Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 632 posts

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#251

Post by adventured »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #124

For those with PR, marketing and community management experience - if you we're in a position to try and solve this, what would you do to minimize the damage and move the community on as quickly as possible?

There are only three action approaches.

1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than just what relates to this specific situation.

2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit - there is nothing without them.

3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).

#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too late.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#252

Post by geofft »

sleepybrett wrote: post #82
Smerity wrote: post #5

One of the most telling points is from /u/imakuram, moderator for /r/books: "This seems to be a seriously stupid decision. We have several AMAs upcoming in /r/books and have no idea how to contact the authors."[1] They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support. Given that the key feature in ensuring the quality of Reddit is the moderation "donated" by the community, this is a de…

Yeah cause what you want to do, as an employer, is go out to a community of people you have no control over and say, 'Hey we are about to fire one of your favorite admins, one of your friends maybe. But don't freak out it'll be ok. We can't talk about why we want to fire her, but trust us. Oh and can you not mention it to her before we fire her tomorrow.' Yeah that will go over well.

I'm curious how this was communicated to the admins. Even in the case where, say, she punched kn0thing in the nose and was currently being carted off to jail, I imagine you could say "Hey mods, something came up, since it's a personnel matter there's unfortunate legal stuff involved, but we needed to terminate Victoria's employment a couple of minutes ago. For now, full responsibility for running AMAs is with so-and-so, who is not going to be as good at it but will try their best. This is what records we have, this is what we don't and we're working on getting them as soon as possible. This sucks and we're really sorry about the impact on AMAs, but so-and-so will try to make things as non-bad as possible, and they will be super easily reachable for you until we figure out what's happening long term."

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#253

Post by dwmtm »

alayne wrote: post #211
kefka wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' : “We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices betw…

Numerous subreddits were closed on Yishan Wong's watch.

Lip service is the first step.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#254

Post by vonklaus »

nols wrote: post #110
eclipxe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pao ruined reddit unfortunately. Time for an alternative.

Spare us, Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there. Just look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments[0]. Not to mention the celeb nudes debacle, which was allowed then disallowed and announced by a sysadmin [1]. And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee [2]. Then we can go way back to /r/jailbait and the Violentacrez affair, the only mod to be awarded a golden trophy…

I wrote out a well thought out response to this, but decided to simply ask you to re-read your own post.

> Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there.

This is true, and all the more worrying. It has a track record of being unsuccessful both at the managerial level and a financial one.

> look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments

"popcorn tastes good" -670 karma

With submissions frozen on top subreddits, massive community backlash against the CEO, and a huge schism forming among communities he decides to antagonize a bit and keep his head down.

> the celeb nudes debacle

reddit is 4chan with a better layout. It is frankly absurd they didn't have a contingency for this, and that they didn't communicate it well. This is hallmark of the company ethos of a lack of preparedness, lack of consistency and above all, a failure to communicate.

> CEO Yishan Wong

Unprofessional for a CEO to go into a thread and blast an employee publicly. At least it felt that way as he never seemed to post visibly but did this simply to settle a score. Also said employee claimed his questioning of allocating 10% of all revenue for the year to charity. Whatever the reason he was fired, if your company is struggling an not posting acceptable profits it is irrational to give $0.10 of every dollar away and operate close to a loss.

>jailbait

This was sort of the beginning of when free speech really came to a head against morality. They have made no progress on this front. Also, jailbait was probably a little closer to black and white than things like gamergate and this adolescent namecalling.

Conclusion

So those massive problems, which are mostly unreseolved, or are symptoms of unresolved issues, have culminated in hiring of techs most hated person of 2014-2015, who has no credible qualifications to run this company. Compounding those issues, she really failed to connect with the community and I would suspect (guessing here) that the transition has been tough in the office as well. The only thing that has kept reddit working this whole time were moderators and the community which have now totally turned on it.

tl;dr arguing a company has a track record of being run poorly but still managing to survive, doesn't seem like a great argument for its success.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#255

Post by sanswork »

drspacemonkey wrote: post #162
calbear81 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like a "haters gonna hate" type of comment. Whatever kn0thing says, it won't be good enough to placate the masses with their pitchforks so the best thing to do is sit back and wait till it all blows over. Generally, reddit has very short term institutional memory, by next week new users and admins will be like "Victoria who?!"

Didn't people say similar things about Digg's short-term collective memory right before their ... "mishap"?

I'd say people who think Diggs change was anything similar to the current reddit changes has a very short memory.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#256

Post by butwhy »

seanalltogether wrote: post #29
mhomde wrote: post #17

What a circus reddit has become. There's probably/hopefully more to this story but still. It will be interesting to see if reddit forces the hands of the biggest subreddits to open again. Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like reddit to have "public facing" administrators Many of the biggest subreddits are…

I'm actually surprised that reddit allows default subreddits to go private or disable themselves in any way. Each community should absolutely be able to moderate themselves, but at the same time being a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

I am also surprised. I wonder what this is going to do for their SEO because there is a lot of content now missing once googles bot gets to some of these pages.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#257

Post by HamSession »

shmerl wrote: post #151
akhilcacharya wrote: post #129

This implosion has got me thinking - what would an alternative site to better? How could this be improved? If we do see another Digg-esque migration, where will those people move?

It should be something decentralized and open.

Agreed fully, this and machine curation of news stories.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#258

Post by olefoo »

forgottenpass wrote: post #56
blhack wrote: post #33

It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users ke…

It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them. I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is bette…

> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand

This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#260

Post by engi_nerd »

blhack wrote: post #33

It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users ke…

Actually a significant group of people are upset with kn0thing about this whole thing, because he commented about this whole mess [0] and gave what many called a "non-answer".

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...

The current Reddit management doesn't seem to be handling this well.

Post reply on HN