271–280 of 393 posts
A dumb but serious question: what powers does a board of directors have? In terms of day to day operations, engineering, product, marketing and so on?
This seems like a demotion. Nothing to celebrate. Reddit is cesspool of bots, disinformation. I find 4chan more civil and interesting. This gentleman would have been better off turning them down.
Come now. Reddit is Reddit. This reminds me of Paul McCartney's response to people who don't like the White Album. "It's the Beatles fucking White Album".
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Yes - in-group bias is a real thing and is prominent across all races, ethnicities, religions, nationalities etc. But in-group bias has literally nothing to do with the conversation we're having here.
Yes it does. Building a board and management team that is more representative of the demographics in society is an effort to reduce the effect of in group bias. This is important because the argument that someone picked with their race in mind to achieve this goal is used to create the subtext that the person would not otherwise have been qualified and is used to undermine their legitimacy and the legitimacy of the g…
Then when will they include conservatives in the board? They are after all half the population, but there doesn't seem to be any in all of Reddit's board or company.
Being a republican, I'm scared of the leadership choices social platforms are making. Michael Seibel is a pro-Democrat and anti republican and anti-Trump. For god sake, allow reddit to have free-speech and don't censor the voices of "silent majority" in the USA. P.S 60M American citizens voted for Trump.
I don't see why Republicans can't just use another platform like gab or voat if they think reddit has become hostile to them. Reddit being a private company has every right to control what ideologies are promoted on their pages just as you have every right to start your own reddit clone and moderate it however you feel. There's even an open source core with which to start from: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddi…
This is the exact same reasoning letter by letter that was used against rock'n'roll at that time by republicans. They also didn't use state censorship, just private companies executing their rights. Just saying.
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They have ultimate power over everything. They could ban my favourite subreddit tomorrow if they wanted. In practice however, they hire a CEO to handle all that for them and don't get involved unless things get so out of hand that they feel their CEO is steering the ship wrong. At this point they tell the CEO what outcomes they expect, and if he can't or won't comply, he gets replaced.
> They have ultimate power over everything. They could ban my favourite subreddit tomorrow if they wanted. No well-functioning board would act like that. Sure, they can pressure the CEO to take particular action when the company is under pressure, but normally, that kind of micromanaging by the board would be a sign of serious dysfunction. They are there to represent the shareholders, appoint the executives, and to e…
Why stick to the insular Silicon Valley club and not get someone who's devoted their life to civil rights? There are a ton of community activists who could actually bring a fresh perspective. EDIT: I do not mean to question his particular qualifications or his commitment to change, only to comment on the fact that it could have been someone from a different walk of life. Tech leadership in Silicon Valley does not app…
Presumably the duties of a Silicon Valley board member would center on running a Silicon Valley company, which a Silicon Valley CEO would be uniquely qualified to do.
This seems like a demotion. Nothing to celebrate. Reddit is cesspool of bots, disinformation. I find 4chan more civil and interesting. This gentleman would have been better off turning them down.
The problem is with the large subreddits, they will always devolve into memefests or the same old rehearsed jokes in the comments where if you've been on reddit for 10 years you learned to just... Skip through.
I believe it'd be really hard to have a /r/AskHistorians on 4chan, the same for the hobby communities I'm part of.
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Board members aren't really in a position to work on specific problems - their role is to set high-level priorities, and Reddit's already indicated fighting hate speech is a priority. If you want someone who's empowered to make specific concrete changes, that's not a board member.
There's some glaringly obvious action they could take in a moment if they actually wanted to do something about fighting hate speech. They don't.
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> PLEASE treat reddit as a web-first platform. Agreed. But I think they've made up their minds already. In the meantime, you can use "old.reddit.com" until they decide to take that away.
Killing old.reddit.com would probably be their final Digg moment for me. Maybe they'll manage to keep the bulk of their users and keep some husk of it's former self going for a long time, but I'm gone. I suspect many others will join. The quality of content has been plummeting for years anyway. Too bad there's no clear successor this time.
A dumb but serious question: what powers does a board of directors have? In terms of day to day operations, engineering, product, marketing and so on?
The board of a directors does not get involved with day to day operations. The board of directors sets the strategy for the firm. That is because the board of directors has the authority to hire/fire company management. Board of directors != Advisory board.
Not really.
The Board is there to oversee the company on behalf of the shareholders. Their primary job is oversight, they hire and fire the CEO, will be involved in recruitment for C-Level. They may or may not be involved with any kind of strategy. They will definitely be involved in financial governance issues such as fundraising, IPOs, major debt issuances.
They can be involved strategically by helping to form relationships, introductions, and in some cases providing guidance.
But the board doesn't make plans, do strategies etc. They're not very involved. Most board members don't do much at all.