Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mvdtnz 977 days ago
That is some incredible revisionist history.
1 comments

Elaborate?
What is there to say? The decisions that OP says were not hers, were hers. And the claim that they chose an Asian woman for the intended purpose of setting a racist mob against her is completely unfounded and frankly racist itself. Believe it or not, there are some Asian women out there that have qualities other than being the target of racism.
Most of the decisions Ellen Pao made, especially the banning of the FPH subreddit, was genuinely for the better. She bent over backwards, IMO, to avoid the hate - and should not have.
FPH essentially put itself into a position where it had to be banned:

1. Imgur blocked its images from being shown on FPH, essentially crippling the subreddit

2. In response, the FPH mods put a collage of Imgur's overweight staff in the subreddit sidebar

3. Reddit will have had to ban the subreddit to maintain their relationship with Imgur (who they ended up buying).

Sure, I'm not defending the unhinged behaviour of Redditors. But the claim that Pao is not responsible for these changes is just not true.
Ehh, given that reddit doubled down on pretty much every decision they made post Pao, I'm inclined with hindsight to think she was indeed scapegoated. Not necessarily for sexism reasons (try would happily do the same thing with Hitler as a CEO) but that's just a semi-common strategy with big business, especially towards an unpopular board member when the opportunity arises.

Really taught me not to celebrate these "CEO steps down" stories. Short of an entire board replacing itself it's just a new shade of black coming in to lead the change they want all along.

It can be both. If you are the CEO, the buck is meant to stop with you. Don't weep for her.