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Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

• gesman 11y ago
  >> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity... May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.
  • splitbrain 11y ago
    Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.
    • _dark_matter_ 11y ago
      Given how bad the public reaction has been, if it was something "quite bad", one would think they would tell people about it so as to pacify the crowds. (I understand there could be repercussions for doing this but it would seem to be worth the risk.)
    • Iuz 11y ago
      http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/reddit-victoria-taylor-firing-jesse-jackson-ama http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/reddit-victoria-tayl...
      • danso 11y ago
        > One of the criticisms of the Jackson AMA was that, in some cases, his responses seemed out of sync with the questions. But this wasn't the standard AMA format, wherein an interviewee reads questions off the screen and types in answers directly. As often happens with other celebrity AMAs, Taylor selected Redditors' questions and asked them to Jackson live. She then transcribed his verbal responses and posted them on his behalf. Yet Jackson's AMA was even more complicated than usual because it was also one of the first in a forthcoming series of video AMAs to be released this fall. In this setup, he answered the questions in front of a camera in a ballroom in Los Angeles' Hyatt Century Plaza while Taylor communicated with him remotely from New York... > ...Taylor asked Jackson the upvoted question despite its confrontational nature. It was hard to blame her, since Reddit does call it "Ask Me Anything." Jackson's response was criticized as rambling and nonsensical, and to an extent it was, but the critics may not have realized that he didn't hear the full question. Out of politeness, perhaps, Taylor had paraphrased it to omit the most incendiary language. It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim. As the Mother Jones article quotes Reddit's execs as saying, this purportedly didn't have anything to do with Victoria's firing. While I still think there's a need for a community leader like her, I wasn't aware how much of her job was being the transcriber and translator between celebrity and fans. Frankly, I think Reddit's IAmA would be much better off without this kind of arrangement...this isn't a statement against Victoria's performance, but against the whole dog-and-pony show in the first place. IAmA's give the appearance that the questionee is deciding which things to answer...as the MJ article describes, not only was a Reddit employee acting as a filter, but was paraphrasing both question and answer. That to me kills a bit of the spirit of Reddit IAmA's...again, there's obviously a need for Victoria in a community leader role, but I'm happy if IAmA's go on without a Reddit employee acting as a translator for celebrities. If that means fewer celebrities do IAmA's, whooopteedoo. The best IAmA's have always been the non-celebrities, like the vacuum repair technician, or the woman who fought off a bear who ripped her face off, or the guy with two penises.
        • thaumasiotes 11y ago
          > It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim. This is an incredibly dishonest thing to say. There's only one reason to publish someone's verbal responses verbatim, which is that you're trying to make them look like an idiot. Someone who gave verbal interviews and published the responses verbatim would be totally unfit for their job.
          • dwmtm 11y ago
            So television interviews...?
            • thaumasiotes 11y ago
              Television interviews aren't read, they're watched (and more relevantly, heard). Transcriptions of television interviews aren't verbatim unless they're made for the purpose of research.
          • danso 11y ago
            I think "incredibly dishonest" is overstating it. I've worked in journalism, I know that what we print as reporters is often not "verbatim", such as not including "ums" and ahs". I'm assuming that the writer of the MJ piece has also done enough journalism and so when he says that things weren't verbatim, it's possible he is applying this same level of tolerance and standard.
    • deleted 11y ago
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    • ajford 11y ago
      Given the recent push for monetization of Reddit, it's also entirely possible that she put her foot down against some kind of hair-brained scheme for monetizing AMAs, and was summarily dismissed for refusing to go with the flow.
      • peu4000 11y ago
        It's also possible that she murdered 14 children, but it's all conjecture unless an actual reason is released.
    • ritchiea 11y ago
      You say "few things get you fired immediately" but I'd say it depends. If you're at a big relatively stable company few things get you fired immediately. If the company is small or in flux (as Reddit appears to be) it can be a lot easier to be fired quickly.
      • SilasX 11y ago
        But that doesn't change the logic of how stupid it would be to fire someone with so many loose ends and contacts depending on her. An employee would need to commit some very serious transgression to justify the urgency, and the destruction that results from such abrupt removal. "Disagreement about the general direction of a feature" isn't even close to meeting that standard. It was extremely irresponsible.
    • wnevets 11y ago
      This is probably just a rumor but I recall reading it she wasn't comfortable with the monetization strategy of that subreddit
    • Zikes 11y ago
      Rumors abound. The most prominent rumor is that it was because of a bad public reaction to a Jesse Jackson AMA. Some leaked info from a supposed disgruntled Reddit admin says it's because Ellen Pao pressured Victoria into pushing an NDA + promise of a cut of future sales resulting from AMAs on the AMA subjects, which Victoria disagreed with a little too loudly.
      • nightpool 11y ago
        The moderators of IAmA have said that they believe the decision was made to fire her before the Jesse Jackson AMA happened. EDIT: whoops, didn't mean to downvote you. mobile misclick :(
        • Zikes 11y ago
          Which is still speculation.
          • nightpool 11y ago
            Sorry, I was a little vague. The mods of r/IAmA have been in contact with reddit admins about the situation, and from how the timeline was explained to them by reddit staff, the decision was made before the Jesse Jackson AMA even happened. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/3bw7ms/top_mod_of_riama_explains_why_its_been_set_to/csqa8bj https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/3bw7ms/top_mod_of_r...
    • ihuman 11y ago
      No one outside of the company knows right now. To protect her privacy, they said that they are not going to publicly say why. All the current explanations are just rumors and speculation.
    • emodendroket 11y ago
      They claim they wanted to change the positions they had altogether so maybe not.
    • Someone1234 11y ago
      I believe she claimed she did't know why it occurred. But she has barely said a word about it. Reddit has actually terminated a lot of their own employees in the last year or so, so actually in this case her getting suddenly let go isn't that strange. Reddit seems to be trying to move IAMAs into some kind of team structure (ama@reddit.com, etc).
    • ForEnglandJames 11y ago
      It's a personnel matter, so reddit will never tell you, and she's likely bound by an agreement to never disclose. My guess is not censoring the Jesse Jackson AMA when the users got nasty. I have another comment on this site that details what I suspect went down. You can search it out if you're really curious--I don't know how to permalink here.
    • Balgair 11y ago
      Not as of yet. It's all being kept above board, so maybe there are NDA type things preventing anyone form talking. Also, last night a series of posts on 4chan by a person claiming to be an admin at reddit said that more changes are afoot, including heavy facebook integration. As with everything on 4chan, it is likely a steaming pile of BS: https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/3cih4x/reddit_employee_leaks_info_to_b/ https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/3cih4x/reddit_employ...
    • ianhawes 11y ago
      Not confirmed, but the rumor was because she was based in NYC and Pao demanded that all employees move to SF. There was additional speculation that it was the result of the (failed) Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm doubtful of that.
    • haberman 11y ago
      I wonder if the authors of this NYT piece (the Reddit mods) know what happened (or at least know her side of it). I wonder if they are in communication with her. By making this such a high-profile thing, they draw attention to it, which could hurt her if the story eventually comes out and it's unflattering to her.
    • wvenable 11y ago
      On the same day the admin responsible for reddit gifts was always let go. And over the last 6 months there has been a lot of turnover.
  • twoodfin 11y ago
    Isn't it more likely than not that she was dismissed with good cause? Otherwise, why so abruptly and without explanation from either side? Presumably reddit for legal and other reasons didn't want to kick her on the way out, but what else explains her relative silence?
    • VLM 11y ago
      "but what else explains her relative silence?" Non-disparagement clauses as part of a cash settlement are a thing. This proves nothing but does fit the evidence.
      • twoodfin 11y ago
        Yeah, but that doesn't explain the abruptness, or reddit's continuing silence. If it was a disagreement over policy or direction, it doesn't seem worth the PR hit not to try to explain it. On the other hand kn0thing's "popcorn" comment suggests it couldn't have been that embarrassing.
        • hullo 11y ago
          management explaining firings hasn't gone well for them in the past https://www.quora.com/Should-Reddit-CEO-Yishan-Wong-regret-having-publicly-commented-on-the-dismissal-of-a-former-employee https://www.quora.com/Should-Reddit-CEO-Yishan-Wong-regret-h...
      • dgabriel 11y ago
        Right, "sign this, stay quiet, we'll give you a year's salary." It's hard to turn that kind of an offer down unless you have a lot of money in the bank.
  • kenrikm 11y ago
    We're not really sure what she was fired for, she may have actually done something really bad that warranted her removal. If not and it was just a case of management being out of touch with the community then it would seem that the backlash would be justified. We don't know the full story so it's hard to say at this point.
• zedpm 11y ago
  Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management. This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. That too is a legitimate complaint, one that shouldn't be shouted down or conflated with shameful behavior on the part of relatively few individuals in the community.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    • Stefan-H 11y ago
      The censorship is not happening by the community, it is coming from the admins that are on the reddit payroll. There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.
      • speeder 11y ago
        Also adding to what Stefan said, the admins have been deleting subreddits too, sometimes the wrong ones (for example they deleted an Whale Watching subreddit believing it was a fat people harassment subreddit...)
        • nightpool 11y ago
          Bullshyt. They deleted a Whale Watching subreddit because it got taken over by users from FPH looking for a new home. Some of the mods of that sub were FPH admins and were communicating to other users that it was a "backup sub" they could use when they got banned. As soon as the furor died down, the sub came back.
        • valarauca1 11y ago
          Deleting a sub that existed purely to dehumanize people is your primary example of censorship going to far?
• paulhauggis 11y ago
  This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit, which isn't the case. This is the problem, actually. Because it's not a paid position, the company can't use that as leverage in situations like this. The moderators essentially have nothing to lose. Even in the article, it states that it was shutdown because of the abrupt termination of Ms. Taylor. Anybody that makes these sort of emotional decisions shouldn't be anywhere near a position of power. If I were the CEO of Reddit, I would be making it my next goal to slowly take away the power away from these moderators.
  • Zikes 11y ago
    Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run, and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power". The average Reddit user doesn't know or care where the content comes from or how it's moderated, and they similarly have no loyalty to Reddit. If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded.
    • mxfh 11y ago
      They are curators, not creators. And the talk about being democratic is kind of wishful thinking at best. Did the moderators got elected in a qualified voting process?
    • paulhauggis 11y ago
      "Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run" I disagree. Most content on Reddit is copied/pasted from elsewhere. "and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power". There have been many other successful communities that didn't give so much power to moderators. The moderators at HN, for instance, are paid employees. "If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded." Users fled Digg because it made a really bad experience for the average person going to the site. Moderators are a minority and can easily be replaced. As long as the average user experience is un-changed, Reddit will remain popular. When a large company replaces the management team, most people are un-fazed unless it actually effects them in some way. The moderators made the mistake of using the nuclear option. A bad strategy in the long-run. Another simple solution is to make it so the moderators can move a sub-reddit to private, but if the community has over a certain amount of subscribers, it's pushed up to a paid employee before it is activated. This removes 90% of the mods power with very little effort. Most might not even notice until they try to changing the sub-reddit to private, which for the most popular ones, is rare.
• nanny 11y ago
  When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions. Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know. Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario. The responses to this event are entirely unjustified, because there is no information at all to base a reaction on.
  • _dark_matter_ 11y ago
    I don't know if you deliberately haven't been reading anything or what, but it wasn't just in reaction to the firing. This is just the straw the broke the camel's back.
    • nanny 11y ago
      People keep saying things like this, but what exactly was on the camel's back in the first place? "Bad communication"? Can you give me any specific, concrete examples?
      • darkstar999 11y ago
        Bad communication. Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly. Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way". A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job.
        • coldpie 11y ago
          Literally none of these are specific or concrete.
• deleted 11y ago
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  • morganvachon 11y ago
    You need a proper SSL cert for edenboards.com, it's flagged as untrusted in Firefox.
    • fortytw2 11y ago
      Yeah, nothing is up on that site right now, a friend of mine was messing with and failing to set up SSL on that domain...
• robrenaud 11y ago
  How hard would it be to fork reddit AMA on a third party site? I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board, a lot of the mods/community would follow. Certainly some custom support for the AMA would be nice, like getting cleanly summarized final outputs and highlighting direct conversation with the askee, and making it easy to find highly upvoted non-answered questions.
  • joosters 11y ago
    I imagine it'd be extremely difficult. It's the users that give reddit its power. You can set up another site but if it hasn't got the readership, fewer people are going to do AMAs there. There are already several reddit clones but they are nowhere near as successful.
    • hoopd 11y ago
      When Barbara Walters switches networks viewers and celebrities follow her because they like and trust her, people feel the same way about Victoria.
  • habitue 11y ago
    This is pretty much what voat is. The biggest issue is handling the traffic. Only a fraction of users went to voat and it was offline for days, crippled by the traffic. edit: I previously said Voat was a reddit fork, that wasn't correct.
    • joshuapants 11y ago
      > This is exactly what voat is, a Reddit fork Voat mimics Reddit functionally, but I don't think it's a fork
      • danso 11y ago
        That's correct...Voat is written in C# ASP.NET MVC 5. https://github.com/voat/voat https://github.com/voat/voat
      • 11y ago
• imjk 11y ago
  "We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less." I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to NY to meet with Victoria and was told that the meeting was cancelled. As expected, panic ensued among the subreddit's moderators. Whether the firing was justified or not, the fact that Reddit's leadership didn't immediately see the consequences of their action on one of their most popular communities just shows their disregard. Or even worse, they realized the consequences and just didn't bother to help facilitate them. I mean these are real people with real meetings spending real dollars for the community, which is all run but volunteers, and Reddit's leadership didn't feel it was important enough to communicate with them to help avoid unnecessary consequences. I understand the frustration.
  • ChrisPebble 11y ago
    Ignorance more than callousness appears to be the sin here. From snippets of communications posted with the mods it looks like they weren't really aware of what Victoria did for the mods. Since the community is their "product" I find it disconcerting that they're not more familiar with the details of how these relationships work and what Victoria actually did. I would actually find it more comforting if they were aware of all of this and made a rational business decision that may have been seen as callous, but they appear to have had very little clue as to what was actually going on. That doesn't bode well for future business decisions if they really don't understand their product.
    • slg 11y ago
      Devils advocate, that is partly Victoria's fault. If your managers don't know what you do all day, I don't think it is surprising that you are fired. Yes, it is a sign off bad management, but it is also a sign off an employee not communicating up to management. EDIT: The downvotes seem to indicate I wasn't clear. I'm not saying the Reddit management team thought Victoria wasn't doing any work. However, it was clear that Victoria was spending time doing things that management didn't know about. From the sound of it, Victoria saw work that needed to be done and did it. Her job responsibilities likely continued to expanded as IAMA grew. However if management truly didn't know how involved she was in that, that is a failing of both management for not staying involved in the process and her for not communicating up the extra work she was doing.
• mildweed 11y ago
  People often say that the users of a site like Reddit are the product, not the customers. In the case of Reddit moderators, they are also essentially employees. Employees who need to be treated more as customers, due to the fact they're volunteers. Anger the masses of Reddit all you want, but don't piss off the volunteers that hold your product together.
• throwaway_97 11y ago
  http://str8c.me/ http://str8c.me/
  • dredmorbius 11y ago
    Could you provide some details on this rather than just a naked link?
• embik 11y ago
  What really baffles me is the way reddit management handled this situation. There were many things they simply fucked up - They did not install the new AMA team properly (hell, the subreddit mods did not know about it), they reacted childish to the shutdown (something along the lines of "popcorn tastes good" - one of your biggest communities just shut down because you failed to do basic management, in what universe is this a proper response?) and they won't address the real issues, it's all PR speech (take a look at the "we' sorry" post, a lot of important questions raised are not answered). This is just horrible - You cannot anger your community in such a "business model". reddit depends 100% on their users and especially the content creators and moderators. They do very little by themselves, and most of it is stuff around the core functionality only a small percentage is even using.
  • steve-howard 11y ago
    "Popcorn" as a metaphor for drama is a daily in-joke at SubredditDrama, where that comment was posted. What kn0thing didn't count on was that a lot of readers had never been there before and instead took it at face value.
    • tfinniga 11y ago
      The way I took this statement was roughly "I will enjoy watching this drama unfold, but I won't do anything other than watch". Is that inaccurate?
      • steve-howard 11y ago
        I just saw it as someone throwing out a joke in the middle of handling a stressful situation. Reading his retrospective post on the matter, it sounds like he'd been trying to understand and address the situation all day and hadn't realized that the userbase at large didn't know that. Given that most of the popular subreddits were offline for the day, I can't imagine anyone would seriously think they didn't care at all. Failing to address that situation would have been a great way to kill the site entirely.
    • luso_brazilian 11y ago
• hoopd 11y ago
  A discussion between an admin and the science mods leaked: http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_conversation_from_kn0thing_and_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_...
  • tmuir 11y ago
    Not just an admin. YC alum and cofounder Alexis Ohanian. This conversation tells you everything you need to know. They aren't sorry. This wasn't bungled. They are doubling down on their lack of communication.
    • hoopd 11y ago
      I feel bad posting it because it's a leak but it informs the conversation.
• throwaway_97 11y ago
  I think the management is doing the right thing for the long term. They will try to make it more and more social and maybe even try to act as a news portal; things that bring in profits. It should attract a lot of new people. It won't be the reddit you remember but it will be a more profitable reddit. On a personal note I feel nothing as I find reddit to be quite a distraction to my productivity and many subreddits of my interests are dead.
• spodek 11y ago
  Never surprise your team. This incident looks like it comes from inexperienced, counterproductive leadership, as do the several incidents leading up to it and that will follow. Or maybe authoritarian. Several days after a firing, people are complaining in the NY Times that they are still surprised. Not surprising your team is one of the top principles I've learned in teamwork. If, as a manager, your firing someone surprises them or their team, you almost certainly mismanaged the process. If you have a reason for firing someone, you should be able to create a process everyone understands even if they don't agree to it. The people left should certainly not be surprised, especially after the firing. If your team is surprised by your strategy, if your customers are surprised by your product, and so on, you probably managed poorly. You should only surprise your competition. At least the rest of us can learn from Reddit's management what not to do: motivating competitors to satisfy their users and customers while they're alienating them.
  • dublinben 11y ago
    >Never surprise your team. It's never been more clear that the managers of Reddit Inc. do not consider the moderators of their most popular subreddits to be part of their team.
• ScootyPuff3000 11y ago
  And why is this website that makes 1/20th the revenue of many of those "Cat Meme" sites (with 20x the staff) so important?
  • theklub 11y ago
    Its really not important at all. Just a lot of people use it and its kinda going down in flames. Pretty funny to watch honestly. The AMA section was a great advertising tool for Reddit IMO, they def should take better care of that one area.
• ScootyPuff3000 11y ago
  She was fired for wanting to negotiate her salary. Chairman Pao says that's "sexist."
• theklub 11y ago
  I can't believe people take reddit so seriously. Its amazing to me.
  • darkstar999 11y ago
    Some people have been on that site for 10 years.
    • secstate 11y ago
      That's fine, but it's effectively a giant forum with volunteer moderators. I feel like it can best be described as the social equivalent of trying to steer a boat that's really 30,000 small boats all tied together. They have volunteers with the ability to simply turn off huge traffic parts of their site? How is this a for-profit company?
      • MichaelGG 11y ago
        I'm guessing they will take that power back from the community, under "responsibilities for default subreddits". But if they would update their site (vs relying on 3rd parties) and update stuff and actually talk to these volunteers, they wouldn't be in this position. It's pretty impressive how they've managed to give an appearance of not caring.
    • byuu 11y ago
      I've been there five years, and really have no attachment to it whatsoever. You can say, "why go back?", but I'd just say, "why not?" It's pretty much because it's there. Either way, I imagine a lot of people feel the same about it as I do. And when your product is that dispassionate, you risk everyone leaving for the "next big thing." It's certainly happened many times before: Digg, Livejournal, Myspace, etc. I'm not sure how you can really build a lot of commitment and loyalty from a community that basically just submits links and comments on them. Moderators, absolutely. But regular users?
  • nkassis 11y ago
    Reddit varies widely on quality. Some forums on reddit are the best source of info on their particular topic. I don't really care for reddit as a whole but I would miss it if some of the the subreddit communities I follow were to disappear with nothing to replace them. Albeit none of those subreddits are the type that would end up on the Reddit ban list I presume.
• alecco 11y ago
  An article critical of reddit? Let's see how fast this is taken out of HN frontpage. Edit: Same as top post (NYSE) 1h and same votes, and it's at 9th position... Bring me your downvotes. Truth hurts?
  • DanBC 11y ago
    These threads are pretty toxic, so it's not surprising they get flagged. Also, your comment got downvotes for baiting.
• zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Why is it okay for a corporation to do it, but when mods do it everyone accuses them of pushing their own agenda?
• jonknee 11y ago
  The problem with volunteers is that you can't easily fire them. It's great that reddit gets a lot of free labor from moderators, but their sense of entitlement is a huge drag. Regardless of why Victoria was let go, it's very difficult to run a business when you can't make staffing changes without threat of open revolt. I would hire a replacement for Victoria and swap out every moderator of /r/IAmA who was part of this coup. It's not their property, it's reddit's. It will be ugly (not that it isn't already), but in the end there are a few moderators and millions of users who literally could not care less and just want to read interesting stories.
• sparkzilla 11y ago
  Article>The issue goes beyond Reddit. We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers — and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant. It's time for companies to stop treating the free work of contributors as a given, and pay them for their contributions: http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-same-disease/ http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-sam...
• pasbesoin 11y ago
  Based upon the facts if and as described here, I would have to consider Pao entirely incompetent in her current role. Regardless of how one feels about her as a person. I regret a bit jumping on the bandwagon, here, but if things occurred as described, the facts alone are damning. P.S. I also have to question what the hell Alexis is up to. I've read elsewhere that he conducted the actual termination. Is he really so clueless at this point about his own site? (Even if he agreed with the termination, for whatever reason, its manner and fallout is just simply unacceptable.) There has to be some serious dollar play behind this. Which does not speak well for the future of reddit; it may make it to the other side, but only based upon the gigantic momentum it has built that may sustain it through to some better policy -- if Management has the brains to see the light. P.P.S. Is voat back up, now?
  • theklub 11y ago
    Yes voat is back up.
• jmount 11y ago
  Rambling and self contradictory (presumably even after editing). "We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest." "The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that ..." Own up to one or the other.
  • Frenchgeek 11y ago
    How so? Their community shut down to regroup and protest, without anticipating others doing the same.
    • jmount 11y ago
      And "The secondary purpose" was a protest, contradicting the claim protest wasn't one of their purposes.
      • Frenchgeek 11y ago
        They didn't claim they didn't want to protest, they claim they didn't expect their protest to have followers.
  • Chathamization 11y ago
    Yeah, it's interesting that right after the shutdown they said that they were closing it down merely to figure out how to operate without Victoria (what would they have done if she caught the flu?), not protesting. The shutdown was fairly brief (less than a day, it seems). Now days later they're coming back with, "eh, that thing we did a few days ago, it was also a protest." Doesn't seem terribly effective.
• xaa 11y ago
  Apparently Reddit has exactly 2 board members: Alexis and Sam Altman [1]. Why would Sam Altman, and by extension YC, have thought that Ellen Pao would make a good ("interim") CEO for Reddit? This scenario should really be causing shareholders/board members to think about how dependent Reddit really is on moderator goodwill [2]. There needs to be a CEO and leadership team that can at least create a credible perception, if not the reality, that Reddit values moderators who donate their time to make the business viable. For this purpose, it would seem you want a CEO who is going to be non-inflammatory (i.e., not Pao) and perceived as a relatively neutral arbitrator between the needs of shareholders for monetization and the needs of moderators for adequate support (i.e., probably not someone from a VC background). Considering how little it should actually cost the company to provide a reliable support network for mods, including honest, non-HR-speak communication, this hardly seems like a demanding task, but somehow they continue to manage it very poorly. Does anyone know if there have been public comments by YC about any of these issues? [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?privcapId=29927936 http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?p... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/csu119e https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
• kjs3 11y ago
  There seems to be an incredulous "we gave our time to a for profit company for free and got fucked" attitude that I can't help, undoubtedly because I'm a bad person, but think 'duh!'.