They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.
No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them.
But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).
This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing.
Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.
> No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them.
Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's 'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of the users.
I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they don't have control over their community.
This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.
Social sites really aren't easy to monetize without pissing off your users. MySpace imploded, Twitter still isn't profitable, Google backed off'ish from Plus, etc... I think Facebook is one of the few that seemed to successfully monetize a free social site.
I think the issue is that Pao (et al.) genuinely don't understand their community. That's the major source of the friction. Consequently, they can't figure out a realistic plan to build a healthy business around it. They seem to manage to piss a large percentage of their community off with every minor change they try to make. It's a bit sad because it's a huge community.
Possibly Aether (http://getaether.net/) might be something like what you have in mind.
So you are saying they should have spun it and presented the moderator in bad light? Yes, they are allowed to fire her, but so is the community allowed to vocally disagree with the decision and other terrible management that has gone far enough on Reddit.
Not exactly : that employee was the sole line of communication for the most popular part of the site.
The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became.
The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening.
They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins.
So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting.
Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Aside from the protest over the weekend, over 150k people (non-moderators) signed a petition to have Ellen Pao removed as CEO. That doesn't seem like a tools issue.
> Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
But out of Reddit's entire user base how many are actually pissed off enough to go someplace else? Let alone how many are actually pissed off over this or other politics around Reddit and mods. I'd have to imagine the number is very small.
The entire userbase doesn't matter that much. The majority of reddit users don't contribute any decent content.
Keeping the minority of users that are actually producing content happy is what they have failed to do and is the real risk - if there's nothing to look at, the rest of the userbase will follow the content somewhere else.
Honestly, the much bigger issue was that they didn't tell anyone she was let go!
The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?".
That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.
That's not really a logical reason to be upset since we don't know the reasons behind her termination. Even if it was a heartless business move, that's still not a very good reason for all the crazy levels of anger directed at Pao. She might be bad at her job, but a lot of it was way over the top.
What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit?
edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.
What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job.
The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
I'm sure this happens a lot. But I'd have expected more of an effort to gain the trust of the users, which would seem to me to be an important element in all this.
Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense.
> The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO.
I have a hard time attributing recent events directly to Pao, though with her being CEO I guess ultimately the buck does stop with her.
> I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
That could well be the case (though I fail to see the connection), but that still does not explain why she was initially picked and that's what my question is about. I can't imagine it was just a roll of the dice.
A lot of this conversation assumes we all know what the role of Reddit's CEO should be. But we probably don't: the title means radically different things in different organizations.
It seems from easily available evidence that Reddit's core business challenge was taking a runaway successful online community and reliably monetizing it. If the CEO role at Reddit was primarily responsible for dealing with that problem, it's not surprising that the kind of person who filled it might not be congenial to message board nerds. The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.
The knee-jerk response to this obvious point is that someone brought in to monetize a community could easily damage it by being tone-deaf or compromising it in pursuit of profit. But most of the things Reddit Inc did to damage its community predate Pao, often by many years.
This is the stuff I think about when people point out that Pao was a terrible CEO for Reddit Inc because she didn't know how to send a private message.
How does any CEO get selected?
I'd imagine it has something to do with knowing the right people.
I wouldn't necessarily blame Pao entirely for what transpired, but it works both ways. Nadella, for instance, has been attributed with many of the positive changes that occurred recently within Microsoft. Was he single-handededly responsible for all of these positive changes? Hardly.
Human beings are poor at grasping complex and sometimes chaotic systems. Hence we concentrate our emotions on a single target. The amount of vitriol in this instance may or may not be warranted, but I'd hope that someone who took the job title of CEO was prepared for it.
I keep getting the sense this is some major inside-baseball stuff getting played out in public because moderators and admins on Reddit have giant megaphones. The complaints seem reasonable, the responses seem reasonable, but almost none of it has any impact on users of the site.
The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever.
Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech.
It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.
But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).
This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing.
Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.