Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 877 posts

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

#651

Post by Doji »

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…

All she managed to do was give these "Type 3" subs the benefit of the Streisand effect. It should have been obvious that the backlash to any perceived censorship would be far greater than the effect of the censorship itself.

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

#652

Post by craigyk »

vehementi wrote: post #639
albinofrenchy wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you don't have internal proprietary data doesn't mean you cant have a rational opinion on the matter. That is a ridiculous standard. The Victoria thing was a monumental cluster fuck in one of the most outward facing facets of the company.

Okay, and how many wins did Pao have? In your "wins and fuckups" columns that you surely made prior to the post, "fuckups" includes the Victoria thing and whatever else. What is in your "wins" column (internal company initiatives, key hires, process changes, etc.) that were appropriately weighed in order to come to your rational opinion that she has overall failed as a CEO?

If you know anything about the drama surrounding her, you know she's at least an accessory to some extremely shady business dealings. Any defense of her character falls into the same defense strategies as for W Bush. Either she is of (very) questionable moral character, or she is a somewhat decent, but hopelessly ill-fortuned dupe. In either case, hardly good qualifications for being a CEO.

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

#653

Post by nopenopeyep »

ThomPete wrote: post #590
nopenopeyep wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for al…

But the moderation is part of what keeps it a fairly enjoyable experience still IMO.

That's irrelevant to my comment. However, I don't think you have any evidence to support your assumption.

As I expected: downvoted for pointing out the truth. HN is terrible.

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

#654

Post by mirimir »

fragsworth wrote: post #524
MBCook wrote: post #237

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…

> Given the amount of stuff I've seen in the last year against various people in the games industry in other places, some of that organized on Reddit, I'm happy to see something done. I'm not. I'd prefer all of the communities stay on a site like reddit, where specific users get banned for clear violations of harassment rules, rather than the entire communities getting shut down because of the actions of a few. Most…

> This is going to make the Internet a worse place in general for all of us.

How?

Wouldn't that make it a better place, because you won't even know that they exist. Unless you looked, anyway.

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

#655

Post by mistermann »

vehementi wrote: post #518
fredkbloggs wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. Also, firing someone without some kind of plan for redistributing her duties is a Management 101 no-no. Ellen Pao failed as CEO of Reddit. That has nothing to do with the 1% or whatever of Reddit users who are racists and/or misogynists. That's just the real world; you have to get past the obnoxious idiots and focus on what matters. The reason Ms. Pao was fired (let's be honest) is that she failed to m…

Nevermind misogyny etc., you're pointing to two incidents of unknown magnitude (because you lack the data internal to the company) among an unknown number of other things she's handled and you claim she's failed as a CEO? That is ridiculously uninformed.

The so-called misogynists (I'm of the opinion that much of the brutal words written about her were a large part tongue-in-cheek, deliberate over the top absurdity, not that that excuses it) are a part of reddit. You can't just say "I shouldn't have to deal with this".

Besides, these people have always been there and haven't caused any large scale problems, and they didn't when Ellen was appointed (which is when they should have started protesting, assuming you buy the misogyny charge). It was when some quite heavy handed restrictions started to be laid down with regards to freedom of speech that the uprising began to grow.

Personally, I'm glad she's gone, I much prefer reddit to be an extremely politically incorrect place. Take fatpeoplehate for instance - is it hurtful to fat people? Sure. But that subreddit can be easily blocked from your feed. Should someone have to do that? I think yes, they should, because if the new policy is to not hurt anyone's feelings, a whole bunch of content has to disappear.

Now that's just my opinion of how I want reddit to be - it is up to the owners of reddit to decide how they want it to be.

Was turning the front page of /r/all into a cesspool of hate the right way to protest her decisions? Maybe not, but honestly, what alternative is there that would have actually had any effect?

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

#656

Post by jonathankoren »

scrollaway wrote: post #465
jonathankoren wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the story. What I want to know is how this is relevant to her tenure as CEO. Which you've failed to specify.

You asked, verbatim, "What the fuck is this?". Parent answered. But somehow, parent is to blame for not answering the rest of your very rhetorical-looking post.

Troll harder.

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

#657

Post by mistermann »

eli wrote: post #81
nawitus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't really follow this subject, but I saw a lot of crude and frankly pretty racist joke images voted up to the front page.

I didn't see any racism, unless you consider characterizing her as communist dictator Mao Zedong to be racism?

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

#658

Post by electricarc »

This NYT report is as much detached from reality and propagandist as reporting on support for the 2003 Iraq war. Is Victoria, the popular Reddit employee fired, in support of whom all this affair happened, a male?

Attempting such a propaganda in this connected day and age is supremely stupid.

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

#659

Post by BorisMelnik »

KVFinn wrote: post #511
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #47

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…

one of the craziest things about all the racism is that much of it is trolling from non-racist or not normally racist people looking to get a rise out of people. I see the same thing on YouTube and Reddit all of these troll parody accounts created by ant-social 20-somethings in an attempt to get a reaction or "shock" people.

Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.

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

#660

Post by jodah »

SloopJon wrote: post #578
jodah wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the downvoting is all about - let's hope you never get cancer. The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo... It was on HN a while back.

> The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit It looks like Dacvak deleted his own posts: "Edit: I've removed this post. All future discussions regarding this subject will be between me and reddit."

I think he just deleted that one post. The rest were deleted by Reddit, as was the entire conversation for a while, before being restored.
Post reply on HN