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It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the us

It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them. I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).

lingben 11y ago
reddit is one of the simplest and easiest sites for a new user to learn to use. Somehow, Ellen Pao doesn't know how to use reddit, nevermind what the culture and community that has built over a decade truly means. She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost: https://archive.is/9RFIp https://archive.is/9RFIp Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
- flashman 11y ago
  That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. Being a Reddit admin must be really frustrating.
  - lingben 11y ago
    It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach. When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh. This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction. For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all. She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension? Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times? Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey. An intelligent person would make their choice. A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc TL;DR reddit needs a 'bee whisperer'
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      > The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way Who would have thought that the minds responsible for redpill, mensrights, and coontown might make a community less than enjoyable?
      - beedogs 11y ago
        Thing is, before they started hellbanning all of those subreddits (TrayvonMartin, fatpeoplehate, etc.) I had no idea they even existed. For 8 years I've been blissfully unaware of all the garbage subreddits popping up.
        curl_princess 11y ago
        FatPeopleHate was really recent. It exploded in popularity. It wasn't even a year old when it got banned. That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
        ljk 11y ago
        same here, i have not heard about any of these extreme subreddit until the /r/fph announcement, and i've been on reddit before the "digg exodus" i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
        rodgerd 11y ago
        > i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful... Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
        11y ago
  - go1dfish 11y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks
  - ljk 11y ago
    > That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. I left a comment in that thread, but wasn't one of the hateful ones. While I don't think saying those hateful things are justified, I can see where they're coming from. This was right after the whole scandal with the banning, i think within 24hrs of the announcement, and a lot of them were passionate about the site, so they weren't really being friendy toward her
- kaonashi 11y ago
  Given the content of those replies, banning was entirely warranted.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    So some people call you names and that's too much to handle as a CEO that they need to be banned?
    - icanhackit 11y ago
      I tried the link provided but was unable to display the page, though as a citizen of the internet I can take a stab at the flavor of the insults. Given her recent gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins and potential appeal, it would have made strategic sense to block anything sexist. I don't know if that's what was in the content of the replies - just guessing. Also guessing it was pretty racist, and <checks underpants - yep, white penis> I can only imagine that shit got old more than a century ago.
- tehwebguy 11y ago
  Do you know if any users in that thread were actually banned? I checked out the reddit for the top level posts and it appears that many of them, even the ones that posted the most mean spirited comments in that thread, seem to be active. Most of them have plenty of recent comments with votes and replies. Maybe the banned had their comments deleted? I don't think that's how it works though.
  - ljk 11y ago
    i commented on that thread, and i wasn't banned/shadowbanned
- andreyf 11y ago
  > Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email. Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine. Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to confuse a private message with a public reply.
  - mediocrejoker 11y ago
    If I want to see how a url will appear to someone before I send it, I open an incognito tab in chrome and paste it there. It doesn't have access to any of my currently open sessions, cookies, etc. so I see exactly what someone else will see when they click, and I send or don't send (or modify and send) accordingly.
    - andreyf 11y ago
      I do that too sometimes, but I wouldn't equate someone not doing it to "my grandma sending me the local path to a file".
  - ljk 11y ago
    > * is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is ...* i think it's the same with different technologies, it all depends on the user :p
vonklaus 11y ago
> basically everything you said It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you. > this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general I couldn't agree more
- rodgerd 11y ago
  You forgot ethics in game journalism.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    People caring to much about bullshit like ethics in game journalism are missing the forest for the trees. Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
    - tehwebguy 11y ago
      I think they were being sarcastic
      - rodgerd 11y ago
        Quite. It's like a sea lion colony in here.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      So what you're saying is "Caring about any single little/domain-specific problem is bad because there's war, cancer and starvation"? Fallacy of relative privation, much?
      - vonklaus 11y ago
        > begging the question but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that: 1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily. 2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired. >content has been sliding >doxxing has gone up >several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down >community is faltering >no side wants to compromise tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
olefoo 11y ago
> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
Frozenlock 11y ago
>the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv. I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface. But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'. Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it. Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games... It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities. Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
- ep4d4s 11y ago
  The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard. Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever). Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
  - Frozenlock 11y ago
    How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
  - rjaco31 11y ago
    > Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
ljk 11y ago
> back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users some would go back even further and talk about the Aaron Swartz days...
joshlegs 11y ago
What's really funny though, is that this was prompted by someone who seems to have been excellent at marketing, given her stellar reputation among the reddit userbase and universal praise from all of her AMA collaborators. I can't help but think all this will end up in her netting some really swank job. I've seen some post that claimed insider knowledge that Taylor was fired because she resisted further monetization of the AMA series. Given some of the decisions over there I don't find that implausible in the least. Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.

lingben 11y ago

reddit is one of the simplest and easiest sites for a new user to learn to use. Somehow, Ellen Pao doesn't know how to use reddit, nevermind what the culture and community that has built over a decade truly means. She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost: https://archive.is/9RFIp https://archive.is/9RFIp Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.

flashman 11y ago
That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. Being a Reddit admin must be really frustrating.
- lingben 11y ago
  It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach. When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh. This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction. For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all. She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension? Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times? Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey. An intelligent person would make their choice. A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc TL;DR reddit needs a 'bee whisperer'
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    > The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way Who would have thought that the minds responsible for redpill, mensrights, and coontown might make a community less than enjoyable?
    - beedogs 11y ago
      Thing is, before they started hellbanning all of those subreddits (TrayvonMartin, fatpeoplehate, etc.) I had no idea they even existed. For 8 years I've been blissfully unaware of all the garbage subreddits popping up.
      - curl_princess 11y ago
        FatPeopleHate was really recent. It exploded in popularity. It wasn't even a year old when it got banned. That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
      - ljk 11y ago
        same here, i have not heard about any of these extreme subreddit until the /r/fph announcement, and i've been on reddit before the "digg exodus" i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
        rodgerd 11y ago
        > i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful... Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
        11y ago
- go1dfish 11y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks
- ljk 11y ago
  > That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. I left a comment in that thread, but wasn't one of the hateful ones. While I don't think saying those hateful things are justified, I can see where they're coming from. This was right after the whole scandal with the banning, i think within 24hrs of the announcement, and a lot of them were passionate about the site, so they weren't really being friendy toward her
kaonashi 11y ago
Given the content of those replies, banning was entirely warranted.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  So some people call you names and that's too much to handle as a CEO that they need to be banned?
  - icanhackit 11y ago
    I tried the link provided but was unable to display the page, though as a citizen of the internet I can take a stab at the flavor of the insults. Given her recent gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins and potential appeal, it would have made strategic sense to block anything sexist. I don't know if that's what was in the content of the replies - just guessing. Also guessing it was pretty racist, and <checks underpants - yep, white penis> I can only imagine that shit got old more than a century ago.
tehwebguy 11y ago
Do you know if any users in that thread were actually banned? I checked out the reddit for the top level posts and it appears that many of them, even the ones that posted the most mean spirited comments in that thread, seem to be active. Most of them have plenty of recent comments with votes and replies. Maybe the banned had their comments deleted? I don't think that's how it works though.
- ljk 11y ago
  i commented on that thread, and i wasn't banned/shadowbanned
andreyf 11y ago
> Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email. Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine. Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to confuse a private message with a public reply.
- mediocrejoker 11y ago
  If I want to see how a url will appear to someone before I send it, I open an incognito tab in chrome and paste it there. It doesn't have access to any of my currently open sessions, cookies, etc. so I see exactly what someone else will see when they click, and I send or don't send (or modify and send) accordingly.
  - andreyf 11y ago
    I do that too sometimes, but I wouldn't equate someone not doing it to "my grandma sending me the local path to a file".
- ljk 11y ago
  > * is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is ...* i think it's the same with different technologies, it all depends on the user :p

vonklaus 11y ago

> basically everything you said It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you. > this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general I couldn't agree more

rodgerd 11y ago
You forgot ethics in game journalism.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  People caring to much about bullshit like ethics in game journalism are missing the forest for the trees. Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
  - tehwebguy 11y ago
    I think they were being sarcastic
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      Quite. It's like a sea lion colony in here.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    So what you're saying is "Caring about any single little/domain-specific problem is bad because there's war, cancer and starvation"? Fallacy of relative privation, much?
    - vonklaus 11y ago
      > begging the question but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that: 1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily. 2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired. >content has been sliding >doxxing has gone up >several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down >community is faltering >no side wants to compromise tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.

olefoo 11y ago

> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.

Frozenlock 11y ago

>the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship. In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv. I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface. But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'. Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it. Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games... It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities. Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.

ep4d4s 11y ago
The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard. Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever). Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
- Frozenlock 11y ago
  How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
- rjaco31 11y ago
  > Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers. Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.

ljk 11y ago

> back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users some would go back even further and talk about the Aaron Swartz days...

joshlegs 11y ago

What's really funny though, is that this was prompted by someone who seems to have been excellent at marketing, given her stellar reputation among the reddit userbase and universal praise from all of her AMA collaborators. I can't help but think all this will end up in her netting some really swank job. I've seen some post that claimed insider knowledge that Taylor was fired because she resisted further monetization of the AMA series. Given some of the decisions over there I don't find that implausible in the least. Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.