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Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

862 points by jonmarkgo 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago
Converting large-scale investor dollars into compelling returns using the world's most entitled and monomaniacal message board: not, in fact, an easy job. Pretty sure very few of us could do it either.
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- jstakeman 11y ago
  It's remarkable how fast and how organized they were.
  - fixxer 11y ago
    I was thinking the opposite. Feels like it took forever to extricate her.
    - jstakeman 11y ago
      It's been about a week... that's faster than South Carolina and its flag.
      - fixxer 11y ago
        Sure, since the outright protest, but the community has been against her since the start.
      - greglindahl 11y ago
        Not a very good comparison - the flag situation has been ongoing since the 1860s, and isn't done yet. (I grew up in SC.)
- ctb__ 11y ago
  *Communities
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - nissehulth 11y ago
    *Lynch mobs
ZoZoBee 11y ago
Wish her the best of luck where ever she ends up, so long as its not here....
deleted 11y ago
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15step 11y ago
Great to see Steve back in the fold
kaa2102 11y ago
That was quick but the corporate agenda being pushed flew in the face of the Reddit community. Power to the people!
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post_break 11y ago
I think most people just let out a sigh of relief.
nhf 11y ago
I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community. I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS: > As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward. All in all, a good day I think.
- Flammy 11y ago
  Link to full statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol... It is a good read.
- ForEnglandJames 11y ago
  >> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen So what. She got better than she deserved.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  I'm curious about a few things, like just how many of the people on reddit making the noise are actually literally children. Probably quite a lot!
- revelation 11y ago
  You applaud them on a PR strategy that is akin to dictatorships all over the world denouncing opposition as "terrorists" and criminals? The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.
  - 11y ago
goldfeld 11y ago
So can someone summarize the ordeal?
- deleted 11y ago
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- weego 11y ago
  She thought she could enforce her agenda onto an online community and it would all go well. Results as expected by anyone who has ever been part or observed an online community.
- unchocked 11y ago
  Ellen Pao has been CEO of Reddit for 8 months. A month or so ago, Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior. Since Pao had recently lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, aspects of the reddit community pattern-matched the occurances as "Social Justice Warrioring" and engaged in an organized hate-fest on Pao. About a week ago, Victoria, the admin who coordinated Reddit's "ask me anything" subreddits (interviews with celebrities for the most part) was fired for unknown reasons. The optics of this were handled poorly, and the community got enraged. Since the buck stopped with Pao, and she was already weakened due to the backlash on the earlier issue, this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised, and thus untenable as CEO. Edit: corrected tenure
  - djloche 11y ago
    It wasn't just the 'optics'. They screwed up everything about it. They didn't have a replacement. They didn't have a transition period. They didn't have a clue how much work Victoria was doing. They didn't realize how significant she was to a number of core subreddits. They didn't realize how important those core subreddits were. They thought that none of these things mattered, and that a mere email address pointed to the rest of the reddit team could 'pick up the slack'. They didn't just screw up the optics - they royally screwed up, and then tried to laugh it off.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    > Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. If they had cleaned out all the trash at once, the community impact probably would have been minimal.
osetinsky 11y ago
rough year for her
ChickeNES 11y ago
Announcement on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...
- 001sky 11y ago
  Friday afternoon, eh? Someone took a PR class in college! -- Top Comment on that thread
gesman 11y ago
Wow, I applaud this development! Now, if Victoria is coming back too - that's would be 200% right move for reddit!
lisper 11y ago
So... who is replacing Steve at Hipmunk?
tacos 11y ago
Yup, she did awesome Sam. Especially recently. (Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.) I didn't even know who she was until "the last few months." Which have been a parade of increasingly-negative press and idiotic behavior. And that's from reading Reuters and the NY Times -- I don't even use Reddit. --- Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board... “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.
- tsotha 11y ago
  >Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted. Meh. It's traditional. There's nothing to be gained from running down your outgoing CEO. Besides, they hired her, so the worse she looks the worse their own judgement looks.
dvt 11y ago
Pretty much had to happen. To say that the Victoria situation was mishandled is a severe understatement. I wonder what will happen with communities like FPH and others (that have since moved to Voat). Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts? Time will tell. IMO, the problem at hand is that reddit is still trying to make advertisers their bread and butter. And advertisers will never be overly attracted to censorship-free spaces. Even though I may not agree with her aggressively politically-correct agenda (nor does most of reddit), I think it may have been a smart move from a business dev. perspective.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts? I doubt it. Garbage like FPH should have been dealt with much sooner. The reason there was a backlash about that at all, imo, is because they let it drag out too long. Reddit was the friend-parent for so long that when it finally came time to enforce some discipline, it came as a shock and felt like a betrayal.
  - dvt 11y ago
    True, although it's important to note that there are still many communities that are much worse than FPH on reddit.
    - Ocerge 11y ago
      This is why it got so messy when they got rid of FPH. They did a MISERABLE job of defining the line on what is and is not appropriate. If you're going to censor, it better be a well-defined line.
    - wvenable 11y ago
      The issue is that these communities aren't frequently in the top of /r/all and causing outside issues. FPH just got too big and too obnoxious to ignore.
  - post_break 11y ago
    Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS? They seemed to hide behind the vail of harassment and not peak behind the curtain of what reddit really is. Reddits problem is they said anything goes, and then years later they saw what they created.
ksenzee 11y ago
Reddit would do well to hire someone with experience in the association management field. Those folks specialize in managing fractious communities such that the volunteers not only stick around, they're happy to pay for the privilege.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  But where are they going to find someone like that? Guess it's time to put an ad on Craigslist.
slg 11y ago
I will be interested to see if anything changes regarding the management of Reddit or at least the communities opinion of it. I wonder if the community will chalk this up as a win and suddenly forget all of the reasons they have been complaining which really have nothing to do with Pao in the first place.
noir_lord 11y ago
This entire debacle and the 'communities' (the small vocal part that acted horribly) response pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for me when it comes to reddit. With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna. Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now). Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Agreed. It's why I stay off Reddit.
- deleted 11y ago
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- ars 11y ago
  I agree 100%. Except for certain sub-reddits, I go to reddit when I want to see what the idiots think. There was a time when I would read a news subreddit and reminded myself that every headline should be understood exactly in reverse. I stopped doing that because it's hard to keep up the mental filter. I think the problem is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September - reddit is mostly made up of stupid and bored teenagers.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Facebook's shortcomings on privacy keep me away.
- amyjess 11y ago
  I'm glad that most of the communities I'm part of sat out of this mess. The top subs I read and/or post to are /r/asktransgender, /r/ainbow, /r/comicbooks, and /r/kamenrider. None of them would've benefited from taking part in any kind of blackout (the first two of those function as support groups and any blackout could seriously hurt someone who needs help, the third is a mid-sized fandom where people care more about talking about their hobby than staging a juvenile protest, and the fourth is an extremely niche fandom so small that nobody would notice a blackout).
istvan__ 11y ago
I am opening a bottle of champagne and at the same time answer my own question: it took 3 weeks for the community to get rid off a tyrant. Well done Reddit! Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.
- prawn 11y ago
  PG has posted on HN saying that downvoting for disagreement is fine.
  - caminante 11y ago
    I didn't know this for HN, though I'd seen it on Reddit. Thanks for passing this along. On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives. On reddit, I was familiar with the saying -- "downvote isn't disagree button." Though, the current rediquette has removed that language. Compare [1] (old) v. [2] (current). [1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette?v=08ebd986-6459-11e2-83d1-12313d182d8d https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette?v=08ebd986-6459-11e2... [2] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
    - stefantalpalaru 11y ago
      > On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives. Unfortunately, it is a serious problem. The moment you become a dissonant voice is the moment you're downvoted into unreadability by the choir. Make no mistake, many people here have enough karma points to downvote and they are quick to react.
      - arprocter 11y ago
        I can't tell if the fact you got downvoted for this was a joke or not. Too many levels of meta?
  - 11y ago
pkorzeniewski 11y ago
“Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said. What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists
- tacos 11y ago
  I don't even use Reddit and Sam's quote was so odd it caused me to comment below (probably turning more and more grey by the moment). In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community. I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - pen2l 11y ago
    Sam said it for PR reasons. He also posted this one a Friday afternoon! Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.
- ars 11y ago
  I agree that nothing much as changed, but "majority"? Not in the slightest, the majority could not care less about this ruckus and think those agitators are idiots. Those people are a small, but vocal, minority.
  - npizzolato 11y ago
    Maybe. I'm sure a large amount of redditors (maybe not majority) appreciate a well-run IAmA which manages bringing in celebrities and other big names. Pao's actions as CEO directly impacted their ability to do that.
minimaxir 11y ago
Ellen Pao gives the reason for leaving on /r/self: http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha... > So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles. This is believable because there have been odd business decisions under her watch, not just policy decisions. RedditMade, one of the intended revenue-generating models for Reddit, failed while she was interim CEO. Alienating /r/IAMA probably did not help.
- calcol 11y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there was more to it, and the image that she has on Reddit was certainly not helpful, but she wasn't fired because of the backlash from last week and previous, because if that was the case she would have been fired much sooner, but instead she stepped down, by force or not, because she wasn't able to guarantee good revenue for Reddit by past actions and admission of the above.
- kolbe 11y ago
  Reading between the lines and viewing her resignation in the context of what she's had to go through in the past few months, she was harassed out of the job by the user base.
  - return0 11y ago
    E. Pao and Brendan Eich are the two polar examples why the word 'harassment' has lost its meaning.
    - j_baker 11y ago
      You're not trying to say the two are comparable are you?
      - return0 11y ago
        In what way are they not?
bane 11y ago
Right or wrong, fair or unfair, or whatever you think about Ellen, I think most people agree that she had become personally and professionally toxic to reddit as a brand and community and even if she did a great job from here on out, it was going to be an uphill battle to restore community confidence in her as a CEO. I personally don't believe she had the right qualifications to lead a community-driven site like reddit as it is today, but would have the right qualifications if reddit was going to start making a serious pivot to a more lucrative money making direction via commercial partnerships, advertising, etc. Reddit may still go that direction, but Huffman won't have the same baggage weighing him down. (note: this will also likely feed the conspiracy that her turn in the head office was a convenience for her lawsuit, now that she lost, she has no reason to stay in that position) I agree with other comments chastising the community for the racist/sexist/whatever nature of lots of the negative comments against her. It was childish and dangerous. She had enough issues worthy of reasonable criticism that it wasn't even necessary. I think this is a good thing for reddit.
devindotcom 11y ago
Maybe I missed it, but was there ever any information on why Victoria was fired, or whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it? From where I was sitting, it seemed like no one actually learned the full story, which might be confidential or take time to contextualize/safely explain, and everyone immediately threw it on Pao's lap and downvoted any holding maneuvers she and the rest of the staff tried to attempt. It was poorly handled, sure, but it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening. For that matter, do we even know now? If I'm wrong, though, happy to correct my ideas here. (grammar edit)
- davmre 11y ago
  This (deleted) Quora post is the best explanation I've seen thus far: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--N83GXLMb--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1326107685476973672.jpg http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--N83GXLMb...
  - Flammy 11y ago
    Interesting, thanks for sharing.
  - pvg 11y ago
    Which was explicitly denied by reddit and is no different than any other piece of baseless speculation.
    - evolve2k 11y ago
      But it does seem to fit the corporate 'need to monetize' narrative quite well.
      - pvg 11y ago
        The bulk of that 'narrative' is speculative tinfoilhattery as well so of course it fits. See all the handwringing about potential monetization of AMA without anyone ever suggesting any kind of remotely plausible revenue model for it. And again, this is something reddit have addressed directly.
bedhead 11y ago
During the KP trial I had always kept an open mind towards her arguments...until I later learned she was married to Buddy Fletcher, one of the biggest scoundrels and thieves in the investment world in recent years. The character and judgment of a person who would fall in love and wed someone like that says more than I can articulate. It's oddly reassuring to see my (and many, many others') skepticism about both her judgment and motives validated.
- lingben 11y ago
  Everything about their saga is bizarre. Did you know that up until his marriage to Ellen, Buddy had lived as a homosexual? he was living with a partner of multiple years (Hobart “Bo” Fowlkes) and was openly gay. Not that there is anything odd or wrong about that. It is just rather strange how these two polarizing figures came together in a union. For more info and details see: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ellen-pao http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletch... And then there are the KP employee reviews and other internal documents which became public as a result of the trial she lost that show Ellen Pao to be a thoroughly unproductive and toxic employee who was given every opportunity to shape up but was too busy engrossed in the internal office politics and making 'enemy lists'. If someone made a movie about this stuff and the people involved, most would think it too unrealistic.
  - nawitus 11y ago
    The article states that Buddy lived with a boyfriend, which is not the same as living as a homosexual, as he might be bisexual. Some other articles state that he was "openly gay", but perhaps those articles are slightly incorrect.
    - jacobwcarlson 11y ago
      The VF article also states that Fletcher dated exclusively women while at Harvard, and that "Fowlkes wasn’t surprised that his former boyfriend had become involved with a woman."
  - 11y ago
arprocter 11y ago
I hope reddit has good legal representation...
onewaystreet 11y ago
> “It became clear that the board and I had a different view on the ability of Reddit to grow this year,” Ms. Pao said in an interview. “Because of that, it made sense to bring someone in that shared the same view.” Does this mean that the board thought Pao was being too aggressive in pushing growth or not aggressive enough? If it's the latter then the Reddit community is in for a shock.
- josso 11y ago
  Not aggressive enough: > So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles. http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
  - calbear81 11y ago
    I can see how growing users organically was going to be tough, especially with the new community guidelines: 1) Pushing commercial IamAs was going to have a two-fold effect: increasing revenue and increasing traffic. Traffic would have basically come from Fortune 500 brands paying to drive traffic to Reddit via TV, online ads, etc. Companies today drive users to their own sites or to branded channels on YouTube or Facebook but not to Reddit. Sponsored IAmAs might have helped create a new stream of mainstream users but would have generated a large backlash with the moderators and the current rules on IamA (non-commercial). 2) Banning morally dubious but wildly popular content - The Fappening BROKE reddit. It drove so much traffic and introduced reddit to so many new users that by holding themselves to now a different standard of community policing, they are also banning from content that drives a lot of traffic growth. Celebrity, gossip and scandal brings all the eyeballs and $$$ to the yard. The only logical place for the type of growth they are looking for is mobile hence the push for more video content and anything that capitalizes on how people consume content now-a-days.
    - danielweber 11y ago
      #2 reminds me how reddit clamped down on the unauthorized nude photos, and then shamed the community for its behavior (correctly, IMHO). But then someone asked if reddit was going to refund all the gold purchased during and because of it, and AFAIK the admins just stopped talking about that. (If they did any more than say "that's a tough call" I missed it.) https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_for_his_own_soul/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r... It's tough to have a conscience when you are getting funding for violating it.
notsony 11y ago
>Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board, said he personally appreciated Ms. Pao’s efforts during her two years working at the start-up. “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said. This is clearly nonsense, otherwise there wouldn't have been a grassroots campaign to remove Ellen Pao from her role. If Sam Altman honestly believes that Ellen did a "phenomenal" job, he should reconsider his own position at YCombinator.
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  I think he was just being polite but then who knows, we don't get to see what's going on behind the scenes, we just see the outcome of their decisions.
  - antirez 11y ago
    To say the contrary of what you think is not being polite, is a stupid communication rule that in other places of the world would just make things more complex to understand. There is the possibility to just express what you think in a balanced way. One can just say: she tried to fix a complex problem, that many experiences in the past proved to be very hard to fix. And she is stepping down now after the recent happenings. Or something like that, but to say he did an incredible job when all this mess happened is not a good form of communication.
    - curiousjorge 11y ago
      I'd agree for the most part but especially in North America, there is a culture of beating around the bush and most people avoid confrontation or directly addressing the problem of course unless the other person has an inability to recognize the issue. I'd say even for someone who has a large stake in a publicly visible company, it'd be tough to break that mold even more. I agree that it could've been better worded without coming out as blunt or being overly polite and politically correct. But then again, Ellen Pao sued her former employer based on questionable grounds (gender bias cried the wolf) and timing (her husband is bankrupt after scamming investors). If I was in Sam's position, I'd be careful not to awaken the bees nest and just hope that the cold season comes and they all die.
return0 11y ago
Isn't it already too late? How can a new captain save the sinking ship? The new CEO would be standing on a double edged sword. If he reverses course immediately claiming reddit an absolute free-speech enviromnent, the people who wanted a safe-space will be disillusioned, if he doesn't the rest of the users will keep seeking for another platform.
- arprocter 11y ago
  I'd suggest that the 'safe spacers' are on the wrong site. When anything gets as big as reddit there will always be unsavory things posted - flying the banner of 'free speech' for so long and then suddenly doing a 180 is what has made people annoyed
  - return0 11y ago
    It doesnt really matter, reddit users move as packs, and they have been divided, so there's a danger the entire place will become deserted.
  - knorby 11y ago
    The site banned posting personal information has enacted various community standards long before anything that happened recently. There is a pretty clear history, intent, and common sense around banning communities from using the to organize harassment and bringing other vile things into the world. They could have communicated that better, but there is no 180 to speak of.
- dbpokorny 11y ago
  Pushing hard on moderator tools. In the short term, Reddit should watch its moderators, look for usage patterns, and build systems to reduce moderation effort. In the long term, Reddit should develop artificial moderation (AM). Reddit is the natural place for the discipline of artificial moderation (using AI / ML to help moderate public forums) to develop. For example, an automated "argument detection" bot could intervene when two participants start going down the warpath, acting like a janitor who pushes two rowdy students apart when they start fighting. Or, a bot could detect when a post consists entirely of one participant insulting another and take appropriate action. These are difficult problems, but Reddit is sitting on a goldmine of training data in the form of the human-generated moderation logs. Reddit should either hire the talent to develop such systems or partner with those who already have (Google / IBM / ...).
tosseraccount 11y ago
There's a fine line between being polite and being so boring that it's stifling. Every commenting site has it's herd mentality and punishment of thought crimes. Reddit users just wore it on the their sleeves and trying to suppress them was silly. It might turn into DIGG 2 pretty fast and might not recover. The investors and the "community" are just too far a part on this.
muglug 11y ago
Will the anti-corporate brigades in these large community-driven sites make turning a profit impossible in the long-run?
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  No, the corporations will simply adapt and learn to play the anti-corporate tune to turn a profit. See Continuum, American Odyssey, Mr. Robot, The Lego Movie, and so on. You want an anti-corporate message and you are willing to pay for it? There are corporations ready to fulfill your need :-)
- mindcrime 11y ago
  I don't think so, because the degree of "anti corporate" sentiment varies dramatically from sub to sub. The thing is, it almost doesn't even make sense to talk about "The Reddit Community" as though it was any one, unified, cohesive whole, because it largely isn't.
  - muglug 11y ago
    Agreed, but there's a subset of the reddit community that passionately rallies against comprehensive attempts to make the site more commercial in nature. And now, with this resignation, they're likely to feel emboldened.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      I'm not sure that keeping them around matters a whole lot to reddit as a company. People who resist monetization so heartily are unlikely to be anything but a drain on resources anyway.
    - mindcrime 11y ago
      Fair enough.
kolbe 11y ago
After seeing what Ellen went through, I think Sam will need to raise some more funds to offer a significant pay bump to entice even mediocre talent to fill her void.
- jellicle 11y ago
  Absolutely correct. There's no way that any moderately-intelligent woman would ever take the job now. Perhaps a fairly dim, elderly man who doesn't know much about social media and therefore is immune to the storms of reddit.
- tsotha 11y ago
  I doubt it. In a lot of ways she created her own problems. What they need is someone who focuses on the business side. People on reddit shouldn't care who the CEO is, and they wouldn't if they didn't feel the CEO was making the site worse.
seany 11y ago
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
MBCook 11y ago
I don't like this at all. Even if she wasn't the right person (I don't know), all the worst elements of the site are going to see this as a victory for their awful behavior and it's going to get worse. The people who attacked her with sexism and comments about her personal relationships. The people who supported FPH even though they were attacking people in real life and off Reddit, not just posting comments in their personal corner of 'discussion'. She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. I worry heavily that if the new person doesn't draw a clear line at the start things are going to get a lot worse in terms of hate/abuse/harassment. EDIT: After posting this I saw Nilay Patel tweeted basically the same thing: https://twitter.com/reckless/status/619620964658245632 https://twitter.com/reckless/status/619620964658245632
- caractacus 11y ago
  > She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. These are two separate things. The fact that she tried to stand up against some of the idiots that inhabit the site doesn't mitigate against the fact that she did not do a good job. She should have resigned or been fired for not doing a good job regardless of how well she coped with the jerks en masse.
  - MBCook 11y ago
    They're not the same thing, my worry is that some Redditors (or employees) may not pay attention to the difference and avoid further cleanup.
- lingben 11y ago
  > but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. I'm baffled at how people misunderstand Ellen's actions in shutting down a few subreddits randomly. She did not 'clean' reddit of the worst of reddit nor 'hate' subreddits. In fact, there are still dozens and dozens of really disgusting stuff on reddit like /r/gasthekikes and /r/coontown Let's please stop this false narrative that she was a champion of some kind who came in and tried to 'clean up' reddit. Not only are there plenty of reprehensible stuff on reddit still, Ellen's claim that she targeted behavior and not speech rang hollow for the majority on reddit because communities like SRS were and are getting away with the same or worse behavior.
smitherfield 11y ago
I'm sorry to see it go down like this. Redditors treatment of her got really ugly (/r/all after the FPH banning was shocking) over the past few weeks, and it's disheartening to see people's bad behavior rewarded.
- throwaway54984 11y ago
  What about her bad behavior which affected many redditors?
ljk 11y ago
It's interesting how fast people go from hating[1] /u/kn0thing to love[2] him again [1]: https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama... [2]: https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/csz1gcn https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...
- edkennedy 11y ago
  And then Ellen echoed his statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/csz1krm https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_th...
  - ljk 11y ago
    what is happening, not used to reading positive interactions on reddit with that account...
- unchocked 11y ago
  I think it has to do with how mob psychology latches onto whatever is bright and shiny. So a character with both pros and cons in the mass narrative is able to be demonized one day and lionized the next, based on whichever trait sparkled more that day.
- reustle 11y ago
  I think it has a lot to do with how he handled it. He immediately came out after making that comment and said he screwed up big time and was really sorry. People took that as sincere, and I did too, since it was really only a single comment.
ElComradio 11y ago
PR that comes out of corporations cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Altman is being honest that he appreciated her efforts. We can't trust that her and her husband were in love. All of this that comes out of spokesmen is carefully crafted as a result of a numbers game. When do we hear "so and so CEO did a horrible job and was forced out by the board."? Never. So are we to believe there is no such thing as a terrible CEO? Will we hear Sam saying "We made a terrible decision putting her in charge."? Never. Even if it was the actual truth. Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman.
- justizin 11y ago
  > Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman. It seems like she's been the subject of vitriol primarily for being a woman, since a lot of the vitriol predates the past few days.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    As someone who has only watched this popcorn feast, I have the sense that she was the subject of vitriol primarily for taking actions that people didn't like. Many of the insults may well have targeted her gender, but that is not the same thing at all. I have seen literally no evidence that she was harassed simply for being a woman.
    - moskie 11y ago
      > I have seen literally no evidence that she was harassed simply for being a woman. Well, the litmus test can't be simply whether the harassment solely targeted her gender and nothing else. Sexism (and other forms of bigotry) have a more insidious nature to them.
      - oldmanjay 11y ago
        I didn't say there wasn't sexism. I do indeed believe that gendered insults are the result of sexism. I am, however, stating that the genesis of the entire Ellen Pao affair seemed to be about her actions, not her womanhood.
jug5 11y ago
Hope you go away forever chairman Pao.
pfisch 11y ago
The real question is will Ellen Pao sue reddit now?
deleted 11y ago
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trhway 11y ago
Seems like Reddit hired Ellen without checking up her references at the previous job, ie. Kleiner, and now they harvest the same results - insufficient performance and high scandals. (note: there is nothing about her sex here - just read the case materials and you'll see that she behaved just like a jerk at Kleiner - for God sake she complained there that some assistant was using company fax to send brain scans of dying from cancer mother)
- jellicle 11y ago
  If you read the case materials, you discover her peers and superiors generally rated her performance as exceeding expectations.
  - trhway 11y ago
    i did read the materials and discovered that they clearly understood that a rattlesnake they've got on their hands and were very cautious to not get that rattlesnake angry (and thus in particular very carefully worded reviews with nowhere close to real "exceeding expectations") and were just waiting for her to leave on her own ( they even paid her to do that if I remember correctly - ie. she was more worth to them being gone than working for them )
deleted 11y ago
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scobar 11y ago
In the 24th Upvoted by Reddit podcast, Steve and Alexis talked about all the great content and communities hiding within Reddit that go undiscovered. I'm excited to see how they'll try to solve that problem, and hope they find a great solution. Reddit is really great, and it's very cool to see both Steve and Alexis back to enjoy and advance it.
brock_r 11y ago
Reddit: The world's largest drunken mob.
puranjay 11y ago
As someone who frequents only a couple of subs on Reddit (which were completely insulated from this fiasco), I have no idea why people were so pissed off. So she made a bad decision. Big fcking deal. "She's killing the community!". Well, if your idea of 'community' is making public rape threads (while you use a throwaway) and threaten to kill a person, then maybe your community deserves to die. Reddit has a lot* of good. I've been there long enough to see it. But it has a lot of absolute low-lifes clogging its sewers as well.
- tmerr 11y ago
  I think users were pissed off because of the lack of transparency. No one knew what the admins were deleting. It was up to the community to find out which subreddits were banned and why. Further the admins never logically explained their decisions, for example, to ban fph over srs. From the outside it seemed like an arbitrary power trip. And for what? Reddit's moderation system is perfect: let users form their own communities and moderate them as they wish. Some of the communities will be terrible but that's the beauty of it; you don't have to go to them. This system is what let reddit grow to the size it is today. While hackernews takes a different approach (moderation at the admin level isn't unusual) that is only manageable for a site of a smaller size.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    It seems to me that HN is more like a single subreddit than Reddit as a whole. The admin action on HN feels more like mod action on Reddit, because there is no larger umbrella above HN.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
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luckydude 11y ago
I posted this over on reddit but it got lost in the noise: Cool, I guess. But after having spent some time on voat.co I think reddit will get less and less of my attention (not that anyone gives a shit about me but I suspect I'm not alone). Reddit's management has destroyed any sense of trust I had in Reddit (I'm looking at you /u/kn0thing, it's not just Ellen, my understanding is you fired Victoria, right? And then grabbed popcorn [I know, cheap shot, but it appears like you really fell out of touch]). It appears that it is all about making money which I think is going to be the end of Reddit for some of us. Reddit could have a decent revenue stream on reasonable ads but that wasn't enough, it had to be more. That is really troubling because the next thing you might decide to "monetize" is what each of your users reads. That would make the NSA look amateurs and would be a massive invasion of privacy. It would also be very easy to monetize. Given all that has been going on, it would appear to be just a matter of time before "user optimized marketing" appears. Welcome back but the existing management has dug you a mighty big hole. I don't trust you any more.
- luckydude 11y ago
  Huh. I may have to walk that back. I just got back from cleaning up some Greg Chesson's computers (he passed on) so I haven't been watching stuff. Caught up and read Steve Huffman's stuff, he seems like the real deal, he seems to care, be all over it, maybe he'll fix it. He at least sounds like someone who gives a shit about the right things. So maybe I'm wrong, it happens.
robot22 11y ago
The one take away I have from this situation is that we have an honesty problem. People criticize Reddit as a platform of hate and vitrol, but as in reality this only partially describes the entirety. They complain that people on the internet are too free to speak their minds, but perhaps this is a reflection on our society a place where honesty and the free exchange of ideas is discouraged. Response to material: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-the-internet-we-wanted-and-thats-a-pro#.mkVMY61GKa http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-... Food for thought: https://www.facebook.com/psiljamaki/posts/10153334440110516?notif_t=like https://www.facebook.com/psiljamaki/posts/10153334440110516?...
myrandomcomment 11y ago
As a CEO she chose to take actions in manner and method that allowed things to spiral out of control. It was her job to control the message and blowback. She failed at her job, therefore she needed to go. It is really that simple.
generic_user 11y ago
The knife cuts both ways. The clickbait media and various groups are trying to paint the now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again. Over 200,000 people with legitimate concerns sign a petition to have Pao step down yet they still carry on with there charade. People are sick and tired of the media and a small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with. They engage in all forms of harassment, trying to get people fired, posting addresses and family pictures etc. The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits. All of which is factual information available to the public and even the media has to admit these things are facts. The clickbait media has to be called out more then anyone for trying to turn every issue no matter how banal into a black and white battle between good and evil and then fanning the flames on both sides. Its extremely cynical mostly to drive traffic to there sites. There is zero accountability in the media today and zero ethics. Everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations.
- deleted 11y ago
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- magicalist 11y ago
  > The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits. All of which is factual information available to the public and even the media has to admit these things are facts. Oh please. You can disclaim the disgusting statements made all over reddit recently as not part of a coherent community or whatever, but don't pretend they didn't exist at all. As for the rest of this nonsense, the statement quoted had nothing to do with "clickbait media and various groups" (I seriously feel like we're in talking points memos territory with this stuff), this is a statement from Sam Altman, so take it up with him. > There is zero accountability in the media today and zero ethics. Everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations. I mean, seriously, what on earth are you addressing here? Who are you talking to?
  - 11y ago
scotty79 11y ago
Corporations are like sea of cockroaches on the dark floor. They look vast. Roaches have their little fights and wars, but when they make some random noise and draw outside attention, it's funny to look how individual cockroaches run away from the spotlight.
iblaine 11y ago
Being the CEO of reddit is a political position. And Ellen Pao has too much drama in her life to be a good politician. Losing a sexual harassment case, marrying a crook who stole millions...those are events that don't happen by accident.
golergka 11y ago
So, there are two stories people use to sum all the affair up: either "the witch is dead", or "pitchfork mob got what they wanted". But neither of these stories really fit the information we have right now. Both of them fit some of it, and look realistic — unless you look at the whole picture. The best conclusion we can have here is that we don't actually know what's _really_ going on, just a bunch of facts and a couple of theories.
yegor256a 11y ago
Who is Ellen Pao?
- reddytowns 11y ago
  She is Reddit's Chief.
neur0tek 11y ago
quelle surprise
justonepost 11y ago
Don't piss off Kleiner perkins, that's all I can say...
neur0tek 11y ago
quelle surprise
atarian 11y ago
Even on the internet, mob mentality wins.
musesum 11y ago
I wonder if a Law Degree runs counter to running a social network? Where authority bumps up against anarchy. Imagine Peter Thiel running reddit. Both Thiel and Pao have law degrees. Both have been lightning rods. I suspect a JD comes in handy for some ventures. Such as Thiel running Paypal or Pao sourcing funding for RPX. In both of those cases, it is about removing ambiguity. For social nets, the opposite holds true. Because, ambiguity is the main product.
mcintyre1994 11y ago
> “The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” @sama, how do you explain this claim without ignoring the community's enormous support for Victoria Taylor?
- reustle 11y ago
  Those two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
  - Doji 11y ago
    This is nothing unusual. Ballmer and many other male CEO's have been treated abusively. People only notice it more because she's a woman.
- spacehome 11y ago
  Sam has to say this or else risk Ellen suing him too. I wouldn't read into anything he says more than that.
- archagon 11y ago
  Victoria rarely expressed any of her own opinions, especially controversial ones. She was a facilitator for interviews.
sergiotapia 11y ago
Ellen Pao was a scapegoat. She was the face of a lot of changes that didn't sit well with the community. Now the people clamor, they remove her, and the people are happy again. Notice how they didn't mention anything about reverting the bad changes to the website. ;)
chaostheory 11y ago
I'm not even going to debate whether or not she was an effective CEO. At the end of the day it's about the lawsuit, and I'm not going to argue the merits of that either. The only thing she should have realized from the start was that you can't have your cake and eat it too. You either choose reddit or the lawsuit. You can't divide your focus between both or you lose both.
rocky1138 11y ago
We keep hearing over and over again about how it's a small minority of vocal people who spew vitriol in any community, but how about providing some real, hard data? Reddit has enough data and skill to identify approximately the percetage of users who engaged in this type of behaviour at the very least. I'd rather see the numbers myself than read a press release simply stating something and being asked to believe it.
slr555 11y ago
I think the take away may be that Ellen Pao is not the executive that someone's hype machine purports her to be.
alhenaworks 11y ago
Perpetual PR nightmare averted.
thirdreplicator 11y ago
That's what you get for trying to turn the internet into Disneyland.
nohat 11y ago
That article was more suited for editorial than technology. Pao was hated mainly for things either done by reddit before her, or done by her before reddit. Unfortunately, as leaders often are, she was held responsible for both. That being said she was interim, and was apparently not aligned with reddit culturally. That's an internet thing, not, as this article was so quick to claim, a gender thing.
multinglets 11y ago
Hey I've got an idea: Let's all cry together because someone said something mean about a public figure. In fact, I'm incapable of discussing any other aspect of this event until this unspeakable atrocity has been addressed.
ScootyPuff4000 11y ago
Hooray!
electricarc 11y ago
This NYT report is as much detached from reality and propagandist as reporting on support for the 2003 Iraq war. Is Victoria, the popular Reddit employee fired, in support of whom all this affair happened, a male? Attempting such a propaganda in this connected day and age is supremely stupid.
Grue3 11y ago
Friendly reminder that this very website widely supported a campaign to make a black woman leave a board of a tech company. [1] And she actually didn't do anything questionable while being on board, to warrant such an outrage. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069
rayalez 11y ago
Sometimes internet-hate is completely arbitrary. Maybe she screwed up some things, I don't know, but from reading posts on reddit it felt like an arbitrary cat video going viral - the amount of attention was not warranted by the "causes". Remember PG getting all the shit on twitter because of his misunderstood statement about women? Outrage is a powerful emotion, and people enjoy participating in revolutions when it doesn't require any effort and can be done from the safety of a computer screen. I'm pretty sure 99% of people participating in this shitstorm had no good reason to care about it at all, and did it just because it felt "fun" to participate in something like this. Also - way to teach an angry mob that they can get what they want if they yell about it enough by giving in to their demands.

862 points by jonmarkgo 11y ago

Converting large-scale investor dollars into compelling returns using the world's most entitled and monomaniacal message board: not, in fact, an easy job. Pretty sure very few of us could do it either.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jstakeman 11y ago
It's remarkable how fast and how organized they were.
- fixxer 11y ago
  I was thinking the opposite. Feels like it took forever to extricate her.
  - jstakeman 11y ago
    It's been about a week... that's faster than South Carolina and its flag.
    - fixxer 11y ago
      Sure, since the outright protest, but the community has been against her since the start.
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      Not a very good comparison - the flag situation has been ongoing since the 1860s, and isn't done yet. (I grew up in SC.)
ctb__ 11y ago
*Communities
- deleted 11y ago
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- nissehulth 11y ago
  *Lynch mobs

ZoZoBee 11y ago

Wish her the best of luck where ever she ends up, so long as its not here....

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

15step 11y ago

Great to see Steve back in the fold

kaa2102 11y ago

That was quick but the corporate agenda being pushed flew in the face of the Reddit community. Power to the people!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

post_break 11y ago

I think most people just let out a sigh of relief.

nhf 11y ago

I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community. I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS: > As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward. All in all, a good day I think.

Flammy 11y ago
Link to full statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol... It is a good read.
ForEnglandJames 11y ago
>> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen So what. She got better than she deserved.
oldmanjay 11y ago
I'm curious about a few things, like just how many of the people on reddit making the noise are actually literally children. Probably quite a lot!
revelation 11y ago
You applaud them on a PR strategy that is akin to dictatorships all over the world denouncing opposition as "terrorists" and criminals? The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.
- 11y ago

goldfeld 11y ago

So can someone summarize the ordeal?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
weego 11y ago
She thought she could enforce her agenda onto an online community and it would all go well. Results as expected by anyone who has ever been part or observed an online community.
unchocked 11y ago
Ellen Pao has been CEO of Reddit for 8 months. A month or so ago, Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior. Since Pao had recently lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, aspects of the reddit community pattern-matched the occurances as "Social Justice Warrioring" and engaged in an organized hate-fest on Pao. About a week ago, Victoria, the admin who coordinated Reddit's "ask me anything" subreddits (interviews with celebrities for the most part) was fired for unknown reasons. The optics of this were handled poorly, and the community got enraged. Since the buck stopped with Pao, and she was already weakened due to the backlash on the earlier issue, this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised, and thus untenable as CEO. Edit: corrected tenure
- djloche 11y ago
  It wasn't just the 'optics'. They screwed up everything about it. They didn't have a replacement. They didn't have a transition period. They didn't have a clue how much work Victoria was doing. They didn't realize how significant she was to a number of core subreddits. They didn't realize how important those core subreddits were. They thought that none of these things mattered, and that a mere email address pointed to the rest of the reddit team could 'pick up the slack'. They didn't just screw up the optics - they royally screwed up, and then tried to laugh it off.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  > Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. If they had cleaned out all the trash at once, the community impact probably would have been minimal.

osetinsky 11y ago

rough year for her

ChickeNES 11y ago

Announcement on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

001sky 11y ago
Friday afternoon, eh? Someone took a PR class in college! -- Top Comment on that thread

gesman 11y ago

Wow, I applaud this development! Now, if Victoria is coming back too - that's would be 200% right move for reddit!

lisper 11y ago

So... who is replacing Steve at Hipmunk?

tacos 11y ago

Yup, she did awesome Sam. Especially recently. (Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.) I didn't even know who she was until "the last few months." Which have been a parade of increasingly-negative press and idiotic behavior. And that's from reading Reuters and the NY Times -- I don't even use Reddit. --- Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board... “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.

tsotha 11y ago
>Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted. Meh. It's traditional. There's nothing to be gained from running down your outgoing CEO. Besides, they hired her, so the worse she looks the worse their own judgement looks.

dvt 11y ago

Pretty much had to happen. To say that the Victoria situation was mishandled is a severe understatement. I wonder what will happen with communities like FPH and others (that have since moved to Voat). Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts? Time will tell. IMO, the problem at hand is that reddit is still trying to make advertisers their bread and butter. And advertisers will never be overly attracted to censorship-free spaces. Even though I may not agree with her aggressively politically-correct agenda (nor does most of reddit), I think it may have been a smart move from a business dev. perspective.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
> Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts? I doubt it. Garbage like FPH should have been dealt with much sooner. The reason there was a backlash about that at all, imo, is because they let it drag out too long. Reddit was the friend-parent for so long that when it finally came time to enforce some discipline, it came as a shock and felt like a betrayal.
- dvt 11y ago
  True, although it's important to note that there are still many communities that are much worse than FPH on reddit.
  - Ocerge 11y ago
    This is why it got so messy when they got rid of FPH. They did a MISERABLE job of defining the line on what is and is not appropriate. If you're going to censor, it better be a well-defined line.
  - wvenable 11y ago
    The issue is that these communities aren't frequently in the top of /r/all and causing outside issues. FPH just got too big and too obnoxious to ignore.
- post_break 11y ago
  Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS? They seemed to hide behind the vail of harassment and not peak behind the curtain of what reddit really is. Reddits problem is they said anything goes, and then years later they saw what they created.

ksenzee 11y ago

Reddit would do well to hire someone with experience in the association management field. Those folks specialize in managing fractious communities such that the volunteers not only stick around, they're happy to pay for the privilege.

CamperBob2 11y ago
But where are they going to find someone like that? Guess it's time to put an ad on Craigslist.

slg 11y ago

I will be interested to see if anything changes regarding the management of Reddit or at least the communities opinion of it. I wonder if the community will chalk this up as a win and suddenly forget all of the reasons they have been complaining which really have nothing to do with Pao in the first place.

noir_lord 11y ago

This entire debacle and the 'communities' (the small vocal part that acted horribly) response pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for me when it comes to reddit. With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna. Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now). Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Agreed. It's why I stay off Reddit.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ars 11y ago
I agree 100%. Except for certain sub-reddits, I go to reddit when I want to see what the idiots think. There was a time when I would read a news subreddit and reminded myself that every headline should be understood exactly in reverse. I stopped doing that because it's hard to keep up the mental filter. I think the problem is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September - reddit is mostly made up of stupid and bored teenagers.
tosseraccount 11y ago
Facebook's shortcomings on privacy keep me away.
amyjess 11y ago
I'm glad that most of the communities I'm part of sat out of this mess. The top subs I read and/or post to are /r/asktransgender, /r/ainbow, /r/comicbooks, and /r/kamenrider. None of them would've benefited from taking part in any kind of blackout (the first two of those function as support groups and any blackout could seriously hurt someone who needs help, the third is a mid-sized fandom where people care more about talking about their hobby than staging a juvenile protest, and the fourth is an extremely niche fandom so small that nobody would notice a blackout).

istvan__ 11y ago

I am opening a bottle of champagne and at the same time answer my own question: it took 3 weeks for the community to get rid off a tyrant. Well done Reddit! Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.

prawn 11y ago
PG has posted on HN saying that downvoting for disagreement is fine.
- caminante 11y ago
  I didn't know this for HN, though I'd seen it on Reddit. Thanks for passing this along. On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives. On reddit, I was familiar with the saying -- "downvote isn't disagree button." Though, the current rediquette has removed that language. Compare [1] (old) v. [2] (current). [1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette?v=08ebd986-6459-11e2-83d1-12313d182d8d https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette?v=08ebd986-6459-11e2... [2] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
  - stefantalpalaru 11y ago
    > On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with <~500 karma and I haven't seen many false positives. Unfortunately, it is a serious problem. The moment you become a dissonant voice is the moment you're downvoted into unreadability by the choir. Make no mistake, many people here have enough karma points to downvote and they are quick to react.
    - arprocter 11y ago
      I can't tell if the fact you got downvoted for this was a joke or not. Too many levels of meta?
- 11y ago

pkorzeniewski 11y ago

“Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said. What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists

tacos 11y ago
I don't even use Reddit and Sam's quote was so odd it caused me to comment below (probably turning more and more grey by the moment). In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community. I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pen2l 11y ago
  Sam said it for PR reasons. He also posted this one a Friday afternoon! Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.
ars 11y ago
I agree that nothing much as changed, but "majority"? Not in the slightest, the majority could not care less about this ruckus and think those agitators are idiots. Those people are a small, but vocal, minority.
- npizzolato 11y ago
  Maybe. I'm sure a large amount of redditors (maybe not majority) appreciate a well-run IAmA which manages bringing in celebrities and other big names. Pao's actions as CEO directly impacted their ability to do that.

minimaxir 11y ago

Ellen Pao gives the reason for leaving on /r/self: http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha... > So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles. This is believable because there have been odd business decisions under her watch, not just policy decisions. RedditMade, one of the intended revenue-generating models for Reddit, failed while she was interim CEO. Alienating /r/IAMA probably did not help.

calcol 11y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there was more to it, and the image that she has on Reddit was certainly not helpful, but she wasn't fired because of the backlash from last week and previous, because if that was the case she would have been fired much sooner, but instead she stepped down, by force or not, because she wasn't able to guarantee good revenue for Reddit by past actions and admission of the above.
kolbe 11y ago
Reading between the lines and viewing her resignation in the context of what she's had to go through in the past few months, she was harassed out of the job by the user base.
- return0 11y ago
  E. Pao and Brendan Eich are the two polar examples why the word 'harassment' has lost its meaning.
  - j_baker 11y ago
    You're not trying to say the two are comparable are you?
    - return0 11y ago
      In what way are they not?

bane 11y ago

Right or wrong, fair or unfair, or whatever you think about Ellen, I think most people agree that she had become personally and professionally toxic to reddit as a brand and community and even if she did a great job from here on out, it was going to be an uphill battle to restore community confidence in her as a CEO. I personally don't believe she had the right qualifications to lead a community-driven site like reddit as it is today, but would have the right qualifications if reddit was going to start making a serious pivot to a more lucrative money making direction via commercial partnerships, advertising, etc. Reddit may still go that direction, but Huffman won't have the same baggage weighing him down. (note: this will also likely feed the conspiracy that her turn in the head office was a convenience for her lawsuit, now that she lost, she has no reason to stay in that position) I agree with other comments chastising the community for the racist/sexist/whatever nature of lots of the negative comments against her. It was childish and dangerous. She had enough issues worthy of reasonable criticism that it wasn't even necessary. I think this is a good thing for reddit.

devindotcom 11y ago

Maybe I missed it, but was there ever any information on why Victoria was fired, or whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it? From where I was sitting, it seemed like no one actually learned the full story, which might be confidential or take time to contextualize/safely explain, and everyone immediately threw it on Pao's lap and downvoted any holding maneuvers she and the rest of the staff tried to attempt. It was poorly handled, sure, but it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening. For that matter, do we even know now? If I'm wrong, though, happy to correct my ideas here. (grammar edit)

davmre 11y ago
This (deleted) Quora post is the best explanation I've seen thus far: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--N83GXLMb--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1326107685476973672.jpg http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--N83GXLMb...
- Flammy 11y ago
  Interesting, thanks for sharing.
- pvg 11y ago
  Which was explicitly denied by reddit and is no different than any other piece of baseless speculation.
  - evolve2k 11y ago
    But it does seem to fit the corporate 'need to monetize' narrative quite well.
    - pvg 11y ago
      The bulk of that 'narrative' is speculative tinfoilhattery as well so of course it fits. See all the handwringing about potential monetization of AMA without anyone ever suggesting any kind of remotely plausible revenue model for it. And again, this is something reddit have addressed directly.

bedhead 11y ago

During the KP trial I had always kept an open mind towards her arguments...until I later learned she was married to Buddy Fletcher, one of the biggest scoundrels and thieves in the investment world in recent years. The character and judgment of a person who would fall in love and wed someone like that says more than I can articulate. It's oddly reassuring to see my (and many, many others') skepticism about both her judgment and motives validated.

lingben 11y ago
Everything about their saga is bizarre. Did you know that up until his marriage to Ellen, Buddy had lived as a homosexual? he was living with a partner of multiple years (Hobart “Bo” Fowlkes) and was openly gay. Not that there is anything odd or wrong about that. It is just rather strange how these two polarizing figures came together in a union. For more info and details see: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ellen-pao http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletch... And then there are the KP employee reviews and other internal documents which became public as a result of the trial she lost that show Ellen Pao to be a thoroughly unproductive and toxic employee who was given every opportunity to shape up but was too busy engrossed in the internal office politics and making 'enemy lists'. If someone made a movie about this stuff and the people involved, most would think it too unrealistic.
- nawitus 11y ago
  The article states that Buddy lived with a boyfriend, which is not the same as living as a homosexual, as he might be bisexual. Some other articles state that he was "openly gay", but perhaps those articles are slightly incorrect.
  - jacobwcarlson 11y ago
    The VF article also states that Fletcher dated exclusively women while at Harvard, and that "Fowlkes wasn’t surprised that his former boyfriend had become involved with a woman."
- 11y ago

arprocter 11y ago

I hope reddit has good legal representation...

onewaystreet 11y ago

> “It became clear that the board and I had a different view on the ability of Reddit to grow this year,” Ms. Pao said in an interview. “Because of that, it made sense to bring someone in that shared the same view.” Does this mean that the board thought Pao was being too aggressive in pushing growth or not aggressive enough? If it's the latter then the Reddit community is in for a shock.

josso 11y ago
Not aggressive enough: > So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles. http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
- calbear81 11y ago
  I can see how growing users organically was going to be tough, especially with the new community guidelines: 1) Pushing commercial IamAs was going to have a two-fold effect: increasing revenue and increasing traffic. Traffic would have basically come from Fortune 500 brands paying to drive traffic to Reddit via TV, online ads, etc. Companies today drive users to their own sites or to branded channels on YouTube or Facebook but not to Reddit. Sponsored IAmAs might have helped create a new stream of mainstream users but would have generated a large backlash with the moderators and the current rules on IamA (non-commercial). 2) Banning morally dubious but wildly popular content - The Fappening BROKE reddit. It drove so much traffic and introduced reddit to so many new users that by holding themselves to now a different standard of community policing, they are also banning from content that drives a lot of traffic growth. Celebrity, gossip and scandal brings all the eyeballs and $$$ to the yard. The only logical place for the type of growth they are looking for is mobile hence the push for more video content and anything that capitalizes on how people consume content now-a-days.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    #2 reminds me how reddit clamped down on the unauthorized nude photos, and then shamed the community for its behavior (correctly, IMHO). But then someone asked if reddit was going to refund all the gold purchased during and because of it, and AFAIK the admins just stopped talking about that. (If they did any more than say "that's a tough call" I missed it.) https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_for_his_own_soul/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r... It's tough to have a conscience when you are getting funding for violating it.

notsony 11y ago

>Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board, said he personally appreciated Ms. Pao’s efforts during her two years working at the start-up. “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said. This is clearly nonsense, otherwise there wouldn't have been a grassroots campaign to remove Ellen Pao from her role. If Sam Altman honestly believes that Ellen did a "phenomenal" job, he should reconsider his own position at YCombinator.

curiousjorge 11y ago
I think he was just being polite but then who knows, we don't get to see what's going on behind the scenes, we just see the outcome of their decisions.
- antirez 11y ago
  To say the contrary of what you think is not being polite, is a stupid communication rule that in other places of the world would just make things more complex to understand. There is the possibility to just express what you think in a balanced way. One can just say: she tried to fix a complex problem, that many experiences in the past proved to be very hard to fix. And she is stepping down now after the recent happenings. Or something like that, but to say he did an incredible job when all this mess happened is not a good form of communication.
  - curiousjorge 11y ago
    I'd agree for the most part but especially in North America, there is a culture of beating around the bush and most people avoid confrontation or directly addressing the problem of course unless the other person has an inability to recognize the issue. I'd say even for someone who has a large stake in a publicly visible company, it'd be tough to break that mold even more. I agree that it could've been better worded without coming out as blunt or being overly polite and politically correct. But then again, Ellen Pao sued her former employer based on questionable grounds (gender bias cried the wolf) and timing (her husband is bankrupt after scamming investors). If I was in Sam's position, I'd be careful not to awaken the bees nest and just hope that the cold season comes and they all die.

return0 11y ago

Isn't it already too late? How can a new captain save the sinking ship? The new CEO would be standing on a double edged sword. If he reverses course immediately claiming reddit an absolute free-speech enviromnent, the people who wanted a safe-space will be disillusioned, if he doesn't the rest of the users will keep seeking for another platform.

arprocter 11y ago
I'd suggest that the 'safe spacers' are on the wrong site. When anything gets as big as reddit there will always be unsavory things posted - flying the banner of 'free speech' for so long and then suddenly doing a 180 is what has made people annoyed
- return0 11y ago
  It doesnt really matter, reddit users move as packs, and they have been divided, so there's a danger the entire place will become deserted.
- knorby 11y ago
  The site banned posting personal information has enacted various community standards long before anything that happened recently. There is a pretty clear history, intent, and common sense around banning communities from using the to organize harassment and bringing other vile things into the world. They could have communicated that better, but there is no 180 to speak of.
dbpokorny 11y ago
Pushing hard on moderator tools. In the short term, Reddit should watch its moderators, look for usage patterns, and build systems to reduce moderation effort. In the long term, Reddit should develop artificial moderation (AM). Reddit is the natural place for the discipline of artificial moderation (using AI / ML to help moderate public forums) to develop. For example, an automated "argument detection" bot could intervene when two participants start going down the warpath, acting like a janitor who pushes two rowdy students apart when they start fighting. Or, a bot could detect when a post consists entirely of one participant insulting another and take appropriate action. These are difficult problems, but Reddit is sitting on a goldmine of training data in the form of the human-generated moderation logs. Reddit should either hire the talent to develop such systems or partner with those who already have (Google / IBM / ...).

tosseraccount 11y ago

There's a fine line between being polite and being so boring that it's stifling. Every commenting site has it's herd mentality and punishment of thought crimes. Reddit users just wore it on the their sleeves and trying to suppress them was silly. It might turn into DIGG 2 pretty fast and might not recover. The investors and the "community" are just too far a part on this.

muglug 11y ago

Will the anti-corporate brigades in these large community-driven sites make turning a profit impossible in the long-run?

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
No, the corporations will simply adapt and learn to play the anti-corporate tune to turn a profit. See Continuum, American Odyssey, Mr. Robot, The Lego Movie, and so on. You want an anti-corporate message and you are willing to pay for it? There are corporations ready to fulfill your need :-)
mindcrime 11y ago
I don't think so, because the degree of "anti corporate" sentiment varies dramatically from sub to sub. The thing is, it almost doesn't even make sense to talk about "The Reddit Community" as though it was any one, unified, cohesive whole, because it largely isn't.
- muglug 11y ago
  Agreed, but there's a subset of the reddit community that passionately rallies against comprehensive attempts to make the site more commercial in nature. And now, with this resignation, they're likely to feel emboldened.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    I'm not sure that keeping them around matters a whole lot to reddit as a company. People who resist monetization so heartily are unlikely to be anything but a drain on resources anyway.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Fair enough.

kolbe 11y ago

After seeing what Ellen went through, I think Sam will need to raise some more funds to offer a significant pay bump to entice even mediocre talent to fill her void.

jellicle 11y ago
Absolutely correct. There's no way that any moderately-intelligent woman would ever take the job now. Perhaps a fairly dim, elderly man who doesn't know much about social media and therefore is immune to the storms of reddit.
tsotha 11y ago
I doubt it. In a lot of ways she created her own problems. What they need is someone who focuses on the business side. People on reddit shouldn't care who the CEO is, and they wouldn't if they didn't feel the CEO was making the site worse.

seany 11y ago

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

MBCook 11y ago

I don't like this at all. Even if she wasn't the right person (I don't know), all the worst elements of the site are going to see this as a victory for their awful behavior and it's going to get worse. The people who attacked her with sexism and comments about her personal relationships. The people who supported FPH even though they were attacking people in real life and off Reddit, not just posting comments in their personal corner of 'discussion'. She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. I worry heavily that if the new person doesn't draw a clear line at the start things are going to get a lot worse in terms of hate/abuse/harassment. EDIT: After posting this I saw Nilay Patel tweeted basically the same thing: https://twitter.com/reckless/status/619620964658245632 https://twitter.com/reckless/status/619620964658245632

caractacus 11y ago
> She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. These are two separate things. The fact that she tried to stand up against some of the idiots that inhabit the site doesn't mitigate against the fact that she did not do a good job. She should have resigned or been fired for not doing a good job regardless of how well she coped with the jerks en masse.
- MBCook 11y ago
  They're not the same thing, my worry is that some Redditors (or employees) may not pay attention to the difference and avoid further cleanup.
lingben 11y ago
> but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. I'm baffled at how people misunderstand Ellen's actions in shutting down a few subreddits randomly. She did not 'clean' reddit of the worst of reddit nor 'hate' subreddits. In fact, there are still dozens and dozens of really disgusting stuff on reddit like /r/gasthekikes and /r/coontown Let's please stop this false narrative that she was a champion of some kind who came in and tried to 'clean up' reddit. Not only are there plenty of reprehensible stuff on reddit still, Ellen's claim that she targeted behavior and not speech rang hollow for the majority on reddit because communities like SRS were and are getting away with the same or worse behavior.

smitherfield 11y ago

I'm sorry to see it go down like this. Redditors treatment of her got really ugly (/r/all after the FPH banning was shocking) over the past few weeks, and it's disheartening to see people's bad behavior rewarded.

throwaway54984 11y ago
What about her bad behavior which affected many redditors?

ljk 11y ago

It's interesting how fast people go from hating[1] /u/kn0thing to love[2] him again [1]: https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama... [2]: https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/csz1gcn https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

edkennedy 11y ago
And then Ellen echoed his statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/csz1krm https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_th...
- ljk 11y ago
  what is happening, not used to reading positive interactions on reddit with that account...
unchocked 11y ago
I think it has to do with how mob psychology latches onto whatever is bright and shiny. So a character with both pros and cons in the mass narrative is able to be demonized one day and lionized the next, based on whichever trait sparkled more that day.
reustle 11y ago
I think it has a lot to do with how he handled it. He immediately came out after making that comment and said he screwed up big time and was really sorry. People took that as sincere, and I did too, since it was really only a single comment.

ElComradio 11y ago

PR that comes out of corporations cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Altman is being honest that he appreciated her efforts. We can't trust that her and her husband were in love. All of this that comes out of spokesmen is carefully crafted as a result of a numbers game. When do we hear "so and so CEO did a horrible job and was forced out by the board."? Never. So are we to believe there is no such thing as a terrible CEO? Will we hear Sam saying "We made a terrible decision putting her in charge."? Never. Even if it was the actual truth. Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman.

justizin 11y ago
> Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman. It seems like she's been the subject of vitriol primarily for being a woman, since a lot of the vitriol predates the past few days.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  As someone who has only watched this popcorn feast, I have the sense that she was the subject of vitriol primarily for taking actions that people didn't like. Many of the insults may well have targeted her gender, but that is not the same thing at all. I have seen literally no evidence that she was harassed simply for being a woman.
  - moskie 11y ago
    > I have seen literally no evidence that she was harassed simply for being a woman. Well, the litmus test can't be simply whether the harassment solely targeted her gender and nothing else. Sexism (and other forms of bigotry) have a more insidious nature to them.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      I didn't say there wasn't sexism. I do indeed believe that gendered insults are the result of sexism. I am, however, stating that the genesis of the entire Ellen Pao affair seemed to be about her actions, not her womanhood.

jug5 11y ago

Hope you go away forever chairman Pao.

pfisch 11y ago

The real question is will Ellen Pao sue reddit now?

deleted 11y ago

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trhway 11y ago

Seems like Reddit hired Ellen without checking up her references at the previous job, ie. Kleiner, and now they harvest the same results - insufficient performance and high scandals. (note: there is nothing about her sex here - just read the case materials and you'll see that she behaved just like a jerk at Kleiner - for God sake she complained there that some assistant was using company fax to send brain scans of dying from cancer mother)

jellicle 11y ago
If you read the case materials, you discover her peers and superiors generally rated her performance as exceeding expectations.
- trhway 11y ago
  i did read the materials and discovered that they clearly understood that a rattlesnake they've got on their hands and were very cautious to not get that rattlesnake angry (and thus in particular very carefully worded reviews with nowhere close to real "exceeding expectations") and were just waiting for her to leave on her own ( they even paid her to do that if I remember correctly - ie. she was more worth to them being gone than working for them )

deleted 11y ago

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scobar 11y ago

In the 24th Upvoted by Reddit podcast, Steve and Alexis talked about all the great content and communities hiding within Reddit that go undiscovered. I'm excited to see how they'll try to solve that problem, and hope they find a great solution. Reddit is really great, and it's very cool to see both Steve and Alexis back to enjoy and advance it.

brock_r 11y ago

Reddit: The world's largest drunken mob.

puranjay 11y ago

As someone who frequents only a couple of subs on Reddit (which were completely insulated from this fiasco), I have no idea why people were so pissed off. So she made a bad decision. Big fcking deal. "She's killing the community!". Well, if your idea of 'community' is making public rape threads (while you use a throwaway) and threaten to kill a person, then maybe your community deserves to die. Reddit has a lot* of good. I've been there long enough to see it. But it has a lot of absolute low-lifes clogging its sewers as well.

tmerr 11y ago
I think users were pissed off because of the lack of transparency. No one knew what the admins were deleting. It was up to the community to find out which subreddits were banned and why. Further the admins never logically explained their decisions, for example, to ban fph over srs. From the outside it seemed like an arbitrary power trip. And for what? Reddit's moderation system is perfect: let users form their own communities and moderate them as they wish. Some of the communities will be terrible but that's the beauty of it; you don't have to go to them. This system is what let reddit grow to the size it is today. While hackernews takes a different approach (moderation at the admin level isn't unusual) that is only manageable for a site of a smaller size.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  It seems to me that HN is more like a single subreddit than Reddit as a whole. The admin action on HN feels more like mod action on Reddit, because there is no larger umbrella above HN.
  - deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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luckydude 11y ago

I posted this over on reddit but it got lost in the noise: Cool, I guess. But after having spent some time on voat.co I think reddit will get less and less of my attention (not that anyone gives a shit about me but I suspect I'm not alone). Reddit's management has destroyed any sense of trust I had in Reddit (I'm looking at you /u/kn0thing, it's not just Ellen, my understanding is you fired Victoria, right? And then grabbed popcorn [I know, cheap shot, but it appears like you really fell out of touch]). It appears that it is all about making money which I think is going to be the end of Reddit for some of us. Reddit could have a decent revenue stream on reasonable ads but that wasn't enough, it had to be more. That is really troubling because the next thing you might decide to "monetize" is what each of your users reads. That would make the NSA look amateurs and would be a massive invasion of privacy. It would also be very easy to monetize. Given all that has been going on, it would appear to be just a matter of time before "user optimized marketing" appears. Welcome back but the existing management has dug you a mighty big hole. I don't trust you any more.

luckydude 11y ago
Huh. I may have to walk that back. I just got back from cleaning up some Greg Chesson's computers (he passed on) so I haven't been watching stuff. Caught up and read Steve Huffman's stuff, he seems like the real deal, he seems to care, be all over it, maybe he'll fix it. He at least sounds like someone who gives a shit about the right things. So maybe I'm wrong, it happens.

robot22 11y ago

The one take away I have from this situation is that we have an honesty problem. People criticize Reddit as a platform of hate and vitrol, but as in reality this only partially describes the entirety. They complain that people on the internet are too free to speak their minds, but perhaps this is a reflection on our society a place where honesty and the free exchange of ideas is discouraged. Response to material: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-the-internet-we-wanted-and-thats-a-pro#.mkVMY61GKa http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-... Food for thought: https://www.facebook.com/psiljamaki/posts/10153334440110516?notif_t=like https://www.facebook.com/psiljamaki/posts/10153334440110516?...

myrandomcomment 11y ago

As a CEO she chose to take actions in manner and method that allowed things to spiral out of control. It was her job to control the message and blowback. She failed at her job, therefore she needed to go. It is really that simple.

generic_user 11y ago

The knife cuts both ways. The clickbait media and various groups are trying to paint the now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again. Over 200,000 people with legitimate concerns sign a petition to have Pao step down yet they still carry on with there charade. People are sick and tired of the media and a small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with. They engage in all forms of harassment, trying to get people fired, posting addresses and family pictures etc. The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits. All of which is factual information available to the public and even the media has to admit these things are facts. The clickbait media has to be called out more then anyone for trying to turn every issue no matter how banal into a black and white battle between good and evil and then fanning the flames on both sides. Its extremely cynical mostly to drive traffic to there sites. There is zero accountability in the media today and zero ethics. Everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations.

deleted 11y ago
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magicalist 11y ago
> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits. All of which is factual information available to the public and even the media has to admit these things are facts. Oh please. You can disclaim the disgusting statements made all over reddit recently as not part of a coherent community or whatever, but don't pretend they didn't exist at all. As for the rest of this nonsense, the statement quoted had nothing to do with "clickbait media and various groups" (I seriously feel like we're in talking points memos territory with this stuff), this is a statement from Sam Altman, so take it up with him. > There is zero accountability in the media today and zero ethics. Everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations. I mean, seriously, what on earth are you addressing here? Who are you talking to?
- 11y ago

scotty79 11y ago

Corporations are like sea of cockroaches on the dark floor. They look vast. Roaches have their little fights and wars, but when they make some random noise and draw outside attention, it's funny to look how individual cockroaches run away from the spotlight.

iblaine 11y ago

Being the CEO of reddit is a political position. And Ellen Pao has too much drama in her life to be a good politician. Losing a sexual harassment case, marrying a crook who stole millions...those are events that don't happen by accident.

golergka 11y ago

So, there are two stories people use to sum all the affair up: either "the witch is dead", or "pitchfork mob got what they wanted". But neither of these stories really fit the information we have right now. Both of them fit some of it, and look realistic — unless you look at the whole picture. The best conclusion we can have here is that we don't actually know what's _really_ going on, just a bunch of facts and a couple of theories.

yegor256a 11y ago

Who is Ellen Pao?

reddytowns 11y ago
She is Reddit's Chief.

neur0tek 11y ago

quelle surprise

justonepost 11y ago

Don't piss off Kleiner perkins, that's all I can say...

neur0tek 11y ago

quelle surprise

atarian 11y ago

Even on the internet, mob mentality wins.

musesum 11y ago

I wonder if a Law Degree runs counter to running a social network? Where authority bumps up against anarchy. Imagine Peter Thiel running reddit. Both Thiel and Pao have law degrees. Both have been lightning rods. I suspect a JD comes in handy for some ventures. Such as Thiel running Paypal or Pao sourcing funding for RPX. In both of those cases, it is about removing ambiguity. For social nets, the opposite holds true. Because, ambiguity is the main product.

mcintyre1994 11y ago

> “The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” @sama, how do you explain this claim without ignoring the community's enormous support for Victoria Taylor?

reustle 11y ago
Those two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
- Doji 11y ago
  This is nothing unusual. Ballmer and many other male CEO's have been treated abusively. People only notice it more because she's a woman.
spacehome 11y ago
Sam has to say this or else risk Ellen suing him too. I wouldn't read into anything he says more than that.
archagon 11y ago
Victoria rarely expressed any of her own opinions, especially controversial ones. She was a facilitator for interviews.

sergiotapia 11y ago

Ellen Pao was a scapegoat. She was the face of a lot of changes that didn't sit well with the community. Now the people clamor, they remove her, and the people are happy again. Notice how they didn't mention anything about reverting the bad changes to the website. ;)

chaostheory 11y ago

I'm not even going to debate whether or not she was an effective CEO. At the end of the day it's about the lawsuit, and I'm not going to argue the merits of that either. The only thing she should have realized from the start was that you can't have your cake and eat it too. You either choose reddit or the lawsuit. You can't divide your focus between both or you lose both.

rocky1138 11y ago

We keep hearing over and over again about how it's a small minority of vocal people who spew vitriol in any community, but how about providing some real, hard data? Reddit has enough data and skill to identify approximately the percetage of users who engaged in this type of behaviour at the very least. I'd rather see the numbers myself than read a press release simply stating something and being asked to believe it.

slr555 11y ago

I think the take away may be that Ellen Pao is not the executive that someone's hype machine purports her to be.

alhenaworks 11y ago

Perpetual PR nightmare averted.

thirdreplicator 11y ago

That's what you get for trying to turn the internet into Disneyland.

nohat 11y ago

That article was more suited for editorial than technology. Pao was hated mainly for things either done by reddit before her, or done by her before reddit. Unfortunately, as leaders often are, she was held responsible for both. That being said she was interim, and was apparently not aligned with reddit culturally. That's an internet thing, not, as this article was so quick to claim, a gender thing.

multinglets 11y ago

Hey I've got an idea: Let's all cry together because someone said something mean about a public figure. In fact, I'm incapable of discussing any other aspect of this event until this unspeakable atrocity has been addressed.

ScootyPuff4000 11y ago

Hooray!

electricarc 11y ago

This NYT report is as much detached from reality and propagandist as reporting on support for the 2003 Iraq war. Is Victoria, the popular Reddit employee fired, in support of whom all this affair happened, a male? Attempting such a propaganda in this connected day and age is supremely stupid.

Grue3 11y ago

Friendly reminder that this very website widely supported a campaign to make a black woman leave a board of a tech company. [1] And she actually didn't do anything questionable while being on board, to warrant such an outrage. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069

rayalez 11y ago

Sometimes internet-hate is completely arbitrary. Maybe she screwed up some things, I don't know, but from reading posts on reddit it felt like an arbitrary cat video going viral - the amount of attention was not warranted by the "causes". Remember PG getting all the shit on twitter because of his misunderstood statement about women? Outrage is a powerful emotion, and people enjoy participating in revolutions when it doesn't require any effort and can be done from the safety of a computer screen. I'm pretty sure 99% of people participating in this shitstorm had no good reason to care about it at all, and did it just because it felt "fun" to participate in something like this. Also - way to teach an angry mob that they can get what they want if they yell about it enough by giving in to their demands.