[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.

[celticninja]

yes it is a recent thing however look at the "we apologise" thread and it is the topic of the top voted comment. People care about it.

The cunt/hitler thing all relates to the banning of r/fph and the reasoning behind it. Her statement to the effect that reddit was not a free-speech site but a safe place was the originator of most of the hatred. Reddit always championed itself as a free-speech site and it was the users that came and stayed for that reason that felt betrayed by her personally.

[dredmorbius]

Reddit and Redditors, as with HN and its participants, are diverse and contain multitudes.

I moderate a couple of modest subs and have participated on Reddit, generally positively, for three years. Pao hadn't impressed me hugely, though I didn't find her behavior strongly negative. The FPH situation was handled and communicated poorly, but from what I understand, was sound (the banning was based on violations of site rules, not specific expressed opinions).

Pao's personal legal issues have certainly been a distraction, and while I've not obsessed over the case and related issues, she, and her husband, seem to have an interesting history and set of problems.

The blow-up over Taylor was different: it concerned directly trust between Reddit and a small number of very crucial moderators -- /r/IAMA's mod team is 23 users, but the are the gatekeepers to one of Reddit's most valuable features (not one I use much myself, FWIW). The specific roster of complaints from IAMA and other subs affected were on point and material.

The response from the larger Reddit community has varied: some was legit, some expressions of outrage over real or imagined past offenses.

My own views of Pao took a sharp downward note at that point. David Frum and Asher Wolf, neither of whom are pimply-faced teenage boys, both make great observations:

https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf/status/616834072015339520 "Reddit's users are their product. Reddit is currently discovering where the balance of power lies when a product with opinions revolts."

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/616965682517921792 "I'm not following the Reddit thing closely, but one thing seems obvious: corporations shouldn't hire CEOs who hate their product and customers."

I'm also a fan of Merideth L. Patterson's "On Port 80": https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a

(My own comments: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/jxHO4czSkI3duweJv5XTRA)

It's one thing to have the usual outrage squads raising a ruckus. Another when core subs go dark because the mods have revolted.

That's what pushed this impasse. Pao's been handling it very poorly, though she may still turn things around.

[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.

[dredmorbius]

A key role of the CEO is in addressing key constituencies and stakeholders: investors, business partners, customers, employees. And in Reddit's case, the people who do much of the heavy lifting in managing the forums, and in participating in discussions on the site.

There are limits to how much time you want to dedicate to any one constituency. But yes, when you've got a problem with your mods and users on a mod-and-user-centric company, you talk to the mods and users.

[celticninja]

maybe not, but this is a social media site, where those in charge have always engaged with the users through the site. kn0thing, jedberg, spez etc all did, Yishan did and so users can be forgiven for expecting Pao to follow suit. To avoid that and go to Buzzfeed, which is a reddit petpeeve just because they take a good portion of their content from reddit and dont give atribution, well it doesnt take the CEO of a social media site to work out how that will pan out.

[McGlockenshire]

> Is it a given that responding to the community is the proper role for a CEO?

No, it isn't.

Ellen Pao being at fault for everything is a meme spawned by the Gamergate/MRW/anti-SJW crowd. The recent mishandling of the fatpeoplehate ban and then the lack of communication about letting Victoria go have just fanned those existing flames.

If the CEO was some boring old white man, nobody would be calling for his head like this, nor would they be the best person to be publishing apologies.

[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.