Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by genericuser » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:38 AM UTC

genericuser wrote: post #251

ElComradio wrote: post #100

PR that comes out of corporations cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Altman is being honest that he appreciated her efforts. We can't trust that her and her husband were in love. All of this that comes out of spokesmen is carefully crafted as a result of a numbers game. When do we hear "so and so CEO did a horrible job and was forced out by the board."? Never. So are we to believe there is no such thing as a terrible…

No one said give her a pass, it was simply said the 'vitriol was appalling.' That simply means that the denizens of the internet when taken as a collective are horrible people who can not voice criticism in a civil manner. Assuming she was completely horrible and a terrible CEO... Assuming that! How could someone's lack of ability to do their job (or anything else for that matter) make the type of death and rape thre…

When I made this post (and for a good time afterward), and I clicked 'parent' of your post it took me to the post with the person talking about the vitriol being appalling.

My response above was written assuming that the intended 'parent' post was the one being linked as the 'parent' at the time.

That post is no longer the parent of your comment, instead the parent is a post which your post actually works as a relatively legitimate reply to.

I am saying this as a way of acknowledging, all my further replies (some of which may have been made after the parent changed, without me noticing) are clearly deserving of down votes in the current context.

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

#562

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:38 AM UTC

genericuser wrote: post #251

ElComradio wrote: post #100

PR that comes out of corporations cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Altman is being honest that he appreciated her efforts. We can't trust that her and her husband were in love. All of this that comes out of spokesmen is carefully crafted as a result of a numbers game. When do we hear "so and so CEO did a horrible job and was forced out by the board."? Never. So are we to believe there is no such thing as a terrible…

No one said give her a pass, it was simply said the 'vitriol was appalling.' That simply means that the denizens of the internet when taken as a collective are horrible people who can not voice criticism in a civil manner. Assuming she was completely horrible and a terrible CEO... Assuming that! How could someone's lack of ability to do their job (or anything else for that matter) make the type of death and rape thre…

[deleted]

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

#563

Post by donw » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:42 AM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #321

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.

"There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion." Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time,…

That really is the case. Completely asinine, but if you are a public figure, the masses can be shockingly awful. There is an interesting article where Penn and Teller compare their rather large influx of death threats with Richard Dawkins[1], and from what I know, pretty much anybody in the public eye has to deal with this.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10836833/Penn-and...

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

#564

Post by danielweber » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:42 AM UTC

aiiane wrote: post #542

danielweber wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because it leads to an incoherent policy. Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that. Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems: 1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's al…

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good isn't great either.

This isn't responsive to anything I said. It's a response to a different comment that says "they should only get rid of all toxic communities, not just some of them."

Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon.

The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.

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

#565

Post by stefantalpalaru » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

caminante wrote: post #424

prawn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=08ebd…

> On HN, it isn't as much a problem, from my experience, because the downvote button is masked for users with Unfortunately, it is a serious problem. The moment you become a dissonant voice is the moment you're downvoted into unreadability by the choir. Make no mistake, many people here have enough karma points to downvote and they are quick to react.

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

#566

Post by morbius » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:44 AM UTC

blhack wrote: post #515

morbius wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Victoria was beloved despite the fact she was a woman, not necessarily because of it. I understand what you're trying to say, but it doesn't really hold up.

Should somebody be like because of their gender? Isn't that outrageously sexist?

I never said someone should be liked because of their gender. It's just that using Victoria as a defense for Reddit's consistently juvenile view of women doesn't really work.

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

#567

Post by axlprose » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:45 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #544

axlprose wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical thinking just involves analysis of arguments presented. If my arguments were fallacious, then I apologize, but you haven't exactly clarified how exactly I exaggerated the OP's claims, as opposed to just summarized them. I'll accept the godwin's law card, that was a slip. Secondly, I did notice your analysis, but I was referring to the general "you", so that others can feel free to chime in and critique as we…

"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 argued for, then what is the rule for applying this whole "integrity in journalism argument" => "gamergate" => BS chain of logic? If there is none, then by definition, it can be applied anywhere. So I don't see how my comment is logically invalid in pointing this out.

I also hope you realize that your comparison between this article and gamergate is about as valid as my original one was to orwell & huxley; i.e. it's pointless to just point out and insinuate some kind of similarity unless you clarify what it is you're actually trying to argue. Pointing things out like that without explanation just gives the impression that you want to throw the negative connotations of events like gamergate (or the holocaust for hitler analogies) onto unrelated arguments to silence them.

And finally, the problems with media run farther than just the bigtime moguls out there like Murdoch, and as I've already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's a direct byproduct of the influence social media has had, and this is more thoroughly elaborated on in the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying". That book came out well before gamergate even happened, yet random questions about the dubious journalistic practices this book outlines are all somehow related to that silly gamergate incident?

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

#568

Post by aneil » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:47 AM UTC

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…

I'm a pretty regular user, but have unsubscribed from a number of the default subreddits. Still, there is often a feeding frenzy mentality that takes over there. The racism during Ferguson was appalling. I saw a Pao subthread where people were discussing how sexually unappealing she is. It degenerated from there. Pretty awful stuff.

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

#569

Post by morbius » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #327

sbilstein wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to explain objectively; I think the things that turned me off to reddit back then (now it's more mainstream) were people's willingness to assume tons of knowledge of topics they didn't really know about, the general white, upper middle class male from the burbs tastes of things like r/music and other cultural subreddits. It felt like walking into a videogame fraternity and realizing I didn't belong there. That's…

There's certainly a white fraternity feel in a lot of reddits, so I can imagine how people can feel disconnect to it. But /r/shitredditsays, well... I was subscribed to it for some time, and the posts themselves do a good job at noticing really bad behaviour on reddit sometimes — but then I discovered the comments there, and I must say, it feels like half of the users of this sub are trolls who pretend to be THE wors…

The SRS sidebar makes it pretty clear that the whole SJW façade is exactly that: a façade. They obviously have legitimate complaints but hyperbolise everything to poke fun at it.

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

#570

Post by Natsu » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #255

austenallred wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://np.reddit.com/r/FaithInHumanity/comments/39ee4c/char... She tried to share a link to a private message. That's the equivalent of my mom emailing me and saying, "Here's the picture - c:\\user\desktop\pic.jpg" - it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works. Then everyone who replied was shadowbanned and every post was deleted. So no, she literally didn't know how to use the site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol... The new CEO doesn't know how to make lists. Is he going to catch shit for it?

I'll hazard a 'yes' here, based on the comments (see top comment, below). In the interest of fairness, admins can see the private links, so Pao may have just posted to the wrong Reddit, rather than doing something ridiculous (though it would look that way to anyone not familiar with admin powers).

===

kciuq1 1758 points 3 hours ago Maybe the first priority is to learn how reddit works.