611–620 of 877 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand that either. I can't think of a single thing that she has done to make reddit better.
Is that out of the ordinary? What has any reddit ceo done to make reddit better?
Yishan Wong was also a CEO (prior to Pao) having been an engineer at facebook. His tenure was also controversial although not as much as Pao.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly every public figure is compared to Hitler at some point or the other on the internet. There have been pretty personal attacks on Ellen Pao on reddit, but every link you posted here is relatively mild. Similar posts and subreddits were made about Yishan Wong[1] when he was CEO. Hell, reddit also makes fun of little kids[2]. You can not police what people make fun of. The personal attacks and name calling, whic…
> However they were few and far in between. No they were not. https://www.reddit.com/r/all was dominated by them for days following the banning of /r/FatPeopleHate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems you missed what I tried to convey. I explicitly stated that the issue is objectiveness, and subjective terms, by definition cannot be objective. You can gather all the data in the world about reddit users and their mannerisms, but that does not change the way the logic behind 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' work.
I think the overwhelming majority of our society will agree that the mentioned behaviour was misogynistic. That makes it a fairly objective statement. You can still disagree with it (in the same way people disagree with other objective statements, like vaccines and autism), but that doesn't make it subjective.
So immediately there are 2 problems here:
1.) Ellen Pao does not represent all women, nor would all women agree for her to represent them most likely. So dislike of Pao does not conclusively imply a dislike of women in general. Especially when we keep in mind the context of people being upset about a female employee being fired.
2.) Even if we assume that yes, Ellen Pao did represent all women, that still does not imply that the public's sentiments against her were somehow "ingrained" or unjustified. She did decide to ban several subreddits before the latest incident with Victoria (which may or may not have involved Pao). The anger may have been unjustly directed towards her specifically when it should've been directed towards Reddit management in general, but being a lightning rod for bad press has always been an unspoken the function of CEOs. It may not conclusively prove that the anger directed at her was purely due to management issues, but it does cast doubt about it being because she was a woman.
So the issue here is not that something can't be pseudo-objective if enough people agree, it's that the claim is not specific enough to be meaningful, and these kinds of terms are usually just used as social trump cards that discourage questioning, which again, is the opposite of what journalism is supposed to be about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At last, a voice of reason in hundreds of pointless comments. Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censo…
Freedom of speech != freedom to force anyone to listen to you. As long as you are free to create your own community where you can say whatever you want, there is no need for any other community to listen to you.
Reddit spent years building a freewheeling culture. Pao decided to impose standards on that, and her guiding principles weren't well articulated. In the end, it was a really bad copy of Disneyland, and the fact that the effort failed was no surprise.
I'm not sure the company really knows what happened, given that they think they've given their users what they asked for, but they're also telling their users that they're spoiled kids.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freedom of speech != freedom to force anyone to listen to you. As long as you are free to create your own community where you can say whatever you want, there is no need for any other community to listen to you.
As I understand it, the founding fathers cast it more as "freedom to listen" rather than freedom of speech. And it's certainly understandable that Reddit has no wish to be associated with certain speech, but that comes with troubling implications as well. For example, do they not then appear to support whatever they do not ban if we know that whatever sufficiently offends them gets the ban hammer? For another example…
They don't sell Nazi flags in their store or (afaik) let people advertise using them, so this doesn't seem as inconsistent to me as you make it sound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 4th option would be to just not assign a moral value to their comments, and chose for yourself as an individual to not let yourself be offended by them. It doesn't mean the co-workers were right, but it doesn't penalize them if the didn't intend to be bad (because doing so would be a slippery slope to thought policing). Unless OP thinks his/her co-workers would face Pao in person and tell her those things, or wor…
OP did not say he was offended, just disgusted. Like "haha gross, look at these shitty guys". Just like if someone starts making racist remarks, even if I don't personally believe they would murder a black person in the street, I will feel embarrassed for associating with them, and recognize that they are shitty people at the moment, and that is not a slippery slope to thought policing. That is how culture slowly fix…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"this reminds me of gamergate" => "questioning ethics in any journalism anywhere" It's a fairly stock form of strawman, taking someone's opinion and extrapolating it to the extreme. There are qualitative parallels between this event and gamergate, and the GP was mentioning them. I thought the same as the GP. But questioning ethics in any journalism anywhere ? Seriously? For example, people question the ethics of Rupe…
The comment was intending to cast doubt about a critique of the news article posted here. This article has nothing to do with gamergate, and the critique had nothing to do with gamergate. The comment could've elaborated on the parallels and presented a thoughtful analysis about that, but that's not what was posted. Thus if there was no blatant relationship between these events, and none were elaborated or clearly arg…
Similarly, my 'there are parallels' and your 'huxley and orwell' aren't the same. You say that it's pointless to present without clarification, yet I presented the comment dispassionately and gave some counter-examples to clarify. Your huxley/orwell comment was a snarky comment, based off a strawman.
You're also confusing my point with the GP's. While I agree with the GP, my point is not that this event is reminiscent of gamergate, but that you're behaving hypocritically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. I have no idea whether Ellen was a capable CEO, but the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally (through other news articles and here on HN) was absolutely appalling.
>As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-mod…
Mind linking it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> By no means did she clear up Reddit. But at least I saw she tried to do something, dipping her toe into the battle. And I'm worried I'll be back sliding on that. The main problem I think most people had with it wasn't that there was action taken. It's that it was arbitrary, there were no guidelines given, and there was no consistency. If there had been a set of community guidelines published, a week given for moder…
Analytics showing brigading statistics would be dead simple. It would establish a clear, objective metric and back the notion of behavior, not ideas, being targeted.
I also kind of doubt objective numbers would justify the actual banned subreddits; I think it would show a lot of other ones were just as bad or worse, but weren't so unapologetically disgusting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it isn't. Given that there was no blatantly illegal content involved, there are only two possible reasons for not treating these two subreddits the same. Either the admins are a) clueless nitwits who don't know what's going on with their own site, or b) sympathetic to one but not the other. Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?
Funny how you're getting downvoted for stating the obvious.