[emehrkay]

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation.

As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.

Children are emotional.

[Raphmedia]

Disclaimer: I have been a moderator on a website of slightly less than a million registered users from 2003 to 2008 so I have my heart on the moderator's side.

The moderators of Reddit actually have very legitimate issues and are bringing points that need to be addressed. Moderators of websites as big as reddit should be managed correctly and supervised. They should also have a line on communication with the administrators of the website for issues such as this one.

They should also receive proper tools needed to ensure that their work is done correctly and in a timely fashion.

Reddit's moderators have even greater responsibilities than moderators of more normals websites have. Their efforts on this point should be rewarded or at the very least recognized. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.

Some subreddit are ecosystems that are bigger, better staffed and more organized that a lot of websites out there.

To say openly that moderators and content creators are simply creating a ruckus out of nothing and should be ignored is biting the hand that feeds you. Those people are people of passions, and people of passions will hate quickly and move on to a better suited ecosystem even faster.

The firing of that employee was only the bottlecap blowing out from all the pressure. She also ended up a martyr to push the strike into the mind of regular users. Otherwise, she is barely related to what happened on reddit recently.

[SerpentJoe]

There are certainly legitimate complaints to be made about how Reddit empowers the volunteer work of moderators, but that is the least of the complaints that are clogging the site right now. There are three major objections being raised loudly and repeatedly:

1) Moderators, who provide a huge portion of the value of the site, are treated with disrespect by the organization.

2) An employee whose availability was useful to a few major subreddits was dismissed without warning, leaving those subreddits in the lurch, which is emblematic of the above disrespect.

3) Ellen Pao is CEO.

These are presented in decreasing order of relevance to the actual problem, and increasing order of urgency to those driving the discussion.

Pao needs to do an AMA. A small number of users is upset at her stance in favor of diversity and against sexism, and because she's historically refused to directly engage a community that's gotten used to having direct access to movie stars and presidents, those few have been able to convince many more that she's a cold bitch and doesn't deserve respect. She needs to be on the front page all day gracefully responding to the revolting things being said about her so that normal users can remember that she's an actual person and not an anonymous force of nature advancing evil in the world.

Edit: Seems that's what she's doing right now.

[Raphmedia]

It is sadly too late. On such a crisis, you need to react and react fast. You or your public relation team must be ready to leap and be as transparent as possible. You need to have someone on call for such situations.

The minute that employee was fired and the pressure was building up, they should have reacted by saying (as much as legally possible) why she was fired. The internet is used to transparency. Then, they should have explained how Reddit, as a community, will move on. Meanwhile, the moderators should have been aware of what was going on since the very beginning and the administrators of the website should have relied on them to control their respective communities.

Firmly affirm the current situation, then firmly affirm your plan for the future.

They should have addressed the fears of the users. Users who are known to be very afraid of order and who will quickly pick up a mob mentality.

Instead of reacting quickly, the community was completely ignored and free to be scared. This resulted in making a meme of hating the CEO of Reddit. By meme, I mean that definition: "an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means".

It is too late to change this. Once the internet makes a meme out of something, and that meme catch, is it contagious and there is nothing you can do about it.

They then apologized. By apologizing, you are taking the blame in the eyes of everyone.

Ellen Pao will never be seen with respect by the Reddit community from now on. Instead, she appear to be an incompetent leader who is unable to deal with crisis.

[cthalupa]

> A small number of users is upset at her stance in favor of diversity and against sexism

Uh. What?

First of all, Ellen Pao's stances against sexism and pro diversity are suspect. She used them as a reason as to why she was fired, and sued her former employer. She lost. Miserably.

Her husband is also an allged ponzi scheme fraudster.

Whatever Ellen Pao may deserve, sympathy is not it.

[jacquesm]

> She needs to be on the front page all day gracefully responding to the revolting things being said about her so that normal users can remember that she's an actual person and not an anonymous force of nature advancing evil in the world.

Because that worked so well for kn0thing...

[georgemcbay]

Alexis' early responses were the exact opposite of "graceful".

[celticninja]

yes but since his mea culpa the community is not holding it against him.

One of the mig issues people have with Ellen Pao is that her first responses on the issue were to the NYT, Buzzfeed etc and not directly to her own users.

[7Z7]

>One of the mig issues people have with Ellen Pao..

Bullshit, that's just the newest thing they've loaded their blunderbusses with - and is less than days old. It isn't why they've been calling her a cunt and hitler, and asking for her to be fired or killed for months.

[sanderjd]

Is it a given that responding to the community is the proper role for a CEO? I can envision a configuration of reddit corporate structure where there is a responsive, deeply involved, and powerful "head of community" position who would respond to the community in these situations, while the CEO does more traditional CEO stuff like talking to investors and press (among other things). The problem seems to me to be that they don't appear to have that "head of community" position. Indeed, it seems that /u/chooter had become that person de facto, perhaps without the company's leadership realizing it, and seemingly without the necessary internal sway.

[snowwrestler]

I have to wonder how many of these issues are the result of poor allocation of limited resources.

Reddit runs on a shoestring for an audience that big, and still loses money. As I understand Victoria's position, a full salary went to hand-hold celebrities during AMAs. That's a lot to spend for a portion of the participants in one subreddit (I don't think every AMA got that support).

Given limited resources, that meant that a salary's worth of resources were not available to help pay a software developer who could be working on better mod tools--which would benefit every mod on the entire site.

That might be the entire story behind Victoria's dismissal: reallocating money from hand-holding to software development. Which is more in line with the typical Silicon Valley tech company way of doing things. Facebook and Google and Twitter spend a lot of money for software development, so they don't have to spend much on hand-holding.

> It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.

Reading Pao's post, it looks like that was part of their decision. Since the value primarily comes from the users and mods, let them organize and run the AMAs from now on. Then the company can use that money to make better software.

Note: this is my own speculation based on public stuff I've read.

[celticninja]

it was not just one subreddit though. She orgamised a lot of AMAs on a lot of subreddits. r/IAMA was the main one, but she did a lot for r/books, r/science etc. Specifically if you look at r/science AMAs these tend not to be for the people to shift their latest product or raise awareness of their charity but to impart knowledge onto the public. TO explain current news stories usually with the people that ran or worked directly on the project. So it was not spent solely on the participants of one subreddit. However it was also her work that helped provide more credibility to the format. Things like the barack obama AMA were major factors in driving people to the site. And you only have to look at how the morgan freeman or woody harrelson AMAs went to get an idea of how a poorly managed AMA could quickly become a PR car crash. Having Victoria protected both the site, its users and the AMA guests by giving them someone who knew the process, what would and what would not work.

>Since the value primarily comes from the users and mods, let them organize and run the AMAs from now on

This is not what they have proposed. They have set up a team to deal with AMA issues. So now there is a team where there was once a single point of contact with direct responsibility. They dont want to concentrate on software they want to monetize the site. AMAs are one of their best features for doing that, it brings in advertisers, page views, recognition, credibility etc so that they handled the whole thing so poorly reflects badly on management.

[Domenic_S]

They recently closed a $50MM round. If that's a "shoestring budget" then we really are in a bubble.

[dredmorbius]

Reddit's got a team of 65: https://www.reddit.com/about/team/

Advertising revenue is under $10 million per a link provided earlier today from Merideth Paterson.

I don't know about other revenues (Gold, ??).

$50m/64 gives $781,250 per employee. At $200k/yr spend per employee, that's about a four year run time. How much above or below that depends on revenues, growth plans etc.

That should be reasonably decent bank.

[hsod]

Celebrity AMAs are the biggest way Reddit gets media exposure. I would think investing in making them run smoothly would be a high priority for Reddit.

[darkmighty]

Yes, unless you could automate "Contact courteously celebrities, explain everything, answer questions, and guide them.", it should be money very well spent for Reddit.

[Sharlin]

Never mind getting the celebs to want to interact with said automaton as opposed to a living, breathing person.

[vonklaus]

I know you are trolling, but people legitimately are asking this question so I will respond.

>I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset. >they're >they

Reddit is 160 million people because it is a huge online community. Calling them children and referring to them as a contiguous unit of alike individuals is laughable. So there isn't a straight answer why some subset of 160 million people are angry but a lot of them are for various reasons.

>I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired

Brendan Eich was way more qualified to run Mozilla than Pao is to run reddit. He was really fucking good at his job and is one of the smartest engineers in tech. He couldn't effectively do his job and had to resign. It doesn't matter if the backlash was fair, it was impacting the company negatively. Pao is not the right person to run reddit, hasn't made great decisions, is followed by personal scandal and is generally detested by the community(which is reddits product). She has to step down whether you feel slighted about it or not.

[nahiluhmot]

What makes you think parent is trolling?

[vonklaus]

Calling people emotional children and upset kids is just flame inducing. Maybe that person wasn't actually trolling but it was obvious crafted to illicit an angry response.

[dredmorbius]

Even where trolling is highly probable, "assume good faith" is generally a better tactic.

[dschulz]

*elicit

[psychometry]

Don't you think you're being a bit premature in your assessment of Pao? She's an interim CEO who's been on the job mere months. Shutting down the subreddits she did needed to happen in order for reddit to be viable long-term. This latest issue is just about disaffected male teenagers looking for a reason to get mad at the new female CEO. It's so transparent and so pathetic.

[oldmanjay]

I'm curious about something - do you feel like the obvious bigotry in your statement is justified? It's almost entirely unlikely that you have any real demographic information about the people you are slagging, never mind any actual knowledge of people's reasoning, so from my POV, your statement is borne of pure prejudice. Care to convince me otherwise?

[psychometry]

You have no idea what bigotry is. It's possible to criticize the actions of a group of people without being prejudiced and my assessment is based on actual posts and comments that I've read over the past week. Seeing what kinds of content is upvoted gives you a sense of the overall sentiment and it's hard to rationalize the vitriol of the user base in response to this particular event.

Also, reddit's age and gender demographics are not hard to find: http://thepowertoprovoke.com/the-blog/2014/02/reddit-demogra...

[mucker]

I actually think he has a much firmer idea of what bigotry is than you do. I'm actually astounded that you would flaunt your ignorance of the word.

[oldmanjay]

Interesting opening sentence in your reply. I didn't bother reading past it since starting with an insult like that is as good an excuse to ignore your thoughts as I need. Thanks for making it easy!

[dang]

Please, both of you and everyone else, follow the HN guidelines when commenting on this site. That means replying civilly and substantively, or not at all. This is the rule here, irrespective of how wrong or provocative another user may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[vonklaus]

> This latest issue is just about disaffected male teenagers looking for a reason to get mad at the new female CEO

> It's so transparent and so pathetic.

I just don't find it obvious that it is because she is a woman. I also didn't realize it was only socially mal-adjusted male teenagers who are calling for her ouster. 200K people signed the petition to find a new CEO. Why do you think this is just angsty women hating teenagers?

[axlprose]

It's also not "obvious" due to the fact that this whole uprising started with the firing of a female employee. If this demographic of over 160 million users is in fact made up of largely "women hating teenagers", why would they get so riled up and defend a woman that lost her job? It just doesn't add up.

What's obvious here, is people trying really hard to frame almost every bit of internet drama possible into some kind of gender war. It's just disingenuous and disgusting.

[evan_]

You mean this petition:

https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-red...

Which doesn't list any actual specific grievances, but does mention the completely irrelevant gender discrimination lawsuit she was involved with? The one that supporters are signing with openly misogynistic and racist slogans and nicknames? The one that's full of duplicate signatures and obviously fake names? That's the petition you're talking about?

[psychometry]

Let's not forget the genius of not wanting someone who will "sue her way to the top". To the top of what...reddit? She's already the CEO. Whoever wrote that pretty much explicitly dislikes her for the gender discrimination lawsuit and has little to say about her job performance.

Really, it's right out of the men's rights playbook: Pretend everyone always gets by on merit alone and anyone disputing that fantasy must be trying to cheat their way through life.

[vonklaus]

Why do you think this is some sexist conspiracy? She lost the lawsuit against KPCB, she tried to blackmail them by threatening appeal and it does speak to her job performance. She was dismissed because she didn't have:

“the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player.”[0]

Many people seem to cling to the trope that women are being oppressed and intentionally singled out. This isn't one of those cases. Why do you think it is?

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/magazine/whats-really-at-s...

[nailer]

According to the trial, Pao slept with a married colleague and then tried using it as leverage for the next few years. It's ugly but certainly a relevant aspect of Pao's character.

[evan_]

Strange, I've never heard anyone make that claim before nor can I find it in any write ups of the case.

That she slept with a married man is public record but "used it for leverage" doesn't seem to have been part of the testimony. I'm afraid you may have been duped by a person with an agenda to make Pao look bad.

[Nadya]

Victoria being let off ruined a lot of currently planned AMA's - because she played such a huge part in it all.

It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person.

With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase. AMA's on Reddit are a pretty huge deal. It's a large part of Reddit's popularity - such that even the POTUS has had an "AMA" on Reddit. So when you disrupt how they work and give absolutely no word as to why the person who played such a large part in many AMA's being scheduled, planned, and hosted: you're going to step on a lot of toes.

I read one story of a person flying to New York for an AMA. He had to change his plans and work with the person planning the AMA to schedule different interviews or sightseeing on his time because the AMA was cancelled due to Victoria being let off. That's a loss of a person's time and money with no explanation being given for why someone who was performing their job suddenly wasn't tasked with the job. I'd be pretty peeved myself. Luckily the man was very understanding it was outside of the moderator's control with Victoria being let off, but I imagine some mods aren't as lucky with their scheduled AMA's.

[emehrkay]

To me it seems clear that they've decided to dislike Ellen ( they have sub dedicated to portraying her as Hitler, for fucks sake). So whenever her administration makes a mistake their reaction is going to be bloody murder.

Yeah firing the woman without a backup plan for the scheduled AMAs or whatever else was going on was a mistake. But what does someone have to do in order to be fired in that manor? Are we to assume that Reddit didn't understand the woman's daily duties and what affect her immediate/un-planned absence from the company would be? We don't know why the woman was let go, could had been worth the potential of missing a few scheduled AMAs (or even this backlash).

[fnordfnordfnord]

>they have sub dedicated to portraying her as Hitler, for fucks sake

Hadn't seen that one. /r/PaoYongYang is good for a few chuckles though.

>But what does someone have to do in order to be fired in that manor?

Casting aspersions as to the character of /u/chooter AKA Queen Victoria is risky, and also not in particularly good taste.

>Are we to assume that Reddit didn't understand the woman's daily duties and what affect her immediate/un-planned absence from the company would be?

I've seen corporate types make what appear to be uninformed decisions which turned out to be unwise.

[celticninja]

regardless of the reasons for the firing there definitely did not appear to be a backup plan in place with regard to her AMA responsibilities.

A plan has appeared now and they seem to be portraying it as being in place prior to the firing but it seems haphazard and if it was in place it was not communicated to the people who would need to use it (AMA mods) in time for it to prevent any disruption.

[sp332]

Right, this isn't about firing the person but about the complete lack of communication with all the other people that action affected.

That said, I have to agree with most of GP's points. The amount of vitriol aimed at Pao doesn't seem to jibe with anything she's actually done.

[fixermark]

Given how open Reddit's structure is (in the sense that it gives non-employees strong moderator rights and works to make them feel part of the community), are they treading untrodden ground in walking the tightrope between keeping the community in the loop and respecting the right to privacy of their employee?

Maybe Victoria was let go because the big mean American tech industry is full of misogynists and she's another casualty in the culture war. Or maybe she was let go because Reddit can't afford to pay her. Or maybe she was let go because she profoundly screwed the company over. The fact of the matter is that the privacy door swings both ways (protects the company, but also protects the employee). We don't know and we don't have a right to know---neither do the moderators.

But that aspect of right to know is traditional. In an ecosystem with so many (essentially) volunteer staff members, perhaps the traditional rules can't be cleanly applied. I suspect the sift-out of this situation will teach people much about how to operate heavy-volunteer corporations.

[jshen]

> With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase

No it doesn't, and in most cases the company is protecting the privacy of the individual being fired. Can you imagine if she were fired for something like sexual harassment and reddit we're telling the world all of the dirty details? In all likelihood, saying nothing is what they should be doing.

[jeletonskelly]

AMA worked fine before all the organization and planning of celebrity appearances. If you're a celebrity or politician or whatever, just hop on, make a post, message a mod for verification or post something to twitter and have at it. The only reason it became so ridiculous is because the mods themselves wanted to feel important, like they were "running" AMA. If some "important" person can't use the internet, then don't do an AMA or find someone to help you. Why there needs to be an employee and all this formality is beyond me...

[jacquesm]

I suspect the added complexity is because of the care some of the more visible AMA subjects take in managing their image.

[pbreit]

She's not very likable. You don't see down voting like this for Alexis, Yishan or, elsewhere, PG and SamA. She still speaks more in MBA-ease like "providing tools" and "listening to users" and "communicated poorly", etc.

And the person fired was by most accounts a well-liked, very visible, performing employee. Dismissing someone like that with very little care was horrific management.

Edit: I don't know why I included Alexis since he also comes off pretty smug and user-hostile (e.g. "popcorn time").

[iaw]

I've met a lot of people I'd consider 'success' focused individuals in the Ivies, I suspect if I met her I'd consider her in the same group.

There is a focus on a narrow definition of success that is more important than anything else. How that success is accomplished doesn't matter, just that it is. The behavior is surprisingly irrespective of traditional intellect or competence, it's pure focus and drive. It also is not about doing anything well per se, it's just about gaining stature.

[innguest]

It's called Narcissism.

[iaw]

I don't know if it maps perfectly to narcissism because there is a huge effort component that is not requisite to being a narcissist but is ever-present in the group I'm trying to describe.

[snowwrestler]

When I looked at his account during the height of the anger, Alexis's every comment was below -1,000. He got downvoted hard.

[pbreit]

You're right. I made an edit.

[celticninja]

>They have no real reason to dislike her.

I dont think that is true. I have used reddit for quite some time, probably since 2006. I have no personal animosity toward her however I dont think she is the right leader for reddit. And I say that as a user, not an owner, shareholder, employee etc. My reasons are because I like they way the old reddit operated. The reason that I say that is because when I started using reddit the free speech ethic was proudly trumpeted. This was around the time of the DeCSS key event that started the downfall of Digg.

Even up to as recently as 2012 Yishan Wong was reaffirming reddits commitment as a free speech platform. This was around the time of the r/jailbait takedown. But really that was the beginning of the end, r/jailbait was shut down because of illegal content being posted. I never saw definitive proof of that and I dont think any was offered. This was about the time that there was media interest in reddit (and to be fair r/jailabit was one of the more embarassing links that could and did show up on a google search for reddit). So it went and with it the start of a slippery slope of censorship began.

After r/jailabit (which the majority of users agreed with) there was the fappening, again a lot of users agreed, but all these agreeable users were relatively new, they were here for cat pictures and memes. They didnt care about reddit as a free speech platform because their interests were not affected. Then we arrive at r/fatpeoplehate being banned. This went because of 'harassment'.

Now we are at a stage where reddit is going to be kept clean and media friendly. It is not a free speech site (and I dont need to hear about free speech does not have to be protected by a businesss, i know that) even though it started off like that and it attracted a lot of users like that and those users built the communities that make reddit thrive.

I dont post that often anymore, i very rarely submit content anymore, I am not as attached to my accounts as I used to be. I am looking for alternatives because the site has changed so much (and so has the userbase) that the content it now has is no longer as relevant as it once was and this is only going to continue under the current leadership, and once a certain point is passed there is no getting it back. If she went now it may be retrieveable, if she lasts another 6-12 months in her position then it may not be.

[x0x0]

You're making this far too personal. Reddit is and was a shitty business; afaik, they lost money every year at least through 2012 (Yishan released not raw numbers but a graph showing expenses > revenue).

Reddit has to change: at some point, they will either make money, become a billionaire's hobby or vanish. That's completely separate from the fact that certain people were happy to host jailbait and stolen celebrity titty pics and others are ashamed to be associated with people who do and/or support the former.

Ellen has little do with any of the above except her current remit to make reddit into a functioning -- that is, profitable -- business. But any ceo will have that task.

[celticninja]

Yes it is not a profitable business, that is not my concern or that of its users. If reddit went under tomorrow and disappeared from the web, users would find a new site (voat.co, some other reddit clone, it doesnt matter) and congregate there.

Are they allowed to monetise their site? Yes of course they are. However there is a fine line between monestising a social media site and killing it. Just look at Digg, they tried to give to much power to superusers and sites that gained traffic from them. Result the users left in droves so that they werent spoon fed corporate shit. It went from a valuation of $150m to being sold for under half a million. It will never regain what it was, diggs are no longer even measure don the site.

The same thing could happen to reddit. The CEOs job is to monetise the site, but if you kill the site you can not monetise it. This is why reddit needs a CEO that the users like. If ellen pao fucks up the monetisation in such a way that it alienates users they will not be forgiving. If the users like a CEO and the CEO fucked up then they are more likely to forgive and remain redditors than if they hate the CEO and the fuckup is the straw that breaks the camels back.

[x0x0]

my contention -- perhaps not clear enough -- is a ceo the users like will be unable to monetize reddit. After all, ceos the users liked failed for what, 9 years running: 2005 to 2014?

[celticninja]

A successful CEO would, if it is possible be able to monetise the site without destroying it. Yes the standard box of tricks could not be applied, so a good CEO would work out how to do it without using examples from their MBA classes.

The management of reddit means they have only really had 2 CEOs, prior to that they were a subsidiary of CondeNast. The previous one leaving rather unexpectedly although by his own volition.

[forgottenpass]

They're unpaid contributors to very general interest content, of course it's going to be full of low quality submissions and commenters. Hell, even blogs on general entertainment and "news entertainment" subject matter are full of catty assholes for paid writers. That's just the territory of targeting a wide audience on the internet, and you sorta have to accept it for what it is, because it isn't changing anything soon.

The worst thing you can do is let that behavior poison the well for you. There is always going to be someone who shares your opinions but you don't like their reasoning or the way they choose to share their reasoning. You don't want other people to write your ideas off because some people that agree with you are assholes, so extend the same courtesy to people you don't agree with.

I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.

Yes, you can. There is more than one answer, and 10x more people that are just into bandwagon shouting than thoroughly articulating their positions, but that doesn't mean you can't find it. It means you don't want to try.

[Lawtonfogle]

>As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired.

Supposedly she helped with setting up a lot of IAMAs as well as fighting to keep their integrity up (i.e. identifying when an actor's agent was posing as that actor as part of a marketing ploy). Even if you really liked IAMAs and what I've heard is completely true, these are benefits you wouldn't directly notice. It is like the average computer user feeling slighted by the Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or the average voter feeling slighted by the TPP. These have nasty effects, but they are not at all direct in the harm they cause, and as such people do not feel slighted even when they have been.

[chaostheory]

Was this why Victoria was fired?

[freebish]

No one has publicly said why she was fired. We only know it happened rapidly. It happened shortly after a Jesse Jackson AMA that went way off the rails, but that could be coincidence.

[tptacek]

As I understand it: nobody knows why Victoria was fired, and speculating will probably do more harm than any possible good.

[jazzyk]

Is it speculating or finding out the truth that would do harm in your opinion? Her firing is at the very center of a very public controversy - why should it be a secret? Victoria is most likely legally barred from speaking out, so the facts would need to come from third-party witnesses.

[psychometry]

One look at the completely irrelevant second sentence of the petition to remove her [1] should tell you everything to know about why users are actually angry at her. This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.

Reddit has harbored toxic subreddits for long enough that they've nurtured a huge user base of racists and misogynists. It's a demographic crisis and it apparently doesn't take much to incite these mobs. These vocal and active users hated Pao before she became reddit CEO and these events were entirely predictable.

[1] https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-red...

[fnordfnordfnord]

It doesn't take a misogynist or a racist to be upset to see a well-liked person fired abruptly, especially with no apparent cause. There is a lot of stored-up discontent with the way Reddit is run, some of it even goes back to when Yishan was CEO. It's a fool's errand to try to please all of such a huge userbase, but Pao seems to have been able to unite some very unlikely factions against her.

[psychometry]

You say there is no apparent cause, but you're not privy to the details and have no right to be unless you were a reddit employee working closely with her. It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing, regardless of the position and company.

The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice to people who depending on the fired person. That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>but you're not privy to the details

That's why I said there is no apparent cause.

>not privy to the details and have no right to be

Strictly speaking that's correct. Here in the real world, Reddit might weigh more carefully how their operational decisions have affected actual operations, as opposed to continuing to operate as if they have total control of every aspect of Reddit.

>It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing

Of course it is, but keeping silent won't stop the speculation. Something tells me that decorum isn't the reason for Reddit's silence. I suspect they are merely worried about exposing themselves to the possibility of a lawsuit. In that light, it may have been better to come up with a more creative way to move /u/chooter out of her role.

>The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice to people who depending on the fired person.

That is one of the legitimate complaints about /u/chooter's firing. Like it or not, it is perfectly legitimate for anyone, especially Reddit mods and users to have and express an opinion about Reddit and their operations. That's kind of what Reddit is, a place for people to express opinions; I am not sure how that aspect escaped the notice of management. And, yeah, Reddit also dropped the ball by not having a contingency plan for /u/chooter's departure and they probably don't have contingency plans for other employees in critical roles.

>That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.

That's because the firing of /u/chooter was just the catalyst that began the release of a lot of pent-up discontent.

[psychometry]

What was the pent-up discontent about? Removing awful subreddits? I still can't come up with any good reasons why people are so angry. Some moderators should be mildly peeved, but that's about it.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>What was the pent-up discontent about?

Lack of moderation tools, unresponsive admins, accusations of shady conspiracy stuff (payola, censorship, etc), there is other stuff. I don't care to list it all but you should look into it if you want your arguments to be taken seriously.

>Removing awful subreddits?

As has been related to you many times, that is a recent issue.

[ub]

I disagree that it's all because she's a woman. Just read her statement here. http://www.thesocialmemo.org/2015/07/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-va...

She has no clue that the "vocal minority" is the one that creates the content that the majority consumes. She comes across as aloof, as if she's just playing out the role of the CEO without really understanding the soul of Reddit. Of course, the vitriol poured out by some of the users is misogynistic, but the larger backlash is really because of the way things were handled by the company.

[pygy_]

In the comment thread of the OP, she clarifies the "vocal minority" as referring to the people obsessed with her.

> I assume you’re referring to the NYT quote. I want to clarify the quote's context. The reporter asked about the people who are posting and commenting really negatively about me, not about the mods and content creators. That's what I was referring to when I talked about them being a vocal minority. I do understand that the site is built on the content and voting, and I know that we and the community owe a lot to our mods and core users. —/u/ekjp, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

[shock-value]

You could say the same about Twitter's hosting individuals who espouse toxic views. I believe that Reddit essentially wants to be a Twitter for communities (as opposed to individuals), in that they aren't interested in guiding the moral ethos of its userbase (beyond removing illegal or harassing content). So, honest question, would you apply your criticism to Twitter? (and if not, why not?)

[psychometry]

I don't use Twitter, so I have no idea. But each company, despite their freewheeling public images, has a right to dictate how their services are used. If that means adopting a stronger stance on these toxic elements in order to improve their user experience (and attractiveness to advertisers), it's probably best to do it.

Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.

[axlprose]

> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.

You're right, but it doesn't matter whether they're "beholden" to it or not, they're the consumers and they're telling the market that they want a platform with transparency and where speech is protected. It's just supply and demand, so if there are signals that reddit isn't satisfying what its market demands, how exactly is reddit immune from your average market forces here? It's a popular site, sure, but so were digg and myspace. Just because users have certain expectations of a site, that the site itself may or may not have actually promised, does not make the site immune from competition.

So in reality, it's not so much about users feeling entitled to anything, it's that reddit seems to have been getting complacent about what it feels it needs to deliver to stay relevant to its content producers and power users (which are the main drivers of a site like that).

Companies can dictate how their services are used all they want, but that doesn't mean they have an automatic right to remain successful/profitable/relevant, especially if how they went about dictating their terms hurt their PR (whether reasonably or not).

[psychometry]

Reddit needs to worry about what their advertisers want, too, which I imagine does not include a place where TheRedPill and CoonTown are thriving.

[axlprose]

We can imagine all we want, but that's up to the markets to decide, not you, advertisers, or anyone else. Advertisers just want to have an audience they can make money off of. If reddit scares away what it's trying to sell to advertisers because it's ideals aren't aligned with its product/userbase, then it deserves to be disrupted by competition.

It's not like we live in a dictatorship where we can easily designate what is/isn't appropriate for a site like reddit to be successful. If a competitor to reddit finds itself being more successful by hosting things like TheRedPill and CoonTown, then so be it, that's how the market works.

[shock-value]

> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe.

It's cliché at this point, but I'll say it anyway: Tell that to Digg

[gohrt]

> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.

And yet, when those non-"beholding" users revolted, Pao apologizes to them, instead of continuing to ignore them.

> imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.

"imagined" by... the Reddit administrators.

http://www.reddit.com/rules

"reddit is a pretty open platform and free speech place, but there are a few rules"

[psychometry]

Exactly, they are merely "pretty open" and can change the rules as they see fit. Like I said, any belief that all speech should be protected on reddit is false.

[blfr]

Every company has a right to dictate how their services are used but they don't have a right to keep their "freewheeling public images" if they do a lot of dictating.

[MisterWebz]

A bunch of misogynists who are upset that a female employee was fired. Right.

[evan_]

No, you're right- they don't care about that at all. They're mad that the administration are cracking down on abusive subreddits like "fat people hate" and all of the revenge porn subs that got shut down last year. They're pretending to care about the Victoria thing because it's more socially acceptable.

[axlprose]

And you know this because you interviewed the hundreds of thousands of discontent reddit users I presume?

Generalizations are fun, but they don't make the greatest arguments.

Not all users that were upset at the /r/fatpeoplehate ban were subscribers to that sub, and not all subscribers to that sub were partaking in harassment I presume (which is a reasonable assessment based on the subscriber numbers and the usual ratios of participation in online communities).

So taking all that into account, even if this is in fact the main demographic of disgruntled users, that still has nothing to do with misogyny. If it were true misogyny, they likely wouldn't even be using a female employee as their martyr. I really don't understand what distorting contexts and stretching the truth to frame things in terms of sexism is supposed to accomplish, but it's certainly not proving any points.

Reddit screwed up, and it's CEO's decisions clearly affected an influential and vocal part of the community, to the point where it's now open to competition from sites like voat. There's enough business mishaps and silliness in all this to explain everything, I don't see how shoehorning misogyny into it adds anything of value.

[innguest]

> This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.

If the Reddit CEO were male AND their "failed lawsuit" were also about a dishonest attempt at smearing the name of innocent companies and people - like cowards and people without principles do - then I bet you the outcry would be the same.

Good people hate liars, and there's no coming back from playing the victim and seeking compensation unjustifiably.

I won't quote here but search for the points made by celticninja. It's incredible that we allow women to get away with so much that we even forget to acknowledge that liars and unprincipled narcissists come in all shapes and colors. Don't hate the gender, hate the (lack of) principles.

[mucker]

Uh...no?

[ryanSrich]

Wow. I really didn't expect this type of shill comment on HN. I mean, I know YC has a vested interest in Reddit but this comment is just awful. Perhaps you should look into what real issues exist within Reddit before saying everyone who doesn't think favorable of EP is an angry "child".

[thearn4]

I've been on reddit for a few years, but never really took in how toxic the community is until I started following this. I cannot for the life of me understand how seriously people take that site and the things that go on there. It's like middle school lunchroom politics.

[emehrkay]

Maybe I'd be as invested if my Reddit check stopped coming in or it started to look funny after Ellen took over.

[jordigh]

And they were attacking her with sexist and racist comments. Classic Reddit: 4chan 2.0

[shock-value]

It's the price that's paid to have a site that encourages anonymity. You can't deny that there are benefits to said anonymity at the same time though.

[jordigh]

I don't think so. I don't see this kind of behaviour widely upvoted in HN or in Lobsters, and we're no less anonymous here or there.

[mrec]

HN is small and heavily weighted towards programming-related types. You don't see that kind of behaviour widely upvoted in the smaller programming-related subreddits either.

I'm a heavy Reddit user who steers well clear of the default-sub cesspits, and I basically never see it.

[chaostheory]

We're a much smaller community with a much smaller scope in topics as well.

Reddit is another animal.

[gohrt]

HN moderation is design in a way that forces very slow growth, which controls the content of new posters/posts.

You can't get to an X-million posting community with that style.

FWIW, Slashdot comments sit between HN and Reddit.

Also, HN intentionally avoids most controversial kinds of top-level post content that Reddit explicitly encourages in subreddits.

[jessedhillon]

Could I ask you for an invitation to lobsters?

[serve_yay]

If they're the problem, why is she apologizing to them for doing wrong by them?

Why is a supposedly community-based website run by someone the community hates?

You don't have to love reddit's community to smell a rat here. It's a complete shitshow.

[psychometry]

She's apologizing for the firing, not her existence. Reddit would seem to prefer having her apologize for an irrelevant lawsuit and then resign because the lawsuit conflicts with the personal beliefs of an ever-growing contingent of bitter, young males.

[McGlockenshire]

Now, imagine what's going to happen as these angry users leave for somewhere else. They're going to take their attitude with them, and the admins of that future site are going to have to deal with the same exact mentality.

Communities that suffer schisms like the one reddit is working itself into don't fare well. You can't build a healthy community out of a mindset like "well, we aren't THEM". This has happened time after time, and I've been on both sides of the problem, sometimes as a user, sometimes as the admin.

[celticninja]

The community is what you make it and who you enagage with. You see a shit community because you probably dont get involved in anything other than the default subreddits. You read the r/funny comments and see LCD comments for karma, that is a shit part of reddit I agree, but it is just a part of reddit it doesnt represent the whole community.

The reddit community just gets cherry picked depending on the view you want to put across. 'Bad Guys' - find an appropriate reddit, e.g. r/picsofdeadkids, or r/hangniggers or just go to r/SRS and choose a topic, sexism, racism etc, choose a particualarly vile comment from a single user and then say look this is representative of reddit, what a hive of scum and villainy.

'Good Guys' - go to r/randomactsofkindness or r/randomactsofpizza, or any local subreddit like r/oregon and find a heart warming story of a user sending another user a new laptop when theirs was stolen right before finals, or turning up with money for a hotel when a guy and his kid get stuck in a new city at night after a football game, or any of a hundred other amazing things that people do for one another just because they are a user of the same site.

Generalising like you have and saying you cant even get an answer about why they are upset is evidently trolling or laziness on your behalf as anyone with 10 minutes could find out the reasons behind the dislike of Pao just by reading the r/announcements and the user comments that go along with them.

[arfliw]

With regard to Victoria, she ran the AMA's and was very popular with redditors. Think of it like a sports team cutting a really popular player, without offering an explanation. The fanbase would be really unhappy about that. And this is what reddit does when it's unhappy about something.

The Ellen Pao stuff is complicated, she does have some fault for being the one who made unpopular decisions and the way she managed the process (particularly extremely poor communication) but in general I agree that she gets way too much criticism from the community. She's very unpopular for a bunch of things that are not actually her fault (like people who incorrectly think she censors reddit).

[tedks]

> They have no real reason to dislike her.

Imagine you're a freshman in college. You join a club and make friends with the people there. Quickly, the club becomes the center of your social life as you make friends with other people there and most of your time, formally or informally, revolves around the club.

As you get older, the club changes as old members leave and new members come. In two years, you feel like things are "going downhill", but just try to do your part a little better, and while you don't feel like you can have any effect on the larger portions (like the big introductory events) you have a little social circle that enjoys what you do, and you focus on making that the best place it can be.

However, when you're a junior, the leadership of the club starts changing rapidly. In six months there are two club presidents, each less liked than the last. Because of the way the university is structured, it would be very difficult to start a new club, or to get members of the previous club to come to the new club, and you've built up a lot of credential within the organization that will evaporate if you leave.

You're in a difficult situation now. You've invested a lot in this community. But top-down changes, possibly combined with normal drift over time, make it look like this community is going downhill. Suddenly, you feel like your little social circle will become an island in a hostile place rather than a part of a bigger organism.

>As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen

A casual X of any Y has no real reason to feel strongly about changes in Y. If I casually played golf, I wouldn't care if the rules changed. If I casually wrote iOS apps, I wouldn't care if Apple took a bigger or smaller cut. If I casually participated in politics, I would be unconcerned about changes that people who are above the level of casual are quite concerned with.

Deciding that because you do not feel personal investment with communities on reddit you are somehow above the "children" who do is misinformed. If you are a casual user you have no reason to be invested and no reason to care.

But to someone who feels close to a community that happens to live on reddit, these changes are scary. All of a sudden the administration team of reddit isn't the friendly, startup-vibe-having, tight-knight team of nerds that do cool april fools pranks and sometimes leave witty comments in pun threads. The Reddit admins have become depersonalized, and lately, they have been making changes that are very intrusive into the site. Whether you agree with those changes is immaterial. The fact is Reddit has moved from a mostly hands-off admin stance to a more hands-on one.

It's impossible to summarize this in a straight answer, because the fundamental reason why people are so upset over this (you are right that they are minor events -- only in the context of the larger reddit/community relationship do they become significant) is mere fear of change, and of the unknown. I think Redditors are very aware of the precarity of their communities. They don't want to lose them, but they think they might now, more so than they used to.

I hope this gives you a better idea of why Redditors might be upset. It's important to remember that every time we can't think of a likely true motivation for someone's actions, that is our own ignorance of human psychology, not a signifier of irrationality on the part of the person we observe. It's easy to write this off with bigotry or ageism, but that doesn't bring us closer to the truth.

[tripzilch]

> a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation.

In all fairness, a lot of their users are probably kids. Who are upset.

[baakss]

I tend to (maybe unjustly) associate the Reddit community as being the Gamergate community.

I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.

[LeoNatan25]

No, the hate comes from a frivolous lawsuit, terrible policies, terrible management and overall terrible CEO. None of that has anything to do it with video games, SJW or her being a woman.

[pbreit]

Very unjustly. That's a tiny percentage of overall usage.

[dominotw]

Not all of her answers are downvoted. This one from 15 minutes ago has 100's of upvotes. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

Get off your moral high-horse.

[onedev]

Kanye West is an amazing amazing figure, and a really interesting personality. If all you know about the man are his misplaced frustrations that manifest themselves in public ways, then you really don't know the guy or the influence he's had on millions over a decade.

He's produced greatness, but not only that, he's done so consistently. He's made some missteps along the way but if you really dig deep and watch his interviews over the years you'll start to understand the person he is.

People are very interesting, and it's so easy to characterize public figures in these black and white ways and dismiss their work, but it's far more difficult to truly understand the person, their motivations, and their frustrations.

I've watched hours and hours of Kanye interviews, listened to days and days of his music, and watched him grow as a person as he progressed through his legendary career. It's truly incredible.

I think there's something be learned from Justin Bieber as well, whose music I don't like and whose fanbase I dislike even more.

People are fascinating, you just have to dig deeper to find those parts, and put forth effort to learn something from other people. Even those people you don't like.

[celticninja]

but you can legitimately dislike someone, Kanye is incredibly conceited. I appreciate his music (well first 4 anyway) but his attitude sucks. Even at glastonbury he was stopping the performance to tell the crowd they were witnessing the greatest rock star ever. That just isnt true and if he actually believes it then he is making more of an idiot of himself.

You dont decide you are the greatest rock star, the people do, and they discuss it for a long time before they come to that conclusion. You need to be compared to historical greats to even come close. The only person I see talking about Kanye in that way is Kanye.

I should not need to wade through hours of footage to see him portrayed in a favourable light, if he acts a dick when he knows he is being watched/recorded/broadcast then it is a safe assumption to make that he is generally a dick.

[6stringmerc]

I've actively avoided digging "deeper" into the ego maniac that is Kanye West, but I do enjoy pointing out that he tried to rip off Aphex Twin by lifting a sample and not paying for the usage rights. Kanye is quite an inspiration though, in that if he can get ahead in this world with the limited talents and acidic presence, then there's hope for other, better people to achieve influence. I mean, it's not really difficult to find a snippet of music, loop it, add a beat that sounds like it came pre-programmed on an MPC, and claim to be a production genius, but it definitely takes some hubris.

[bentcorner]

reddit seems to have a fascination with Kanye's "thug face". It's practically a meme where he's jovial and happy until the camera is put on him.