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Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

nytimes.com

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Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#321

Post by mwfunk »

nawitus wrote: post #69
nhf wrote: post #10

I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community. I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS: > As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for…

Did the "community" make death threats? I didn't see any, and I don't think the average redditor would approve those. There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion. The typical upvoted comments actually consisted of valid criticism against Pao and reddit's management.

"There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion."

Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#322

Post by genericuser »

scrollaway wrote: post #268
genericuser wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said give her a pass, it was simply said the 'vitriol was appalling.' That simply means that the denizens of the internet when taken as a collective are horrible people who can not voice criticism in a civil manner. Assuming she was completely horrible and a terrible CEO... Assuming that! How could someone's lack of ability to do their job (or anything else for that matter) make the type of death and rape thre…

> But when you reply objecting to a comment that is basically just saying the type of hate a woman got on the internet was horrible So now she got all those threats because she's a woman ? What? You know the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] right? It applies to male and females alike. And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point…

>So now she got all those threats because she's a woman? What?

No one in this chain of comments said that; besides maybe the GP you are defending. I referred to her as a woman and said the type of hate was horrible. There was no causation there.

>You know the ....

No shit, whats your point how does that justify ANYONE getting death and rape threats for doing their job in a manner others consider badly? So what if some of the people threatening her were probably also female? Or was there a different equally horrible point?

>And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point out Pao did an atrocious job and was an awful choice for CEO, and you'll never hear the board admit that.

I am sorry I didn't mean to implicate that. I meant to flat out say that is what the the GP was effectively doing.

That person decided to reply to a post of which the only content was saying that the internet acted poorly.(basically a truism), and they made a post that disagrees as a response, the only way that post furthers the conversation as a reply is with them supporting the very hate the original poster was talking about.

Look if a person does not want come across as supporting rape and death threats it is best not to disagree with posts which are only pointing out how horrible those type of threats are. It's a pretty basic idea. And if a person does want to support rape and death threats, they should just flat out say so, that way they can be removed as a user on whatever sites want to have actual conversations.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#323

Post by magicalist »

axlprose wrote: post #297
badsock wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but those last two lines read to me like a callout to #gamergate's "It's about ethics in journalism" BS.

So questioning ethics in any kind of journalism anywhere is automatically BS now because of some random highly-opinionated internet drama? Way to discourage critical thinking. Orwell and Huxley would be proud.

No, abruptly trying to turn a conversation about disgusting comments made on reddit into one on the "clickbait media has to be called out" is like a parody of the parodies of gamergate. I mean, it's like well into Poe's law territory.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#324

Post by pavs »

MBCook wrote: post #237
lingben wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit. I'm baffled at how people misunderstand Ellen's actions in shutting down a few subreddits randomly. She did not 'clean' reddit of the worst of reddit nor 'hate' subreddits. In fact, there are still dozens and dozens of really disgusting stuff on reddit like /r/gasthekikes and /r/coontown Let's please stop this false narrative that she was a cha…

Let's make three categories of things on Reddit. One is innocuous (or relatively so) like /r/knitting or even /r/politics or /r/atheism. Perhaps there are big arguments but in the grand scheme of things it's not bad. Type two is /r/coontown or other hate subs. They're clearly offensive. I wouldn't let them on my site if I ran it, but they exist. The key here is they stay mostly to themselves. I wasn't aware of them b…

There were a lot more banned subreddits and users way before Pao was anywhere in the reddit picture. Its nothing new.

The reddit anger towards her was mostly accumulation of cultural change that has been going in reddit management every since Yishan left (also ~30 employees were fired/let go in a very short period) and firing of Victoria just the tipping point. It also helps that Victoria was very well liked.

I honestly dont know who is to be blamed for reddit going the shithole but at the end of the day CEO needs to take responsibility.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#325

Post by saryant »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #279
morbius wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again This is a pretty accurate narrative. You may not agree, but casual misogyny is incredibly pervasive on most defaults, and it's fairly prevalent within the smaller, community-based subs as well. > small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with If you're referring to…

Didn't Ellen Pao her self claim that the racists and misogynists are a small minority?

Regardless of the actual numbers (I have no idea what they are), I wouldn't expect the CEO of Reddit to effectively announce to prospective advertisers that their user base was a bunch of racists.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#326

Post by magicalist »

Nadya wrote: post #319
eli wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to explain it in a few sentences for those of us who are confused but don't wish to read a book?

Pick a topic with many shades of gray. Paint it black and white - preferably around a modern controversial issue (this day and age it's sexism/racism). Frame the narrative to fit the controversy ("50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again!") Ignore the 199,950 shades of gray and all other motivation behind the users and everything else. Zoom in to these 50 people. Cast the…

Again, what does that have to do with Sam's statement?

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#327

Post by golergka »

sbilstein wrote: post #316
golergka wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feeling really uncomfortable browsing any of the major subreddits Genuinely curious: why?

Hard to explain objectively; I think the things that turned me off to reddit back then (now it's more mainstream) were people's willingness to assume tons of knowledge of topics they didn't really know about, the general white, upper middle class male from the burbs tastes of things like r/music and other cultural subreddits. It felt like walking into a videogame fraternity and realizing I didn't belong there. That's…

There's certainly a white fraternity feel in a lot of reddits, so I can imagine how people can feel disconnect to it. But /r/shitredditsays, well... I was subscribed to it for some time, and the posts themselves do a good job at noticing really bad behaviour on reddit sometimes — but then I discovered the comments there, and I must say, it feels like half of the users of this sub are trolls who pretend to be THE worst strawmen feminists/SJW (I hate this term, but since we're talking about strawmen, I think it fits) ever. Just saying.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#328

Post by cheald »

moskie wrote: post #234
oldmanjay wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say there wasn't sexism. I do indeed believe that gendered insults are the result of sexism. I am, however, stating that the genesis of the entire Ellen Pao affair seemed to be about her actions, not her womanhood.

I just think it's important that we don't gloss over the possibility that the level of criticism and outrage could very well have been exaggerated as a result of latent/subconscious sexism.

I think it's much more likely that the amplification of criticism and outrage was catalyzed by her high-visibility public image stemming from the KP trial. She came out looking (IMO) like a vindictive, petty, and greedy person. Whether that's true or not, I suspect that image was then projected onto her role as Reddit's CEO. The kind of insults she got were absolutely driven by some of the most vile and reprehensible expressions of sexism, but I think it was more that Pao was an unsympathetic person who made an easy target for sexists, than that some latent sexism caused otherwise-normal reddit users to turn against her.

I don't think she was responsible for nearly so much of the stuff Reddit reacted negatively to over the course of her tenure as some would think, but I think the primary blame for that perception lies with Reddit's leadership as a whole and their astounding lack of communication to their audience. They knew that Pao had been the subject of a high-visibility lawsuit heavily steeped in social justice implications, which she rather badly lost - it doesn't take a PR genius to think that if you start introducing sweeping social justice-driven changes to your site while she's in office as CEO, people are going to presume that she's the one driving them. That could have been trivially defused by saying "This was a decision made by our board" or "This initiative is something we've been working on for the past 3 years", rather than just sitting by and letting the bogeyman grow and grow.

As another example, as best I can tell, Ohanin let Pao take all the heat for Victoria Taylor's firing, and then clarified that he was the one who made the decision to terminate her only after Pao had resigned. A huge amount of unrest could have been deflected off of Pao if Ohanin had said "Hey, I'm the one that made this decision", but that wasn't said (if I'm wrong, please let me know; the first reference I saw to this admission was timestamped around ~1h ago). In fact, reddit's leadership as a whole was extremely wishy-washy and vague about the whole thing, despite the fact that it upset the volunteer base that makes reddit usable enough to incite mini-revolt.

Leaping to claims of sexism seems lazy and just a little-too-convenient for me. I think that if her husband had been in the CEO role and the same things had happened, given his PR image problems, you'd have seen the same magnitude of criticism and outrage (but then, of course, people would level claims of racism as the cause, which I think would have been equally as wrong).

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#329

Post by scrollaway »

geofft wrote: post #301
scrollaway wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when you reply objecting to a comment that is basically just saying the type of hate a woman got on the internet was horrible So now she got all those threats because she's a woman ? What? You know the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] right? It applies to male and females alike. And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point…

Yishan was actually an incapable CEO and a bad choice. And all the complaints about Ellen apply to him too: he censored subreddits with no clear policy, he was at odds with his own staff and his own board, and he presided over lots of unhappy departures of valuable employees for stupid reasons. A lot of the problems we see now are his doing. Did he get the same sort of personal, visceral threats?

While we're at it, there were two unpopular firings last month at reddit. The Reddit Gifts guy, who was let go without much fanfare, and chooter (Victoria), who got the entire website to support her, go dark in protest, and fast-forwarded Pao's resignation.

But we don't mention those, no no. It's only "sexism" and "mysoginy" because we don't like what happened to a woman. When it's good for a woman, that's just sheer luck. Or white-knightism, whatever floats your boat.

Please.

Re: Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

#330

Post by pavs »

lingben wrote: post #85
pkorzeniewski wrote: post #32

“Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said. What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists

Considering that it was Sam who brought in Ellen, what do expect him to say? if that isn't enough to warrant 'corporatespeak' over-drive, consider that Ellen really enjoys suing her employers and she still hasn't been able to completely pay her legal fees for the last case she lost. Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?

I think it was Yishan (former Reddit CEO) who brought in Ellen.
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