5 ms·

The way she was treated, though, was disgusting. I have zero doubt that her gender/ethnicity was a major motivating factor for the majority of people involved

by jmkni 9y ago

The way she was treated, though, was disgusting. I have zero doubt that her gender/ethnicity was a major motivating factor for the majority of people involved in this backlash and that a white male in the same position would have pretty much gotten a pass from the same people. /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/revengeporn where two incredibly toxic subreddits, and I was personally happy to see them go.

ramblerman 9y ago
> /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/revengeporn where two incredibly toxic subreddits, and I was personally happy to see them go. I agree, but we were discussing motive. It's not unfair to expect reddit's leadership to have some insight into its userbase. If I took ownership of vogue tomorrow and introduced articles about bmx racing, that would be a dumb move. I could complain that the readership doesn't understand bmx racing - but ultimately I hurt the bottom line.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Or maybe they understood the userbase very well, and hence got themselves a sacrificial lamb before banning those subreddits.
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Not only are you misrepresenting what Pao did and didn't do at Reddit, your analogy is poor too. The subreddits in question were utter trash, maybe even illegal in how they targeted people, and a very poor representation of what Reddit is.
  - intoverflow2 9y ago
    > and a very poor representation of what Reddit is I'd disagree, the fatpeoplehate subreddit is basically the same thing as /r/trashy /r/cringeanarchy and other other popular subreddits that are regular fixtures on the popular page. It's a thoroughly unpleasant website.
archagon 9y ago
Yeah, what a shitshow. It's a testament to the strength of her character that she still hangs out and posts sometimes. I would have burned that bridge with fury. (Something, by the way, I would have been afforded as a dude, and that Pao would have surely been ridiculed for until the end of her career. It's sad that institutional forces have forced her to act "distant, even a bit robotic" in these situations.)
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  I don't think bridge burning is a privilege only extended to men. Nor do I think that if you had Pao's role, and angrily left reddit, that the community would have given you a pass. Why would they? Maybe, what I should be asking, is where you are getting these ideas from. What makes you believe that men can burn bridges and women can't?
alan-crowe 9y ago
I want to speak up in favour of r/fatpeooplehate. The various weight loss subreddits (such as loseit, keto, intermittentfasting) often have personal accounts of being undermined by family and friends when trying to follow orthodox medical advice. It is hard to avoid getting fat when family and friends are already fat and encouraging you to join them. sangharakshita (a Buddhist teacher) preached that the central problem of the spiritual life – for most people at least – is to find emotional equivalents for their intellectual understanding. That is wise and true. But if it is misunderstood as a restrictive claim (this is only a problem for spiritual life, for the rest of life intellectual understanding on its own suffices.) then it is dangerously misleading. It is not enough to understand calories in and calories out intellectually. You still have to cultivate the emotional strength needed to escape your own rationalisations, the rationalisations that other people push on you, and actually put down the fork. Much of today's USA thinks that it is OK to eat yourself into an early grave. Gluttony has become so accepted and endorsed that getting fat has become socially contagious. When people reject this, there is a phase of being angry: how did I get sucked into such a dysfunction social consensus? One chocolate bar at a time? Then what? r/fatpeoplehate is angry and anger is ugly, but it is also important and necessary. People want to escape the social consensus and, people being people, they cannot do that on intellect along. They need space to vent and be angry. You can see an example of fat-people-hate at https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 FPH is on the side of the people that it nominally hates. It wants people to change, to come to the light side of the plate. The people who banned r/fatpeooplehate don't literally have blood on their hands, that is not how type 2 diabetes works, but they ought to have gangrenous, amputated toes on their conscience.
- etplayer 9y ago
  Does one not think that there could have been a better way to encourage people to lose weight than to laugh at them, ridicule them and, to be honest, hate them? I'm not so sure if I consider your analysis to be a valid representation of the intentions of the people there, though I have little experience with the community itself, this model of "helping" people seems very alien to me, and contrary to what I had (intellecutally) understood to be how people behave on the Internet. I think also ultimately it is the choice of the person to find their encouragement, as much as it is very difficult. Diet communities are built around the idea of individual desire to improve (which is why posts like "Three weeks in and it's great!" get upvoted there) rather than having it 'forced' upon them.
tnone 9y ago
I agree that her gender and ethnicity were a factor: when a white male is a CEO, nobody will conclude he isn't in full authority in his role and deserves full responsibility and blame for what happens under his watch and tenure. This view of Pao as an automatic victim is special pleading and ironically, denies her the agency of a full adult that feminists claim others refuse to grant women.
lagadu 9y ago
I disagree, particularly in regards to r/fatpeoplehate (I didn't know r/revengeporn existed but I know revenge porn is illegal in my country at least). Fatpeoplehate was one of the strictest subs when it came to enforcing the rediquette rules of "not touching the poo": members were very quickly banned if they got caught using the content in the sub to harass anyone outside it. Once that boundary is set it all becomes a matter of the viewer's morality. You likely think that it's wrong to dislike (or at least not to coddle and treat them like they're wonderful snowflakes) people who let themselves go and even glorify obesity; they did not. What's relevant is that as long as a group keeps to its own circle I feel we have no standing in judging them because my moral values are no better or worse than theirs.
- b4ux1t3 9y ago
  > members were very quickly banned if they got caught using the content in the sub to harass anyone outside it. Er, not from what I remember. And even still, if a subreddit, even without meaning to, encourages real-life harassment, that's toxic. The fact that they had to keep banning people for being toxic leads me to the conclusion that it just drew toxic pieces of garbage. There are plenty of ways to encourage someone to lose weight that don't involve typing the word "hate" when you want to get to a community discussing weight loss. Or you could recognize that people have the right to eat and be however they like, even if you don't like it. You have the right to be an asshole and point at them and tell them they're fat and going to die early, but Reddit has the right to prevent you from using their platform for doing that. There was an interesting idea that I heard last week regarding the whole Charlottesville Nazi incident. It was something along the lines of the Paradox of Tolerance. Essentially, being tolerant of intolerance leads to intolerance. So, in order to keep tolerance alive, you have to snuff out intolerance, before it becomes systemic. You have to become intolerant of intolerance. Ellen Pao is (ostensibly) intolerant of intolerance, and that, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. I don't particularly like her, but enforcing Reddit's own rules was one of the better parts of her tenure at Reddit.
- wvenable 9y ago
  I would argue that r/fatpeoplehate was effectively two subreddits. It "happily" chugged along for a long time as just another subreddit but at some point it reached the tipping point and became uncontrollable.
debacle 9y ago
spez has gotten much of the same treatment from those same users on 4chan, voat, and the remaining right aligned subreddits. I would argue that worse has been said of/to spez.
fav_collector 9y ago
It has more to do with her political involvement and activism than her gender or race. There will always be people who dislike polarizing political figures.

by jmkni 9y ago

ramblerman 9y ago

> /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/revengeporn where two incredibly toxic subreddits, and I was personally happy to see them go. I agree, but we were discussing motive. It's not unfair to expect reddit's leadership to have some insight into its userbase. If I took ownership of vogue tomorrow and introduced articles about bmx racing, that would be a dumb move. I could complain that the readership doesn't understand bmx racing - but ultimately I hurt the bottom line.

icebraining 9y ago
Or maybe they understood the userbase very well, and hence got themselves a sacrificial lamb before banning those subreddits.
arkitaip 9y ago
Not only are you misrepresenting what Pao did and didn't do at Reddit, your analogy is poor too. The subreddits in question were utter trash, maybe even illegal in how they targeted people, and a very poor representation of what Reddit is.
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  > and a very poor representation of what Reddit is I'd disagree, the fatpeoplehate subreddit is basically the same thing as /r/trashy /r/cringeanarchy and other other popular subreddits that are regular fixtures on the popular page. It's a thoroughly unpleasant website.

archagon 9y ago

Yeah, what a shitshow. It's a testament to the strength of her character that she still hangs out and posts sometimes. I would have burned that bridge with fury. (Something, by the way, I would have been afforded as a dude, and that Pao would have surely been ridiculed for until the end of her career. It's sad that institutional forces have forced her to act "distant, even a bit robotic" in these situations.)

ImSkeptical 9y ago
I don't think bridge burning is a privilege only extended to men. Nor do I think that if you had Pao's role, and angrily left reddit, that the community would have given you a pass. Why would they? Maybe, what I should be asking, is where you are getting these ideas from. What makes you believe that men can burn bridges and women can't?

alan-crowe 9y ago

I want to speak up in favour of r/fatpeooplehate. The various weight loss subreddits (such as loseit, keto, intermittentfasting) often have personal accounts of being undermined by family and friends when trying to follow orthodox medical advice. It is hard to avoid getting fat when family and friends are already fat and encouraging you to join them. sangharakshita (a Buddhist teacher) preached that the central problem of the spiritual life – for most people at least – is to find emotional equivalents for their intellectual understanding. That is wise and true. But if it is misunderstood as a restrictive claim (this is only a problem for spiritual life, for the rest of life intellectual understanding on its own suffices.) then it is dangerously misleading. It is not enough to understand calories in and calories out intellectually. You still have to cultivate the emotional strength needed to escape your own rationalisations, the rationalisations that other people push on you, and actually put down the fork. Much of today's USA thinks that it is OK to eat yourself into an early grave. Gluttony has become so accepted and endorsed that getting fat has become socially contagious. When people reject this, there is a phase of being angry: how did I get sucked into such a dysfunction social consensus? One chocolate bar at a time? Then what? r/fatpeoplehate is angry and anger is ugly, but it is also important and necessary. People want to escape the social consensus and, people being people, they cannot do that on intellect along. They need space to vent and be angry. You can see an example of fat-people-hate at https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 FPH is on the side of the people that it nominally hates. It wants people to change, to come to the light side of the plate. The people who banned r/fatpeooplehate don't literally have blood on their hands, that is not how type 2 diabetes works, but they ought to have gangrenous, amputated toes on their conscience.

etplayer 9y ago
Does one not think that there could have been a better way to encourage people to lose weight than to laugh at them, ridicule them and, to be honest, hate them? I'm not so sure if I consider your analysis to be a valid representation of the intentions of the people there, though I have little experience with the community itself, this model of "helping" people seems very alien to me, and contrary to what I had (intellecutally) understood to be how people behave on the Internet. I think also ultimately it is the choice of the person to find their encouragement, as much as it is very difficult. Diet communities are built around the idea of individual desire to improve (which is why posts like "Three weeks in and it's great!" get upvoted there) rather than having it 'forced' upon them.

tnone 9y ago

I agree that her gender and ethnicity were a factor: when a white male is a CEO, nobody will conclude he isn't in full authority in his role and deserves full responsibility and blame for what happens under his watch and tenure. This view of Pao as an automatic victim is special pleading and ironically, denies her the agency of a full adult that feminists claim others refuse to grant women.

lagadu 9y ago

I disagree, particularly in regards to r/fatpeoplehate (I didn't know r/revengeporn existed but I know revenge porn is illegal in my country at least). Fatpeoplehate was one of the strictest subs when it came to enforcing the rediquette rules of "not touching the poo": members were very quickly banned if they got caught using the content in the sub to harass anyone outside it. Once that boundary is set it all becomes a matter of the viewer's morality. You likely think that it's wrong to dislike (or at least not to coddle and treat them like they're wonderful snowflakes) people who let themselves go and even glorify obesity; they did not. What's relevant is that as long as a group keeps to its own circle I feel we have no standing in judging them because my moral values are no better or worse than theirs.

b4ux1t3 9y ago
> members were very quickly banned if they got caught using the content in the sub to harass anyone outside it. Er, not from what I remember. And even still, if a subreddit, even without meaning to, encourages real-life harassment, that's toxic. The fact that they had to keep banning people for being toxic leads me to the conclusion that it just drew toxic pieces of garbage. There are plenty of ways to encourage someone to lose weight that don't involve typing the word "hate" when you want to get to a community discussing weight loss. Or you could recognize that people have the right to eat and be however they like, even if you don't like it. You have the right to be an asshole and point at them and tell them they're fat and going to die early, but Reddit has the right to prevent you from using their platform for doing that. There was an interesting idea that I heard last week regarding the whole Charlottesville Nazi incident. It was something along the lines of the Paradox of Tolerance. Essentially, being tolerant of intolerance leads to intolerance. So, in order to keep tolerance alive, you have to snuff out intolerance, before it becomes systemic. You have to become intolerant of intolerance. Ellen Pao is (ostensibly) intolerant of intolerance, and that, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. I don't particularly like her, but enforcing Reddit's own rules was one of the better parts of her tenure at Reddit.
wvenable 9y ago
I would argue that r/fatpeoplehate was effectively two subreddits. It "happily" chugged along for a long time as just another subreddit but at some point it reached the tipping point and became uncontrollable.

debacle 9y ago

spez has gotten much of the same treatment from those same users on 4chan, voat, and the remaining right aligned subreddits. I would argue that worse has been said of/to spez.

fav_collector 9y ago

It has more to do with her political involvement and activism than her gender or race. There will always be people who dislike polarizing political figures.