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As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. I have no idea whether Ellen was a capa

As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. I have no idea whether Ellen was a capable CEO, but the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally (through other news articles and here on HN) was absolutely appalling.

DennisP 11y ago
It depends on the subreddits. With my subscriptions I barely noticed the whole thing.
- ljk 11y ago
  Only sub'd in smaller subreddits; didn't know everything was happening until I saw it on hn
- colinbartlett 11y ago
  I've been a heavy reddit user for 8 years and I did not know about this until I read about it in the New York Times. It's really a small subset of the reddits that were touched by the entire ordeal.
  - city41 11y ago
    It completely and totally dominated /r/all for days, even weeks. /r/all is an aggregate of the most popular posts for the entire site, so I disagree only a small subset were affected. Maybe in number of subreddits, but the subreddits that were affected are absolutely gigantic.
    - danielweber 11y ago
      Most people are completely unaware of /r/all
      - colinbartlett 11y ago
        Certainly not unaware just definitely not interested.
      - danieldk 11y ago
        Isn't that what you get when going to the site while not being logged in? (I echo the comments that say that Reddit has great subreddits like /r/Haskell and it's easy to mis all of this when you are just subscribed to a few subreddits.)
        tomjen3 11y ago
        No, you get a restricted set of /all with posts from some subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/2ycn0x/list_of_default_subreddits_march_8_2015/ https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/2ycn0x/list_of_de... is the current list.
      - Nemcue 11y ago
        You say this with certainty? Do you know this to be true? Because I seriously doubt it.
    - geofft 11y ago
      I'm not subscribed to any of the default subreddits; I imagine very many long-time users are the same way. I never read /r/all precisely because it's an aggregate of posts on subreddits I don't care about. In particular, I'm subscribed to no general-purpose or wide-purpose subreddits. A few city/geographic subreddits mentioned it in passing, but, like, /r/programming or /r/nycbike or /r/radicalchristianity are going to treat any post about it as off-topic. You can't just post an advice animal about it, or request IAmAs from everyone involved, or say that today you learned whatever-it-may-be about Ellen Pao, or what have you. Nor can you do this about any other topic, which is why I bother to read these subreddits.
      - wvenable 11y ago
        I browse /r/all occasionally to get out of the bubble of the subs I'm subscribed to. And sometimes there is a popular post in an obscure subreddit that I've never heard of before and get that gets me to subscribe.
        bluecalm 11y ago
        They could add something like sub-reddit tags: NSFW, offensive, video games, sports, technical etc. Then on r/all NSW/offensive are disabled by default (the same way NSFW is rigth now - you need to change your account settings). Problem solved, FPH will never make it to people who don't want to see offensive staff.
        geofft 11y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding what the commenters in this subthread are saying. It's not simply that I don't want to see FPH. I also don't want to see advice animals, documentaries, creepypasta, or jokes. I have nothing against these as forms of content, it's just not what I visit Reddit for. And even among technology, I have no interest in seeing things about Ruby or Go. Again, it's not that I dislike the languages, it's that they're not professionally relevant to me at the moment so it's not what I visit Reddit for. So what we need is some way for subreddits to be tagged with their own content: /r/rust about Rust, /r/python about Python, /r/sandersforpresident about Bernie, etc., and some /r/all equivalent that just matches what I'm interested in -- which is exactly what https://reddit.com https://reddit.com is for me, right now. I don't need /r/all to be fixed; I have no interest in even seeing "all technology" or "all religion" or "all presidential candidates". FPH being or not being on /r/all is irrelevant.
- geofft 11y ago
  As I mentioned last time this was on HN, me three. I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent. On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page. I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    There are many technical solutions here. First is realizing that there are technical solutions. Some people say "you don't want technical solutions to social problems" but the fact that subreddits have no protection against brigading at all is a serious design flaw with reddit[1]. Second is some way to require subscription for some period of time for votes to appear or to count. The CSS-hack stuff was silly, and as someone who has been on reddit since its first year, I have never seen the CSS-side of reddit because I never turned it on. One of the big complaints from the blackout was the complete lack of tool support and this is an example. Reddit tried to paper over the technical shortcoming with rules and social hacks but once different reddit communities who didn't like each other realized there was a way to attack each other they did so. [1] to be fair I wouldn't have realized it either if I was in charge of the subreddit design
- comrh 11y ago
  The problem is some of the worst parts of reddit love to leak into the innocent, fun sections. My first experience with /r/fatpeoplehate was because one of the trolls started harassing a poster in /r/adventuretime who just wanted to show off an awesome hat she made. It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.
dimino 11y ago
I came this close to not even knowing about this, until someone posted something in /r/dataisbeautiful about Ellen Pao's comment karma over time. Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.
- Nadya 11y ago
  This? https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png I find it telling it was negative a majority of the time. Usually "mods" get +1'd just for being mods (common on many forums). It shows, to me at least, that what she said rarely was supported by the community.
  - j_lev 11y ago
    Wow. Am I the only one that sees this as possibly the greatest potential "turnaround" story ever created?
  - dimino 11y ago
    I completely and utterly disagree with this opinion, and furthermore find it dangerous for what it suggests - specifically, the idea that a large group of anonymous people can do anything but fall prey to their collective impulse. I would argue that decisions of large bodies of anonymous people are historically and demonstrably inaccurate, misleading, nearsighted, and wholly terrible for not only the decision they're making, but also the good of the body itself. Groups of people, at a sufficient capacity, are simply some of the worst, most base, and utterly abhorrent things to exist on this planet, and claiming that the disapproval displayed by the group calling itself "Reddit" is "telling" would be, to say the least, a misstep.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      I'm confused how having a negative karma on Reddit is not a sign that people on Reddit find you disagreeable. It's a metric designed to showcase one's agreeability or disagreeability. If more people agree with you than disagree with you: karma will largely reflect that. If it's consistently negative, people consistently disagree with you. Having a trend over time allows for a better judgement as karma is a metric that can change drastically over time. A generally disagreeable person can have a huge spike in positive karma but that doesn't mean they're liked overall. So it helps that the chart shows as far back as 2013. A slow overall increase with several downward trends means you're generally agreeable but have a controversial opinion (opposed to the "collective group mentality"). A slow overall decrease with an upward trend now and then means you're generally disagreeable and occasionally say something the community agrees with. Her karma over time tells me that she's generally disagreeable with a few moments that brought her from "negative" to "neutral" and that before the subreddit bans her popularity was spiraling downwards, hit a full catalyst, and the apology was rather well received. If her karma was overall positive and only trended negatively in light of the subreddit ban and the Victoria mishap - it'd be telling of a very different story. The fact that it's been consistently negative is telling of the larger picture.
throwaway999666 11y ago
That sounds reasonable; only observe one side of the conflict and none of what might have provoked it and base your whole opinion on that.
sbilstein 11y ago
Honestly I'm so disappointed that Reddit's management allowed such a crappy culture to evolve in their forums for so long. I remember signing on in 2010 and just feeling really uncomfortable browsing any of the major subreddits. Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?
- nostrademons 11y ago
  The Reddit founders had very strong ideas about censorship and freedom of speech, and so as a matter of principle, they refused to censor subreddits unless the latter were breaking the law. As far as growth goes, this was probably the right choice, as a lot of Reddit's userbase came from previously marginalized groups who now had a forum for their interests on the Internet. Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site. Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.
  - nopenopeyep 11y ago
    a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      But the moderation is part of what keeps it a fairly enjoyable experience still IMO.
jodah 11y ago
> the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally... was absolutely appalling. I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).
- otterley 11y ago
  Do you have a primary source for this information?
  - jodah 11y ago
    Not sure what the downvoting is all about - let's hope you never get cancer. The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_former_reddit_employee_and_leukemia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo... It was on HN a while back.
    - SloopJon 11y ago
      > The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit It looks like Dacvak deleted his own posts: "Edit: I've removed this post. All future discussions regarding this subject will be between me and reddit."
      - jodah 11y ago
        I think he just deleted that one post. The rest were deleted by Reddit, as was the entire conversation for a while, before being restored.
- KVFinn 11y ago
  >I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less). That employee got cancer in 2012. He got a salary for almost two years while too sick to work, of the total three years he was at the company. Four months of that salary undo Pao. Then he got an additional full year of health coverage when they finally couldn't wait any longer to fill his position. He was never well enough to even move to the Reddit officers, which was the plan when they hired him in 2012. That's not just not despicable, it's laudable, and it's better than how you'd be treated at 99% of companies in the US. And somehow this became twisted by the furious mob into a story about a vicious CEO firing someone for having cancer? (Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick. Although ironically in this case this employee didn't even qualify for that since he got sick before he was at the company for 12 months.) That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is appalling. Seriously appalling.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
This is the best description of reddit I've found so far: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/619625808403894272 https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/619625808403894272
- eli 11y ago
  As an aside, I think it's notable how Metafilter has maintained a high-quality link aggregation/discussion forum over many years through the use of community norms and relatively aggressive moderation.
- glass- 11y ago
  That analogy doesn't account for what happens when a submission gets posted to both a "pinot" subreddit and a "sewage" subreddit, and subscribers in the sewage subreddit see the post in the pinot subreddit from the other discussions tab and "invade" the other subreddit. Subreddits and their communities are not neatly contained in clearly labelled bottles.
WalterBright 11y ago
I'd rather have appalling speech than censored speech. The idea is to not confuse supporting a person's free speech with endorsing his views. Also, reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.
- dmfdmf 11y ago
  At last, a voice of reason in hundreds of pointless comments. Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censorship.
  - Veedrac 11y ago
    If your version of free speech means allowing anything to be said anywhere, I don't want it. The principle of free speech I subscribe to is allowing anyone a place such that those who want to listen, can. In essence, to prevent one party silencing a communication between two other parties. Reddit need not be that place.
    - dmfdmf 11y ago
      Can you elaborate? Its not clear to me where we disagree, if at all.
    - geomark 11y ago
      That's a good definition. But even that approach will fail when those with power define the "place such that those who want to listen, can" to be so small that nobody can find it. An example is the so-called free speech zones at some colleges that are small designated spots far from earshot of the entire campus population.
      - ketralnis 11y ago
KVFinn 11y ago
>As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong. And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"
- aneil 11y ago
  I'm a pretty regular user, but have unsubscribed from a number of the default subreddits. Still, there is often a feeding frenzy mentality that takes over there. The racism during Ferguson was appalling. I saw a Pao subthread where people were discussing how sexually unappealing she is. It degenerated from there. Pretty awful stuff.
  - ScootyPuff4000 11y ago
    Yes, the racism during Ferguson was appalling. Asian storeowners getting their stores looted and burned down, just for being Asian. White cops getting shot at just for being white. And a violent robbery suspect's family calling for a town to be burned down over phony charges of bias.
- bsder 11y ago
  > I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.
  - pauleastlund 11y ago
    Silicon Valley might not be representative of the nation or the world, but (thankfully!) anonymous internet forums aren't, either.
LordHumungous 11y ago
Hanging out on Reddit has made me understand and appreciate Linus Torvald's style of community management.
sidcool 11y ago
People behind internet coffers are quite nasty, even cruel at times. I guess that's what human nature is. Power corrupts anyone and everyone.
lewisl9029 11y ago
Agreed. Some of the things I see people say on the internet makes me wonder what kind of social lives those people can possibly lead while being so hopelessly devoid of any empathy.
kbatten 11y ago
If you are only an occasional user why are you even commenting? I'm only picking on you because you are an easy target, but I have seen a number of HN posts from people who first state that they barely use reddit, then go on to blast all reddit users as vitriol spitting losers. What do you gain from getting on this bandwagon?
dorfsmay 11y ago
If you follows only subreddits focussed on interrests you have, reddit is a good source of information, not unlike Usenet 20 years ago.

DennisP 11y ago

It depends on the subreddits. With my subscriptions I barely noticed the whole thing.

ljk 11y ago
Only sub'd in smaller subreddits; didn't know everything was happening until I saw it on hn
colinbartlett 11y ago
I've been a heavy reddit user for 8 years and I did not know about this until I read about it in the New York Times. It's really a small subset of the reddits that were touched by the entire ordeal.
- city41 11y ago
  It completely and totally dominated /r/all for days, even weeks. /r/all is an aggregate of the most popular posts for the entire site, so I disagree only a small subset were affected. Maybe in number of subreddits, but the subreddits that were affected are absolutely gigantic.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    Most people are completely unaware of /r/all
    - colinbartlett 11y ago
      Certainly not unaware just definitely not interested.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      Isn't that what you get when going to the site while not being logged in? (I echo the comments that say that Reddit has great subreddits like /r/Haskell and it's easy to mis all of this when you are just subscribed to a few subreddits.)
      - tomjen3 11y ago
        No, you get a restricted set of /all with posts from some subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/2ycn0x/list_of_default_subreddits_march_8_2015/ https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/2ycn0x/list_of_de... is the current list.
    - Nemcue 11y ago
      You say this with certainty? Do you know this to be true? Because I seriously doubt it.
  - geofft 11y ago
    I'm not subscribed to any of the default subreddits; I imagine very many long-time users are the same way. I never read /r/all precisely because it's an aggregate of posts on subreddits I don't care about. In particular, I'm subscribed to no general-purpose or wide-purpose subreddits. A few city/geographic subreddits mentioned it in passing, but, like, /r/programming or /r/nycbike or /r/radicalchristianity are going to treat any post about it as off-topic. You can't just post an advice animal about it, or request IAmAs from everyone involved, or say that today you learned whatever-it-may-be about Ellen Pao, or what have you. Nor can you do this about any other topic, which is why I bother to read these subreddits.
    - wvenable 11y ago
      I browse /r/all occasionally to get out of the bubble of the subs I'm subscribed to. And sometimes there is a popular post in an obscure subreddit that I've never heard of before and get that gets me to subscribe.
      - bluecalm 11y ago
        They could add something like sub-reddit tags: NSFW, offensive, video games, sports, technical etc. Then on r/all NSW/offensive are disabled by default (the same way NSFW is rigth now - you need to change your account settings). Problem solved, FPH will never make it to people who don't want to see offensive staff.
        geofft 11y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding what the commenters in this subthread are saying. It's not simply that I don't want to see FPH. I also don't want to see advice animals, documentaries, creepypasta, or jokes. I have nothing against these as forms of content, it's just not what I visit Reddit for. And even among technology, I have no interest in seeing things about Ruby or Go. Again, it's not that I dislike the languages, it's that they're not professionally relevant to me at the moment so it's not what I visit Reddit for. So what we need is some way for subreddits to be tagged with their own content: /r/rust about Rust, /r/python about Python, /r/sandersforpresident about Bernie, etc., and some /r/all equivalent that just matches what I'm interested in -- which is exactly what https://reddit.com https://reddit.com is for me, right now. I don't need /r/all to be fixed; I have no interest in even seeing "all technology" or "all religion" or "all presidential candidates". FPH being or not being on /r/all is irrelevant.
geofft 11y ago
As I mentioned last time this was on HN, me three. I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent. On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page. I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.
- danielweber 11y ago
  There are many technical solutions here. First is realizing that there are technical solutions. Some people say "you don't want technical solutions to social problems" but the fact that subreddits have no protection against brigading at all is a serious design flaw with reddit[1]. Second is some way to require subscription for some period of time for votes to appear or to count. The CSS-hack stuff was silly, and as someone who has been on reddit since its first year, I have never seen the CSS-side of reddit because I never turned it on. One of the big complaints from the blackout was the complete lack of tool support and this is an example. Reddit tried to paper over the technical shortcoming with rules and social hacks but once different reddit communities who didn't like each other realized there was a way to attack each other they did so. [1] to be fair I wouldn't have realized it either if I was in charge of the subreddit design
comrh 11y ago
The problem is some of the worst parts of reddit love to leak into the innocent, fun sections. My first experience with /r/fatpeoplehate was because one of the trolls started harassing a poster in /r/adventuretime who just wanted to show off an awesome hat she made. It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.

dimino 11y ago

I came this close to not even knowing about this, until someone posted something in /r/dataisbeautiful about Ellen Pao's comment karma over time. Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.

Nadya 11y ago
This? https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png I find it telling it was negative a majority of the time. Usually "mods" get +1'd just for being mods (common on many forums). It shows, to me at least, that what she said rarely was supported by the community.
- j_lev 11y ago
  Wow. Am I the only one that sees this as possibly the greatest potential "turnaround" story ever created?
- dimino 11y ago
  I completely and utterly disagree with this opinion, and furthermore find it dangerous for what it suggests - specifically, the idea that a large group of anonymous people can do anything but fall prey to their collective impulse. I would argue that decisions of large bodies of anonymous people are historically and demonstrably inaccurate, misleading, nearsighted, and wholly terrible for not only the decision they're making, but also the good of the body itself. Groups of people, at a sufficient capacity, are simply some of the worst, most base, and utterly abhorrent things to exist on this planet, and claiming that the disapproval displayed by the group calling itself "Reddit" is "telling" would be, to say the least, a misstep.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    I'm confused how having a negative karma on Reddit is not a sign that people on Reddit find you disagreeable. It's a metric designed to showcase one's agreeability or disagreeability. If more people agree with you than disagree with you: karma will largely reflect that. If it's consistently negative, people consistently disagree with you. Having a trend over time allows for a better judgement as karma is a metric that can change drastically over time. A generally disagreeable person can have a huge spike in positive karma but that doesn't mean they're liked overall. So it helps that the chart shows as far back as 2013. A slow overall increase with several downward trends means you're generally agreeable but have a controversial opinion (opposed to the "collective group mentality"). A slow overall decrease with an upward trend now and then means you're generally disagreeable and occasionally say something the community agrees with. Her karma over time tells me that she's generally disagreeable with a few moments that brought her from "negative" to "neutral" and that before the subreddit bans her popularity was spiraling downwards, hit a full catalyst, and the apology was rather well received. If her karma was overall positive and only trended negatively in light of the subreddit ban and the Victoria mishap - it'd be telling of a very different story. The fact that it's been consistently negative is telling of the larger picture.

throwaway999666 11y ago

That sounds reasonable; only observe one side of the conflict and none of what might have provoked it and base your whole opinion on that.

sbilstein 11y ago

Honestly I'm so disappointed that Reddit's management allowed such a crappy culture to evolve in their forums for so long. I remember signing on in 2010 and just feeling really uncomfortable browsing any of the major subreddits. Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?

nostrademons 11y ago
The Reddit founders had very strong ideas about censorship and freedom of speech, and so as a matter of principle, they refused to censor subreddits unless the latter were breaking the law. As far as growth goes, this was probably the right choice, as a lot of Reddit's userbase came from previously marginalized groups who now had a forum for their interests on the Internet. Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site. Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.
- nopenopeyep 11y ago
  a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    But the moderation is part of what keeps it a fairly enjoyable experience still IMO.

jodah 11y ago

> the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally... was absolutely appalling. I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).

otterley 11y ago
Do you have a primary source for this information?
- jodah 11y ago
  Not sure what the downvoting is all about - let's hope you never get cancer. The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_former_reddit_employee_and_leukemia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo... It was on HN a while back.
  - SloopJon 11y ago
    > The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit It looks like Dacvak deleted his own posts: "Edit: I've removed this post. All future discussions regarding this subject will be between me and reddit."
    - jodah 11y ago
      I think he just deleted that one post. The rest were deleted by Reddit, as was the entire conversation for a while, before being restored.
KVFinn 11y ago
>I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less). That employee got cancer in 2012. He got a salary for almost two years while too sick to work, of the total three years he was at the company. Four months of that salary undo Pao. Then he got an additional full year of health coverage when they finally couldn't wait any longer to fill his position. He was never well enough to even move to the Reddit officers, which was the plan when they hired him in 2012. That's not just not despicable, it's laudable, and it's better than how you'd be treated at 99% of companies in the US. And somehow this became twisted by the furious mob into a story about a vicious CEO firing someone for having cancer? (Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick. Although ironically in this case this employee didn't even qualify for that since he got sick before he was at the company for 12 months.) That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is appalling. Seriously appalling.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

This is the best description of reddit I've found so far: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/619625808403894272 https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/619625808403894272

eli 11y ago
As an aside, I think it's notable how Metafilter has maintained a high-quality link aggregation/discussion forum over many years through the use of community norms and relatively aggressive moderation.
glass- 11y ago
That analogy doesn't account for what happens when a submission gets posted to both a "pinot" subreddit and a "sewage" subreddit, and subscribers in the sewage subreddit see the post in the pinot subreddit from the other discussions tab and "invade" the other subreddit. Subreddits and their communities are not neatly contained in clearly labelled bottles.

WalterBright 11y ago

I'd rather have appalling speech than censored speech. The idea is to not confuse supporting a person's free speech with endorsing his views. Also, reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.

dmfdmf 11y ago
At last, a voice of reason in hundreds of pointless comments. Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censorship.
- Veedrac 11y ago
  If your version of free speech means allowing anything to be said anywhere, I don't want it. The principle of free speech I subscribe to is allowing anyone a place such that those who want to listen, can. In essence, to prevent one party silencing a communication between two other parties. Reddit need not be that place.
  - dmfdmf 11y ago
    Can you elaborate? Its not clear to me where we disagree, if at all.
  - geomark 11y ago
    That's a good definition. But even that approach will fail when those with power define the "place such that those who want to listen, can" to be so small that nobody can find it. An example is the so-called free speech zones at some colleges that are small designated spots far from earshot of the entire campus population.
    - ketralnis 11y ago

KVFinn 11y ago

>As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong. And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"

aneil 11y ago
I'm a pretty regular user, but have unsubscribed from a number of the default subreddits. Still, there is often a feeding frenzy mentality that takes over there. The racism during Ferguson was appalling. I saw a Pao subthread where people were discussing how sexually unappealing she is. It degenerated from there. Pretty awful stuff.
- ScootyPuff4000 11y ago
  Yes, the racism during Ferguson was appalling. Asian storeowners getting their stores looted and burned down, just for being Asian. White cops getting shot at just for being white. And a violent robbery suspect's family calling for a town to be burned down over phony charges of bias.
bsder 11y ago
> I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.
- pauleastlund 11y ago
  Silicon Valley might not be representative of the nation or the world, but (thankfully!) anonymous internet forums aren't, either.

LordHumungous 11y ago

Hanging out on Reddit has made me understand and appreciate Linus Torvald's style of community management.

sidcool 11y ago

People behind internet coffers are quite nasty, even cruel at times. I guess that's what human nature is. Power corrupts anyone and everyone.

lewisl9029 11y ago

Agreed. Some of the things I see people say on the internet makes me wonder what kind of social lives those people can possibly lead while being so hopelessly devoid of any empathy.

kbatten 11y ago

If you are only an occasional user why are you even commenting? I'm only picking on you because you are an easy target, but I have seen a number of HN posts from people who first state that they barely use reddit, then go on to blast all reddit users as vitriol spitting losers. What do you gain from getting on this bandwagon?

dorfsmay 11y ago

If you follows only subreddits focussed on interrests you have, reddit is a good source of information, not unlike Usenet 20 years ago.