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by junkculture 3220 days ago
Well, I do run a content blocker on macos/IOS which turns off all comments on all websites, but that's a trifle limiting.

What annoys me about reddit comments are the pun "trains," endless reruns of old reddit jokes. Every conversation is swamped with these comments, perhaps deliberately, to drown out unpopular opinions. No wait, the Pao era introduced mass deletions instead.
1 comments
AndrewCHM 3220 days ago
the general consensus nowdays is that it was Pao being used as a scapegoat more than anything (I think knothing also straight-up admitted to scapegoating too? I can't remember off the top of my head)

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...

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junkculture 3219 days ago
> scapegoat

I wouldn't be surprised that happened ultimately, but I really don't think that she was hired with that role/goal in mind. No one could be that evil. Could they?

If you look at the history of reddit over the years, they've always lurched from one crisis to another. An absence of adult supervision. Reactive solutions.

I would bet that reddit was under pressure to monetize somehow and ads (a la Facebook) on that "community" wouldn't cut it. I believe that they had an influx of funds around the same time, and the investors were looking to start getting some returns.

Their various stealth marketing schemes were suffering at the hands of the entrenched trolls. The unsavory subreddits were probably putting off established customers.

Maybe Pao just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

yishan's comment is interesting, thanks for linking to it. I didn't follow the whole Pao affair, but I do remember someone telling me that yishan might have been trolling reddit.

One thing jumps out at me from his comment. He calls Pao "the only technology executive anywhere who had the chops and experience to manage a startup of this size, AND who understood what reddit was all about."

Technology executive? Really? That's news to me. I thought she had spent her pre-reddit days in finance.

And she definitely did not understand reddit.

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