> I'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?
Yes and no. Yes there should be outrage directed at him but the buck ultimately stops with the CEO and the firing was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I have not doubt Alexis shares some of the blame but Pao had failed the moderators and the community at large in other ways and her leaving was probably best for Reddit.
The Board is the CEO's boss, and he is the leader of the board, I think it's pretty straight forward. I guess I'm not sure of what you mean by he is also 'below' her on the org chart? Regardless of whatever responsibilities he held at Reddit that might be below the CEO that never changes the fact that he is Executive Chairman of the Board, which should completely clear up any ambiguity of authority.
EDIT: Thanks for clearing up this those comment links. But, my original sentiment still stands in terms of the power dynamic being clear. Just because in some capacities he is under her doesn't diminish his ability to influence her firing/hiring. If anything being in that position could prompt him to take action as a board member because he didn't like decisions she made in his role working under her. And I think Alexis mentioning that is him trying to divert attention away from the real power he actually has.
And yet he has never received the sort of backlash or vitriol that Pao has. I've always been up and down about how much gender and sexism has played a part in all this, outside that it a "small" minority of Reddit is influenced by it. But the idea that while not always popular but Alexis always seems to get a pass from the Reddit community (at least compared to how Pao was treated) is really telling.
This was my main takeaway from the article. Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash, but it sounds like she had nothing to do with Victoria's firing.
> Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash
What changes to "hate speech rules?" Reddit still allows hate speech. What they curtailed were subreddits who existed primarily to harass people both on and off the site (e.g. other Reddit users, YouTubers, game streamers, people with public Facebook profiles, random members of the public, the entire Imgur staff, several Reddit admins, you name it).
That's why whenever this topic gets brought up people link to e.g. racist subreddits which still exist today, and then ask "well, why was XYZ banned, if those aren't?!" while entirely ignoring the fact that the banned subs were banned for HARASSMENT, not for having controversial opinions.
Subs still exist with the same controversial opinions as those who got banned. The difference is that the mods in the ones which survived actively follow Reddit's rules and don't harass innocent people. The mods on the banned ones were actively involved in the harassment and frankly should have been banned.
I agree, they should have and should continue to be banned. It still caused controversy. Yes, their reasoning is that these subs have users that leave their cesspools and harass other people.
> What changes to hate speech rules? These changes
You linked to a page titled: "Removing harassing subreddits" that talks about harassment and doesn't contain the term "hate speech." Can you clarify why you think this has anything to do with hate speech rather than harassment?
On the other hand, the CEO of a company should at least be vaguely aware of personnel changes that would affect strategic parts of their business. And AMAs are definitely strategic to Reddit.
The question then becomes whether Pao didn't know about it because she wasn't paying attention to her business, or because Ohanian and/or other parties deliberately hid the information from her until after the proverbial stuff had hit the fan. I'd consider the latter a fireable offense, but YMMV.
How do you know she didn't know about it? And what level of involvement do you expect a CEO to have in personnel decisions of random departments? You think Tim Cook hears about even 1% of the people Apple fires, or that Craig Federighi can't fire a senior manager directly below him on the org chart?
From what's been said publicly by principals in the story, we know that Ohanian had taken the AMA section into his personal portfolio. By the way: that by itself is weird: the chairman doesn't usually have an operational role in the company, among other reasons because it's a conflict of interest. Regardless of who he was, he had ownership of the department Victoria Taylor worked in. In most well-managed companies, that makes hire/fire his prerogative, and coordination of personnel changes his responsibility.
When people screw hire/fire up and cause disruption, the CEO normally fires or demotes them, and gets extra careful about future promotions and delegations to keep there from being a pattern of poor decisions about delegation. Here, neither thing was allowed to happen: Ohanian is effectively unfireable, and Pao wasn't given a chance to not delegate more stuff to him.
That's so odd that Ohanian was allowed to be chairman of the board, as well as be an employee, I can't imagine having to dance around that situation of having to manage someone who effectively has the ability to manage you. If the 'rumors' are true, he's effectively running the company from behind the scenes. Which is weird? Or is this type of situation normal?
>You think Tim Cook hears about even 1% of the people Apple fires, or that Craig Federighi can't fire a senior manager directly below him on the org chart?
I'm sure that she doesn't have to approve every dismissal, but there's a pretty big difference between Apple and Reddit. Last I heard Reddit only has a few dozen employees. I'd expect the CEO to know most of them by name.
They have a page listing their employees, and there are more than 65 of them. That is way past the point at which VPs can hire/fire without the CEO intervening. And this wasn't a VP: it was Pao's boss.
> what level of involvement do you expect a CEO to have in personnel decisions of random departments? You think Tim Cook hears about even 1% of the people Apple fires, or that Craig Federighi can't fire a senior manager directly below him on the org chart?
Apple has what, 45,000+ employees? Reddit has around 70. (Assuming https://www.reddit.com/about/team/ is accurate, at least.) So I'm not sure how the the one is even remotely comparable to the other.
Moreover, my point was about key personnel, not all personnel. I don't expect Tim Cook to know or care if J. Random Genius at the Genius Bar in Tucson is about to get canned. I do expect him to know if, say, Jony Ive is about to get canned.
In other words, a CEO should at least have a cursory understanding of the status of anyone in the business who could throw it completely off track if they were hit by a bus. Given how much of its future Reddit has pinned on AMAs, and how completely non-functional the AMAs became when Taylor was fired, she would seem to have been a member of the bus brigade. Which to me at least would imply that (1) Ohanian should have known that firing her was a risky move, and (2) he should have informed Pao of that before pulling the trigger if she didn't understand it already.
Of course, if the management structure is already divided up into little fiefdoms that the CEO has no effective control over, none of this matters much.
Ohanian was installed as chairperson at the same moment Pao was elevated to interim CEO, and at that time, in an unusual move, given "marketing and community building" as his operational portfolio. That, by the way, is something Ohanian has himself said more than once.
What you are now suggesting is that, having had AMAs delegated to her boss, the charismatic founder of the company, Pao should have micromanaged the operation of AMAs and prevented Ohanian from terminating Taylor.
This strains credibility.
I think we all think Taylor was a "key employee" because of the drama that happened after she was let go, but that very few of us would, in Pao's shoes, have known Taylor was so operationally critical. Even if we had, I think all of us would have found it difficult to override a decision Ohanian personally made about a division of Reddit he was personally managing.
The backlash was centered around the lack of communication and heads up to the mod teams.
We don't know if it was "she needs to be fired right now, immediately" or if it was "she is not a part of future plans". If it's the former then you can put the blame on Alexis but if Pao was not being pressured to fire her immediately then she could have in theory worked with the mod teams before letting Victoria go.
Frankly, if the mod teams were this disrupted by a single employee's departure, that's at least partially their own fault.
If she'd been hit by a bus or she'd had a personal/family emergency (hell, upcoming AMAs would've been potentially problematic even if her laptop just got stolen), they'd have been just as fucked - and no one to whine at.
They failed miserably at disaster planning. They got very lucky they could shove the blame off on someone else.
They cared enough to throw a giant temper tantrum, they could've cared enough to have a Google Doc with the contact info of upcoming AMA participants. I really don't have much sympathy for them on this one.
Yes and no. Yes there should be outrage directed at him but the buck ultimately stops with the CEO and the firing was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I have not doubt Alexis shares some of the blame but Pao had failed the moderators and the community at large in other ways and her leaving was probably best for Reddit.