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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

#421

Post by scrollaway »

CountSessine wrote: post #408
scrollaway wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You think "the media" is intentionally causing confrontation as part of some collusion with Reddit to make money? GP isn't implying any collusion. The media is intentionally causing confrontation just fine on its own. > I saw racist and sexist posts personally Nobody is claiming the hateful stuff didn't exist. But painting "Reddit" as sexist while conveniently ignoring the 90-9-1 rule and focusing on Pao's gender i…

GP isn't implying any collusion. The media is intentionally causing confrontation just fine on its own. Do you have any evidence of this? atrocious track record Like what? That she shut down a forum called "Fat people hate", where posters singled out the obese for vicious, personal online harrassment? is... in bad taste, to say the least Do you even understand what that means? Criticising Reddit or its community is i…

> Like what? That she shut down a forum called "Fat people hate", where posters singled out the obese for online harrassment?

You don't know me. You have no idea what my feelings are regarding FPH. Yet, you make assumptions.

So now we got that out of the way, hi, I'm Jerry, and I hated FPH and didn't give a rat's arse about its shutdown. Had Pao made only that one decision in her two years as CEO, reddit would have bigger problems on its hands.

Thankfully, I just wrote a reply to someone else's comment right below yours - a much nicer comment which asks a question without making aggressive assumptions - addressing your actual question. Take a look.

> Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste? Seriously?

The thing with rephrasing what someone else said and appending "Seriously?" is it always goes your way, because you get to decide how you rephrase it. Good thing again that I didn't say "Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste". I said:

> painting "Reddit" as sexist while conveniently ignoring the 90-9-1 rule and focusing on Pao's gender instead of atrocious track record [is in bad taste].

In other words, trying to turn millions of people into sexist pigs by ignoring how such communities function is in bad taste. Do you disagree?

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

#422

Post by JohnBooty »

estel wrote: post #338
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This whole thing was really disgusting and made me hate the average Reddit user They are not the average Reddit user. Probably a huge majority of Reddit users have no idea who Ellen Pao is.

Even if that's the case, they're a very visible component of Reddit's userbase, to the point that an outsider definitely might see them as representative. If the default home page and /r/all can all be flooded with posts about her, it's not exactly a small group of extremists.

   If the default home page and /r/all can all 
   be flooded with posts about her, it's not 
   exactly a small group of extremists.
I don't think the numbers support that statement at all.

Reddit has roughly 1.5 million daily users. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic

It only takes about a thousand (net) upvotes to get something to the front page.

So a very small (less than 1%) portion of the visitors can very much get things like "fire Ellen" posts onto the front page, especially when there's no opposing block of voters.

(In other words, there were no passionate defenders of Pao who were eagerly downvoting the posts that trashed her. There were only anti-Pao zealots, and a much larger userbase that simply didn't care much at all. Count me in the latter, FWIW.)

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

#423

Post by oldmanjay »

jrs99 wrote: post #414
spinlock wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a stretch. if the intent is to create a sarcastic nick-name that compares the ceo to a dictator, "chairman pao" is going to be a front-runner not because pao and mao are both chinese but because pao and mao are only 1 letter different from each other.

Regardless of the intention, they ARE both chinese. So is it really a stretch to see a racist element to this nick name? It is racist by default. I'm not saying that it is a greatly offensive nickname or even unfunny, but for someone to call it racist is not at all a stretch.

Is it racist to acknowledge that Ellen Pao is of Chinese ancestry? I don't get how but I don't get a lot of the modern sensitivities.

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

#424

Post by caminante »

prawn wrote: post #80
istvan__ wrote: post #31

I am opening a bottle of champagne and at the same time answer my own question: it took 3 weeks for the community to get rid off a tyrant. Well done Reddit! Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.

PG has posted on HN saying that downvoting for disagreement is fine.

I didn't know this for HN, though I'd seen it on Reddit. Thanks for passing this along.

On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with On reddit, I was familiar with the saying -- "downvote isn't disagree button." Though, the current rediquette has removed that language. Compare [1] (old) v. [2] (current).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette?v=08ebd986-6459-11e2... [2] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette

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

#425

Post by geofft »

oldmanjay wrote: post #399
geofft wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that, from the public information, it sounds like both of those terminations were potentially ill-advised. (There's also rumors that both of them were loosely tied to Yishan's everyone-in-SF policy, as it happens, but only rumors.) Obviously there's more going on than the public will ever know, unless Reddit corporate email ends up on Wikileaks, so I don't actually have an opinion on them because I don't have…

There's something offputting about referring to people by their reddit usernames as if that's an important facet to their personhood. It makes me think, perhaps without justification, that you have your identity far too tied up in a silly website.

I don't know all of their names off the top of my head, and I assume most people reading don't, either, so I went with the Reddit usernames to optimize for clarity and consistency (and Googlability), at the risk of being depersonalizing.

That said, for all four of these people, that "silly website" was not only their job and livelihood, it was also very much a passion of theirs. It's entirely reasonable for it to be a strong part of their identity, and I think it's a bit disrespectful to deny them that.

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

#426

Post by jellicle »

kolbe wrote: post #78

After seeing what Ellen went through, I think Sam will need to raise some more funds to offer a significant pay bump to entice even mediocre talent to fill her void.

Absolutely correct. There's no way that any moderately-intelligent woman would ever take the job now.

Perhaps a fairly dim, elderly man who doesn't know much about social media and therefore is immune to the storms of reddit.

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

#427

Post by scrollaway »

genericuser wrote: post #417
scrollaway wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's get two things out there right now : 1. Nowhere in this thread was someone saying "Rape is Bad", without a bunch of other words around it. Nor was there anyone saying "I disagree", without a bunch of nuances and explanations around it. 2. You're still playing the politician game, trying to reduce the argument down to what suits you best, even after being called out on it. I'm not falling into this trap. If you…

Show me the other CONTENT in this post besides that rape and death threats are appalling. Patrick_Devine 2 hours ago | parent | flag 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.

I'm not seeing any mention of rape of death threats in the post you pasted. You're projecting your own assumption that the peripheral vitriol the comment is talking about consisted of only rape and death threats.

Take a step back and try look at it with a clear head. Criticism can take many other forms, you know...

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

#428

Post by magicalist »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #415
eli wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's jarring -- that is, newsworthy -- to see overt sexist or racist remarks with hundreds of upvotes, suggesting at least widespread if not majority support. So, yeah, that fact is going to find its way into many articles. What is the argument against Pao anyway? It seems like the only non-personal complaints I've heard are that FatPeopleHate was banned and a well-liked moderator was fired on her watch. Is there mor…

There's lots more to it. While I agree with the banning of FPH, the underlying policy that justified it was deeply flawed. The harassment policy was woefully vague to the point of absurdity. There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago, and as we found out today, only last week dedicated employees to work on it; after the defaults revolted. This is a small subset of all of the…

> There's lots more to it

and by lots you mean...that's about it. Honestly if "There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago" was a good criteria for booting a CEO, Reddit would have had ~20 CEOs by now.

That was the actual problem, that mods have never had the tools they need, but that's not why she's resigning/being fired.

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