Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...
It is a good read.
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.
They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you.
When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self.
One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).
> Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.
Like any popular site, Reddit attracts everything from enlightened discussions to 4chan-level casual trolls (and worse). Pointing out the issues with threats and indicating that the community could be better without individuals who would publicly threaten the life of another person seems very reasonable to me.
Actions like the banning of subreddits for the actions of a few bad actors belie the notion that this is how you and they describe it.
If you don't have a coherent content policy -- and no sane person could argue that Reddit does -- then you're better off with none at all.
Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?
Because that's what the admins have basically said, by their actions.
Nope, the Reddit admins just haven't closed those subreddits yet. But they will. They've closed the child porn subreddits, they've closed the revenge porn subreddits, they've closed the hate groups that bleed out into the larger internet. r/coontown will be closed, too. It hasn't yet, which is a shame, but if you read into that fact that the reddit admins approve of it, then be prepared to be disappointed in a few months when it gets closed, too.
Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that.
Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems:
1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community.
2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place.
3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product.
If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely unsuitable for the next crisis which will require yet another made up explanation.
Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon.
The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.
The subreddit was filled with photographs that were either a) creepshots taken off the street without the subject's permission and b) friends-only Facebook posts shared with the public without the subject's permission (which is a violation of Facebook's TOS).
Then, on top of that, they were harassing imgur staff members for enforcing their ToS.
CoonTown, as disgusting as it is, wasn't doing that, at least not in the sheer volumes of numbers FPH was. Most of that sub consisted of making racist statements about news articles and misinterpreted statistics.
If there were in fact some legal concerns, then I stand corrected.
Ellen got so much shot for the "we're banning actions not ideas" quote (in this thread even) yet here's an example of it being used - leaving absolutely vile subs live because they don't brigade and banning subs when they do brigade and she's getting shit for that too.
Pick.
The day I discovered I could do that quickly made Reddit my favorite site on the web (/r/NFL, /r/homeimprovement, /r/television, etc).
I'd love to see a discovery feature similar to that of Pinterest built into the signup process that algorithmically signs new users up for subreddits most related to their interests.
I used Pinterest some in the early days, but I'll avoid like the plague, now.
The worst part is all they did is intercept the search result for someone else's website and force me to give them all sort of marketing data they can sell in order to get it.
Gross.
But isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure in their curation or moderation?
How does a si but isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure of their curation and moderation?
How does a site like that survive long-term?
Global curation could help reddit, but the site actually needs very little of it. It can survive without main promoted content at all.
It might be better to ask users a series of questions about their interests when they sign up, and then create each one a personalized list
And people who should have had the sense to see there were vile pighumpers in their midst did not moderate their nastiness.
"I'm convinced that there is a highly vocal group (of young men, most likely) that are hell-bent on breaking Internet communities and even corporeal communities with their grotesqueries. And when they're challenged, they howl "but you're censoring my free speech!""
why do you think that internet communities need to be so heavily moderated?
"Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful."
Simply put, you will find trolls and people writing death threats wherever you look. These people do not exactly discriminate.
No matter how much you dislike someone, death threats are always the wrong side of the red line.
(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.)
Because I seriously doubt it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.
Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.
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.
Am I the only one that sees this as possibly the greatest potential "turnaround" story ever created?
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.
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.
And do you know something about Victoria's firing that everyone else doesn't? Do you know why she was fired?
Including, but not limited to, "I hate this person so will downvote everything and anything they say."
Which makes you a disagreeable person if enough people hate you enough to downvote anything you say.
In fact I don't know of a true democracy (defined here as a democracy where no group is excluded, where votes are counted fairly and where each person who wishes to do so can vote for whatever he wants) that has since transitioned into anything else.
None of this, of course, means that democracy is a good system, merely that it is sticky.
Reddit is also not a democracy -- it's a series of benevolent dictatorships, where the content is decided on by anarchistic vote, but can be controlled ultimately through a supreme leader, empowered by the virtue of their age (the oldest member of the subreddit gets to decide the content of that subreddit).
In the past, factions went to war in order to take absolute power. When they achieved it they would destroy all rivals and enforce strict conformity. They would try to avoid the necessity of constant fighting to hold on to their position by employing various means to cement their legitimacy in the minds of the ruled. One of these was the idea of an aristocracy which had an inherent right to rule. Another was harnessing religion to declare that the rulers held power by divine right, making rebellion a sin. Regime change would only come about through violence.
In a democracy the competing factions can bide their time in the anticipation that they can get into power again. Because of that, they do not feel compelled to use violence to seize power, and by the same token, violence does not have to be used to suppress them.
An interesting side effect of democracy was the relaxation of the need for absolute conformity. This facilitated social mobility, commerce and the flourishing of literature and scientific exploration, all of which would have been seen as subversive and dangerous to the status quo in the older way of doing things, and consequently, rigorously suppressed.
Democracies have been known for only a few brief periods of human existence. They emerged for a few hundred years, in a very limited sense, in one city-state within Greece, 2500 years ago. And then disappeared until just over 200 years ago, with some spread since.
Fewer than half the people on Earth today live in democracies (though it's close: 48%), only 12.5% live in full democracies. Far more live in autocratic regimes than any other of the forms measured by the Democracy Index: 37.6%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
The fastest growing economy in the world is solidly autocratic: China. Despite the claims of the benefits of both democracy and capitalism, many critical advances have come from countries which lacked one or both institutions: Nazi Germany developed jet aircraft and missiles, Communist Russia was the first to orbit satellites and put man in space.
I'm not opposed to democracy. But it seems it's got a few challenges as well.
(There's a story there. It's interesting.)
There are numerous states that have functioned quite well that _weren't_ (or aren't) democracies.
Nazi Germany was, in fact, a democracy. Hitler stood for election in Germany's presidential elections of 1932. While he didn't win a majority of the July vote (none of the _six_ candidates did), he was appointed chancellor following a series of inconclusive elections.
A concern of mine is whether democracy brings wealth, or wealth democracy. Causality's arrow is sticky.
In a similar fashion, if Barack Obama posted something like "Mom and apple pie are both great.", it would be downvoted by his political foes and upvoted by his political allies. That should not be taken as an indication that "the community" opposes or disagrees with his viewpoints on Mom and apple pie.
I disliked her for
* Firing Victoria, who took AMAs to the next level. I enjoyed them a ton.
* Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl
* Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"
* Treating the community with disdain and contempt, while not understanding how reddit works at all. She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive. If these people are unhappy with her and leave, then the passive majority (such as myself) will follow them to wherever they go.
But no, I'm probably a misogynist and a racist who hates Ellen Pao because she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, amirite?
The Victoria specific AMAs tended to be short, done on the phone where she types responses, and oriented around'My new movie is out Friday don't miss it' instead of a conversation. I prefer the raw format myself.
>Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl
That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is seriously appalling:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9868887
>Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"
I'm personally only familiar with the banning of /neofags because I know people who were targeted and harassed by that reddit. It was clearly banned for the behavior of the mods in the reddit, and not for content, as evidenced by other reddits with much worse content not being banned at the same time.
>She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive.
What does this even mean, all her detractors were also the ones creating the content? Most of the reddits complained about wanting more powerful mod tools, not less control: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cuw90/megathrea...
Incorrect. She did some of the best ones. The ones with Bill Murray and Sean Bean really stick out in my mind as being really great. You couldn't see either of them, but thanks to her you could make out inflections, emphasis and character. It was like hearing them talk, rather than having them type. Either way, regardless of what you think I loved the AMAs that Victoria assisted with, and so did a whole lot of other people. Pao took that away from us, and you're saying that we shouldn't criticise her for that?
> That this became the battle-flag to pitch-fork
He was almost recovered. He would have rejoined work in a month, but she rejected that. That reddit was so benevolent to him was thanks to hueypriest and Yishan Wong. She reversed this policy. Now you're saying its appalling that people are criticising Pao because Yishan and hueypriest were so nice.
> What does this even mean?
It means that the people most engaged with the site (top submitters and moderators) were unhappy with her. The site depends on these people for quality content This was written in really simple English, I don't see what your trouble with understanding it was.
I feel like you were in the flow of a "point-by-point takedown" and had to say something about the last line, but that left you looking pretty silly by the end.
While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years being paid while too sick to work. He got an extra full year of insurance.
He never had a move date scheduled. He was "2-3 months away" and in his AMA when asked where he was working today? He said he still wasn't feeling well enough for full time work - this was 5 months later. "Sorry, we can't keep waiting, we need someone who can do the job immediately."
So yes it is appalling that this became the reason to be furious, while treating an employee better than he would be treated at 99% of other companies in the US. In a reasonable universe the story would have been: "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly."
* I resented that she fired Victoria, because I liked Victoria and what she brought to reddit. I didn't speculate on why she was fired at all. But let me speculate a little now - it wasn't for performance reasons judging by what every single person who has worked with Victoria says.
* I relayed what the employee in question said about it on reddit. If its a question of trusting what he says or what Pao says, I'll err on the side of the former, because of the duplicity that Pao has exhibited in recent months.
I hope that clears it up.
It is unreasonably acceptable for death, rape, and other threats to be used as a form of outspoken criticism online, and as an outspoken critic, I don't appreciate being lumped in.
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.
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.
As I expected: downvoted for pointing out the truth. HN is terrible.
You don't think the downvotes are for this hyperbolic insult?
What is even slightly out of sorts about comparing Ellen Pao to Paul Graham?
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that both sites have an element of sociopathic and downright evil people influencing the culture. And reasonable people can still disagree about the level of accountability for the actions and inactions of Pao and Graham.
There are plenty of details that don't line up well when making that comparison, but I read the comment as intending to illustrate all the hyperbole around Ellen Pao. There are a lot of people on the Internet talking past each other this week.
Genuinely curious: why?
That's a highly subjective opinion...but it's how I felt. r/shitredditsays probably captures a bit of what made me uncomfortable.
> we
> them
Gah.
SRS are notorious for brigading and messing with peoples lives.
IRC networks are still running just fine with minimal intervention.
He wasn't dealt with. He deleted his account in a frantic and futile attempt to avoid exposure.
Violentacres/Violentacrez (had to block him twice) set himself up as king of the reddit underworld. The admins cast a blind eye to his antics, and in return he prevented the raw sewage from gushing onto the clean streets of the reddit front page.
He was a troll from the start, and deliberately so, even in his choice of username which he had stolen from a popular blogger at the time. This illustrates the kind of brinkmanship that was his trademark - it is not quite impersonation to steal someone else's anonymous handle, but it is not quite ethical either.
His one good point was that he kept the other reddit trolls busy via interminable (literally) troll-fights.
The /r/SubredditDrama posts in regards to the incident are correct as I remember it:
Part I - violentacrez: https://archive.is/7ygdr
Part II - CreepShots: https://archive.is/8AVd8
Part 2 above ends with a link to VAs alleged last comments with an alt:
It's a common meme that violentacrez was "special," had some kind of sway with the admins beyond any other moderator, received instruction from the admins that was unique and not the usual ban threats that many subs get in modmail, and so on. Most people who say these things heard it from someone else, because the actual story is that he was barely tolerated. He even says so himself in your linked thread.
I don't get the elevation of violentacrez to something special. I see it a lot (friendly with the admins! The admins asked him to help with creepshots! it's all over this thread) and I don't get it. He was a power mod. So are hundreds of others. There are a bunch of Reddit yarns that put the Kubrick lunar landing to shame; some of them are making an appearance in this thread.
Doxxing is doxxing. It doesn't become 'exposure' when people you like do it.
I meant that the reddit admins didn't 'deal with' Violentacrez. Chen doxxed him, destroying his career, despite the full knowledge that Violentacrez had innocent dependants who would also be hurt badly. If Violentacrez deserved to be 'punished', then whatever punishment was meted out should have fallen exclusively on him.
>It doesn't become 'exposure'.
Bad choice of words. I intended the term in a literal sense, not a judgemental one. It was revolting how Chen made Violentacrez crawl in the false hope he could salvage some part of his livelihood.
>...when people you like do it.
I dislike the people who doxxed Violentacrez very much. I disagree with the use of doxxing as a tactic.
The admins asked violentacrez to help with the /r/creepshots. Later history got rewritten to say that he had created it, maybe to throw him under the bus.
I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?
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).
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo...
It was on HN a while back.
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."
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.
> somehow this became twisted by the furious mob
There's no mob here. If anything, most people seem unfamiliar with this episode.
> Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick
Except where one qualifies for protection under the ADA [1].
> That's not just not despicable, it's laudable
There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao. My overall view of the situation, and likely this goes for others, is in how it was ultimately handled, where Pao said one thing to the employee then did another, more than once. I can see a situation where this could have been handled openly and candidly, with humanity, but that's not what happened.
Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'. Not knowing what would have happened, Pao could have addressed the uncertainly in an honest way, but instead she chose to lie to and then fire the employee. I'm not a one man mob, and I respect your difference of opinion, but that to me is despicable.
[1] http://www.cancer.org/treatment/findingandpayingfortreatment...
Top post on multiple reddits, various random threads upvoted to /all, brought up in this thread by multiple people as a reason the CEO was despicable.
>There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao.
While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years of paid time while he was unable to work. Also under he he got an extra year of medical insurance.
>Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'.
He was supposed to move to the office in 2012. He was never well enough to do so. At the time he was finally let go, he still didn't have a move scheduled. He was still 2 to 3 months away from being able to to start the job. Note his woolly timelines, especially in his followup comments, where 5 months later he was still not ready for full time work.
Changed your mind is not lying, "Sorry, we actually need to someone to start this job immediately, we can't keep waiting."
All this is giving him the most charitable reading of his posts, a post he made at the height of rage at the CEO filled with obvious dog meat like: "Does anyone know of any Reddit alternatives?" "I don't know anything about why Victoria was fired, but he's some speculation as to why she was fired." Etc.
So yeah, I find it despicable that people find this despicable, that comments all across the internet are calling her 'human garbage' and whatnot for treating an employee better than 99% of other companies would have. It's absurd. The story should have been, "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly!"
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.
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.
Okay. But reddit isn't "those with power". reddit isn't making it illegal to do it elsewhere.
Nope, but then again, being that place is what made it grow so large in the first place.
As long as you are free to create your own community where you can say whatever you want, there is no need for any other community to listen to you.
And it's certainly understandable that Reddit has no wish to be associated with certain speech, but that comes with troubling implications as well. For example, do they not then appear to support whatever they do not ban if we know that whatever sufficiently offends them gets the ban hammer?
For another example, take Google removing Confederate flags. I personally hate that damned flag and would be perfectly happy to join others in burning one to express my feelings about it, but I'm loathe to go around removing them. Please understand that I'm perfectly happy if a few get taken down where they appear that some governmental branch was endorsing it.
But at the same time, that's not quite the same as when Google goes about removing them. Sure, they are free to do as they wish, I have to wonder why Google doesn't do the same for Nazi symbols? Surely they don't support Nazis, but it's hard to make a case for not giving the Nazis the same treatment. They're at least as evil, right? So what explanations are left to us for the disparity? That Nazis don't offend googlers as much? That doesn't seem like a likely reason, but just what's left?
And in the end, where does that leave us? The problem is, I don't think that train of thought has an end, and that's what makes me uneasy. After we remove everything offensive, what's left? It's not like we'll have things that don't offend anybody, so at some point it becomes a matter of choosing which people are okay to offend and which people are not okay to offend.
In the end, I just want to get along with everyone. I don't like the thought of living in a society where everything becomes a matter of whether you are one of Us or one of Them and that's where we appear to be heading.
They don't sell Nazi flags in their store or (afaik) let people advertise using them, so this doesn't seem as inconsistent to me as you make it sound.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nazi+swastica&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...
Not to mention copies of the Mein Kampf, etc.
Thankfully, the various non-Nazi uses of the swastika appear to be the most popular, but you can find plenty of Nazi items. I dislike the meaning of both symbols, so I have a hard time imagining any logic where it's okay to sell one of them but not the other.
We only burn the bad books, right?
Also side note: reading Mein Kampf doesn't make you a nazi, indeed if more people had read it back in the day somebody might have stooped that little corporal.
I guess the argument one could make is that the confederate flag is more dangerous and relevant today, but I don't really buy that.
Occam's razor suggests this is just an easy PR grab. They get a few headlines in mainstream tech press for free, and very minor backlash from "free speech nutjubs" as the only downside.
Reddit spent years building a freewheeling culture. Pao decided to impose standards on that, and her guiding principles weren't well articulated. In the end, it was a really bad copy of Disneyland, and the fact that the effort failed was no surprise.
I'm not sure the company really knows what happened, given that they think they've given their users what they asked for, but they're also telling their users that they're spoiled kids.
I think you nailed it there. I'm not a Reddit user, but from what I have read there never seemed to be clear set of guidelines that were evenly enforced by the Reddit staff.
I'm often weirded by the freedom of speech argument in non critical contexts. These persons life aren't at risk because they can't express opinions, isn't that what is meant by FoS ? not just a free card to be able to let yourself loose in public.
I have no solution, but far too often FoS ends up a noisy non-discussions.
ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
No
I personally respect freedom of speech, except hate. For example, HN strongly discourages attacking another member personally (eg. calling someone else idiot). I consider this a reasonable limit on freedom of speech, but concepts and opinions should be fully open for discussion (eg. pro/anti evolution etc). If the discussions are respectful, then anything should be allowed.
I believe Political Correctness has done more harm than it does good. It has created an unhealthy focus on skin colour, reproductive organs, etc to the point of lunacy. Many people struggle to look past superficial features and seem to lost the ability to make reasoned judgements. Any criticism of a woman gets you labelled a misogynist, regardless of how incapable she is. This continues to undermine the credibility of women that are truly capable in their own right. I'm currently managing a team of women. They all got there on their own merit. I would not hire a woman for the sake of political correctness or because I was bullied by a feminist journalist (as is quite common these days). The women in my team were not selected based on their gender - they were selected based on their talents and attitudes. They were available and capable.
This whole Ellen Pao incident made me think about the validity of comments on sexism and racism that are floating around the net. Compare the attitudes towards the criticisms of Steve Ballmer vs Ellen Pao. One of these individuals contributed to the significant growth of Microsoft, the other didn't manage to achieve much that stands out. Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not. The major difference (other than Ballmer's financial track record for Microsoft) is their genders. Political Correctness has driven the need to blindly defend women, no matter how incompetent they may be. The hope is that this behaviour will help "women's rights". I view it as doing the exact opposite ... "jobs for the girls".
It saddens me that we seem to be more sexist, less tolerant and more willing to defend incompetence an an attempt to promote rights for selected members of society.
On a side note, I dislike the term "women's rights". Is it so hard to represent "people's rights"? I believe one of these reflects a destructive, prejudiced mindset and creates a bad attitude of entitlement and encourages sexism. If society said we'd defend the rights of everyone equally based on merit, the world would be a much better place.
The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line, you need to appoint a censor to determine what qualifies as "hate". As Christopher Hitchens asked: "To whom would you want to delegate the task to decide for you what you could read? To relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear?"
Typically this job falls to the public prosecutors. Who will make mistakes, misapply and pervert the laws. Sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with malice.
It is not just an abstract argument, it has very real consequences. Here in Finland we had a case [1] where an MP (now MEP) was convicted of hate speech for making a point about freedom of speech by asking a question along the lines of: 'Why is it ok to write that Finns might be culturally and genetically predisposed to get drunk and kill people, but not ok to write that Somalis might be culturally and genetically predisposed to rob people and live on welfare?'
These types of laws have very real chilling effects on public discourse. People are unwilling to engage in certain topics, which should be discussed, due to the fear of being prosecuted. In democracies trying to suppress or censor an idea or argument will just end up elevating them. In this case, the party to which the convicted MP belongs ended up becoming the second largest party and are now in the government. They no longer have to argue their case, they can simply implement it (and their immigration program was written by the MP in question).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_Halla-aho#Criminal_charg...
I want more great censorship, not less. If it’s done by people and organisations, at least. Because that’s what we are talking about here, right? Reddit, not governments?
Censors are just editors and that job is not some inscrutable thing. It can be done and it can be done excellently.
I mean, to me this only gets tricky when we are talking about basic infrastructure, i.e. should a paper mill be allowed to refuse to sell their paper to Neo Nazis because of ideological reasons? Should a web hoster be allowed to refuse to sell to Neo Nazis?
But Reddit? That’s easy and I don’t really get what the fuss is about. Nothing would be lost at all if the admins were much, much, much more ban happy and much more pro-censorship. They should be, 100%.
reddit does that actually, until you're a well known user, you cannot submit more than a few per minute, after that delays kick in, if it really was something you wanted to share, you'll come back. No censor involved.
That's just an idea, but you get the point.
Specifically, it seems to me that if you're shielded from seeing that they censored, then they could also be censoring "good" speech too. So the only way it seems you could ensure they weren't do this poorly or deliberately would be to allow everyone access to what they've censored. Which inversely seems to defeat the purpose of having a good censor. Now essentially nothing in censored.
Again, perhaps I'm missing something but if I'm not then I don't understand how you resolve this conundrum.
Edit: Unless you're referring to ex post facto censorship, where everyone sees the "bad" speech, and the speaker is banned for violating "community standards" To pre-emptively ban future speech. But this too still allows "bad" speech, and I suppose you also have the problem of deleting the bad speech. If it's gone, then what substantiates the ban/censorship? Because again, what if the action was either done in error, or maliciously to ban "good" but unpopular speech/speakers how would you know?
But I do have the ability to trust people and I know when I enjoy something.
So, this all might sound very abstract, but I do know that I like the censors (they call themselves editors) working for certain newspapers I like. I trust them to make good decisions, partly just because I don’t have time to make those decisions myself.
And that’s obviously not perfect – but this whole nerd dream of provable correctness and absolute, guaranteed access to the truth all the time … it’s all unachievable bullshit anyway. Sometime you just don’t know. Sometimes you just have to live with that. I live with it and I like it.
Honestly, this comes across as "He loved Big Brother"-level creepy.
Do you have some sort of trust issues? I mean, sometimes I’m willing to trust other people, that’s all. I don’t have to believe that everyone is evil and out to get me. So when I read a newspaper I like I have a general trust that the editors (censors) have done their job … because what else can I do? What else can you do?
I don’t have the time to sit around 24 hours by the newswire … and even then, the people writing that and reporting that … how do I know I can trust those absolutely? I can’t. That’s all.
We humans are forever doomed to not know the truth always all the time. And no one is an island and sometimes you just have to trust other people. And that’s healthy and that’s ok.
Well it's crucial that the censors are people who like you. If they didn't like you, you probably wouldn't be such a fan of censorship. That is to say, the only reason you're in favour of censorship on reddit is that you're reasonably that the censors will be people like you, which really is no more than sophisticated tribalism.
If I didn’t like the censors at Reddit I would do the same thing. I think that’s normal and healthy.
> The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line
At some point, hate speech most definitely infringes upon the reader's rights. The canonical example is yelling "FIRE! FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and causing a stampede; your right to free speech doesn't trump everybody else's right to be safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
[A] United States Supreme Court decision concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense.
> Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not.
You mean Ballmer?
We know nothing specific and substantial about internal Reddit politics, so the cause for seeing all this hateful scapegoating can only be some kind of mass stupidity.
I'm sorry. You don't respect freedom of speech then. Drawing an arbitrary line on what you (or anyone else) considers acceptable isn't free speech.
Put it this way: Things that were unacceptable in the 1950s are completely banal and uninteresting now. Things that were considered in poor taste in the past are horribly offensive now (look at Andy Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's). Are you going to be some society guardian, constantly updating what is and isn't acceptable to say as our values shift with the times
I have thought much on these as common person, neither in an academic setting nor who has to deal with these issue frequently.
Lot of time I would argue with myself why can't we have everybody have equal rights ? Why we need to specially fight for rights of women and be feminists or to project the issue to broader sense, where we talk or act about any group. Personally I believe that while the ideal case as it should be is equal rights for everybody, the problem is the inequality created by negative discrimination over the ages. It is more like we are trying to correct the wrong doing over the ages by believing that a positive discrimination for the groups would offset the historical prejudice.
These are personal thoughts. Please feel free to correct.
I want to pull this quote out and address it directly, because it's a valid concern with a real answer. The reason we don't represent "people's rights" is because all people do not need their rights defended. To use an analogy, think of our system for measuring the level of endangered for animals, from "Critically Endangered" to "Least Concern." Is it sensible to say, 'Well, aren't all species important to the ecosystem? Why do we seek to protect Garrulax courtoisi but not Megascops watsonii?' This is because the former is nearly extinct, while the latter is ubiquitous. The cause of "social justice" -- the oft-derided 'warriors' of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc -- is to correct years of disadvantage. It's not accurate to call, say, attempts to further women in technology as 'sexist'. In fact, that's co-opting the term to obfuscate the original issue.
Overall, your heart is in the right place -- it does seem like our attempts to further minorities comes off as patronizing (like affirmative action). But, in the end, the good that is done outweighs the bad so long as we adequately train the individuals we put forward through these initiatives such that no one believes they only 'got it because of their gender' (which to me is no different than 'got here through someone she knows' -- this is how most business seems to be done in the world!)
How far are you willing to take that? You could potentially prohibit satire.
No. That's the exact opposite of free speech. Free speech is meant to protect the most disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, foolish speech.
That's the whole freaking point - nobody wants to silence unoffensive opinions.
>ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
It is funny. Because it's the people who want silence others' free speech who repeat the "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" meme as justification for their horrible actions.
No it's not. It's meant to protect speech which the politically powerful find objectionable. It's not about protecting abuse, but protecting ideas. Rebellious and revolutionary ideas, for example.
This is all a canard anyway - Reddit is not the (US) government. They get to set the rules for communication in their playground. If you don't let them do that, then you are infringing on their freedom of expression. Reddit can only say 'no' on their own systems; they don't stop you spreading whatever disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, or foolish speech in other forums.
If you want free speech the way you describe it, then you need to go to an unmoderated forum. Incidentally, on the front page of HN at the moment is a request for help in removing child porn from a web service, because the owner doesn't have enough resources to moderate it. If you ever wanted a clear example of where free speech is not meant to protect disgusting material, that's got to be it
Saying that people should be open to your arguments privileges those ideas you yourself hold. How do you tell which arguments get such treatment?
I didn't say at all people should be open to my particular arguments, but to arguments in general.
If it's arguments in general,
* you can't hang up on salesmen,
* you can't kick 911 conspirators off your unrelated forum,
* you can't remove most trolls,
* you can't ban homeopathy threads from /r/science,
* etc.
In general, you lose the ability to moderate conversations in spaces you own, or decide what you spend your time doing. This is, to be honest, a pretty extreme idea if taken literally.
Or you could deem salesmen, 911 conspirators, trolls and homeopathy proponents as "crazy and confused", but who decides that? How is that any more unwanted than posting critical meta commentary to /r/fatpeoplehate?
I imagine a concrete implementation of this idea as a meme that people themselves would recognize this as a good rule and that they would consider it as a decision aid whether or not to participate in a certain group.
The loophole, then, is to define ideas the politically powerful find objectionable as abuse.
Ugh. "horrible actions" as a description for calling people out who threaten, belittle, insult and harass other people and claim that is "protected speech".
By the way, even in a context, where the term "freedom of speech" is really adequate (so, when talking laws and government actions, for example), freedom stops where you infringe the rights of others. That's the whole point of states: To balance the natural freedoms of one person with the rights of other people, thus providing stability. Which is why you can't steal, for example. That's a freedom that had to be balanced against the rights of other people.
While I agree that pointless, hateful etc. speech deserves protection one word I almost never see in the reddit free speech wars is *dissent. As in "free speech is meant to protect speech that opposes or challenges orthodox opinion and conventional wisdom."
It's almost like the most vocal part of reddit gets off on being offensive for its own sake and is more concerned about the right to call fat people names rather than defending free speech generally. It does seems like they are flying the free speech flag purely out of narrow self-interest.
How many of them actually give a crap about free speech outside of their "community"? How many of them regularly downvote opinions they don't agree with, I wonder?
Hah yeah because speaking up against these mobs can lead to getting DOXed. What an insane world we live in.
>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.
We must be careful not to confuse commercial viability with government censorship. At some point, advertisers will leave a website that continues to foster vitriol/hate speech/illegal content because they do not want their brand associated with it. This is freedom of speech in action.
I tend to agree with what I think you're saying but I wonder if you realize what a controversial opinion that can be to some people. Consider the reaction to Rand Paul's criticism of the Civil Rights Act. Should one be able to operate a restaurant/business/country club that won't serve [blacks, LGBT, Muslims, whites, hispanics, cops, etc]?
If we were talking about what's legal to publish in your own newspaper, I agree.
If we're talking about what's appropriate to force others to view by brigading with a small number of people to take over a website to use it as its own platform to harass its CEO, I disagree.
That said, I think the moderation Pao symbolised on Reddit as a whole was a very wrong move. The Community certainly did. All the subreddits are individually moderated and the subreddits are opt-in; there's very little need for an overarching moderation of Reddit major.
Combine this with the rules for moderation being so vague everyone was asking what they actually were, and the reason given was "safety". Safety?
To me, "Safety" is a red-cloth term. It smells of the agenda used to rule the masses by fear and security, and to me Reddit is the exact opposite. But in reality, it was probably just an honest answer to Reddit's Community and investors both, that they wanted Reddit to be a safe product.
Well, nobody joined Reddit because it was "safe". It's the wild west of the interwebs, subreddits progressively darker as you find more weird stuff and you have to tell yourself "no - I don't need that" (who hasn't ventured to r/aww - darkness comes in many shades).
tl;dr Reddit is set up as a wild west with moderated towns, it is counter-productive to clamp down on everything with "safety" as the rallying cry.
This is, joking or not, way out of proportion to what happened, which is, a single harassment-focused group was disbanded.
That wasn't the only event that transpired. I'd venture to say things got really intense after Victoria was let go and sub-reddits accounting for 33% of visits were shut down in protest of how the affair was handled (poor communication, no transition planning). I think the disconnect between the mods and Reddit's leadership is what got Pao fired; not the shutting down of FPH.
They stepped in because moderators of a banned sub was found to encourage and even directly participate in harassment of other people. And they only caved in after a. incessant complaints from the public and b. some personal threats against imgur employees who took down some images the abusers uploaded.
More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa...
You have the right to say whatever you want, you do not have the right to say it in my home. I'm curious as to whether or not these individuals understand this, or are just another level of troll trying to stir the pot.
Furthermore, I do have the right to say it "in public".
But, where is that "public" on the internet? I can make a website - a home - and invite other people to come visit me and listen to me ramble, or respond etc. But there is no public space, is there? And if not, should there be?
Most people don't own the homes they live in. Yet the landlord still doesn't get to tell them what to talk about over the dinner table. That's great, but imagine the government sold all sidewalks and public places to private interests, which dictated how you should dress and walk if you want to get out of your home, or to work. Should that be allowed?
Imagine getting thrown out of a mall because someone overheard and disapproved of your conversation there. Does that ever happen? I know there there is no clear line, but that there is one; e.g. if you trail other people and talk to yourself or a friend about them (especially if it's nasty and aggressive) in earshot, that's not exactly cool. But what, other than sanity, would stop all mall owners to agree that anyone e.g. declaring to like the color green should be kicked out, and to hire staff to enforce it? Would that be legal? If it was, should it be? And if it wouldn't be legal, why is that? In what ways, if at all, could or should this applied to the internet?
Most people (63%) own their homes in America, and there are protections in place for people who rent. Your landlord cannot monitor you.
When it comes to the mall though, it's more a matter of scope and scale. Overhearing something in a mall affects a handful of individuals and the intent was not to broadcast. If you stand up on a table in the cafeteria and start spouting hate speech, you can and will be escorted out by security.
The internet is different, because you cannot accidentally overhear a conversation. Said anywhere on the internet, especial a place like reddit of HN, it is viewable by the entirety of internet users. So direct comparisons to the physical world will always fall short.
Reddit is only banning subs that brigade.
No. Free speech is a principle that any party can choose to respect. Free speech has been one of the very core values of Reddit right from the beginning, in the form of the ability to create and manage a subreddit with very minimal restrictions.
Being a platform of free speech was the single biggest reason Reddit grew to be the giant community that it is today.
Then Pao comes along and repeatedly shows that she doesn't respect free speech at all. What do you expect the users to do, other than revolt?
It's easy to brush off these incidents as the doings of "the ugliest users", but remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. History books are filled with people being silenced due to their expression of uncomfortable ideas.
For example, John Stuart Mill's utilitarian defense of free speech in On Liberty is equally applicable to private parties and specifically says society and individual people should be open to expression of views they find abhorrent. He specifically covers widespread social ostracism as well as government laws. According to Mill, free speech is definitely not just about freedom from government restrictions.
I doubt you understand the principles of free speech better than John Stuart Mill. Or if you understand his argument in On Liberty and disagree, please explain why.
Subreddits and their communities are not neatly contained in clearly labelled bottles.
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"
Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.
Mind linking it?
Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.
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.
Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.
It's my estimation that if there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous or pseudonymous discussion comments it's very likely that a few individuals will a make death threat (which are likely not intended to be taken seriously). My point is that stating that death threats were made is not particularly interesting, as that's not a rare occurrence when we're talking about very large number of comments by very large number of people, some of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.
"Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here:"
Could you refrain from sexist comments like that?
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10836833/Penn-and...
You mean this?
> [1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.
All that opposition - strong enough to convince "Chairman Pao" to resign - reduced to death threats? All those arbitrary bans written off as a just punishment for criminal behavior? Something tells me that we haven't seen the last of "safe space" Reddit.
Reddit has ALWAYS loved irreverent and even incredibly offensive puns.
Redditors would be calling her Chairman Pao even if she was well loved just for humor value.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0SO8xk4b...
Altman is not justifying the arbitrary bans (or any Reddit admin shenanigans) here, that is not the topic of this sentence. He is talking strictly about one dangerous activity that gets offenders banned: death threats, which Ellen Pao (the human at the other end) received.
We don't know why Pao went out. We can suspect it was the backlash (more likely), or disagreements with the board [0] but we can suspect.
But that does nothing to make her opposition entirely legitimate, when at its strongest it was hijacked by namecalling, cyber-bullying, and yes, threats to Pao's life. The subset of Redditors who did this deserve to be told how shitty it is. The remaining, legitimate opposition should recognize the distinction.
[0] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddi...
Do you see another reference to the overwhelming opposition inside the user base? Anything in the vein of "the mounting opposition convinced us that there's no point in fighting our users"?
Because from what I read in the announcement, the opposition is presented as a vocal, hateful and criminal minority that should absolutely not be mistaken for the "sweeping majority" that was "incredibly supportive" of the CEO.
Why don't you believe her when she says it was a disagreement with the board over the future of reddit?
"We don't know" when the person in question is saying "this is why" is not very respectful.
However, you're right. The two reasons are not mutually exclusive.
That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.
That's what internet anonymity does. Brings out people's true essence. You see it with road rage too. The protection of the vehicle and the quick flight make giving the finger in response to a reasonable mishap an easy answer. A "FUCK YOU" for accidentally veering into your lane. Sound reasonable?
Yeah there's a few Mother Teresas out there, but most of them are self righteous a-holes too. What a world.
Relevant as always.
I disagree. Some people: yes. Average person: I don't know, I suspect probably not. I've met a lot of people from different parts of the US, Canada, and around the world. A great many of them have exhibited a tendency towards genuine empathy. That too is human nature, it's not all narcissism and self-interest.
Anything less doesn't get heard - or it gets ignored. A certain pirate group that asked the U.N for help, was ignored, and resorted to boarding ships and capturing prisoners comes to mind.
I've known very few people who cared to have Pao as CEO since her taking the position. Anyone who gave attention to Reddit Corporate disliked her being in that position and felt her politics would get in the way (and they did). The only people who seemed to like her in that seat were those with the same ideological and political leanings as her (not a big surprise there). [0]
The fact people had to get "up in arms" and make a huge fuss about her to get her out of the position shows action should have been taken sooner, rather than later. But nobody pays attention to the quiet protests. They only give notice to the extreme.
Yes - some of the comments against her were extreme, unnecessary, and irrelevant to her position and the problems surrounding her. I saw death/rape threats, totally uncalled for. Anything less was ignored.
[0] And her Karma tells the story. It's almost always been negative. https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png
I think this was the right thing to do from a product perspective. Pao didn't really know how to use the site, and didn't ever particularly like the users. I don't know if Huffman likes the users, but one would assume that he would at least know how to use the site he helped build :)
She tried to share a link to a private message. That's the equivalent of my mom emailing me and saying, "Here's the picture - c:\\user\desktop\pic.jpg" - it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works.
Then everyone who replied was shadowbanned and every post was deleted. So no, she literally didn't know how to use the site.
The new CEO doesn't know how to make lists. Is he going to catch shit for it?
===
kciuq1 1758 points 3 hours ago Maybe the first priority is to learn how reddit works.
Can you cite something on this? I really doubt it's true, but if true it's devastating.
And they've officially denied shadowbanning anyone in that thread.
Do you have any proof of this? That seems highly unlikely.
I think the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet (though it has many positive aspects in other contexts) is wreaking havoc on our ability to debate some topics because you wind up with a situation where many people get upset about a legitimate grievance and some overly troll-y subset of those people goes overboard with their backlash and then the whole issue ends up in this very unfortunately binary "us versus them" where rational but legitimately upset people get painted with the same brush as the vocal minority of troll-y jerkwads (or alternately, they have to just excuse themselves from the debate to avoid being painted with that brush).
eg. "Gamergate" (there is an inescapable core truth to the fact that game journalism is broken, perhaps irreparably so, that got completely lost in all of the personal-level misogynistic bullshit) and this reddit situation where the community had every right to be upset at the recent moves they have been making (though to reiterate, I think some forms of the backlash were, as reddit's announcement stated, sickening).
I think HN is great too. The knowledge of some of the commenters here can be very educational.
On the other hand, I don't think that she did a very good job managing the crisis (the first one caused by banning certain douchy subreddits, and the second one caused by the firing), which is one thing a CEO needs to be able to do.
Some hires and the chilling effects thing are maybe the biggest unambiguous positive developments. The subreddit banning and the salary negotiations thing were received with mixed opinion, but even if you agree with what was banned, the handling of it was questionable and seemed very rushed.
And then there was last week, which derailed the site over a weekend and made national news outlets for the whole week. A lot of details about internal dealings came to light, and none of them particularly painted reddit in a good light. There is no plausible way the amount of good shes done in the last 10-12 months outweighed the massive damage that was inflicted.
It is also worth noting that the people who do have access to a lot of internal information about the inner workings of reddit 'mutually' agreed that she shouldn't be the CEO. Undoubtedly the backlash -- some of it misguided -- played into this, but frankly a large part of being the CEO of a community-based site is PR.
No plausible way the day to day internal changes / hirings / firings that you are not privy to have had a balancing effect on this? What was your methodology in assessing the damage that the blackout caused to reddit that you used to measure against the good she could have plausibly caused in order to form your rational opinion? A cursory look at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic does not seem to indicate any lasting impact.
It is not worth noting that random employees (actually, not random: ones who' have enough of an axe to grind that they'll risk their job to break NDA) think a CEO is bad. That is the case at almost every company, small and large. Find me one where you can't find 2 employees that agree there should be a different CEO etc.
Sorry but we are looking at it from a necessarily uninformed outsider's perspective so we can't possibly have a meaningful opinion on whether she was an effective CEO.
And even if I was an employee; well there are always disgruntled employees, their opinion isn't reasonable either.
These are absurd arguments. By the same logic, the CEO of whole foods could hold a press conference and just go on a racist, hateful rant, and I couldn't possibly have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as a CEO.
In any event, the people I meant who did have the internal data weren't employees, I meant their board of directors.
And is it possible that a CEO is really awesome, but really really unlucky, and it just _looks_ like they are bad at their job outwardly? Sure, there is some non-zero chance of this; much like there is some non-zero chance of damn near anything.
Perfect information is an impossible ideal; arguing that a rational opinion is impossible regardless of any circumstance since we don't have access to all the information which exists would imply that no person can have a rational opinion about anything, ever.
And yes, literally it is true that the CEO of whole foods could go on a huge racist rant and you could not have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as CEO. Or rather, what you want to say is "in this extreme example, this CEO is clearly ineffective", but we know of morally shitty CEOs who drive huge company growth & profits and are therefore effective CEOs.
Anyway, can you show your work that you were referring to behind your analysis of the magnitude of the damage that the recent reddit blackout did?
More substantially, if all AMA teams really are going to be running the show without official reddit support, this cuts in a couple of ways. It shows a maintained lack of faith in reddit from the moderators, and it also is going to make the logistics of AMAs more difficult. The AMAs are unique content which is a substantial draw of new users, where a ton of the work was already done by volunteers. The logistical strain is going to make for less or worse content, pick your poison. High profile guests, especially those not technically savvy, are less likely to participate without admin support being available.
Strategically, reddit almost certainly wants to be involved in this -- they want to be tightly coupled, enough that the group can't spin off their own version.
I don't think this damage is irreparable, but I do think it's going to take substantial work to fix. And I mean, don't take that from me, take it from them -- https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap....
The main issue (no one to coordinate AMAs) was dealt with in a matter of hours without serious consequences. The "monumental cluster fuck" image is due to hundreds of people with an axe to grind who piled up on top it, mostly with unrelated "anti-SJW" complaints.
Besides, these people have always been there and haven't caused any large scale problems, and they didn't when Ellen was appointed (which is when they should have started protesting, assuming you buy the misogyny charge). It was when some quite heavy handed restrictions started to be laid down with regards to freedom of speech that the uprising began to grow.
Personally, I'm glad she's gone, I much prefer reddit to be an extremely politically incorrect place. Take fatpeoplehate for instance - is it hurtful to fat people? Sure. But that subreddit can be easily blocked from your feed. Should someone have to do that? I think yes, they should, because if the new policy is to not hurt anyone's feelings, a whole bunch of content has to disappear.
Now that's just my opinion of how I want reddit to be - it is up to the owners of reddit to decide how they want it to be.
Was turning the front page of /r/all into a cesspool of hate the right way to protest her decisions? Maybe not, but honestly, what alternative is there that would have actually had any effect?
You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of why FPH was banned - it wasn't because of offensive/hateful content like /r/coontown; it was because of active off-site harassment & brigading that the mods couldn't control.
One of us has a misunderstanding on that and I'm not so sure it's me. I'm aware of the brigading claim, but not of any widespread evidence. And even if so, then how do you defend the inconsistent enforcement of that rule amongst other subreddits like /r/srs? If you're going to use a rule to close a sub, then by god enforce that rule consistently if you want people to take you seriously.
If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.
As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy. Not that I need to defend reddit's decisions, nor automatically become on their side. Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.
No evidence was given, so you don't know either.
You are correct in that they are free to do as they choose with the website they own, but not taking into consideration your userbase's opinion of your actions seems like not an optimal recipe for success. Treat your users, who produce all your content and manage the majority of your business through voluntary moderation with zero respect, authoritatively decide what is "on or off topic for discussion", and see what happens.
> If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.
Oh I'm aware of the stated reasoning, and I:
a) reject it on the grounds that it is not consistently applied. If <subreddit x> is banned because of <rule y>, but that rule doesn't apply everywhere, then it wasn't actually banned because of <rule y>, because a "selectively enforced" rule is not really a rule. They're trying to use unemotional logical reason to explain their actions, but they are not acting logically.
b) don't believe them, in part because the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech, which is most definitely a change from the original culture and spirit.
> As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy.
I'm not at all aware of the details of this but I would like to learn - is this common knowledge?
> Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.
I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background. Or, if you want to exercise your right (as the platform owner) to completely control all content, then simply state that outright. Or don't, and just continue to subtly move in that direction without discussing it, and see what happens, which I'd argue is exactly what has happened here. What happens is, your users (a significant portion at least) revolt, the story ends up being splashed through mainstream media including financial news, and before too long someone "resigns", "because their growth targets were inconsistent with management". (Do you believe that one also?)
Yes, see the 3rd FAQ of the announcement post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.
See the 2nd FAQ
> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,
Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech". Not that you have or should expect free speech on reddit anyway etc.
Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals. If a subreddit has been banned for harassment, you will see that in the ban notice. The only banned subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers is r/fatpeoplehate[2].
Harassment vs Brigading: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
"When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site."
"We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected" Agreed.
"worry for their safety every day" Oh please.
"because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day." Laughably, transparently false. This sounds like the thruthiness that comes from the minds of MBA's and is accepted (in public discourse) on wall street, but it does go over so well on reddit.
Look, if they want to ban "harassment", which I don't argue that fph was at least in some way, then just state the facts and ban it, it's not so hard. It is the completely unnecessary lying that fired up the outrage, imho. Just say "poking fun at fat people is malicious and we're no longer allowing it. Sorry.", and I don't think there would have been a shitstorm.
>> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.
> See the 2nd FAQ
It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass[1] individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
That in no way excuses srs. As far as I understand, brigading is explicitly a bannable offense. srs brigades. srs has not been banned. Once again, inconsistentcy & dishonesty leads to mistrust and anger.
>> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,
> Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech".
http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-its-not-...
"It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time."
Now, combine that with some of the interesting commentary on "safe spaces" that we see coming out of our institutions of higher learning on a regular basis, and draw your own conclusions as to whether the uprising was based on pure unsubstantiated paranoia or not.
> Not that you have or should expect free speech on reddit anyway etc.
As I said before: force a culture on your users and observe the result. It's certainly the right of reddit's owners, but I don't think they'll like the result. My opinion seems to be fairly consistent with the actions and words of the new (old) management, at least so far.
EDIT: on SRS specifically:
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
"May I ask why /r/shitredditsays[1] has not been banned despite being caught multiple times sending death threats and doxing, and even admitting to doing these things? I think most people would be placated if there were just some consistency in how the rules are applied."
"Sure. We did not ban SRS because the behavior you're referring to, while definitely falling into our current definition of "harassment," happened long ago. We don't put policy into place in order to retroactively ban backlogged behavior. If their harassment becomes a problem again, we will revisit that decision, but until that happens this is where we're at."
Which is a blatant lie, as everyone knows. Again, if you want to selectively ban subreddits, just do it and say why you are doing it, I really think the backlash would be relatively minor, why the compulsive lying?
> Which is a blatant lie, as everyone knows.
I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, and is actually pretty reasonable. How did you determine that everyone knows this?
> I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, so there must be something wrong with your ability to deduce things if you feel that everyone knows that.
Once a conversation reaches the point of pedantry it's generally a good idea to just stop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro
Then go here and click some links - notice anything?
I believe that tends to violate site rules.
Ah, here's where the change was proposed: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/p0yaf/meta_...
Seems like this is vote manipulation
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_vote_c...
"Don't edit the CSS of your subreddit to willfully mislead users."
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_vote_c...
My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.
I think unless they egregiously violate company policy or violate the law or do something which would bring damage to a company it should be up to the company to direct the fate of an officer... Not popular sentiment.
Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.
It's almost like she just sucked at her job and the public backlash and getting fired were both predictable consequences of that fact.
As if officers need to walk on eggshells. What should matter ate results rather than dictated by the winds of public opinion.
I wish the board, management, etc. in these situations would who resolve and say, no, sorry, this is our choice, we stand by it. But no, we see them capitulate to public opinion.
Sometimes that opinion does coincide with"the right thing to do" but let the company execute the right thing. Don't let the mob become your upper management.
> “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -H. Ford
Users present solutions to their problems, when you listen you discover what their problem actually is. In the above case, faster more reliable transportation.
edit: Jobs was a cofounder of what is(or close to) the most profitable company in the world. He saved the company from bankruptcy and is arguably the best quality control engineer ever. Rules always have exceptions but thinking you are the exception often helps to prove the rule.
Regarding "mob rule" this is a free country and people have a choice which website to read and to contribute to. If people want to go away from reddit that is their choice. The company that owns reddit does not need to follow reddit user wishes, but they have to face the distinct possibility that those users will leave and the consequences thereof.
You can call it mob rule, but other's can call it the matter of ordinary people exercising free choice.
Her job was to preside over that mob. And apparently to monetize it. Pissing off that mob means she failed at her job.
In addition, not understanding that you are firing a key employee shows a dramatic level of ignorance. Reddit has so few employees that even an adequate CEO should know what every single employee is doing. This is just basic Management 101--"Know What Your People Do" or its corollary "Never Piss Off A Secretary" aka "Know Who Has The Real Power In Your Company".
Finally, from her attempt at PR positioning you get headlines like this: "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit". Really? "Fighter of sexism". Um, she fired a woman, you know? And her behavior at Kleiner was far from exemplary. Her case for sexism would have been a whole lot stronger if she hadn't appeared to be sleeping her way up the corporate chain.
Overall, the problem seems to be the same tone-deafness as so many at this level of privilege: "The rules don't apply to me. How dare these plebeians attempt to make the rules apply to me!"
But this is not the company firing her --it's the internet firing her. I don't like this approach at all. management by popular opinion is not good. Imagine managing a professional sports team by popular vote --it'd be nuts.
[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/19/us-toyota-executiv...
That's a really bad example to cite because managers and coaches quite often do get fired when the fans start getting too angry.
So far as an example from the automotive industry, look at Rick Wagoner from General Motors. He lost the firm $82 billion and 90% of its market capitalization while he was CEO. And the board did nothing to correct this. With their capital gone, loss of confidence by the market, they were forced into bankruptcy.
But we have seen this play out many many times. Someone is accused --accused, not proven.. and the slightest whiff the company drops the person like a bad contagion. And, so now people expect this from companies. Complain enough and have someone fired. Someone said something crass while drunk 'aha!' fire them, behavior unbecoming. As if these people, unlike us, are not human and can't err. We're scared to see our ugliness in others. Oh the terrible reminder of our frailties! OMG, they were caught in a sting operation and had a rendezvous in a bathroom with a stranger! [Do the private sex lives of executives really matter? Oh but public perception, gasp!]
I don't think companies and organizations should manage by popular opinion. No one will be willing to make bold choices for fear of upsetting some base of people.
If an officers' views are contrary to the official org position, or behavior was egregious or against the law, then sure. If the organizational action simply coincides with popular opinion, then fine --but don't take action _just_ because of popular opinion --that's, to me, not right and gives away control to the whims of the moment.
I think the line needs to be drawn more clearly than that, because we should have populist control over companies.
I'm more concerned about companies that really impact us, for example huge banks, energy conglomerates, people behind the TPP and TiSA.
But when the leader of a company who publishes the words of its' customers - a complex relationship, indeed - tries to curb some of the harmful speech of those customers, I don't think it's a reasonable populist standard to say that people supporting that speech can oppose it.
Also, in such communities, strong anonymity is prudent. It does protect griefers from consequences, I admit. But more importantly, it protects all users from meatspace risks.
Edit: This is an old discussion. Especially if one replaces "Redit" with "Usenet".
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
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.
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.
Type two is /r/coontown or other hate subs. They're clearly offensive. I wouldn't let them on my site if I ran it, but they exist. The key here is they stay mostly to themselves. I wasn't aware of them before all this.
Type 3 are problem subs. Things like /r/FPH. There often offensive, but on top of that they branch out to act in the real world or in other subs. They don't stay confined to their one little corner but actually make things worse for everyone. Never if your topic isn't flat out offensive doxing or causing actual harm fits here.
What they did was a small hit against some of category three. It wasn't much, but it's the most I've seen in a long time on Reddit. Given the amount of stuff I've seen in the last year against various people in the games industry in other places, some of that organized on Reddit, I'm happy to see something done.
There are still tons of subs in category three that they haven't done anything too. The vast majority of them. And I really don't care about category two things, I'd be fine if I didn't wanted to ban those too.
By no means did she clear up Reddit. But at least I saw she tried to do something, dipping her toe into the battle. And I'm worried I'll be back sliding on that.
The reddit anger towards her was mostly accumulation of cultural change that has been going in reddit management every since Yishan left (also ~30 employees were fired/let go in a very short period) and firing of Victoria just the tipping point. It also helps that Victoria was very well liked.
I honestly dont know who is to be blamed for reddit going the shithole but at the end of the day CEO needs to take responsibility.
That's what it boils down to. The buck stops at the CEO's desk, even if the CEO wasn't directly involved with the problem. This is really not much different than the CEO of Target losing his job after someone hacked its customer data.
The main problem I think most people had with it wasn't that there was action taken. It's that it was arbitrary, there were no guidelines given, and there was no consistency.
If there had been a set of community guidelines published, a week given for moderators to rein in their members, and then the ban hammer had come down, I doubt anyone would have cared.
It was probably incompetence rather than malice -- same as firing Victoria -- but the fact is that there were arbitrary actions taken with no explanation, warning, or chance for people to prepare.
There were all of these things. There just wasn't completeness - i.e. they didn't (yet?) ban every sub that was in "category 3" harassing people IRL. It was not arbitrary: those ones were actively harassing people. There were guidelines: they existed before, and she posted them in response. There was no inconsistency: subreddits failing to meet these criteria were not banned under this policy. 100% of people upset on these grounds are in the wrong.
Analytics showing brigading statistics would be dead simple. It would establish a clear, objective metric and back the notion of behavior, not ideas, being targeted.
I also kind of doubt objective numbers would justify the actual banned subreddits; I think it would show a lot of other ones were just as bad or worse, but weren't so unapologetically disgusting.
I'm not. I'd prefer all of the communities stay on a site like reddit, where specific users get banned for clear violations of harassment rules, rather than the entire communities getting shut down because of the actions of a few. Most communities on reddit had clear anti-harassment rules and moderators usually banned it when it was seen.
Now, instead, the communities are moving over to sites like voat.co and 8ch.net - communities that won't get policed in any way whatsoever. And in many cases, the communities encourage harassment, brigading, and general nastiness. This is going to make the Internet a worse place in general for all of us.
How?
Wouldn't that make it a better place, because you won't even know that they exist. Unless you looked, anyway.
Your opinion is offensive to me, yet I don't want to silence you, because freedom of speech is more important than people getting offended.
https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_te...
" 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. "
Should someone hesitate from making the right move if vile people happen to support that move?
This can easily be interpreted as a repudiation of some of the things she tried to do to clean up the site, and that would be a horrible message to send.
Is it not a relevant comment on her character that she has married someone who (allegedly) defrauded over a hundred million dollars worth of pension funds? That she later sued a company she was fired from over supposed sexism for the exact amount her husband needed for his legal defense fund? That she lost the case miserably due to a complete lack of evidence? (The case against her husband, on the other hand, looks like it will be quite the open and shut case with mountains of evidence)
I don't care about reddit at all, but I don't understand how anyone can defend her and her husband after one of them (allegedly) ruined the pension funds of thousands of clients who trusted them, and the other tried to provide him with the funding to get off scot free for the actions.
Would you defend Bernie Madoff or someone who had been complicit in trying to keep him unpunished for his crimes?
This is 2015, I really hope you don't need someone to explain to you that women don't have to share the blame for their husbands (alleged) misdeeds. Disgusting.
Fundamentally, you misjudge my stance: I don't care Pao's a woman. If I learned that the woman I married had done that to people, I would not stay with them, because I cannot reconcile being married to someone who can do that with my own ethos. That she has speaks volumes of her character. If Pao had committed fraud, and her husband had stayed with her, I would have the same feelings about him.
(From your comments, I suppose this is the part where you claim that Male White Nerds on the internet always say that, but never do it, etc.)
Second: It's not even just a matter of staying with him, but she has sued a company that turned out to be innocent for sexual discrimination asking for the exact amount in damages that he needs to cover his legal fees. To me, that steps beyond just having suspect character, to outright being complicit in the attempt to prevent him from paying for his crimes.
Pao is disgusting, and it has nothing to do with her gender. Only her actions.
If Reddit continues to focus on cracking down on the negativity that exists on the site, it will give the negative voices a bigger stage.
I think they will be able to get back to doing positive, fun things, and the negativity will be drowned out.
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
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.
Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.
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.
Not everyone is obsessed with celebrity culture.
Yishan Wong was also a CEO (prior to Pao) having been an engineer at facebook. His tenure was also controversial although not as much as Pao.
Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?
My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.
I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.
Becoming a VC has become the new beginning of the end for any humanity left in a human being.
I suspect she pissed off a very small, but very vocal minority. Most people (myself included) don't really know or care about Pao one way or the other.
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.
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.
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.
If I'm not mistaken, that's a record of one, unless you know something the rest of us don't about her time at Cravath Swaine & Moore, WebTV, BEA Systems, TellMe or Danger.
Pao has a track record that shows she's in the first group. I'm not saying that should automatically get people to treat her differently, but it's enough of a "track record" for some people, regardless of the record having one data point on it.
We'll have to wait for the movie to come out to know what really happened.
http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit
> I am delighted to announce the new team we have in place. Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO. Because of her combination of vision, execution, and leadership, I expect that she’ll do an incredible job.
When "SJWs" get someone fired we're told a loud, vocal minority has too much power and is dangerous.
The same folks seem to be calling the same thing in a direction they like a "grassroots campaign". I find that interesting. Pao's most downvoted posts still got only a few thousand of Reddit's tens of millions of users expressing their dislike, and petitions topped out at what, 20k of those tens of millions?
I think a lot of things were incorrectly attributed to Pao. It doesn't really matter though. I don't think she was ever going to get back the community's confidence.
So half a percent of the userbase or so? I'd call that a vocal minority.
http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-...
> I don't think she was ever going to get back the community's confidence.
Likely true. Backing down here likely means zero chance of addressing toxic communities in the site for the foreseeable future.
By that logic, the people who protested during the Civil Rights movement were also a vocal minority. Doesn't make their grievances any less valid.
This is why I'm contesting the idea that "a grassroots campaign" is evidence that someone was in the wrong. It's merely evidence that some people had an opinion about the situation.
Sheesh.
The glowing "done an amazing job" etc... is typical corporate BS and is the classic back scratching that happens at these upper management levels. As an example when Victoria was fired, there was no statement or acknowledgement despite the publicity - let alone a "Victoria has done an amazing job..." type statement by Pao, Alexis or otherwise.
Again, just reinforcing the manager/worker class division.
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)
There's no way to know whether it's correct or not, use your best judgement. Pao denying anything brings nothing to the table.
The /r/iama mods were not upset that she was fired. They were upset that there was no transition plan in place.
> it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening
There was finger pointing because nobody knew what was happening. Functions that Victoria was performing fell through and — according to the /r/iama mods — jeopardized the functioning of the AMAs that week.
Which long predated Pao at reddit. But even giving her the responsibility for this, nowhere is the apparent gross incompetence apparently seen by those calling so vociferously for Pao to be fired.
From what I saw it was both. They shut down over the latter because it left them unable to manage things to their satisfaction, but they seemed to genuinely like her and wanted her to keep her position.
Even if it was a bunch of racist/misogynist people, you have to consider that despite the messenger, the message might be valid. That's what being open-minded means.
Really, her Rampart-level impedance mismatch with the community was enough.
For god's sakes, stop it. This blatant sexism and double standards is disgusting. If Ellen were a man, never in a million years would they be expected to bear responsibility for their spouses' misdeeds or attacked for who they slept with (indeed, they'd be getting high-fived for being a "womanizer" or "stud").
So caving in to those groups prevents nothing, it just makes things more toxic. As a tactical move, bringing in Steve Huffman might not have been the worst decision though.
Reddit only has around 70 employees, I would find it extremely unlikely a CEO at a company of that size wouldn't have been aware or involved in the decision (if only to rubber stamp it).
"It happened on her watch."
> 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.
edit: i figure u re saying one was harassed more than the other?
Why do people here (in this HN thread) tend to pretend it's either one or the other? When you're speaking about a big amount of people, pretending like they all behave the same way is never a good representation of a situation.
Wait, what? You can raise "reasonable" concerns while harassing someone? Harassment makes raising "valid concerns" not well-argued or reasonable.
Yep. You can write two paragraphs of well-articulated critique and then write something like "this bitch should die and rot in hell" in the end.
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.
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 - reddit is mostly made up of stupid and bored teenagers.
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).
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-...
Of course a cynic would say that reddit is just a reflection of the society we live in and that might be right but it's also a reflection of the society we live in where there are few consequences to been a complete dick (I think if you could punch someone through a computer screen reddit might be a better place).
I've been on reddit >7 years and I'd love to say that it was 'better in the old days' but honestly I don't think it was I just think I've reached a point in my life where I don't feel the need to surround myself with that crap.
It's like saying that food in New York is awful because you reached into a trashcan and found a rancid bagel, but is awesome in Chicago because you looked up the nicest restaurant and spent $500 on a meal there.
Sometimes I don't recognize what y'all are talking about, and I almost want to defend reddit, then I remember: I've long since adjusted my reddit to be virtually nothing but niche. My largest is ~320,000, but it's just a "Deals" reddit. I've got two at 150,000, both very focused. And it goes down from there.
I'd hardly know this was going on except /r/blog is essentially forced on to your reddit front page.
It's just like Usenet was... subscribe to politics.vitriol.hate.anger and rec.sports.flame, and yeah, you're gonna get idiots. Subscribe to comp.lang.niche_language, get almost nothing but signal. Times never really change.
But in the end, the result is the same.
Maybe one of the nice things about UseNet was that you could only be signed up for a forum that you explicitly looked for? That at least forces the trolls to go out of their way to interfere with general-interest sections, not just go after them out of laziness.
There is also something to be said for educating users on the effects of anonymity.
If anything might be a lesson on community design it might be to put up a few more "barriers" between subreddits and the general population and think about how to control interaction between them.
It's safe - I know all the people we can still have arguments but they are well behaved ones.
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.
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.
Isn't that basically what I said?
> Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS?
I genuinely do not know, but they need to find that limit, they need to be transparent about how they came to that decision, and they need to be consistent and fair about applying it to subreddits.
Like I said above, they tolerated it for too long, and then swung the hammer down hard. If you don't house train your dog for three years, and then start screaming at it for peeing on the rug, the dog isn't going to react well.
Cynically? When they start making /r/all.
My own personal opinion is that FPH was an embarrassment to reddit because it had gained enough traction that it was visible outside of its own little bubble, so they nuked it and took a few other inconsequential subs with it to provide plausible cover that they weren't just straight up censoring FPH for the sake of the brand image.
Discussion sites (HN included) exist solely due to their users' laziness for using and/or creating better Free decentralized solutions and ensuing network effects. In exchange for this ease of use, the site inserts an epsilon of advertising and censorship. This is the extent of their value proposition.
Eventually business/legal skinjobs take over, mistake the community for an owned golden goose, and ramp up the amount of advertising/censorship. The illusion of openness is shattered. The users revolt and move to the next green pasture.
Because communities need moderators. A free for all is anarchy; enough shitbags will ruin any particular community. I've moderated a small forum, and that was a headache when I just had two trolls to deal with, and I still failed at it - people left because of those two people, enough of them that the forum is basically dead now.
On a more cynical/business perspective, if enough users leave and if enough negative press is printed, your business loses money.
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.
> 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_tha...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Response to material: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-...
Food for thought: https://www.facebook.com/psiljamaki/posts/10153334440110516?...
@sama, how do you explain this claim without ignoring the community's enormous support for Victoria Taylor?
(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)
[1]: https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...
[2]: https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...
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
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 / ...).
Notice how they didn't mention anything about reverting the bad changes to the website. ;)
-- Top Comment on that thread
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 :-)
Now, if Victoria is coming back too - that's would be 200% right move for reddit!
Perhaps a fairly dim, elderly man who doesn't know much about social media and therefore is immune to the storms of reddit.
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.
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
They didn't just screw up the optics - they royally screwed up, and then tried to laugh it off.
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.
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.
could you elaborate on this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
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.
http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...
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.
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_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_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.
Let's be perfectly honest here: that was Yishan's thing. He announced that change and set it into motion before he resigned.
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-red...
Unofficially, he was burned out, and he used that as his excuse to quit.
(the new office was probably why he wanted everyone to relocate to SF, so everyone could come work at this huge new office he wanted for the team)
1) not targeting nor contacting anybody; not harassment.
2) discussion of another reddit post is not harassment. there was a single comment made on the post which could be considered harassing.
3) victim willingly made comment. in addition, said victim is against the banning of subreddits.
4) I have no idea how this could be considered harassment.
5) see #2
6) you can not harass a dead person
7) see #1
8) see #6
9) see #1
10) AN ACTUAL INSTANCE OF HARASSMENT! A single instance of harassing behavior does not define an entire community.
11) The entire incident was a fabrication by a troll.
1) It is targeted toward the reader in second person narrative, frankly informing them that they are surrounded by people that hate them in everyday life. The tone is not sarcastic or satirical. It has literally no other purpose than directing genuinely intended emotional abuse at real people.
2) It's discussion of pictures of a specific person on reddit, who was easily found and connected to the picture. And as a rule it's easy to find the source of crossposted pics which causes them to be often, if not always, facilitate contact between hopeful harassers and their victims.
3) You seem to be claiming that posting in a thread tacitly constitutes permission for abuse and transforms harassing comments into non-harassing comments. To put it lightly, that theory stands in need of elaboration.
4) It just means you're working with a very forgiving, permissive view toward harassment.
5) See #2 and #4
6,7,8 and 9 are more or less covered by the above.
You're not disputing 10.
11) from what I can see there is a commenter asserting it was a fabrication by a troll, providing links to pages that are no longer accessible. Given the context of many willing accusers and willing apologists on all sides, that doesn't seem like much of a debunking to me.
And just as a big picture gloss, no one posting comments in those threads is mincing over those fine distinctions like we're trying to do here. They're just posting a lot of vile comments and leaving it to everybody else to debate whether it can be proven to be harassment to a degree that holds up under the most granular, forgiving analysis possible. In the cases where it's not harassment, it isn't due to anything approaching principled restraint on the part of the participants. Crossposted pics, for example, may lead to direct harassment or they may not, depending on how people respond to them. The possibility of facilitating harassment clearly isn't stopping people from going ahead and posting them, as the examples above illustrate.
Just to make sure we don't miss the forest for the trees here, that lack of restraint in and of itself is an indictment of their behavior, and should be cause for unequivocal condemnation of how community management was handled on reddit long before we even get to the point of arguing whether specific instances technically count as harassment according to this or that preferred definition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Attempting such a propaganda in this connected day and age is supremely stupid.
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-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.
I find it really strange when people talk about someone's personal life details and then say that there's nothing odd or wrong about it. Especially when right before that they say that their personal situation is "bizzare", and the reader kinda expects to learn, what is so bizzare about it.
So, why did you bring his bisexuality up in that comment?
You're guilty of making a vast assumption about the context.
What would be wrong with a marriage of political or business convenience involving no sex, if that's what it is? Obviously nothing. You've matter-of-fact labeled his sexuality without knowing either way.
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.
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?
If you start trying to troll the trolls, you're laying on a feast of HGH-laden troll-bait.
People have always been shitty to each other. The internet tends to act as a force multiplier for shittiness, allowing people to be shitty to each other at extreme distances, and with much improved protections from the immediate consequences. Once was a time, I hear, where if you insulted somebody in the public square, you had to be ready to drop the gloves if the insultee took it harshly. I dunno, I came in just at the very end of when it was considered acceptable for children to wrassle, and not grounds for throwing them, or maybe their parents, too, in jail.
What "everything" are you referring to here? That's the problem with addressing this "analysis+critique". There's almost nothing being analyzed or critiqued. This was a pretty minor story even in the tech blogs, let alone major news outlets.
This is currently the #1 post on HN. It might not be the biggest community, but it is influential, and many people bypass visiting blogs/sites and come directly here for their news. Things don't have to be on the front page of Time magazine to leave an impact on interested communities. And here, clearly people are interested enough in this matter to make it the most highly commented submission on the front page right now. So to try and paint a popular HN item as pointless chump change is quite disingenuous.
So then what does this have to do with "questioning ethics in any kind of journalism"??
I am a commenter on HN and a redditor and am in no way related to the "clickbait media", so how are my contributions to this thread "explained through the lens of questionable media"?
The problem is the deflection. It started as a discussion about the actual situation, but apparently "everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations", and is now about...biased HN posts? I really have no idea.
If you were worried about that, you should have discussed the actual situation and addressed what you thought were misrepresentations, not going off on some tangent about media ethics.
Herein lies the problem: there is increasingly less of a difference between you or I, some "random strangers on the internet", and 'trusted' news sources like the New York Times. So it's not so much that we're not related to the 'clickbait' media, it's that the media is now mirroring us, unfiltered, and many don't realize that this is basically the modern MO of 'news reporting'. The lines are blurring as a side effect of the influence social media has, that's the danger.
> It started as a discussion about the actual situation, but apparently "everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations", and is now about...biased HN posts? I really have no idea.
Yeah, I agree. It's certainly hard to follow, but we are on a platform that makes misinformation incredibly easy to produce. Technology is unfortunately a double-edged sword like that.
> If you were worried about that, you should have discussed the actual situation and addressed what you thought were misrepresentations, not going off on some tangent about media ethics
I agree, it would be nice, but at this point it'd be like playing whack-a-mole, with changing definitions of what it means to be a 'mole'. It's unfortunate, but it'd be pretty difficult to keep up with every possible distortion even if we tried, so the best I can do is just remind people that "hey, even when I'm not around to remind you, you should probably try to question things that you believe and might've picked up from somewhere".
And really, you're on HN, this is not the place where you need to fly the "don't trust the media" flag with such earnestness. I doubt many people here do, certainly not me.
This is another common trope that happens a lot. We as HN readers are not any more special or immune to proven psychological tactics than anyone else. We are all still humans after all. This elitist sort of viewpoint that HNers are somehow smarter, better, or faster than most people at nearly everything isn't very helpful. I guarantee there are many people here that could benefit from 'basic' knowledge like this, because we all have our biases.
You can know not to trust most media, and apply it to 99.9% of the media outlets you encounter, but if that remaining 0.1% are sources like the New York Times or Fox News, because for whatever reason, your experiences led you to believe they were 'reliable', then knowing that 'you shouldn't trust most media' is useless when those outlets do you a disservice.
What's elitist is to think that the other camp only holds their opinion because they've been duped by the media, and that you're the one that's managed to see through it all with your superior scepticism, which is what generic_user is basically doing with their "The knife cuts both ways" comment.
... it's just delicious.
Uh, I just did.
Reductio Ad Hitlerum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
Overstating the case to extremes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
My point is that you're being a hypocrite, demanding someone else not discourage critical thinking, while exhibiting logical fallacies yourself. Shaming someone about 'discouraging critical thinking' through the use of a strawman is particularly egregious.
Secondly, I did notice your analysis, but I was referring to the general "you", so that others can feel free to chime in and critique as well.
It's a fairly stock form of strawman, taking someone's opinion and extrapolating it to the extreme. There are qualitative parallels between this event and gamergate, and the GP was mentioning them. I thought the same as the GP. But questioning ethics in any journalism anywhere? Seriously? For example, people question the ethics of Rupert Murdoch's empire and those of the UK tabloid culture, yet that public questioning is not reminiscent at all of gamergate.
I certainly don't see Murdoch getting numerous vitriolic rape threats because of his questionable journalistic ethics.
I also hope you realize that your comparison between this article and gamergate is about as valid as my original one was to orwell & huxley; i.e. it's pointless to just point out and insinuate some kind of similarity unless you clarify what it is you're actually trying to argue. Pointing things out like that without explanation just gives the impression that you want to throw the negative connotations of events like gamergate (or the holocaust for hitler analogies) onto unrelated arguments to silence them.
And finally, the problems with media run farther than just the bigtime moguls out there like Murdoch, and as I've already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's a direct byproduct of the influence social media has had, and this is more thoroughly elaborated on in the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying". That book came out well before gamergate even happened, yet random questions about the dubious journalistic practices this book outlines are all somehow related to that silly gamergate incident?
Similarly, my 'there are parallels' and your 'huxley and orwell' aren't the same. You say that it's pointless to present without clarification, yet I presented the comment dispassionately and gave some counter-examples to clarify. Your huxley/orwell comment was a snarky comment, based off a strawman.
You're also confusing my point with the GP's. While I agree with the GP, my point is not that this event is reminiscent of gamergate, but that you're behaving hypocritically.
> those last two lines read to me like a callout to #gamergate's "It's about ethics in journalism" BS.
was just a simple "This reminds me of gamergate", then you are the one putting words in people's mouths. The intention lies in the words "read to me like", implying that the original comment that was in response to, was invoking connotations of the gamergate event.
You are also applying the definitions of these fallacies you are mentioning rather selectively. Because if I am a hypocrite, then your argument that those gamergate parallels are more valid than the godwin invocations is equally hypocritical. A logical fallacy is not a matter of degree, it is a binary evaluation: either an argument is valid or it is not.
So then why are you shaming people with snarky remarks about Orwell? You say you aren't a hypocrite, yet you're doing exactly the thing you say shouldn't be done?
Anyway, I'm tired and bored, and couldn't be bothered reading more of your efforts to somehow argue that a widespread shrill grassroots online hate campaign over 'media ethics'; a female target; based on faulty, incomplete data; in the internet political culture specific to the current time... should put absolutely no-one in mind of gamergate ahead of any other particular event. The two events apparently share no commonalities. You're using me as a sort of playing field for the academic parlour-game of seeing if you can spin-doctor the way out, and frankly, I couldn't be fucked continuing.
a) From my first reponse, I've been addressing your points. I haven't addressed every single last one of your points, just like you haven't done so with mine, because discussion works that way. Not to mention we'd end up with immense walls of text if we did. I just opted out in that last one, for obvious, declared reasons.
and
b) When the argument switches from arguing about a topic to arguing about the nature of the argument itself, it's boring. You can play semantic games into perpetuity like that. I've been arguing online since before the turn of the century; when it gets to this stage, it never goes anywhere, it's never interesting, and there's never any further insight to be gained by anyone.
My apologies though, I did forget your acknowledgment of the godwin stuff.
So, does anyone have guesses as to what the material issues were in the board wanting her gone? I confess to having little interest in Reddit most of the time, so I haven't paid attention to what's going on there (outside of the recent firing-related explosion).
Performance/track record aside, her name had become toxic to reddit. Sometimes you don't clean the stain, you buy a new shirt.
For anyone that's equally confused, I highly recommend reading the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying": http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator...
What's happening right now isn't entirely intuitive, so it's understandable to be a bit lost, but what the parent is talking about is a serious, legitimate issue.
Frame the narrative to fit the controversy ("50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again!") Ignore the 199,950 shades of gray and all other motivation behind the users and everything else. Zoom in to these 50 people. Cast them in the worst light. Cast Pao as a saint and Reddit as being "in the right" for "standing up to these 50 white male racist misogynist neck beards".
Fan the flames and stir the pot to generate traffic (and ad revenue).
Keep the fire alive as long as possible. You look good and get money. Reddit looks good and gets money. You both win.
Alternatively throw Reddit under the bus as well and find past controversies surrounding Pao. Cover those as well. You'll get more money for this.
As for all the users who aren't the 50 being covered? Fuck'em. You're too busy lining your checkbooks.
And isn't painting all of the media in the same cynical light for the actions of, at most, a small minority pretty much exactly what you claim they did to you?
I saw racist and sexist posts personally, so I know that's not a complete fabrication even if not every Redditor holds those beliefs. I found the posts of e.g. Pao as Hitler pretty jarring. If I were writing an article about Reddit and its CEO I probably would have mentioned them, not through any desire to stir trouble and certainly not as part of some money-making conspiracy.
And what does any of this have to do with Sam Altman or Ellen Pao?
Of course. No one's evil, everything's broken. The reason offensive and controversial discussions are so common throughout the interent is that they self-perpetuate; something makes you angry and you make a post 'debunking' it, that makes someone else angry and they reply; the more efficient posts at making people angry get more replies, and so are brought into prominence.
Thus the virus spreads.
GP isn't implying any collusion. The media is intentionally causing confrontation just fine on its own.
> I saw racist and sexist posts personally
Nobody is claiming the hateful stuff didn't exist. But painting "Reddit" as sexist while conveniently ignoring the 90-9-1 rule and focusing on Pao's gender instead of atrocious track record is... in bad taste, to say the least.
What is the argument against Pao anyway? It seems like the only non-personal complaints I've heard are that FatPeopleHate was banned and a well-liked moderator was fired on her watch. Is there more to it?
She doesn't deserve the blame for all of it, but things easily snowball on reddit. Once the mob finds its pitchforks, there's no stopping it. That's not unique to reddit in any way.
There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago, and as we found out today, only last week dedicated employees to work on it; after the defaults revolted.
This is a small subset of all of the complaints of reddit's direction under Pao's leadership.
Honestly, I think she's a lovely person. I don't think she deserves a percent of the shit that's been thrown her way, but she definitely hasn't been an efficient CEO for reddit.
and by lots you mean...that's about it. Honestly if "There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago" was a good criteria for booting a CEO, Reddit would have had ~20 CEOs by now.
That was the actual problem, that mods have never had the tools they need, but that's not why she's resigning/being fired.
There really wasn't anything overly egregious here except an angry internet mob. If it weren't for the subreddit blackout (which, again, was from an issue boiling over for years) timed so soon after the FPH shutdown I would give good odds it would have dissipated and we wouldn't be seeing this resignation today.
Like it or not, the CEO is ultimately responsible for every single thing a company does. That's pretty much their job.
Edit: Also, I have been on reddit for nearly 10 years. I've followed every stupid decision made since comments were implemented. I have never seen a period of bad decisions like this before Pao.
Edit 2: I also think it's sort of shitty for you to move the goalposts. You basically said "there's nothing else major" about Pao to criticize. As soon as I brought up three more things to criticize - well, they weren't important and everyone else is responsible.
You must be detached from reality and what a CEO does if you think those deserve being fired for. And seriously even insinuating that her personal life has anything to do with this is frankly disgusting behaviour.
Let me ask you about Brendan Eich, previously CEO of Mozilla. He contributed money to anti-prop 8 causes in California. He was fired from Mozilla because he supported anti-gay marriage causes. Was it wrong of mozilla to fire him because of his support?
If you say it was wrong, I will respect that we have different views on this issue.
If you think it's OK to fire Eich but not even bring up Pao's personal life, I will call you a hypocrite.
There is a polarising effect which occurs in these kinds of threads (or communities discussions as a whole): once the vitriol has met a critical mass the more moderate people tend to just avoid the whole thing (not participating, likely not even observing). So all that's left are the extremists who keep perpetuating it.
Especially "the last guy said x, so x+1 is ok to say", followed by "the last guy said x+1, so x+2 is ok to say".
Do you have any evidence of this?
atrocious track record
Like what? That she shut down a forum called "Fat people hate", where posters singled out the obese for vicious, personal online harrassment?
is... in bad taste, to say the least
Do you even understand what that means? Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste? Seriously?
You don't know me. You have no idea what my feelings are regarding FPH. Yet, you make assumptions.
So now we got that out of the way, hi, I'm Jerry, and I hated FPH and didn't give a rat's arse about its shutdown. Had Pao made only that one decision in her two years as CEO, reddit would have bigger problems on its hands.
Thankfully, I just wrote a reply to someone else's comment right below yours - a much nicer comment which asks a question without making aggressive assumptions - addressing your actual question. Take a look.
> Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste? Seriously?
The thing with rephrasing what someone else said and appending "Seriously?" is it always goes your way, because you get to decide how you rephrase it. Good thing again that I didn't say "Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste". I said:
> painting "Reddit" as sexist while conveniently ignoring the 90-9-1 rule and focusing on Pao's gender instead of atrocious track record [is in bad taste].
In other words, trying to turn millions of people into sexist pigs by ignoring how such communities function is in bad taste. Do you disagree?
Pao wasn't CEO for even a full year.
Social Justice has infected the media to the point that anything contrary to the desired story is either ignored, recast, or dismissed. You can go google the Confederate flag issue and find far too many stories trying to link Republicans with it when it was Democrat politicians who put it up fifty years ago and kept it there; apparently it was just too good an opportunity to slander the Republicans for something the Democrats didn't fix for the fifty plus years they controlled most of those states.
So yeah, the media intentionally causes confrontation and likely because the same focus groups they use/rely on are merely political machines created to drive people one way or another. Politicians and the media both need a divided population and they both damn well do their best to get it.
Honestly Reddit in general could be taken as "racist and sexist" by an outsider. By an outsider. The humor tends to be sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, and in-group. For example any references to /r/pyongyang can be written off, 99% of the time it's part of a dedicated running joke that's not intentionally malicious. Pao as Hitler is jarring? You seem naively unfamiliar with Reddit.
Yeah. That's a problem. Probably Reddit's biggest problem.
The author gives his own various experiences as examples of how this new style of information flow in the media industry is easily exploitable, and frankly, it's quite scary. Not just because of what he could do, but because how natural and subtle it all the 'propaganda' seemed.
A piece that casually included terms such as "racist" and "misogynistic" as if they were describing the weather. If those terms do sound natural enough to use in something as casual as describing the weather, then congratulations, you've discovered the dangers that this book tried to highlight.
And I don't think racism or sexism is something to be taken lightly. I don't think the New York Times does either, which is probably why the fact that there were racist and misogynistic posts about Ellen Pao was noteworthy enough to include in 8th graf of the article.
It's an example of exactly what the book talks about: subtle, lightly filtered "news".
> Would we be having a different conversation if the thread linked to the Reddit announcement instead?
No, because if you read my previous summary of the book, you would realize that the mechanisms in these two outlets is exactly the same. A single highly emphasized voice/view, with little curation/filtering, being projected loudly through network effects.
If you're still unsure about what I'm talking about, or how it fits in, I can only recommend that you pick up the book. It's really quite an interesting and quick read. And interestingly, the issue you're having of having difficulty seeing what I'm talking about, is basically exactly what the book talks about.
If you think the NYT article made those claims lightly (I don't) then I think that says more about the state of the Internet and its communities in general (or perhaps just you) rather than "The Media"
So in order to be good journalism, it must be objective, and to not describe things in terms of loaded phrases that convey any opinions. The opinions may be right, or they may be wrong, but that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is the one highlighted in the book, which is that our news isn't getting properly filtered, and as a result, we're being shown rather restricted points of view in our media.
If current media organizations were run with proper journalistic merit, almost 99% of what gets published out there as 'news', would be filed in the editorials section.
Please, it seems like you're the one who needs to be honest. The most vocal, outraged reddit users are clearly sexist.
Here's the top most used words in the petition. Sure, let's NOT use the word "sexism" here, since it's kind of unclear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/3cetav/i_made_...
So immediately there are 2 problems here:
1.) Ellen Pao does not represent all women, nor would all women agree for her to represent them most likely. So dislike of Pao does not conclusively imply a dislike of women in general. Especially when we keep in mind the context of people being upset about a female employee being fired.
2.) Even if we assume that yes, Ellen Pao did represent all women, that still does not imply that the public's sentiments against her were somehow "ingrained" or unjustified. She did decide to ban several subreddits before the latest incident with Victoria (which may or may not have involved Pao). The anger may have been unjustly directed towards her specifically when it should've been directed towards Reddit management in general, but being a lightning rod for bad press has always been an unspoken the function of CEOs. It may not conclusively prove that the anger directed at her was purely due to management issues, but it does cast doubt about it being because she was a woman.
So the issue here is not that something can't be pseudo-objective if enough people agree, it's that the claim is not specific enough to be meaningful, and these kinds of terms are usually just used as social trump cards that discourage questioning, which again, is the opposite of what journalism is supposed to be about.
It's as obvious as the fact that vaccinations don't cause autism.
Urinalism is largely discredited at this point due to there bias and agenda.
This is a pretty accurate narrative. You may not agree, but casual misogyny is incredibly pervasive on most defaults, and it's fairly prevalent within the smaller, community-based subs as well.
> small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with
If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.
> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.
I'm not even going to address how laughably absurd your characterization of consistent harassment, abuse, and terrifyingly legitimate rape and death threats as "criticism" is. Most people were upset with Pao because she was part of an executive decision to shut down FatPeopleHate and a couple of other abusive subreddits. It's quite a stretch to say that she was solely responsible for this decision, and even then, it's sobering that people would respond with scathing, fiery, and highly toxic personal and threatening attacks on a decision that was intended to help people be kinder to each other -- and worse, lobbed on someone that had at most 2/5ths of the executive power to make that decision.
The media didn't turn the shaky relationship between reddit's users and their administrators into a black-and-white affair. Reddit itself did, by using Pao as a scapegoat to attack everything they saw as antithetical to freedom of hatred and abuse under the guise of "free speech."
Being a racist or mysogynist is unrelated to being critical of or disagreeing with how she was managing Reddit as a business.
I'm a feminist,and can't stand a lot of the stuff that goes on on reddit.
That said, censorship on that website is rampant. Reddit is trying to monetize, and that means stifling speech, especially that speech critical of corporate governance.
The issue isn't as black and white as you make it. There are people with legitimate grievances. And there are people who are being sexist pigs.
Reddit will tell their userbase that the whole fiasco was Pao's fault. They will tell the board and investors that the userbase is sexist.
They think it's win win, but they are on a sinking ship.
The right to free speech is not the right to speech without consequence. And what obligation does reddit have to preserve "free speech" in the first place? They run the website and it is fully up to them what gets filtered through and what sticks. It's not beholden to the first amendment.
Are you sure? I frankly saw much more of this than the other. I, of course, have a bias, but I think people were focused on censorship.
And you're right. Reddit doesn't owe anyone free speech. But with all due respect, that's the product that they developed. Crowdsourced content aggregation is a useful service, but it's one that is entirely dependent on having "free speech".
If corporations or government can shape the dialogue on a website like reddit, it fundamentally undermines the purpose of having a service that aggregates upvotes.
Reddit can control and censor all they want. But it will take them from having a unique product and niche to being another viral editorial board in a sea of crappy viral editorial boards.
People have the right to free speech. People have the right to be offended by things. And people have a right to leave a service when it stops existing as it once did.
See:
Project Panda, PREDDITORs, Their brigades (https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/14iwvx/its_that_t...), the fact that they are "exempt from the non participation" requirement when linking to other subs.
I think people confuse making some jokes about women with "casual misogyny." People make jokes about everything, including stereotypes of women. Maybe that's in poor taste, and maybe they deserve to be called out for that if it's inappropriate, but it certainly doesn't mean they hate women.
What about the subreddit comparing Ellen Pao to Pyongyang [0].
Jokes about Pao with over a +4000 positive score [1] [2] Jokes comparing Ellen Pao to Hitler. [3] I remember a post to /r/pics or /r/funny of Hitler's Wikipedia page, with Pao's photo instead of Hitler.
I ran into some old coworkers (who take Reddit WAAAY too seriously) at a bar during the weekend this whole thing was first blowing up. They were literally talking about how Pao needs to die. Then they got drunk, forgot they had ranted about her, and told me again how she needed to die.
This whole thing was really disgusting and made me hate the average Reddit user. I'll still browse some of the smaller subs, but I won't be touching the frontpage ever again.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/paoyongyang
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c03y8/ellen_paos_car...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c05wq/what_sound_doe...
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c0b5p/whats_the_diff...
They are not the average Reddit user.
Probably a huge majority of Reddit users have no idea who Ellen Pao is.
If the default home page and /r/all can all be flooded with posts about her, it's not exactly a small group of extremists.
If the default home page and /r/all can all
be flooded with posts about her, it's not
exactly a small group of extremists.
Reddit has roughly 1.5 million daily users. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic
It only takes about a thousand (net) upvotes to get something to the front page.
So a very small (less than 1%) portion of the visitors can very much get things like "fire Ellen" posts onto the front page, especially when there's no opposing block of voters.
(In other words, there were no passionate defenders of Pao who were eagerly downvoting the posts that trashed her. There were only anti-Pao zealots, and a much larger userbase that simply didn't care much at all. Count me in the latter, FWIW.)
Now, I think one could make the argument that /r/Jokes should be more heavily moderated because it's a default sub, and should cater to a more vanilla, easily offended audience.
Ellen Pao wasn't awful, but all-in-all, it's probably a good thing she stepped down. Hopefully, next time there's a huge community changeover or staff change in reddit, everyone will talk through it and about it reasonably, and everyone will be able to bat away the easily-led and the gleeful and/or bored shit-stirrers.
* Their comments were funny / reasonable / etc.; there was nothing wrong with them. GP was wrong to find it disgusting.
* Their comments were bad, but there's nothing we can do about them. Our society involves it being socially acceptable to tell jokes about how people should die because of their inability to articulate clear moderation policies on a popular website, and that's unfortunate, but there's no way that we'll be able to change that social norm. (Or, alternatively, changing that social norm carries unavoidable downsides.)
* Their comments were bad, it's possible to make it no longer socially acceptable to make those jokes, and it should happen.
This doesn't really have anything to do with how seriously we take them.
I believe in the power of speech. I believe that there is utility in being able to convey my thoughts, without someone else filtering or censoring them, to others. I believe that my words mean things, that they reflect what I believe. I believe that being a person "of your word" is an important thing: that when you say you will do something, you intend to do it. I believe that lies are, of themselves, clearly of negative moral value. (Which is not to express an opinion on whether lies can serve some greater moral good, just to say that they have inherent demerit.) I believe that if I care about my friends, I care about what they say; if I value my friends, I value what they say; if I respect my friends, I respect what they say.
It is out of that conviction that I think that restrictions on one's ability to speak, whether from a government or a private party, carry great power, which, like all power, can be abused.
If I don't assign a moral value to these coworkers' comments, if I don't care what they say, if I don't care to have opinions on their speech lest I risk "thought policing" them, if I believe that people may say bad things while intending to be good (or vice versa) and that's just okay... it seems that I have completely devalued the power of speech, and I have destroyed the very reason we care about free speech, without censoring a single word. If anyone can say anything and it could mean anything or nothing, and nobody cares, what is the point of speech?
The personal attacks and name calling, which haven't been linked in your comments, were a bit much. However they were few and far in between.
No they were not. https://www.reddit.com/r/all was dominated by them for days following the banning of /r/FatPeopleHate.
Is there a mountain of unfair coverage I didn't see? It seems kind of obvious that Reddit is much more "the media" than any clickbait news site. And wasn't the whole point of "blacking out" subreddits to gain media attention?
Literally (in the actual sense of this word) there are 160 million unique users on reddit monthly. Personally, I applaud free speech even when it is extremely hateful as I would not trade my right to speak my mind for protection from others voices[0]. However, even if I didn't believe that, I do believe that it is wrong to judge a large group of people based on the actions of a small minority.
[0] I get that the websites are private, before anyone points that out.
Most people you know are in some form or fashion, an asshole. They quietly be a racist, sexist, nationalist to an extreme, have a fetish far beyond the norm, or other strange or socially unacceptable behavior. They just don't personally show it to you to avoid the judgement. It just seems like there are a whole lot more of them on Reddit because Reddit doesn't silence them. Let that settle in for a little bit. It's the anti-gay pastor that gets caught with a man, for example. That said, people are allowed to show their more negative sides without any repercussions things can become problematic and the more extreme can take over a community if enabled.
You're damn right people are tired of the shrill MRAs with their short-sighted, selfish, and immature wails, who can't think of anyone but themselves. They're a small group of militant activists crying over what amounts to a skinned knee, always trying to shout down other people, but never being pro-active and creating events of their own.
So how should you counter people you don't like? Well, by trying to be mature, and if you fail, trying for better next time. Death threats and rape threats are never okay. Especially if the person in question is not forcing themselves into your life - people go to reddit, reddit does not force themselves into living rooms and makes you read it, nor do many people pay for it.
For the record, I am a white male. I loathe the MRA crowd because they're purely reactionary. Men do have systemic social issues that need addressing, but in general, the MRA crowd isn't actually interested in exploring, discussing, and addressing the issues. Instead, they use men's issues as a weapon with which to beat down discussion that other people are having; there is very little that is proactive in that crowd. For example, here on HN, pretty much all the men's rights stuff has been presented as some sort of counterpoint to a perceived feminist slight... yet these same shrill voices that demand we pay attention to the issues faced by men... never post articles in their own right, only weaponised comments to win internet points.
Threats of violence are never okay unless you're being physically threatened. Immature commentary should never be at the forefront of a social movement, since it's never going to solve root causes and can only provide a superficial salve. These things are destructive, and are all about making the other side lose - an ideal outcome is a win-win situation, though that's not always possible, of course.
> never post articles in their own right, only weaponised comments to win internet points.
On balance I think things are fairly equal, honestly women might be slightly better off. There is a very loud minority angrily decrying people who post pro-male articles and such, and the news and media are not interested in it unless it is to point out that he was a MRA killer from 4chan.
That being said, I have become apathetic to these tropic debates (women in tech, gamergate, feminism v antifeminsim, etc) and now just largely support free speech and freedom of expression. This has the potential to make many people upset, and a select few targets of extreme harassment. On balance, however I think it is the most powerful tool in our society.
Your civil comment was quite a nice departure from my regular observations, cheers.
Why the fuck is someone else's sexual harassment lawsuit with their former employer any of your concern? Unless you have a political agenda against women who complain about sexual harassment.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think she was responsible for nearly so much of the stuff Reddit reacted negatively to over the course of her tenure as some would think, but I think the primary blame for that perception lies with Reddit's leadership as a whole and their astounding lack of communication to their audience. They knew that Pao had been the subject of a high-visibility lawsuit heavily steeped in social justice implications, which she rather badly lost - it doesn't take a PR genius to think that if you start introducing sweeping social justice-driven changes to your site while she's in office as CEO, people are going to presume that she's the one driving them. That could have been trivially defused by saying "This was a decision made by our board" or "This initiative is something we've been working on for the past 3 years", rather than just sitting by and letting the bogeyman grow and grow.
As another example, as best I can tell, Ohanin let Pao take all the heat for Victoria Taylor's firing, and then clarified that he was the one who made the decision to terminate her only after Pao had resigned. A huge amount of unrest could have been deflected off of Pao if Ohanin had said "Hey, I'm the one that made this decision", but that wasn't said (if I'm wrong, please let me know; the first reference I saw to this admission was timestamped around ~1h ago). In fact, reddit's leadership as a whole was extremely wishy-washy and vague about the whole thing, despite the fact that it upset the volunteer base that makes reddit usable enough to incite mini-revolt.
Leaping to claims of sexism seems lazy and just a little-too-convenient for me. I think that if her husband had been in the CEO role and the same things had happened, given his PR image problems, you'd have seen the same magnitude of criticism and outrage (but then, of course, people would level claims of racism as the cause, which I think would have been equally as wrong).
To me the uptick in personal insults seems obvious, and uncorrelated to a long history of questionable decisions by Reddit admins. Although I think her being labelled as a feminist false accuser is as much the reason as her being a woman.
Pao was the face of reddit as CEO and had to rightly "face the music", not because she's a woman. I find it incredible to see things boiled down to "they hate her cuz she's a gurl".
More like passing off a lack a simple lack of ability at KPCB as gender discrimination, having the temerity to file a meritless suit on that basis, losing it so conclusively, and then further demonstrating her lack of ability at Reddit thereby harming something a lot of people love a lot.
I find that easy to see how that is vitriol-inducing.
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletch...
Many of the insults we men use on each other just don't work on a woman. For example, what would calling a woman a "dickless wonder" even mean?
Similarly, let's say I wanted to insult a guy raised by a gay male couple. It would make no sense telling him "Your mother is a whore".
What does this have to do with the parent's post?
What the fuck is this? And how is this relevant? And when was the last time you heard a similar comment about a man?
She was previously fired from Kleiner Perkins for unsatisfactory performance.
Perhaps the Reddit board has come to the conclusion she might not be ready for a CEx position.
Assuming she was completely horrible and a terrible CEO... Assuming that! How could someone's lack of ability to do their job (or anything else for that matter) make the type of death and rape threats that this 'vitriol' was seen being expressed with less appalling?
You are falling into a common pit where you may think it was good she has been replaced, and you may be right, and gosh darn it you are certainly entitled to that opinion. But when you reply objecting to a comment that is basically just saying the type of hate a woman got on the internet was horrible, you become part of the problem by basically saying she deserved to receive those threats.
So now she got all those threats because she's a woman? What?
You know the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] right? It applies to male and females alike.
And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point out Pao did an atrocious job and was an awful choice for CEO, and you'll never hear the board admit that.
Did he get the same sort of personal, visceral threats?
- He wasn't in the middle of a bunch of massively controversial fraud/discrimination lawsuits and other issues
- Reddit's administration wasn't a damn soap opera at the time, so people didn't care as much.
PS: You don't need to be a woman to receive death threats. It's not an exclusivity. People are assholes, like I said. I've worked long enough in the video game industry to know this as a fact. Unfortunately, America has this very weird narrative about women which only serves to reinforce the stereotypes they claim to fight. And since it's past 1AM in Europe, we're seeing this narrative dominate the comments... it's pretty sad.
But we don't mention those, no no. It's only "sexism" and "mysoginy" because we don't like what happened to a woman. When it's good for a woman, that's just sheer luck. Or white-knightism, whatever floats your boat.
Please.
However, unless I misread this thread, the conversation wasn't about whether employee terminations were well-advised. I was talking about which Reddit employees received interminable ugliness from Redditors, and whether it was correlated with what the public knew about their performance in their jobs.
To my knowledge, there was no public discussion, vitriolic or otherwise, of either /u/kickme444 or /u/chooter's performance before their terminations, so I'm not sure what point you are making. (There were some comments that received flak for supporting /u/ekjp's "Removing Harassing Subreddits" post.)
edit: I should also note that I'm not taking any position on the merit of /u/ekjp's departure, as mediated by the Board. Probably it was the right thing to do for the site, and quite likely it was the right thing to do for her, as well, but again, I'm not privy to anything that would let me have a well-informed opinion. I am only taking a position on the vitriol leading up to it. I think we'd both agree that it would be a bad thing if the vitriol was causative -- either if the Board relented to the worst parts of the mob (instead of, say, to respectful argument about why she's the wrong CEO), or if she stepped down because she couldn't take it any more -- and I'm hoping and assuming that it's not the case.
My example was that two reddit employees, in two similar situations, got treated differently. Thad a different gender, and in this case, the woman was treated exponentially better.
So my point was that you can play the "let's find the sexist" game. Or you can just admit that there are other circumstances at play. I'm not saying sexes didn't play a role, I'm saying Pao wasn't hated because she was a woman. Nobody gave two shits about her until she started making unpopular moves.
Kindness does not cancel out or excuse vitriol. If women get more kindness and also more vitriol online, getting less vitriol to women is still important; I am not concerned about some sum between positive behavior and negative behavior.
Let's say that the Star-Belly Sneetches either get rich beyond their wildest dreams or find themselves starving and begging on the streets. The Plain-Belly Sneetches don't tend to do better than middle class, but they don't do worse, either. To me, there is a single obvious injustice here worth our immediate efforts. If we make sure that Star-Bellied Sneetches have a place to live and food to eat, and if they still get super rich sometimes (i.e., there wasn't an underlying economic problem that advantaged some at the cost of others), then we can look at why that is and why the Plain-Belly Sneetches don't. But worrying about the Plain-Belly Sneetches first is misplaced, and it's clearly not the case that there's some net equality between the two groups because their average wealth is the same.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3chaut/why_...
That said, for all four of these people, that "silly website" was not only their job and livelihood, it was also very much a passion of theirs. It's entirely reasonable for it to be a strong part of their identity, and I think it's a bit disrespectful to deny them that.
No one in this chain of comments said that; besides maybe the GP you are defending. I referred to her as a woman and said the type of hate was horrible. There was no causation there.
>You know the ....
No shit, whats your point how does that justify ANYONE getting death and rape threats for doing their job in a manner others consider badly? So what if some of the people threatening her were probably also female? Or was there a different equally horrible point?
>And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point out Pao did an atrocious job and was an awful choice for CEO, and you'll never hear the board admit that.
I am sorry I didn't mean to implicate that. I meant to flat out say that is what the the GP was effectively doing.
That person decided to reply to a post of which the only content was saying that the internet acted poorly.(basically a truism), and they made a post that disagrees as a response, the only way that post furthers the conversation as a reply is with them supporting the very hate the original poster was talking about.
Look if a person does not want come across as supporting rape and death threats it is best not to disagree with posts which are only pointing out how horrible those type of threats are. It's a pretty basic idea. And if a person does want to support rape and death threats, they should just flat out say so, that way they can be removed as a user on whatever sites want to have actual conversations.
This is the same discourse BS that we get from politicians, name-dropping "terrorism" and "paedophilia" to pass random bills, laws or make people swallow unpopular opinions.
It's frankly repulsive seeing it happen here too. "Oh you disagree with me? YOU SUPPORT RAPE."
1. Nowhere in this thread was someone saying "Rape is Bad", without a bunch of other words around it. Nor was there anyone saying "I disagree", without a bunch of nuances and explanations around it.
2. You're still playing the politician game, trying to reduce the argument down to what suits you best, even after being called out on it.
I'm not falling into this trap. If you want a sensible discussion, please feel free to actually try and elaborate rather than present riddles and try to play tricks.
Patrick_Devine 2 hours ago | parent | flag
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.
Take a step back and try look at it with a clear head. Criticism can take many other forms, you know...
My response above was written assuming that the intended 'parent' post was the one being linked as the 'parent' at the time.
That post is no longer the parent of your comment, instead the parent is a post which your post actually works as a relatively legitimate reply to.
I am saying this as a way of acknowledging, all my further replies (some of which may have been made after the parent changed, without me noticing) are clearly deserving of down votes in the current context.
We detached this subthread and marked it off topic.
Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.
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... [2] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
edit: yeah, the downvote threshold system was bumped up ~1 year after PG's comment.
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.