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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

You had me believing that reddit was a bad place to work. When you complain that the CEO gave drugs to an employee in a cabin I started to question if your opinion matches my value system. When you were shocked they hosted other points of view then I completely changed my mind because reddit is a place for all viewpoints and thought reddit is starting to sound like a great place to work. Sounds like teams are implementing new features like crazy. The hiring freeze but reaction to losing some great candidates makes sense. Freeze hiring across the board but if great candidates are available grab them. Every rule should be reevaluated based on the situation. Sounds like he wants leaders and risk takers.. people willing to stick there neck out and ignore the boss if they feel it's the right call.

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To your point about viewpoints: Reddit is pretty demonstrably not a place for all viewpoints. Note that I'm not making a normative comment here, I'm just stating a fact: in most of the mainstream and default subreddits, there are a variety of opinions you really can't express without being downvoted.

As for the thing with the CEO giving drugs to someone in a cabin...I think you should interpret this a little more holistically. For a variety of reasons (starting with illegality, and moving on to liability), that is generally not a thing you want your CEO doing in a well functioning organization of Reddit's size. It's not really about whether or not you're personally okay with recreational drug use. It's a bit of a dog whistle. Things that are generally okay can become very not okay in the context of the workplace and professionalism.

The comment around CEO and drugs was gossip pure and simple and should be ignored. I've seen many CEOs buy beer for employees it is part of many offices. Recreational drugs should be treated in the same manner. I will not judge him any differently.

Each subreddit is a kingdom to itself but the fact that you can start your own kingdom allows free speech without forcing all speech on everyone.

There is a huge difference between being downvoted and not being able to express your opinion because of censorship

IMO you should be able to express any opinion, and of course you'll be downvoted if you are a bigot or a religious nutcase

Right now Reddit is going full censorship, which I hate

GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him.

Why can the CEO even technically get access to the data ?

Same with communities, a lot of them get banned. Basically every week I hear about some community get canned, it’s pretty usual, and often justified.

Yet these “other points of view” subreddits that are pretty frequently violating the service rules (no individual bullying, no doxxing, no stalking etc.), and get reported like crazy still get by for years under the excuse of “making efforts to collaborate with the admin team and act on the violations”.

I don’t have insider insight, but from the look of it I can’t imagine a healthy organisation behaving this way.

> GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him.

Huffman has repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement. Using your admin privileges to edit comments for personal reasons is the kind of thing one would expect from some power tripping admin on some small, privately run forum, but not from the CEO of a multibillion Dollar company that operates one of the largest sites on the Internet. That incident alone should have been reason enough for him to either step down or get fired. In fact, his predecessor as CEO Ellen Pao even commented that she would have fired him for this.

I understand banning of subreddits is evil. I think no subreddit should be banned but the press previously were critical of reddit labeling it a jock-boy hangout who group together and attack gay female online users and dox them. They decided to change things their image to please that group. It made it a worse experience for many but stopped the bad press now a year later they are raising at 3b. Would not be possible without the window dressing.

Many users left, most just complain on reddit. Raw usage is not important at this stage for reddit.

That shouldn't make it a good or bad place to work

I am in line with extremely corrosive (as you say harrasment, bullying etc.) or straight illegal subreddits to get banned.

The strange situation for most of us is that while doing the window dressing they left a spiked bat and a swastica flag in the corner and pushed the poop bucket in a closet instead of just getting rid of it. And then have to defend not getting rid of it when publicly asked by their users (the CEO himself gets involved in these back and forth with the community, so it’s not just them ignoring the problems)

It could be just some weird bit that has no impact on how the company works internaly. As you say, content policy has no direct relation with work environment.

But I can’t stop myself from thinking, would that same CEO abuse his position to get rid of unconveniences internaly ? How do they handle gender balance or diversity topics ?

Looking at Ellen Pao’s shitshow (and she did a ton of that “window dressing”), it’s difficult to imagine the internal state is that much better than the external one.

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