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Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

nytimes.com

21–30 of 324 posts

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#22
post #2

>> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity... May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.

Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.

It's a personnel matter, so reddit will never tell you, and she's likely bound by an agreement to never disclose.

My guess is not censoring the Jesse Jackson AMA when the users got nasty. I have another comment on this site that details what I suspect went down. You can search it out if you're really curious--I don't know how to permalink here.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#23
post #19
post #3

Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management. This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matte…

[deleted]

The censorship is not happening by the community, it is coming from the admins that are on the reddit payroll. There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#24

This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit, which isn't the case. This is the problem, actually. Because it's not a paid position, the company can't use that as leverage in situations like this. The moderators essentially have nothing to lose. Even in the article, it states that it was shutdown because of the abrupt termination of Ms. Taylor. Anybody that makes these sort of emotional de…

Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run, and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power".

The average Reddit user doesn't know or care where the content comes from or how it's moderated, and they similarly have no loyalty to Reddit. If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#25
post #13

When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions. Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know. Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when…

I don't know if you deliberately haven't been reading anything or what, but it wasn't just in reaction to the firing. This is just the straw the broke the camel's back.

People keep saying things like this, but what exactly was on the camel's back in the first place? "Bad communication"? Can you give me any specific, concrete examples?

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#26
How hard would it be to fork reddit AMA on a third party site? I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board, a lot of the mods/community would follow.

Certainly some custom support for the AMA would be nice, like getting cleanly summarized final outputs and highlighting direct conversation with the askee, and making it easy to find highly upvoted non-answered questions.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#27
post #13

When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions. Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know. Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when…

As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is not a campaign to bring her back personally.

Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#28
post #13

When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions. Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know. Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when…

> Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.

When you have people travelling from out of town specifically to meet the person you are about to shitcan, you're damn well right you need to do something like that. Either that or delay the action until such time as it will not disrupt something like this. Making the first notification of this be when said person arrives at your front desk is unprofessional and unacceptable, period.

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#29
post #2

>> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity... May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.

Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.

Not as of yet. It's all being kept above board, so maybe there are NDA type things preventing anyone form talking. Also, last night a series of posts on 4chan by a person claiming to be an admin at reddit said that more changes are afoot, including heavy facebook integration. As with everything on 4chan, it is likely a steaming pile of BS:

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/3cih4x/reddit_employ...

Re: Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

#30
post #2

>> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity... May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.

Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.

Not confirmed, but the rumor was because she was based in NYC and Pao demanded that all employees move to SF.

There was additional speculation that it was the result of the (failed) Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm doubtful of that.

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