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We apologize

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Re: We apologize

#21

Post by sp332 »

Nadya wrote: post #18
emehrkay wrote: post #10

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the wo…

Victoria being let off ruined a lot of currently planned AMA's - because she played such a huge part in it all. It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person. With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams som…

Right, this isn't about firing the person but about the complete lack of communication with all the other people that action affected.

That said, I have to agree with most of GP's points. The amount of vitriol aimed at Pao doesn't seem to jibe with anything she's actually done.

Re: We apologize

#22

Post by jonjenk »

This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the failures directly. Just look at the language in the post...

"We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..."

This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.

A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.

Re: We apologize

#23

Post by jeletonskelly »

As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power trip who didn't want to step away because that would be relinquishing some sort of internet "status." When did it get so complicated?

Re: We apologize

#24

Post by jordigh »

emehrkay wrote: post #10

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the wo…

And they were attacking her with sexist and racist comments. Classic Reddit: 4chan 2.0

Re: We apologize

#25

Post by baakss »

emehrkay wrote: post #10

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the wo…

I tend to (maybe unjustly) associate the Reddit community as being the Gamergate community.

I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.

Re: We apologize

#26

Post by uxcn »

Frenchgeek wrote: post #4
joeevans1000 wrote: post #2

They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.

Not exactly : that employee was the sole line of communication for the most popular part of the site. The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became. The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening. They were already asking for ye…

I'm not sure this is accurate. Aside from the protest over the weekend, over 150k people (non-moderators) signed a petition to have Ellen Pao removed as CEO. That doesn't seem like a tools issue.

Re: We apologize

#27

Post by Raphmedia »

emehrkay wrote: post #10

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the wo…

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.

Re: We apologize

#28

Post by smacktoward »

jeletonskelly wrote: post #23

As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power tri…

> Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked.

Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people would feel great about.

Re: We apologize

#29

Post by jacquesm »

idlewords wrote: post #13
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit? edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of peop…

What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job. The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.

I'm sure this happens a lot. But I'd have expected more of an effort to gain the trust of the users, which would seem to me to be an important element in all this.

Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense. > The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO.

I have a hard time attributing recent events directly to Pao, though with her being CEO I guess ultimately the buck does stop with her.

> I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.

That could well be the case (though I fail to see the connection), but that still does not explain why she was initially picked and that's what my question is about. I can't imagine it was just a roll of the dice.

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