Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> basically everything you said It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you. > this is a huge vote of "no confidence" toward…
As to ambiguous decision making -- you're right about that, but they have a problem. Reddit has a largeish group of teenagers, unemployed white men living in their mother's basement and techno-libertarians, that have turned the site into a cesspool of xenophobia, misogyny, wingnut conspiracies and most of all -- lots of eighth grade drama . Those people, of course, don't matter (advertisers don't care much about them), and nobody in the real-world (not most Reddit users) care or even notice the imaginary armageddon taking place in those kids' heads, but the problem with them is that 1) they're unreasonable, and 2) they have the time to make the lives of the site administrators miserable (it would make their day -- they've got nothing more exciting to do).
So the people running Reddit are scared. They've invited the devil -- worse, teenagers -- into their home for an endless party, and they know they'll trash the place even more if the party were to end. So they're sending mixed messages. They're talking about respect, but they allow CoonTown and "men"'s rights groups. It's time for Reddit to grow some balls, kick the misbehaving kids out, shutdown not a few, but all hate subreddits, all without issuing as much as a press release. The kids will talk about their judgement day (that nobody in the world would notice) for years, the grown men in their mom's basement will feel like they're actually being hunted, and everybody would get exactly what they want.