16 ms·

We apologize

177 points by nahiluhmot 11y ago

joeevans1000 11y ago
They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.
- amyjess 11y ago
  Honestly, the much bigger issue was that they didn't tell anyone she was let go! The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?". That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.
- Frenchgeek 11y ago
  Not exactly : that employee was the sole line of communication for the most popular part of the site. The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became. The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening. They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins. So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting. Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
  - TarpitCarnivore 11y ago
    > Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows. But out of Reddit's entire user base how many are actually pissed off enough to go someplace else? Let alone how many are actually pissed off over this or other politics around Reddit and mods. I'd have to imagine the number is very small.
    - jacobtracey 11y ago
      The entire userbase doesn't matter that much. The majority of reddit users don't contribute any decent content. Keeping the minority of users that are actually producing content happy is what they have failed to do and is the real risk - if there's nothing to look at, the rest of the userbase will follow the content somewhere else.
  - uxcn 11y ago
    I'm not sure this is accurate. Aside from the protest over the weekend, over 150k people (non-moderators) signed a petition to have Ellen Pao removed as CEO. That doesn't seem like a tools issue.
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      That is a mob justice issue.
- daviator88 11y ago
  That's not really a logical reason to be upset since we don't know the reasons behind her termination. Even if it was a heartless business move, that's still not a very good reason for all the crazy levels of anger directed at Pao. She might be bad at her job, but a lot of it was way over the top.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit? edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - idlewords 11y ago
      What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job. The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
      - brymaster 11y ago
        > I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism. Hey, there's that convenient boogeyman again that you guys continue to use to drive your narrative! Edit: Hahaha oh wow -2. We're letting our ridiculous bias show now. Since moderators and a whole community are expressing their dislike of poor communication and misconduct by admins (http://imgur.com/ICSz7Xp http://imgur.com/ICSz7Xp & http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...) and CEO of Reddit, by protesting via closing down their subreddits over the poor communication and firing of a beloved AMA coordinator, Victoria Taylor, it must be the work of a massive "misogynist harassment campaign", r-right guys? I cannot imagine the mental gymnastics one has to perform to draw that conclusion. Smart people being stupid or just willfully ignorant?
- dominotw 11y ago
  I think they failed at being transparent on what they were doing like being arbitrary about bans/shadow banning ect.
- MBCook 11y ago
  No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them. But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing). This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing. Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    Of course they are allowed to. But if it's a bad decision or they handle it poorly, that is perfectly legitimate grounds for criticism.
  - LeoNatan25 11y ago
    So you are saying they should have spun it and presented the moderator in bad light? Yes, they are allowed to fire her, but so is the community allowed to vocally disagree with the decision and other terrible management that has gone far enough on Reddit.
  - joeevans1000 11y ago
    > No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them. Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's 'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of the users. I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they don't have control over their community. This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee As far as you know. Last time a reddit employee was fired and there was a public discussion around it, it didn't go so well for the employee.
- killface 11y ago
  The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever. Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech. It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.
- killface 11y ago
  The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever. Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech. It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.
westernmostcoy 11y ago
Why did this apology come out today and not before Pao spoke to news outlets about this topic? Why wouldn't you try to talk to your upset users quickly and directly? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderators-shut-down-parts-of-site-over-executives-dismissal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato... http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420296522/reddit-ceo-says-miscommunication-led-to-blackout-protest http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420...
- McGlockenshire 11y ago
  If you note her account's history, you might notice that every single one of her contributions has been mass-downvoted, including earlier responses on the matter. Downvoted content gets hidden. There's an ongoing voting war over the submission itself, with only 61% upvoting. That's way, way low for reddit. Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.
  - unmagnet 11y ago
    I had the same experience with my account https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain, where we essentially force you to pay for ads, to (add) justify your voice time and space, if you are unpopular.∫ Does anyone else find it interesting, if not as a legal-rational process, that a community-builder and or er community-leader is unable to be heard and read because of that lack of logy?
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Your pain account got downvotes because the posts were incoherent. You may want to include stuff in your profile about your communication style. Your posts frequently seem to have Markov-chain like fragments.
      - 11y ago
emehrkay 11y ago
I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset. Children are emotional.
- McGlockenshire 11y ago
  Now, imagine what's going to happen as these angry users leave for somewhere else. They're going to take their attitude with them, and the admins of that future site are going to have to deal with the same exact mentality. Communities that suffer schisms like the one reddit is working itself into don't fare well. You can't build a healthy community out of a mindset like "well, we aren't THEM". This has happened time after time, and I've been on both sides of the problem, sometimes as a user, sometimes as the admin.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Victoria being let off ruined a lot of currently planned AMA's - because she played such a huge part in it all. It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person. With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase. AMA's on Reddit are a pretty huge deal. It's a large part of Reddit's popularity - such that even the POTUS has had an "AMA" on Reddit. So when you disrupt how they work and give absolutely no word as to why the person who played such a large part in many AMA's being scheduled, planned, and hosted: you're going to step on a lot of toes. I read one story of a person flying to New York for an AMA. He had to change his plans and work with the person planning the AMA to schedule different interviews or sightseeing on his time because the AMA was cancelled due to Victoria being let off. That's a loss of a person's time and money with no explanation being given for why someone who was performing their job suddenly wasn't tasked with the job. I'd be pretty peeved myself. Luckily the man was very understanding it was outside of the moderator's control with Victoria being let off, but I imagine some mods aren't as lucky with their scheduled AMA's.
rdtsc 11y ago
That was actually a decent apology not the typical corporate "We are sorry you feel this way non-apology apology". Yeah it came late. But better late than never.
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  I dunno, she admits they broke promises and promise to do better this time. Anyone who has been in that relationship knows it's entirely typical. They could change, but getting your hopes up is asking to get hurt again. Also: they didn't pull the curtain back at all, so I still find it to be a bland corporate statement.
- Eupolemos 11y ago
  It was just classic HR-speak. Promises following broken promises from and interim CEO, seemingly set in place to make Reddit-users into a more tasty product. I don't blame anyone for not believing her and downvoting her, because the only thing they want from her is a farewell note.
- revelation 11y ago
  It reads like full-bore PR nonsense to me.
bmm6o 11y ago
It's crazy to me how poorly this whole recent "revolt" was handled. The only thing of value to Reddit Inc is the community, so you think they would be more proactive about everything, that they would be hiring more community managers rather than firing key ones. Is this their Digg moment? Probably not, but how many more fuckups like this can they make before the users leave for good? I've cut Pao a lot of slack in the past, but this makes her look like she has no idea what she's doing. No communication for days? Speaking to outside reporters before speaking to her community? It makes no sense to me.
- calcol 11y ago
  She did, in fact, attempt to reply to early discussions on Reddit but she was downvoted into oblivion (e.g. -5500+ down votes) and she wasn't ever going to be heard, no matter how relevant or important her discussion was. So she probably thought it was smarter (and would get better exposure while the community cools down a little bit) to communicate with Buzzfeed et. al.
  - bmm6o 11y ago
    Yeah, I've heard that, and that's crazy too. The community actually has a veto on communications from the CEO? Absolutely nuts. They couldn't just hack the backend to give her a billion upvotes?
    - Niten 11y ago
      Much of this controversy is driven by the community's loss of trust in the site's administration. Do you think the tactic you suggest would be constructive toward rebuilding that trust?
      - bmm6o 11y ago
        Faking upvotes, no. But that wouldn't be necessary if they had an actual communication channel in place ahead of time. Which they would if they really understood the value of the community and what it takes to manage it.
jonjenk 11y ago
This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the failures directly. Just look at the language in the post... "We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..." This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it. A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.
- x0x0 11y ago
  Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during Yishan's tenure?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    And to be fair to her she does take responsibility: > and the buck stops with me.
- omouse 11y ago
  If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it. Actually that's the typical corporate apology. The whole team gets the blame when you're playing the blame game! However CEOs and executives like pushing shit downward. Employee vs CEO is a big difference in status and the type of apology to write.
- heuermh 11y ago
  Proper Apologies have Three Parts 1. What I did was wrong. 2. I feel badly that I hurt you. 3. How can I make this better. (yeah it's from a sign on the wall at Jimmy John's)
- istvan__ 11y ago
  I guess they had a look to the key performance numbers at Reddit after the blackouts, and finally understand that Reddit with new regime control kills popularity, sub-reddits going black can cause a pretty visible dip in the visitor stats. I guess this happens when you move from community driven to profit driven with a site like Reddit.
jeletonskelly 11y ago
As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power trip who didn't want to step away because that would be relinquishing some sort of internet "status." When did it get so complicated?
- smacktoward 11y ago
  > Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people would feel great about.
  - chapium 11y ago
    Nor would most spend their time doing so.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... But they still are part of the backbone. No single mod is, but the ever changing group of mods as a whole are very important. Cease all moderation and what will eventually happen? Some self moderation by means of the voting system will keep everything from going completely crazy, but smaller communities could be crushed. Consider how making twox default would've worked if there were no mods.
  - jeletonskelly 11y ago
    To be clear, I meant the current unionized group of mods who staged the major sub strike in that statement. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be moderators.
dgcoffman 11y ago
Reddit users are too stupid to effectively use reddit.
glorien 11y ago
Why do people moderate large subreddits? They don't get paid... what are they actually getting out of it? Why continue to do it? "fuck you, pay me"
- jeletonskelly 11y ago
  Exactly. Just walk away and make it someone else's problem. Someone is always there to fill their shoes. I suspect that being a "mod" boosts one's internet ego and letting go makes you just a "pleb user" again.
- Nadya 11y ago
  As someone who moderated a large forum (not a subreddit) of >100,000 users (with ~15,000 active users at peak and rarely dipping below 3,000 users at inactive times) a large part has to do with community. The difference decent moderation can make in a large community can vastly impact a community. There's a lot of networking that happens because of it. I was an extremely well-liked moderator who would take over "dying" sections of the forum. I was even given the nickname "The Lifegiver" because any board put under my control would go from 10 posts/week to 100s of posts/day. I made a lot of friends whom I still talk with to this day, nearly a decade later. That is what made being a moderator worth my time. As to what jeletonskelly commented in response to you - no. There isn't always someone willing to "fill the shoes". The boards I was left in charge of were dead precisely because nobody wanted to fill the shoes. Many members of those communities were asked if they wanted to be "promoted" to moderate their board: they always declined the position. Sometimes a board is dead and nobody knows how to solve it or what it would take to revitalize it. Not everyone is a leader. Moderators who are bad with community management have their lives turned to hell. Death threats from users who dislike your actions, dealing with community drama (having to mediate between two users in an argument without pissing either side off), dealing with 'staff' drama (mods who disagree with how another mod handled something usually) is not worth "being in power" or any "ego trip" you get from the position. Moderators are not too far off from the founding administrator when it comes to forums (or subreddits): They enjoy the community and want to help have a part in the creation of the community. Every good moderator I've dealt with has always put the community before anything else. It's when money does get involved that moderation and administrative decisions become questioned. The decisions are no longer What is best for the community? but What is best for my account balance?
JeffKilborn 11y ago
That woman has single-handedly killed Reddit. I've never seen so much incompetence in a CEO of a major internet site. However, the true blame should also go to Reddit's Board of Directors who have installed her and are still supporting her. They're clearly destroying shareholders' value.
Jerry2 11y ago
Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people leave.
iaw 11y ago
This is the first thing I've seen from Ellen Pao that looks like a step in the right direction. There area few challenges she faces at reddit that I don't envy. It is an unfortunate consequence of her lawsuit that she gained enough notoriety to be disliked by a portion of the male cohort of reddit. She is now in the awkward position of both trying to address real problems with the site that have gone unaddressed for a long time and mitigating the damage that her personal brand is causing by being associated with the site. Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her interactions with the reddit community.
oldmanjay 11y ago
well, the harassment standard is worded in such a way that's it's purely subjective, so I predict the continuation of inconsistent application of the policy. also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies are a serious mistake. on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all popcorn-munching entertainment to me.
vonklaus 11y ago
> We are sorry -Reddit Corporate > Prove it -Reddit Community There is no point in analyzing the apology, only the actions that occur over the next month.
GuiA 11y ago
This is just a testament to how most MBAs are incapable of seeing past the blinders that were put on their eyes in B school. Anyone who's been in Silicon Valley long enough will have seen this in many other forms (I know I have), although perhaps not as high profile as this one. The success of Reddit is directly attributable to high profile subs (/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/AMA, /r/ListenToThis, etc.) and less visible but still well run subs that cater to more niche interests/topics (/r/MakeupAddiction, /r/PersonalFinance, etc.). Those subreddits would not exist without the thousands of man hours put in by moderators who are volunteers (modulo a few exceptions, such as Victoria). Anyone who has moderated an internet community knows how much sweat, effort, time, and pain go into maintaining a high quality community, and how crucial it is to keep your moderators happy and make them feel like their effort is valued. The fact that the people running Reddit do not seem to realize that is a perfectly valid reason for the user base to be angry. A lot of Silicon Valley executives like to think of their company+product as some neat little money making machine that sits in a vacuum and that they can tweak and modify as they like. But the reality is that building a community platform like Reddit is very different from running a sausage factory. You can run your sausage factory in to the ground, and the sausages won't complain (the workers might, but the US does a pretty good job at avoiding that through strict control on labor unions). But when you start shitting on Reddit, the users will complain and protest - after all, you might control the code and the servers, but the community as a whole has contributed much more than you have to the end product. You can't separate "reddit" and "the community" like some commenters here are doing. This dualism makes no sense - reddit and its community are the same thing. You can't have the thoughtful, well run threads on /r/AskScience without the dumb jokes on /r/funny. Ellen Pao and friends do not seem to grasp those subtleties (this apology is just damage control), and it lead to the complete disaster we are seeing right now. This isn't rocket science - in fact the Reddit community is quite predictable. Any Reddit user would have been able to tell you how the community was going to react to these actions. The fact that Ellen Pao has some shady connections (her husband not being in jail because he has enough money is a good first example) is just more fuel on top of the fire. This was extremely easy to predict, and the fact that the Reddit leadership seems to be completely clueless about it is a very bad sign for things to come. The reddit community didn't have a problem with kn0thing, yishan, and others because they were first and foremost reddit users and know how to interact with the community. It's not the case for the current people in charge. The community has every right to be up in arms. And if you think that the Reddit community is shit and don't spend time there, like some commenters here state, then what makes you feel like your input has any sort of relevance? This isn't a technology or management fiasco - it's a political debacle. At a community interaction level, it's not very different from taking someone with arbitrary credentials and putting them in charge of a country they're completely unfamiliar with in the hope that they're going to make that country a peaceful democracy. It just doesn't work - you need the leadership to come from the community for it to have any lasting chance.
sergiotapia 11y ago
"Popcorn tastes good." - Never forget that. Personally, I've moved on to Snapzu. Peace out Reddit, it's been real. :) http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg
paulpauper 11y ago
A lot of Reddit users forget or don;t realize that Reddit is a business, not a non-profit. For all we know, it may not have been Ellen's fault...a lot of people jumping the gun
jgrowl 11y ago
I feel bad for Pao on a personal level, but I feel like she is too divisive to be an effective leader of a site like reddit. All people deserve respect though and should not have to put up with hateful personal attacks. I think mainly this underscores the need for the internet to evolve. Sites like reddit and twitter are too important to be controlled by a single for-profit entity. We need distributed systems that respect anonymity and privacy that prevent censorship. We also need the ability for groups to form where content can be curated. I think there are a number of projects in development that have potential. It will be interesting to see where things go.
anthony_romeo 11y ago
There were a few components associated with this recent upheaval. - Earlier that week, reddit modified the search function which (though I don't know the details as I am not a mod and really don't care) apparently affected or limited the moderators' abilities is some negative manner. - The banning of harassing subreddits, though none of the lurkers cared at all and the majority of active users did not care, left a sour taste in many users' mouths. - The firing of that employee apparently greatly affected the ability to facilitate the most popular subreddit on the website, as well as a few others. When the mods of IAMA closed shop for a while due to the third issue, the powder keg exploded, leading others who disliked the treatment of mods and those who irrationally hate the reddit CEO to make a hullabaloo for eight hours. Frankly, I deleted my reddit account due to this. Not for any dislike the CEO or a desire to stand up for mods' rights, but rather because I genuinely do not care about the drama anymore and would rather focus my attention on more important things[1] and more interesting topics[2]. [1] Such as commenting on Hacker News. [2] Such as discussions about Reddit. :-)
deleted 11y ago
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noarchy 11y ago
This post regarding the apology is fairly new, with a lot of points and comments. Yet it has already sunk to page 2. I assume that reddit-related posts are given a negative weighting of some kind on HN, of late?
Simulacra 11y ago
I think the trail showed just out out of touch with reality Chairman Pao really is. In my humble opinon, she needs psychiatric help, not the job of a CEO.
calcol 11y ago
Looking past the vitriol towards Ellen Pao, this seems to be primarily due to a history of miscommunication between moderators, who feel they should have more power and better ways to handle the communities they support, and the admins of Reddit. While I think that there are definite issues on both sides -- I'm not a moderator, especially not of a big subreddit, so I don't know how disrespectful or how much the admins ignored the moderators requests, so my perspective is of an outsider -- I really feel like this is all just a temper tantrum that the moderators handled poorly, potentially purposefully. The users by and large did not need to know that Victoria was fired, and it's a shame that the moderators 1) let that information out, and 2) by letting it out, effectively let it be used as a base for a parade against Ellen Pao. It can't be argued that the moderators didn't/couldn't know this would happen because this kind of shit happens on Reddit all the time, and the more vocal parts of the community will cling to their dislike of Pao with this. I think that the admins should have handled it better, for sure -- they could have at least given the moderators that relied on Victoria's help the heads up of, "hey, we are going to transition to a new community manager, for the time being X, Y, and Z are going to occur," but the backlash from the community and that the moderators are effectively using the community for their own gains instead of trying to handle it internally is a pretty bad reflection on how the community is structured as a whole. All I can think of is that this is basically 4chan and social media combined.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
who is WE? people are pissed at YOU.
lno 11y ago
Serious question about my use case and opting for a substitute: I use reddit to learn and interact with a community about my interests or things that I want to learn. Reddit has been fantastic for this and about 75% of the time the users of specific communities are great resources that I really can't find anywhere else. Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that drama around and within reddit is ruining this - all I want to do is learn and engage - it's impossible now to avoid it. Any alternative that keeps the quality high and the format similar without all the ugly dramatics?
chr 11y ago
Maybe it was laziness, but till now I've been expecting good things from companies backed by YCombinator. Ekjp and kn0thing are eroding the brand value of YC. MY 2 cents, seen from far away.
deleted 11y ago
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177 points by nahiluhmot 11y ago

They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.

amyjess 11y ago
Honestly, the much bigger issue was that they didn't tell anyone she was let go! The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?". That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.
Frenchgeek 11y ago
Not exactly : that employee was the sole line of communication for the most popular part of the site. The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became. The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening. They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins. So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting. Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
- TarpitCarnivore 11y ago
  > Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows. But out of Reddit's entire user base how many are actually pissed off enough to go someplace else? Let alone how many are actually pissed off over this or other politics around Reddit and mods. I'd have to imagine the number is very small.
  - jacobtracey 11y ago
    The entire userbase doesn't matter that much. The majority of reddit users don't contribute any decent content. Keeping the minority of users that are actually producing content happy is what they have failed to do and is the real risk - if there's nothing to look at, the rest of the userbase will follow the content somewhere else.
- uxcn 11y ago
  I'm not sure this is accurate. Aside from the protest over the weekend, over 150k people (non-moderators) signed a petition to have Ellen Pao removed as CEO. That doesn't seem like a tools issue.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    That is a mob justice issue.
daviator88 11y ago
That's not really a logical reason to be upset since we don't know the reasons behind her termination. Even if it was a heartless business move, that's still not a very good reason for all the crazy levels of anger directed at Pao. She might be bad at her job, but a lot of it was way over the top.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit? edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - idlewords 11y ago
    What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job. The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
    - brymaster 11y ago
      > I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism. Hey, there's that convenient boogeyman again that you guys continue to use to drive your narrative! Edit: Hahaha oh wow -2. We're letting our ridiculous bias show now. Since moderators and a whole community are expressing their dislike of poor communication and misconduct by admins (http://imgur.com/ICSz7Xp http://imgur.com/ICSz7Xp & http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...) and CEO of Reddit, by protesting via closing down their subreddits over the poor communication and firing of a beloved AMA coordinator, Victoria Taylor, it must be the work of a massive "misogynist harassment campaign", r-right guys? I cannot imagine the mental gymnastics one has to perform to draw that conclusion. Smart people being stupid or just willfully ignorant?
dominotw 11y ago
I think they failed at being transparent on what they were doing like being arbitrary about bans/shadow banning ect.
MBCook 11y ago
No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them. But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing). This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing. Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.
- pbreit 11y ago
  Of course they are allowed to. But if it's a bad decision or they handle it poorly, that is perfectly legitimate grounds for criticism.
- LeoNatan25 11y ago
  So you are saying they should have spun it and presented the moderator in bad light? Yes, they are allowed to fire her, but so is the community allowed to vocally disagree with the decision and other terrible management that has gone far enough on Reddit.
- joeevans1000 11y ago
  > No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them. Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's 'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of the users. I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they don't have control over their community. This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.
rodgerd 11y ago
> What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee As far as you know. Last time a reddit employee was fired and there was a public discussion around it, it didn't go so well for the employee.
killface 11y ago
The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever. Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech. It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.
killface 11y ago
The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever. Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech. It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.

westernmostcoy 11y ago

Why did this apology come out today and not before Pao spoke to news outlets about this topic? Why wouldn't you try to talk to your upset users quickly and directly? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderators-shut-down-parts-of-site-over-executives-dismissal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato... http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420296522/reddit-ceo-says-miscommunication-led-to-blackout-protest http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420...

McGlockenshire 11y ago
If you note her account's history, you might notice that every single one of her contributions has been mass-downvoted, including earlier responses on the matter. Downvoted content gets hidden. There's an ongoing voting war over the submission itself, with only 61% upvoting. That's way, way low for reddit. Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.
- unmagnet 11y ago
  I had the same experience with my account https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain, where we essentially force you to pay for ads, to (add) justify your voice time and space, if you are unpopular.∫ Does anyone else find it interesting, if not as a legal-rational process, that a community-builder and or er community-leader is unable to be heard and read because of that lack of logy?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Your pain account got downvotes because the posts were incoherent. You may want to include stuff in your profile about your communication style. Your posts frequently seem to have Markov-chain like fragments.
    - 11y ago

emehrkay 11y ago

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset. Children are emotional.

McGlockenshire 11y ago
Now, imagine what's going to happen as these angry users leave for somewhere else. They're going to take their attitude with them, and the admins of that future site are going to have to deal with the same exact mentality. Communities that suffer schisms like the one reddit is working itself into don't fare well. You can't build a healthy community out of a mindset like "well, we aren't THEM". This has happened time after time, and I've been on both sides of the problem, sometimes as a user, sometimes as the admin.
Nadya 11y ago
Victoria being let off ruined a lot of currently planned AMA's - because she played such a huge part in it all. It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person. With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase. AMA's on Reddit are a pretty huge deal. It's a large part of Reddit's popularity - such that even the POTUS has had an "AMA" on Reddit. So when you disrupt how they work and give absolutely no word as to why the person who played such a large part in many AMA's being scheduled, planned, and hosted: you're going to step on a lot of toes. I read one story of a person flying to New York for an AMA. He had to change his plans and work with the person planning the AMA to schedule different interviews or sightseeing on his time because the AMA was cancelled due to Victoria being let off. That's a loss of a person's time and money with no explanation being given for why someone who was performing their job suddenly wasn't tasked with the job. I'd be pretty peeved myself. Luckily the man was very understanding it was outside of the moderator's control with Victoria being let off, but I imagine some mods aren't as lucky with their scheduled AMA's.

rdtsc 11y ago

That was actually a decent apology not the typical corporate "We are sorry you feel this way non-apology apology". Yeah it came late. But better late than never.

forgottenpass 11y ago
I dunno, she admits they broke promises and promise to do better this time. Anyone who has been in that relationship knows it's entirely typical. They could change, but getting your hopes up is asking to get hurt again. Also: they didn't pull the curtain back at all, so I still find it to be a bland corporate statement.
Eupolemos 11y ago
It was just classic HR-speak. Promises following broken promises from and interim CEO, seemingly set in place to make Reddit-users into a more tasty product. I don't blame anyone for not believing her and downvoting her, because the only thing they want from her is a farewell note.
revelation 11y ago
It reads like full-bore PR nonsense to me.

bmm6o 11y ago

It's crazy to me how poorly this whole recent "revolt" was handled. The only thing of value to Reddit Inc is the community, so you think they would be more proactive about everything, that they would be hiring more community managers rather than firing key ones. Is this their Digg moment? Probably not, but how many more fuckups like this can they make before the users leave for good? I've cut Pao a lot of slack in the past, but this makes her look like she has no idea what she's doing. No communication for days? Speaking to outside reporters before speaking to her community? It makes no sense to me.

calcol 11y ago
She did, in fact, attempt to reply to early discussions on Reddit but she was downvoted into oblivion (e.g. -5500+ down votes) and she wasn't ever going to be heard, no matter how relevant or important her discussion was. So she probably thought it was smarter (and would get better exposure while the community cools down a little bit) to communicate with Buzzfeed et. al.
- bmm6o 11y ago
  Yeah, I've heard that, and that's crazy too. The community actually has a veto on communications from the CEO? Absolutely nuts. They couldn't just hack the backend to give her a billion upvotes?
  - Niten 11y ago
    Much of this controversy is driven by the community's loss of trust in the site's administration. Do you think the tactic you suggest would be constructive toward rebuilding that trust?
    - bmm6o 11y ago
      Faking upvotes, no. But that wouldn't be necessary if they had an actual communication channel in place ahead of time. Which they would if they really understood the value of the community and what it takes to manage it.

jonjenk 11y ago

This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the failures directly. Just look at the language in the post... "We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..." This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it. A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.

x0x0 11y ago
Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during Yishan's tenure?
- DanBC 11y ago
  And to be fair to her she does take responsibility: > and the buck stops with me.
omouse 11y ago
If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it. Actually that's the typical corporate apology. The whole team gets the blame when you're playing the blame game! However CEOs and executives like pushing shit downward. Employee vs CEO is a big difference in status and the type of apology to write.
heuermh 11y ago
Proper Apologies have Three Parts 1. What I did was wrong. 2. I feel badly that I hurt you. 3. How can I make this better. (yeah it's from a sign on the wall at Jimmy John's)
istvan__ 11y ago
I guess they had a look to the key performance numbers at Reddit after the blackouts, and finally understand that Reddit with new regime control kills popularity, sub-reddits going black can cause a pretty visible dip in the visitor stats. I guess this happens when you move from community driven to profit driven with a site like Reddit.

jeletonskelly 11y ago

As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power trip who didn't want to step away because that would be relinquishing some sort of internet "status." When did it get so complicated?

smacktoward 11y ago
> Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people would feel great about.
- chapium 11y ago
  Nor would most spend their time doing so.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... But they still are part of the backbone. No single mod is, but the ever changing group of mods as a whole are very important. Cease all moderation and what will eventually happen? Some self moderation by means of the voting system will keep everything from going completely crazy, but smaller communities could be crushed. Consider how making twox default would've worked if there were no mods.
- jeletonskelly 11y ago
  To be clear, I meant the current unionized group of mods who staged the major sub strike in that statement. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be moderators.

dgcoffman 11y ago

Reddit users are too stupid to effectively use reddit.

glorien 11y ago

Why do people moderate large subreddits? They don't get paid... what are they actually getting out of it? Why continue to do it? "fuck you, pay me"

jeletonskelly 11y ago
Exactly. Just walk away and make it someone else's problem. Someone is always there to fill their shoes. I suspect that being a "mod" boosts one's internet ego and letting go makes you just a "pleb user" again.
Nadya 11y ago
As someone who moderated a large forum (not a subreddit) of >100,000 users (with ~15,000 active users at peak and rarely dipping below 3,000 users at inactive times) a large part has to do with community. The difference decent moderation can make in a large community can vastly impact a community. There's a lot of networking that happens because of it. I was an extremely well-liked moderator who would take over "dying" sections of the forum. I was even given the nickname "The Lifegiver" because any board put under my control would go from 10 posts/week to 100s of posts/day. I made a lot of friends whom I still talk with to this day, nearly a decade later. That is what made being a moderator worth my time. As to what jeletonskelly commented in response to you - no. There isn't always someone willing to "fill the shoes". The boards I was left in charge of were dead precisely because nobody wanted to fill the shoes. Many members of those communities were asked if they wanted to be "promoted" to moderate their board: they always declined the position. Sometimes a board is dead and nobody knows how to solve it or what it would take to revitalize it. Not everyone is a leader. Moderators who are bad with community management have their lives turned to hell. Death threats from users who dislike your actions, dealing with community drama (having to mediate between two users in an argument without pissing either side off), dealing with 'staff' drama (mods who disagree with how another mod handled something usually) is not worth "being in power" or any "ego trip" you get from the position. Moderators are not too far off from the founding administrator when it comes to forums (or subreddits): They enjoy the community and want to help have a part in the creation of the community. Every good moderator I've dealt with has always put the community before anything else. It's when money does get involved that moderation and administrative decisions become questioned. The decisions are no longer What is best for the community? but What is best for my account balance?

JeffKilborn 11y ago

That woman has single-handedly killed Reddit. I've never seen so much incompetence in a CEO of a major internet site. However, the true blame should also go to Reddit's Board of Directors who have installed her and are still supporting her. They're clearly destroying shareholders' value.

Jerry2 11y ago

Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people leave.

iaw 11y ago

This is the first thing I've seen from Ellen Pao that looks like a step in the right direction. There area few challenges she faces at reddit that I don't envy. It is an unfortunate consequence of her lawsuit that she gained enough notoriety to be disliked by a portion of the male cohort of reddit. She is now in the awkward position of both trying to address real problems with the site that have gone unaddressed for a long time and mitigating the damage that her personal brand is causing by being associated with the site. Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her interactions with the reddit community.

oldmanjay 11y ago

well, the harassment standard is worded in such a way that's it's purely subjective, so I predict the continuation of inconsistent application of the policy. also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies are a serious mistake. on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all popcorn-munching entertainment to me.

vonklaus 11y ago

> We are sorry -Reddit Corporate > Prove it -Reddit Community There is no point in analyzing the apology, only the actions that occur over the next month.

GuiA 11y ago

This is just a testament to how most MBAs are incapable of seeing past the blinders that were put on their eyes in B school. Anyone who's been in Silicon Valley long enough will have seen this in many other forms (I know I have), although perhaps not as high profile as this one. The success of Reddit is directly attributable to high profile subs (/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/AMA, /r/ListenToThis, etc.) and less visible but still well run subs that cater to more niche interests/topics (/r/MakeupAddiction, /r/PersonalFinance, etc.). Those subreddits would not exist without the thousands of man hours put in by moderators who are volunteers (modulo a few exceptions, such as Victoria). Anyone who has moderated an internet community knows how much sweat, effort, time, and pain go into maintaining a high quality community, and how crucial it is to keep your moderators happy and make them feel like their effort is valued. The fact that the people running Reddit do not seem to realize that is a perfectly valid reason for the user base to be angry. A lot of Silicon Valley executives like to think of their company+product as some neat little money making machine that sits in a vacuum and that they can tweak and modify as they like. But the reality is that building a community platform like Reddit is very different from running a sausage factory. You can run your sausage factory in to the ground, and the sausages won't complain (the workers might, but the US does a pretty good job at avoiding that through strict control on labor unions). But when you start shitting on Reddit, the users will complain and protest - after all, you might control the code and the servers, but the community as a whole has contributed much more than you have to the end product. You can't separate "reddit" and "the community" like some commenters here are doing. This dualism makes no sense - reddit and its community are the same thing. You can't have the thoughtful, well run threads on /r/AskScience without the dumb jokes on /r/funny. Ellen Pao and friends do not seem to grasp those subtleties (this apology is just damage control), and it lead to the complete disaster we are seeing right now. This isn't rocket science - in fact the Reddit community is quite predictable. Any Reddit user would have been able to tell you how the community was going to react to these actions. The fact that Ellen Pao has some shady connections (her husband not being in jail because he has enough money is a good first example) is just more fuel on top of the fire. This was extremely easy to predict, and the fact that the Reddit leadership seems to be completely clueless about it is a very bad sign for things to come. The reddit community didn't have a problem with kn0thing, yishan, and others because they were first and foremost reddit users and know how to interact with the community. It's not the case for the current people in charge. The community has every right to be up in arms. And if you think that the Reddit community is shit and don't spend time there, like some commenters here state, then what makes you feel like your input has any sort of relevance? This isn't a technology or management fiasco - it's a political debacle. At a community interaction level, it's not very different from taking someone with arbitrary credentials and putting them in charge of a country they're completely unfamiliar with in the hope that they're going to make that country a peaceful democracy. It just doesn't work - you need the leadership to come from the community for it to have any lasting chance.

sergiotapia 11y ago

"Popcorn tastes good." - Never forget that. Personally, I've moved on to Snapzu. Peace out Reddit, it's been real. :) http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg

paulpauper 11y ago

A lot of Reddit users forget or don;t realize that Reddit is a business, not a non-profit. For all we know, it may not have been Ellen's fault...a lot of people jumping the gun

jgrowl 11y ago

I feel bad for Pao on a personal level, but I feel like she is too divisive to be an effective leader of a site like reddit. All people deserve respect though and should not have to put up with hateful personal attacks. I think mainly this underscores the need for the internet to evolve. Sites like reddit and twitter are too important to be controlled by a single for-profit entity. We need distributed systems that respect anonymity and privacy that prevent censorship. We also need the ability for groups to form where content can be curated. I think there are a number of projects in development that have potential. It will be interesting to see where things go.

anthony_romeo 11y ago

There were a few components associated with this recent upheaval. - Earlier that week, reddit modified the search function which (though I don't know the details as I am not a mod and really don't care) apparently affected or limited the moderators' abilities is some negative manner. - The banning of harassing subreddits, though none of the lurkers cared at all and the majority of active users did not care, left a sour taste in many users' mouths. - The firing of that employee apparently greatly affected the ability to facilitate the most popular subreddit on the website, as well as a few others. When the mods of IAMA closed shop for a while due to the third issue, the powder keg exploded, leading others who disliked the treatment of mods and those who irrationally hate the reddit CEO to make a hullabaloo for eight hours. Frankly, I deleted my reddit account due to this. Not for any dislike the CEO or a desire to stand up for mods' rights, but rather because I genuinely do not care about the drama anymore and would rather focus my attention on more important things[1] and more interesting topics[2]. [1] Such as commenting on Hacker News. [2] Such as discussions about Reddit. :-)

deleted 11y ago

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noarchy 11y ago

This post regarding the apology is fairly new, with a lot of points and comments. Yet it has already sunk to page 2. I assume that reddit-related posts are given a negative weighting of some kind on HN, of late?

Simulacra 11y ago

I think the trail showed just out out of touch with reality Chairman Pao really is. In my humble opinon, she needs psychiatric help, not the job of a CEO.

calcol 11y ago

Looking past the vitriol towards Ellen Pao, this seems to be primarily due to a history of miscommunication between moderators, who feel they should have more power and better ways to handle the communities they support, and the admins of Reddit. While I think that there are definite issues on both sides -- I'm not a moderator, especially not of a big subreddit, so I don't know how disrespectful or how much the admins ignored the moderators requests, so my perspective is of an outsider -- I really feel like this is all just a temper tantrum that the moderators handled poorly, potentially purposefully. The users by and large did not need to know that Victoria was fired, and it's a shame that the moderators 1) let that information out, and 2) by letting it out, effectively let it be used as a base for a parade against Ellen Pao. It can't be argued that the moderators didn't/couldn't know this would happen because this kind of shit happens on Reddit all the time, and the more vocal parts of the community will cling to their dislike of Pao with this. I think that the admins should have handled it better, for sure -- they could have at least given the moderators that relied on Victoria's help the heads up of, "hey, we are going to transition to a new community manager, for the time being X, Y, and Z are going to occur," but the backlash from the community and that the moderators are effectively using the community for their own gains instead of trying to handle it internally is a pretty bad reflection on how the community is structured as a whole. All I can think of is that this is basically 4chan and social media combined.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

who is WE? people are pissed at YOU.

lno 11y ago

Serious question about my use case and opting for a substitute: I use reddit to learn and interact with a community about my interests or things that I want to learn. Reddit has been fantastic for this and about 75% of the time the users of specific communities are great resources that I really can't find anywhere else. Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that drama around and within reddit is ruining this - all I want to do is learn and engage - it's impossible now to avoid it. Any alternative that keeps the quality high and the format similar without all the ugly dramatics?

chr 11y ago

Maybe it was laziness, but till now I've been expecting good things from companies backed by YCombinator. Ekjp and kn0thing are eroding the brand value of YC. MY 2 cents, seen from far away.

deleted 11y ago

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