5 ms·

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.
  - sampo 11y ago
    > While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. I think "organized harassment" here means, people form the banned subs reached out to harass people in the real life, outside of reddit. Not just posting vile stuff in a sub.
    - joshuapants 11y ago
      Yes, that's exactly what I said. There have been doxxings and harassment campaigns from plenty of subreddits, and only a few were removed.
- GhotiFish 11y ago
  > this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised could you elaborate on this?
  - unchocked 11y ago
    The community turned against her. To illustrate, her apology thread appears to have no further comments from her (making Pao appear aloof), but in reality she did make several mature and understanding comments in the thread, but they each accumulated thousands of downvoted and were buried. Simply put, she became a lightning rod and people's animosity toward her meant that she could no longer be effective as the executive of a community-driven organization. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
  - allthetime 11y ago
    In a very short period of time, a very vocal and visible part of the reddit community basically took over the site lashing out against Pao (you couldn't go there without reading about how Pao was ruining reddit). This happened once with the subreddit bannings, and then couple weeks later with Victoria's firing. This powerful section of the reddit community's opinion of Pao is basically ruined at this point, and any further perceived transgressions on her part would no doubt lead to even larger, more damaging backlashes. It seems the protests have had their intended effect and demonstrated to reddit's management that the community is essentially what drives the site's success (or failure) and that they need to keep this in mind when forming plans for the future. Keeping Pao on as CEO was only fracturing the community, so she had to go.
- erikj1321 11y ago
  Pao was CEO for only 8 months until now, she even says so in her resignation note. http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mmanfrin 11y ago
Whole situation started when reddit closed a few hateful subreddits (r/fatpeoplehate, and a few racist ones as well); a very vocal backlash came from the contingent of reddit that believes the admins have no right to 'regulate free speech'. The site was brigaded and flooded with anti-Pao posts (who they saw as their villain) which then turned to racist 'Chairman Pao' posts, posts with her and a nazi flag, etc. After a while this calmed down. A week ago reddit fired/let go Victoria, who was the liaison for hundreds of celebrities and reddit, often transcribing entire IAmAs (community interviews). Victoria's departure was immediate and caused a lot of planned IAmAs to be postponed or canceled, since she was the go-between (and in some cases the only point of contact). A few major moderators were angry and posted about their displeasure at Victoria's departure and the general lack of interface admins have with moderators. This snowballed in to a 'blackout' of many major subreddits for about a day (longer for a few of the smaller ones). One of the admins posted a 'Popcorn tastes good...' comment when people asked him what he thought of the anger; which fanned the flames. The major protests died down after about a day or two, but a few subreddits spawned for the specific purpose of continuing the protest and to oust Pao. These people brigaded most posts about Pao and promoted the petition link calling for her removal. The anti-Pao rhetoric continued at full force (with the usual racist 'Chairman Pao' meme, nazi flags, posts of her photo to a subreddit called 'punchablefaces'). In summary: Pao and admins were wrong to not communicated with the moderators more, especially when it came to Victoria; the original protest had legitimate legs but then devolved in to the same 4chan-esque bile that happens any time reddit makes some sort of administrative move. That awful bile of protest is what kept the flames going which led to Pao stepping down.
Flammy 11y ago
Two major publicly visible actions: 1) Banning of several 'hate' subreddits especially /r/FatPeopleHate for harassment. The harassment was kind of dubious, as while they certainly weren't saying nice things, it didn't seem like they were actively doing 'raids' or doxing. At the same time several significantly worse, but smaller, subreddits remained online (gore, racism, sexism, etc) More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_was_rfatpeoplehate_along_with_several_other/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa... 2) Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Notably Victoria, who coordinated numerous AMAs with key people, and her removal completely cut off communications with several planned AMAs, including several that were live. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa... Both events were followed by a large amount of anti-Pao hate and general massive amounts of spammy posts for 2-3 days taking over the front page of reddit. The first instance also involved lots of new subreddits that would get banned, before another dozen would appear in an endless game of whack-a-mole.
- amyjess 11y ago
  > Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Let's be perfectly honest here: that was Yishan's thing. He announced that change and set it into motion before he resigned.
  - mmanfrin 11y ago
    ? I thought Yishan left because he wasn't a fan of moving to SF. e: half correct, they were in SF, moving to a new SF office but he wanted instead for the new office to be in Daly City: "Then, when it came time to relocate from one San Francisco office to another, Wong put his foot down, Reddit sources say, and said he wanted to move the company to Daly City. “I felt that locating an office in San Francisco proper is an incredibly difficult thing given the strains the city is facing and the high rents it imposes on employees who wish to live close to the office,” Wong said" http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/11/14/yishan-wong-leaves-reddit-because-hes-completely-worn-out/ http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/11/14/yishan-wong-leaves-red...
noobie 11y ago
Here's an analogy: Imagine a pub (Digg) that everyone in town went to. Everything was great until the pub decided to try to make more money by forcing patrons to sit a certain way. Everyone in town decided to boycott this pub, and then they found another pub (Reddit), that didn't have the silly monetization scheme that the Digg pub had. The influx of new patrons turned this quiet little pub in the corner of the town into the main pub in town. Everyone was welcome in this pub - sports types, gamers, geeks, fitness nerds. Everyone had their own little corner, and for a few years the pub provided the town with a place to meet up with people of similar interest, even if the interests were darker in nature. During the last year, the pub decided to hire a new manager (Ellen Pao). The new manager wants the pub to be a more welcoming place for people of all types so she decides to ban a group of rowdy patrons. However, other patrons felt that Ellen Pao intruded on their freedom to express themselves and their own opinions in the pub, and an uprising took place. To calm the uprising, Pao decides to completely silence people who talked shit about her (shadowbans, subreddit bans), and bans out even more groups of people. Patrons were NOT happy about this situation. Then, the managers of this pub decided to fire a very well loved employee who contributed a lot to bringing awesome guests to the pub, without letting the patrons or the other employees know about it. This made other employees of the pub very angry, as they all loved what she does for the community. To make matters worse, the managers make snide comments about the situation. Due to the previous Ellen Pao bannings and the recent firing, everyone in the pub decides to riot in whatever way they can. They also consider moving to a new pub in town (voat.co) though the pub seems to always be full. People were angry, and they knew they have the power to completely render Reddit unpopular, just like they did with Digg. Reddit listened to the community rather than got stuck inside their own views on what the website should or should not be and the resignation of Pao was the outcome; a good PR move.
- jff 11y ago
  That's a pretty poor analogy since it's basically just the regular explanation with s/website/pub/ applied.
  - noobie 11y ago
    "it's basically just the regular explanation with the regular expression s/website/pub/ applied" would've sounded wittier but, joke aside, I am sorry you see it that way.
rverghes 11y ago
Failure to understand Non-Profit 101. If you rely on unpaid volunteers, you can't afford to enrage them. It doesn't really matter if those volunteers are right or wrong.

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.
- sampo 11y ago
  > While leaving up other subreddits that also have organized harassment behavior. I think "organized harassment" here means, people form the banned subs reached out to harass people in the real life, outside of reddit. Not just posting vile stuff in a sub.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what I said. There have been doxxings and harassment campaigns from plenty of subreddits, and only a few were removed.
GhotiFish 11y ago
> this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised could you elaborate on this?
- unchocked 11y ago
  The community turned against her. To illustrate, her apology thread appears to have no further comments from her (making Pao appear aloof), but in reality she did make several mature and understanding comments in the thread, but they each accumulated thousands of downvoted and were buried. Simply put, she became a lightning rod and people's animosity toward her meant that she could no longer be effective as the executive of a community-driven organization. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
- allthetime 11y ago
  In a very short period of time, a very vocal and visible part of the reddit community basically took over the site lashing out against Pao (you couldn't go there without reading about how Pao was ruining reddit). This happened once with the subreddit bannings, and then couple weeks later with Victoria's firing. This powerful section of the reddit community's opinion of Pao is basically ruined at this point, and any further perceived transgressions on her part would no doubt lead to even larger, more damaging backlashes. It seems the protests have had their intended effect and demonstrated to reddit's management that the community is essentially what drives the site's success (or failure) and that they need to keep this in mind when forming plans for the future. Keeping Pao on as CEO was only fracturing the community, so she had to go.
erikj1321 11y ago
Pao was CEO for only 8 months until now, she even says so in her resignation note. http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

mmanfrin 11y ago

Whole situation started when reddit closed a few hateful subreddits (r/fatpeoplehate, and a few racist ones as well); a very vocal backlash came from the contingent of reddit that believes the admins have no right to 'regulate free speech'. The site was brigaded and flooded with anti-Pao posts (who they saw as their villain) which then turned to racist 'Chairman Pao' posts, posts with her and a nazi flag, etc. After a while this calmed down. A week ago reddit fired/let go Victoria, who was the liaison for hundreds of celebrities and reddit, often transcribing entire IAmAs (community interviews). Victoria's departure was immediate and caused a lot of planned IAmAs to be postponed or canceled, since she was the go-between (and in some cases the only point of contact). A few major moderators were angry and posted about their displeasure at Victoria's departure and the general lack of interface admins have with moderators. This snowballed in to a 'blackout' of many major subreddits for about a day (longer for a few of the smaller ones). One of the admins posted a 'Popcorn tastes good...' comment when people asked him what he thought of the anger; which fanned the flames. The major protests died down after about a day or two, but a few subreddits spawned for the specific purpose of continuing the protest and to oust Pao. These people brigaded most posts about Pao and promoted the petition link calling for her removal. The anti-Pao rhetoric continued at full force (with the usual racist 'Chairman Pao' meme, nazi flags, posts of her photo to a subreddit called 'punchablefaces'). In summary: Pao and admins were wrong to not communicated with the moderators more, especially when it came to Victoria; the original protest had legitimate legs but then devolved in to the same 4chan-esque bile that happens any time reddit makes some sort of administrative move. That awful bile of protest is what kept the flames going which led to Pao stepping down.

Flammy 11y ago

Two major publicly visible actions: 1) Banning of several 'hate' subreddits especially /r/FatPeopleHate for harassment. The harassment was kind of dubious, as while they certainly weren't saying nice things, it didn't seem like they were actively doing 'raids' or doxing. At the same time several significantly worse, but smaller, subreddits remained online (gore, racism, sexism, etc) More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_was_rfatpeoplehate_along_with_several_other/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa... 2) Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Notably Victoria, who coordinated numerous AMAs with key people, and her removal completely cut off communications with several planned AMAs, including several that were live. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa... Both events were followed by a large amount of anti-Pao hate and general massive amounts of spammy posts for 2-3 days taking over the front page of reddit. The first instance also involved lots of new subreddits that would get banned, before another dozen would appear in an endless game of whack-a-mole.

amyjess 11y ago
> Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Let's be perfectly honest here: that was Yishan's thing. He announced that change and set it into motion before he resigned.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  ? I thought Yishan left because he wasn't a fan of moving to SF. e: half correct, they were in SF, moving to a new SF office but he wanted instead for the new office to be in Daly City: "Then, when it came time to relocate from one San Francisco office to another, Wong put his foot down, Reddit sources say, and said he wanted to move the company to Daly City. “I felt that locating an office in San Francisco proper is an incredibly difficult thing given the strains the city is facing and the high rents it imposes on employees who wish to live close to the office,” Wong said" http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/11/14/yishan-wong-leaves-reddit-because-hes-completely-worn-out/ http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/11/14/yishan-wong-leaves-red...

noobie 11y ago

Here's an analogy: Imagine a pub (Digg) that everyone in town went to. Everything was great until the pub decided to try to make more money by forcing patrons to sit a certain way. Everyone in town decided to boycott this pub, and then they found another pub (Reddit), that didn't have the silly monetization scheme that the Digg pub had. The influx of new patrons turned this quiet little pub in the corner of the town into the main pub in town. Everyone was welcome in this pub - sports types, gamers, geeks, fitness nerds. Everyone had their own little corner, and for a few years the pub provided the town with a place to meet up with people of similar interest, even if the interests were darker in nature. During the last year, the pub decided to hire a new manager (Ellen Pao). The new manager wants the pub to be a more welcoming place for people of all types so she decides to ban a group of rowdy patrons. However, other patrons felt that Ellen Pao intruded on their freedom to express themselves and their own opinions in the pub, and an uprising took place. To calm the uprising, Pao decides to completely silence people who talked shit about her (shadowbans, subreddit bans), and bans out even more groups of people. Patrons were NOT happy about this situation. Then, the managers of this pub decided to fire a very well loved employee who contributed a lot to bringing awesome guests to the pub, without letting the patrons or the other employees know about it. This made other employees of the pub very angry, as they all loved what she does for the community. To make matters worse, the managers make snide comments about the situation. Due to the previous Ellen Pao bannings and the recent firing, everyone in the pub decides to riot in whatever way they can. They also consider moving to a new pub in town (voat.co) though the pub seems to always be full. People were angry, and they knew they have the power to completely render Reddit unpopular, just like they did with Digg. Reddit listened to the community rather than got stuck inside their own views on what the website should or should not be and the resignation of Pao was the outcome; a good PR move.

jff 11y ago
That's a pretty poor analogy since it's basically just the regular explanation with s/website/pub/ applied.
- noobie 11y ago
  "it's basically just the regular explanation with the regular expression s/website/pub/ applied" would've sounded wittier but, joke aside, I am sorry you see it that way.

rverghes 11y ago

Failure to understand Non-Profit 101. If you rely on unpaid volunteers, you can't afford to enrage them. It doesn't really matter if those volunteers are right or wrong.