We apologize • Hacker News Board

Re: We apologize

#51

Post by pbreit » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

emehrkay wrote: post #10

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the wo…

She's not very likable. You don't see down voting like this for Alexis, Yishan or, elsewhere, PG and SamA. She still speaks more in MBA-ease like "providing tools" and "listening to users" and "communicated poorly", etc.

And the person fired was by most accounts a well-liked, very visible, performing employee. Dismissing someone like that with very little care was horrific management.

Edit: I don't know why I included Alexis since he also comes off pretty smug and user-hostile (e.g. "popcorn time").

Re: We apologize

#52

Post by pbreit » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

baakss wrote: post #25

emehrkay wrote: post #10

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation. As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the wo…

I tend to (maybe unjustly) associate the Reddit community as being the Gamergate community. I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.

Very unjustly. That's a tiny percentage of overall usage.

Re: We apologize

#53

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #29

idlewords wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job. The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.

I'm sure this happens a lot. But I'd have expected more of an effort to gain the trust of the users, which would seem to me to be an important element in all this. Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense. > The level of abuse…

A lot of this conversation assumes we all know what the role of Reddit's CEO should be. But we probably don't: the title means radically different things in different organizations.

It seems from easily available evidence that Reddit's core business challenge was taking a runaway successful online community and reliably monetizing it. If the CEO role at Reddit was primarily responsible for dealing with that problem, it's not surprising that the kind of person who filled it might not be congenial to message board nerds. The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.

The knee-jerk response to this obvious point is that someone brought in to monetize a community could easily damage it by being tone-deaf or compromising it in pursuit of profit. But most of the things Reddit Inc did to damage its community predate Pao, often by many years.

This is the stuff I think about when people point out that Pao was a terrible CEO for Reddit Inc because she didn't know how to send a private message.

Re: We apologize

#54

Post by pbreit » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #17

joeevans1000 wrote: post #2

They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.

No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them. But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing). This applies to other incid…

Of course they are allowed to. But if it's a bad decision or they handle it poorly, that is perfectly legitimate grounds for criticism.

Re: We apologize

#55

Post by forgottenpass » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #11

That was actually a decent apology not the typical corporate "We are sorry you feel this way non-apology apology". Yeah it came late. But better late than never.

I dunno, she admits they broke promises and promise to do better this time.

Anyone who has been in that relationship knows it's entirely typical. They could change, but getting your hopes up is asking to get hurt again.

Also: they didn't pull the curtain back at all, so I still find it to be a bland corporate statement.

Re: We apologize

#56

Post by jeletonskelly » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #45

jeletonskelly wrote: post #23

As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power tri…

>It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... But they still are part of the backbone. No single mod is, but the ever changing group of mods as a whole are very important. Cease all moderation and what will eventually happen? Some self moderation by means of the voting system will keep everything from going completely crazy, but smaller communities could be crushed. Consider how ma…

To be clear, I meant the current unionized group of mods who staged the major sub strike in that statement. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be moderators.

Re: We apologize

#57

Post by iaw » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:04 PM UTC

This is the first thing I've seen from Ellen Pao that looks like a step in the right direction. There area few challenges she faces at reddit that I don't envy. It is an unfortunate consequence of her lawsuit that she gained enough notoriety to be disliked by a portion of the male cohort of reddit. She is now in the awkward position of both trying to address real problems with the site that have gone unaddressed for a long time and mitigating the damage that her personal brand is causing by being associated with the site.

Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her interactions with the reddit community.

Re: We apologize

#58

Post by jordigh » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:04 PM UTC

shock-value wrote: post #49

jordigh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they were attacking her with sexist and racist comments. Classic Reddit: 4chan 2.0

It's the price that's paid to have a site that encourages anonymity. You can't deny that there are benefits to said anonymity at the same time though.

I don't think so. I don't see this kind of behaviour widely upvoted in HN or in Lobsters, and we're no less anonymous here or there.

Re: We apologize

#59

Post by oldmanjay » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

well, the harassment standard is worded in such a way that's it's purely subjective, so I predict the continuation of inconsistent application of the policy.

also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies are a serious mistake.

on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all popcorn-munching entertainment to me.

Re: We apologize

#60

Post by Nadya » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:06 PM UTC

glorien wrote: post #39

Why do people moderate large subreddits? They don't get paid... what are they actually getting out of it? Why continue to do it? "fuck you, pay me"

As someone who moderated a large forum (not a subreddit) of >100,000 users (with ~15,000 active users at peak and rarely dipping below 3,000 users at inactive times) a large part has to do with community.

The difference decent moderation can make in a large community can vastly impact a community. There's a lot of networking that happens because of it. I was an extremely well-liked moderator who would take over "dying" sections of the forum. I was even given the nickname "The Lifegiver" because any board put under my control would go from 10 posts/week to 100s of posts/day. I made a lot of friends whom I still talk with to this day, nearly a decade later. That is what made being a moderator worth my time.

As to what jeletonskelly commented in response to you - no. There isn't always someone willing to "fill the shoes". The boards I was left in charge of were dead precisely because nobody wanted to fill the shoes. Many members of those communities were asked if they wanted to be "promoted" to moderate their board: they always declined the position. Sometimes a board is dead and nobody knows how to solve it or what it would take to revitalize it. Not everyone is a leader.

Moderators who are bad with community management have their lives turned to hell. Death threats from users who dislike your actions, dealing with community drama (having to mediate between two users in an argument without pissing either side off), dealing with 'staff' drama (mods who disagree with how another mod handled something usually) is not worth "being in power" or any "ego trip" you get from the position.

Moderators are not too far off from the founding administrator when it comes to forums (or subreddits): They enjoy the community and want to help have a part in the creation of the community.

Every good moderator I've dealt with has always put the community before anything else.

It's when money does get involved that moderation and administrative decisions become questioned. The decisions are no longer What is best for the community? but What is best for my account balance?