I have no strong opinion on Gebru, but... it's so easy for a random person to make a throwaway account on Reddit, and these comments don't have any specific info to suggest they are anything more than that.
One of the replies further down had a more concrete example. I did not see any Googlers refute it:
To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.
The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth.
> I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence.
What if what some vocal minority advocates say is correct, and they have to carefully weigh every move they make, throughout their whole lives? If living that carefully is incredibly stressful, what percentage chance of it being the lived experience of minorities in tech justifies someone fighting aggressively to make things easier for minorities?
I agree this is a difficult spot to be put in: be quiet (or nice) and nothing changes, or be loud and aggressive so that people are forced to take notice. I don't wish that kind of double-bind on anybody.
In this position, some people seem to find a third alternative: be fierce and yet unflinchingly kind. Make a lot of noise, but be charitable with your opponents so that their good side has the opportunity to come out. People change on their own time. We can't force it.
Truth be told, it takes considerable wisdom to pull this off, and it's unfair to expect that of most people. But the alternative is to become increasingly bitter and caustic. That ends up making you feel increasingly self-righteous, but also increasingly isolated (which then feeds the self-righteousness, in a vicious cycle). It doesn't actually help the cause.
She doesn't deserve contempt for falling into that trap. Like all of us, she deserves compassion. But it's okay to point out that her behavior is unhelpful. We, too, should not fall into the double bind of keeping quiet about it versus responding aggressively. We can be kind and firm.