've chosen to let employees go.
It is also, literally, none of our business. Did Taylor ask people to dig into her personnel story? In a situation involving something as private and sensitive and reputational as a termination, you would want more than tea leaf reading: you'd want an overt affirmative consent from Taylor that she wanted the world talking about what happened to her at Reddit.
Apologies if that's what's happened, but I haven't seen it.
Why do you think people believe that? Maybe they are just trolls? Maybe they will just ask because it's easy to ask and someone might respond eventually.
It's not uncommon for a corporation to state why they are terminating an employee. GM terminates known engineers as scapegoats for negligence resulting in multiple deaths; many firms pre-announce mass terminations; some shut-down with no notice, save a publicly posted letter on the front door of their building telling the employees who show up for work that day that they no longer have a job ("sorry! but we tried").
Anyway, reddit left AMA out to dry by not arranging some kind of transition plan for the community, and instead created the perception of operating in secret to unknown ends.
I think people believe it because they want to believe it. Knowing feeds drama. Not knowing starves it.
It is very uncommon for companies to reveal reasons for employee termination. It may seem like that's not the case because the only termination stories you pay attention to are the newsworthy ones where the cause was stated, but that's an artifact of selection bias. Tens of thousands of people are let go every year from tech companies and their stories are never told.
Because I assume that Reddit management would prefer not to have a lot of their user base furious with them, and because a placatory answer (if one was available) would at least ease that a little bit.
But I do have a bad habit of expecting human beings to act like human beings even if they also happen to be corporate leaders.
there are often legal issues around firing someone and explaining why. it's common for both sides to sign a confidentiality agreement on something like this.
> The protest was the latest episode in nine months of tumult for Reddit, a highly popular internet message board which has more than 160 million monthly visitors. Under Ms. Pao’s leadership, many users of the site have been upset with what they have perceived as major challenges to free speech and a lack of censorship. In May, Reddit users revolted when the company instituted stricter guidelines against prohibiting harassment on the site.
The first emphasized sentence makes sense (barely); the challenges are to both free speech and a lack of censorship. The wording sucks, but it could be worse.
The second sentence, on the other hand, is plain nonsensical.
I don't know, because this is the NYT and they will treat anyone as a source? Frequently granting them anonymity when their position neither deserves nor requires it?
Why would Reddit have had a hard time simply installing Ohanian or Huffman as the CEO? Why would they need covert machinations to put the founders back at the helm?
You're not new here, so you probably already know this, but when HN users flag a story, the story gets demoted. A sufficient number of flags kills the story altogether.
This is a very flaggable submission and that's probably what's happening.
I can't speak for anyone else, but when on the rare occasion I do flag something, it isn't just to enforce site guidelines but also to keep HN's submission and discussion quality up.
This is an article about Reddit drama and there have already been a number of recent submissions about that. There are only 30 positions on the front page and Reddit drama doesn't deserve one of them.
I don't think it's just "reddit drama" especially since reddit is a YC company and Sam Altman is on the board. Some of the revelations give some really interesting insight in how, what is considered a wildly successful web-startup, is (mis)-managed and some of the back-room dealings happen in the supposedly "meritocratic" valley.
I think this is ripe for really interesting discussion actually - especially when it comes to how a massively public company that came out of such a technically oriented culture handles this much scrutiny.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadI'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?
What changes to "hate speech rules?" Reddit still allows hate speech. What they curtailed were subreddits who existed primarily to harass people both on and off the site (e.g. other Reddit users, YouTubers, game streamers, people with public Facebook profiles, random members of the public, the entire Imgur staff, several Reddit admins, you name it).
That's why whenever this topic gets brought up people link to e.g. racist subreddits which still exist today, and then ask "well, why was XYZ banned, if those aren't?!" while entirely ignoring the fact that the banned subs were banned for HARASSMENT, not for having controversial opinions.
Subs still exist with the same controversial opinions as those who got banned. The difference is that the mods in the ones which survived actively follow Reddit's rules and don't harass innocent people. The mods on the banned ones were actively involved in the harassment and frankly should have been banned.
https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...
I agree, they should have and should continue to be banned. It still caused controversy. Yes, their reasoning is that these subs have users that leave their cesspools and harass other people.
You linked to a page titled: "Removing harassing subreddits" that talks about harassment and doesn't contain the term "hate speech." Can you clarify why you think this has anything to do with hate speech rather than harassment?
The question then becomes whether Pao didn't know about it because she wasn't paying attention to her business, or because Ohanian and/or other parties deliberately hid the information from her until after the proverbial stuff had hit the fan. I'd consider the latter a fireable offense, but YMMV.
From what's been said publicly by principals in the story, we know that Ohanian had taken the AMA section into his personal portfolio. By the way: that by itself is weird: the chairman doesn't usually have an operational role in the company, among other reasons because it's a conflict of interest. Regardless of who he was, he had ownership of the department Victoria Taylor worked in. In most well-managed companies, that makes hire/fire his prerogative, and coordination of personnel changes his responsibility.
When people screw hire/fire up and cause disruption, the CEO normally fires or demotes them, and gets extra careful about future promotions and delegations to keep there from being a pattern of poor decisions about delegation. Here, neither thing was allowed to happen: Ohanian is effectively unfireable, and Pao wasn't given a chance to not delegate more stuff to him.
I'm sure that she doesn't have to approve every dismissal, but there's a pretty big difference between Apple and Reddit. Last I heard Reddit only has a few dozen employees. I'd expect the CEO to know most of them by name.
Apple has what, 45,000+ employees? Reddit has around 70. (Assuming https://www.reddit.com/about/team/ is accurate, at least.) So I'm not sure how the the one is even remotely comparable to the other.
Moreover, my point was about key personnel, not all personnel. I don't expect Tim Cook to know or care if J. Random Genius at the Genius Bar in Tucson is about to get canned. I do expect him to know if, say, Jony Ive is about to get canned.
In other words, a CEO should at least have a cursory understanding of the status of anyone in the business who could throw it completely off track if they were hit by a bus. Given how much of its future Reddit has pinned on AMAs, and how completely non-functional the AMAs became when Taylor was fired, she would seem to have been a member of the bus brigade. Which to me at least would imply that (1) Ohanian should have known that firing her was a risky move, and (2) he should have informed Pao of that before pulling the trigger if she didn't understand it already.
Of course, if the management structure is already divided up into little fiefdoms that the CEO has no effective control over, none of this matters much.
What you are now suggesting is that, having had AMAs delegated to her boss, the charismatic founder of the company, Pao should have micromanaged the operation of AMAs and prevented Ohanian from terminating Taylor.
This strains credibility.
I think we all think Taylor was a "key employee" because of the drama that happened after she was let go, but that very few of us would, in Pao's shoes, have known Taylor was so operationally critical. Even if we had, I think all of us would have found it difficult to override a decision Ohanian personally made about a division of Reddit he was personally managing.
We don't know if it was "she needs to be fired right now, immediately" or if it was "she is not a part of future plans". If it's the former then you can put the blame on Alexis but if Pao was not being pressured to fire her immediately then she could have in theory worked with the mod teams before letting Victoria go.
If she'd been hit by a bus or she'd had a personal/family emergency (hell, upcoming AMAs would've been potentially problematic even if her laptop just got stolen), they'd have been just as fucked - and no one to whine at.
They failed miserably at disaster planning. They got very lucky they could shove the blame off on someone else.
Yes and no. Yes there should be outrage directed at him but the buck ultimately stops with the CEO and the firing was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I have not doubt Alexis shares some of the blame but Pao had failed the moderators and the community at large in other ways and her leaving was probably best for Reddit.
EDIT: Sources that Alexis reported to Ellen Pao:
From Alexis: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
From u/kickme444 (previous employee; fired last month): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
EDIT: Thanks for clearing up this those comment links. But, my original sentiment still stands in terms of the power dynamic being clear. Just because in some capacities he is under her doesn't diminish his ability to influence her firing/hiring. If anything being in that position could prompt him to take action as a board member because he didn't like decisions she made in his role working under her. And I think Alexis mentioning that is him trying to divert attention away from the real power he actually has.
There was another thread on this earlier today and I think my comment there is applicable here too...
--
Yishan seems to love to do stuff like this. While I personally find it interesting, it also seems pretty unprofessional. Some issues with this particular comment:
1. Yishan no longer works at Reddit so I don't think he can be considered an authoritative source for what happened.
2. Yishan appointed Pao so isn't unbiased when discussing her.
3. The CEO's job is to represent the company. The chairman's job is to appoint the CEO. The outcome of events seems correct even if what Yishan says is true. reply
I rather doubt that Ellen Pao's job description included "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them."
Stop making excuses for assholes.
Secondly, "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them." is almost the precise definition of what the CEO role is. You represent the whole company for better or worse. You are the face of the company.
Where are you getting such precise definitions from?
Yes it is, although sometimes the COO plays a large part in internally managing that. I'm not sure how Reddit is structured.
The CEO being the face of the company is always part of the job though.
> Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by /u/kn0thing.
IIRC, it was also known from the beginning that the r/ShitNiggersSay et al. were banned, not for being offensive, but for doxxing people in violation of Reddit's few explicit rules. Once the mob locks on target, inconvenient little details like that tend to vanish.
This time around many users claimed that it was the beginning of a clean-up campaign instigated by Pao. I don't know if the administrators failed to get their message across or if they were simply out-shouted by the mob.
This is exactly what I was talking about. The truth is right there, up front and easy to access, but you'd rather uncritically believe the voice of the mob.
But occasionally they ban entire subreddits for what some users do. Curious, isn't it?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
[2] https://archive.is/kfrFM
And they had such a good track record up 'til now.
Reddit clearly has both plenty of money, and plenty of work to be done. This explanation doesn't add up at all.
Here's him talking about marketing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IyyIGg12QZw
Move fast. Break things?
If so, they certainly achieved both objectives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9880953
http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit
Having the goal to have celebrities / famous figures be part of the reddit community seems rather naive. Given the time commitment, it would seem that the pool of potential AmA's would dry up. Also, having Victoria do the leg work would seem familiar to celebrities who would view it as normal to have an event handler.
> Here's one.
> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
> JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
If this isn't a joke, he and a ton of other people are going to be sued into the ground for this. If it is a joke, then he and a ton of other people are going to be investigated and possibly sued anyway.
http://www.businessinsider.com/yishan-wong-says-alexis-ohani...
Seems like slander would be a very hard case to win and what else is there that you could sue him for?
If you're an executive, diluting your shareholders is extremely illegal.
He's talking about actions he says he committed when he was CEO. He could get himself, Sam Altman, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman all sued for fucking over Conde Nast (i.e. their own shareholders).
I also don't really see what there's grounds to sue on - pretty much all of business is based on taking advantage of undervalued assets and changing control of them so they can be better utilized. Framing it as a long con won't make any friends at Conde Nast, but all the moves at Reddit have (to my knowledge) been by-the-book, legally.
Whats the best long con you ever pulled?
I mean, he went on reddit and had an argument with a former employee after that no remote work fiasco.
Reddit is basically a society of 36M people now, roughly the size of Iraq. If it were a country, it'd be the 36th largest, bigger than Canada, Venezuela, and Taiwan. r/IAmA alone has 8.6M subscribers, r/AskReddit has 9M.
The biggest challenge of a leader is aligning interests. Many of those "citizens" are not aligned with the board, and are not even aligned with each other. It's no wonder that they keep burning through CEOs. Yishan may have been more aligned with the Reddit userbase (although even then, a good portion of the site hated him) and clashed with the board, while Ellen tried to please the board and ended up pissing off the whole userbase.
* She was CEO at a time when Alexis Ohanian terminated Victoria Taylor. But Ohanian was the chairman of the company, Pao's immediate superior. And the circumstances of Pao's accession to CEO didn't leave much time for the company to sort the problems of an operational chairman out: Pao was brought in as interim CEO at the same time as Ohanian was installed.
* She was a principal in a high-profile gender discrimination law suit against a giant venture capital firm where she previously worked. One wonders what this had to do with her tenure at Reddit, but it leads off the popular petition for her ouster.
* She presided directly over the termination of David Croach, who had leukemia. Croach claims he was terminated because he was unable to perform his job as community manager, and that he was unable because he was required to work from San Francisco --- a policy created by Yishan Wong. Reddit, through a spokesperson, disputed the veracity of Croach's story. We don't know why he was fired, but it seems like we do know that he was not --- as Pao's critics are very, very fond of saying --- simply fired "for having leukemia".
* She is married to Buddy Fletcher, who presided over a failed hedge fund and is accused of impropriety. This too is prominently recorded in the petition for her ouster, and, like her lawsuit, has little to do with her operational role. She is also accused of having deleted posts critical of her and her husband, but admins at Reddit later clarified that she not done that --- which makes sense, since we're talking about someone who couldn't even figure out how to send a private message on Reddit.
* She presided over a policy that banned the FPH subreddit. Reddit "free speech" advocates are very fond of suggesting that Pao was cracking down on objectionable speech at Reddit, and doing so selectively, so that white power subreddits were left to stand while FPH was banned. Of course, this leaves out the fact that FPH was banned for harassment, not for hosting hate speech.
What am I missing?
I don't know that any of these summaries are dispositive. Maybe the FPH issue is more complicated than I realize. Maybe Croach's termination really was mis-handled (if he was fired simply for having leukemia, he has a very straightforward legal case against Reddit).
I only ask that we do not accept uncritically the notion that Pao placated the board at the expense of Reddit's community.
Your answer to this question might relate to the "popular" perception of the leader of reddit in the past ~year, whether honestly and solely earned by them or not.
To me, the most important moderation goal for HN is ensuring that members remain collegial and capable of discussion, even though we wildly different backgrounds and experiences.
"Hot" controversies --- Reddit is one, most political stories also --- can harm that goal. People get nasty in them. If dropping hot stories off the front page reduces nastiness, I am all for it.
Reddit is not HN. I have no idea how Reddit should be moderated. I try to minimize my participation on Reddit, because it's not moderated in a way that I find compatible with how I want to interact with people. That doesn't make Reddit evil, just, not for me.
(I am a semi-avid consumer of the "good" stuff on Reddit, though).
For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal.
To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.
The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing.
It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small.
One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit.
But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.
For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken.
----
The main thing is (the perception that):
Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.
----
To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage.
Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao. Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intent to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".
In the end, I very strongly suspect that the problem is much deeper and probably well beyond any control of the central management. If there were a way to, I would put money down on the prediction that the Reddit crisis, a direct continuation of the exact same crisis that's currently associated with Ellen Pao, will continue.
To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.
Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions.
To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat.
Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.
Same applies to "political" issues, like antigay CTOs, or nearly every gender related thread. It'd be great if there was a way to get high quality discussion, I'll settle for just burying the crap. Even if it's fun and ostensibly relevant.
In an online community - just as in a real-life community - you can always tell who is actually invested in the community and who is using it for their own purposes. Take a look at the reception that Starfighter got on HN vs. the one that a random promotional post on the New page [1] gets. A lot of this is because you and Patrick have both invested in HN - you post about things other than ones directly related to your business.
Yishan made a lot of unpopular decisions when he was CEO at Reddit as well, but the community outrage was blunted because he was, to some extent, seen as "one of us" and the tone he took when communicating with Reddit was "Yeah, Reddit is a business, I have to make some unpopular decisions, but I care about the site just like you, and I've been a Redditor for years." The mistakes Pao made aren't all that different, but she's given very little latitude for them because the Reddit community views her as an interloper, a corporate CEO brought in who doesn't really understand the product.
It'll be interesting to see how Steve & Alexis do now that they're back at the helm. They have immense cultural capital by virtue of being the founders, and so far I think they've managed it well with their public comments. But the Reddit userbase (suspicious as always) is going to be watching them to see "Is Reddit being managed for my benefit? Or is it managed for the benefit of shareholders, and I'm just a product being bought and sold?"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881172
By being a woman and thinking Reddit might do better without the sort of people who would be booted from 4chan.
There's also the "no salary negotiation" thing, which is either offensive to women, men, or workers depending on the argument.
It doesn't seem fair that Alexis isn't getting as much flak. It'd be cool, for the popcorn value, if reddit starts a backlash against him.
Edit: And wow, a lot of reddit users really take themselves seriously and think reddit's really Changing The World. So the CEO's more like a political position, where you get judged on irrelevant-to-the-position criteria.
The Reddit userbase was very much under the impression that it was Pao's decision to terminate Taylor, not Alexis'. Pao was acting CEO, ordinarily that would be a CEO's decision, not the board's, and Alexis never really took responsibility for the termination except for one vague comment which most people took to mean that Alexis was responsible for the termination after all.
The timing of the termination was unfortunate, because it followed immediately after an AMA with Jesse Jackson in which some of the comments Taylor would have forwarded to him were pretty inflammatory. Initial suspicion on most of the site was that Pao terminated Taylor because of that AMA, which fit nicely into the narrative of Pao that much of the userbase had been building.
> She was a principal in a high-profile gender discrimination law suit against a giant venture capital firm where she previously worked. One wonders what this had to do with her tenure at Reddit...
Reddit has two different very vocal groups on it that have slightly overlapping opinions: the MRAs and the anti-SJWs (whatever they call themselves, I dunno). Both groups see any attempt to make a gender discrimination or racial discrimination claim as worthy of ridicule.
According to their story -- and this was stated outright in a lot of high-score comments before the Taylor termination, as the KP lawsuit was unfolding -- Pao is an untalented woman who was using her gender as a weapon against an innocent business in retaliation for being fired, while also attempting to rescue the financial disaster that her husband-in-convenience-only was facing. (Their words, not mine.)
So, to them, they see their worst nightmare helming one of the few sites online where they can all congregate semi-freely.
> She presided directly over the termination of David Croach, who had leukemia. ... he was not --- as Pao's critics are very, very fond of saying --- simply fired "for having leukemia".
Right, but "he was fired for reasons we don't understand and we should all get on with our day or maybe find some other cause to be upset about" doesn't play nearly as well as "Feminist SJW fired an employee because he had leukemia".
Reddit is not exactly a pillar of intellectual discourse.
> She is also accused of having deleted posts critical of her and her husband...
Context matters: this is all happening around the same time as the tail-end of things like "Gamergate" and the whole Hugo Awards mess thing. In that context, the Reddit mass would easily imagine Pao as some kind of SJW version of Rupert Murdoch, where she wouldn't have to understand the workings of the site to make her desires known to the people who could remove content she didn't approve of.
> She presided over a policy that banned the FPH subreddit. ... FPH was banned for harassment, not for hosting hate speech.
Several people pointed that out at the time, but they were mostly drowned out by the outrage. This was the lynchpin that really made the Pao-is-a-social-justice-warrior narrative work.
And -- and I'm a little sick to my stomach for taking this position -- FPH wasn't the only sub that was banned, and there were other subs on the site that were guilty of harassment of some form or another (an oft-mentioned one is SRS), and some of the other banned subs didn't seem to be guilty of harassment.
Setting down anything resembling a sane and consistent policy on what is and isn't allowed behavior on Reddit has been one of its weaknesses for years now. Every time Reddit doesn't communicate clearly enough with its userbase to make sure all the gaps are filled in, the userbase responds by coming up with about the worst possible story that could feasibly fit what they think they're seeing.
There was also the sudden termination of the employee behind the redditgifts site and the hu...
Reddit is overwhelmingly 4chan graduates, full of men who perceived themselves to be victimised by women who are trying to assert their humanity.
2. It speaks to her character. She has an affair with a married coworker and the sues for a very specific amount (see point 4)
3. According to posts by Croach, Pao agreed to let him keep his job and then rescinded the next day. we may never know the truth on this.
4. "Failed hedge fund" is one way to put it, lol. The guy is accused of running a ponzi that steals from firefighters pensions. He apparently owes a bunch of money for legal fees and the Pao lawsuit conveniently requested this amount (this might be a coincidence). However, the bans are well documented facts (http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/35uyil/transp...). Of all the comments in the thread, only the Pao\Fletcher ones received bans. If pao didnt personally click the "shadowban" button, it seems pretty clear she ordered them.
5. They may have technically been banned for "harassment" but the messaging was clear from Pao herself: "Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to have authentic conversations and share ideas and content on an open platform". It seems reddit users really hates "MBA speak" about "authentic conversations" when someone on the site is censoring authentic conversations about subjects the admins dont agree with (see point 4)
Remember, Yishan is biased. He quit under fire from the board, and is a big fan of Ellen Pao. That doesn't make him wrong (or right); just biased.
That's why they kept bringing up the situations with mod tools, lack of communication, and so on.
Reddit (the company, not the community) is NOT your friend and has no obligation to the community. Just like every other social media company out there, their fundamental goal is to make money, and serving the community isn't always aligned with that interest.
Which is why Digg is considered a such a success today right? Sure, the community is the product, but there is a breaking point where you end up losing the community.
Yay, this meme again. What a silly oversimplification. Of course reddit users are customers of reddit. Reddit does not exist without their continuing visits. Their ability to create meaningful content is part of the product, along with how reddit the site actually functions. But they are in no means not customers nor the only part of the product.
I'm surprised how often people on reddit say this, given what happened to Digg.
https://www.reddit.com/advertising
The only significant claim I'm making is that social media users are not customers/clients unless they are giving money to the websites. Mostly it's advertisers giving the money.
Also, I know that the content of social media websites is both created and consumed by users, but nevertheless the social media companies operate those websites, store and process the content, and provide the content created by everyone to everyone. This doesn't make the users into customers however, because they still aren't giving money to website. An analogy would be a TV show where the creators just gave the show to the network for free, and then watched it at home. Or maybe, a news station that films people's real lives and then uses that to sell ads.
As for Hacker News, we are also not the customers. Maybe you could argue that investors are customers, since HN is a promotional vehicle for YC. But, that's kind of murky.
The community around /r/askscience or /r/askhistorians perhaps. The community around /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, and /r/creepshots probably not so much.
> On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
If so, I really don't understand why there hasn't been an official justification yet. So much of the rage could have been defused by a prompt and earnest explanation of why she was fired. The fact that that hasn't happened seems to imply that the real reason would only make people angrier.
If she was terminated for cause, Reddit has no obligation to reveal what that cause was, and neither does she. Leave them be, it's not really any of our business anyways.
That is a non sequitur.
It is also, literally, none of our business. Did Taylor ask people to dig into her personnel story? In a situation involving something as private and sensitive and reputational as a termination, you would want more than tea leaf reading: you'd want an overt affirmative consent from Taylor that she wanted the world talking about what happened to her at Reddit.
Apologies if that's what's happened, but I haven't seen it.
It's not uncommon for a corporation to state why they are terminating an employee. GM terminates known engineers as scapegoats for negligence resulting in multiple deaths; many firms pre-announce mass terminations; some shut-down with no notice, save a publicly posted letter on the front door of their building telling the employees who show up for work that day that they no longer have a job ("sorry! but we tried").
Anyway, reddit left AMA out to dry by not arranging some kind of transition plan for the community, and instead created the perception of operating in secret to unknown ends.
It is very uncommon for companies to reveal reasons for employee termination. It may seem like that's not the case because the only termination stories you pay attention to are the newsworthy ones where the cause was stated, but that's an artifact of selection bias. Tens of thousands of people are let go every year from tech companies and their stories are never told.
Victoria signed a very comprehensive non-disclosure agreement, and would have to give up a decent severance;
and Victoria is uninterested in picking a huge fight in public because she'd like to be employed again.
Because I assume that Reddit management would prefer not to have a lot of their user base furious with them, and because a placatory answer (if one was available) would at least ease that a little bit.
But I do have a bad habit of expecting human beings to act like human beings even if they also happen to be corporate leaders.
> The protest was the latest episode in nine months of tumult for Reddit, a highly popular internet message board which has more than 160 million monthly visitors. Under Ms. Pao’s leadership, many users of the site have been upset with what they have perceived as major challenges to free speech and a lack of censorship. In May, Reddit users revolted when the company instituted stricter guidelines against prohibiting harassment on the site.
The second sentence, on the other hand, is plain nonsensical.
Regardless, I think with her reputation and respect - she'll likely be doing something even more exciting.
She's wisely avoiding stirring muddy waters for now...
Ohanian seemed content to use Ellen Pao as a meatshield, whether she deserved it or not.
Imagine that: A Silicon Valley soap opera with no heros.
In comparison there are currently older posts with less points or comments on the HN front page.
Obviously someone at YC/HN is driving this story down.
This is a very flaggable submission and that's probably what's happening.
This is an article about Reddit drama and there have already been a number of recent submissions about that. There are only 30 positions on the front page and Reddit drama doesn't deserve one of them.
I don't think it's just "reddit drama" especially since reddit is a YC company and Sam Altman is on the board. Some of the revelations give some really interesting insight in how, what is considered a wildly successful web-startup, is (mis)-managed and some of the back-room dealings happen in the supposedly "meritocratic" valley.
I think this is ripe for really interesting discussion actually - especially when it comes to how a massively public company that came out of such a technically oriented culture handles this much scrutiny.