So can someone summarize the ordeal?
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...
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.
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.
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.