Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by nightpool » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #14

splitbrain wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rumors abound. The most prominent rumor is that it was because of a bad public reaction to a Jesse Jackson AMA. Some leaked info from a supposed disgruntled Reddit admin says it's because Ellen Pao pressured Victoria into pushing an NDA + promise of a cut of future sales resulting from AMAs on the AMA subjects, which Victoria disagreed with a little too loudly.

The moderators of IAmA have said that they believe the decision was made to fire her before the Jesse Jackson AMA happened.

EDIT: whoops, didn't mean to downvote you. mobile misclick :(

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

#32

Post by imjk » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

"We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less."

I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to NY to meet with Victoria and was told that the meeting was cancelled. As expected, panic ensued among the subreddit's moderators. Whether the firing was justified or not, the fact that Reddit's leadership didn't immediately see the consequences of their action on one of their most popular communities just shows their disregard. Or even worse, they realized the consequences and just didn't bother to help facilitate them. I mean these are real people with real meetings spending real dollars for the community, which is all run but volunteers, and Reddit's leadership didn't feel it was important enough to communicate with them to help avoid unnecessary consequences. I understand the frustration.

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

#33

Post by VLM » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #7

gesman wrote: 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.

Isn't it more likely than not that she was dismissed with good cause? Otherwise, why so abruptly and without explanation from either side? Presumably reddit for legal and other reasons didn't want to kick her on the way out, but what else explains her relative silence?

"but what else explains her relative silence?"

Non-disparagement clauses as part of a cash settlement are a thing. This proves nothing but does fit the evidence.

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

#34

Post by nanny » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #27

nanny wrote: 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.

>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.

What if she did something really bad and was fired on the spot? How could they "have a plan in place" for a situation like that?

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

#35

Post by joosters » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

robrenaud wrote: post #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.

I imagine it'd be extremely difficult. It's the users that give reddit its power. You can set up another site but if it hasn't got the readership, fewer people are going to do AMAs there. There are already several reddit clones but they are nowhere near as successful.

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

#36

Post by mildweed » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

People often say that the users of a site like Reddit are the product, not the customers. In the case of Reddit moderators, they are also essentially employees. Employees who need to be treated more as customers, due to the fact they're volunteers.

Anger the masses of Reddit all you want, but don't piss off the volunteers that hold your product together.

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

#37

Post by Zikes » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

nightpool wrote: post #31

Zikes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumors abound. The most prominent rumor is that it was because of a bad public reaction to a Jesse Jackson AMA. Some leaked info from a supposed disgruntled Reddit admin says it's because Ellen Pao pressured Victoria into pushing an NDA + promise of a cut of future sales resulting from AMAs on the AMA subjects, which Victoria disagreed with a little too loudly.

The moderators of IAmA have said that they believe the decision was made to fire her before the Jesse Jackson AMA happened. EDIT: whoops, didn't mean to downvote you. mobile misclick :(

Which is still speculation.

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

#38

Post by speeder » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

Stefan-H wrote: post #23

[deleted] wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Also adding to what Stefan said, the admins have been deleting subreddits too, sometimes the wrong ones (for example they deleted an Whale Watching subreddit believing it was a fat people harassment subreddit...)

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

#39

Post by haberman » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

splitbrain wrote: post #4

gesman wrote: 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.

I wonder if the authors of this NYT piece (the Reddit mods) know what happened (or at least know her side of it). I wonder if they are in communication with her. By making this such a high-profile thing, they draw attention to it, which could hurt her if the story eventually comes out and it's unflattering to her.

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

#40

Post by amyjess » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

zedpm wrote: 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…

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. The subreddits shut down last month were all hate groups that were targeting individuals for harassment and posting their photographs without permission in order to attack them. I've personally seen my pictures posted by one of these groups twice, and the day before those subs got banned, there was a very upset mother asking what recourse she had because these hate groups were posting pictures of her underage child and refused to take them down (and I distinctly remember this because I was one of a handful of people who helped teach her how to message the admins).