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Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

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Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#611

Post by Zak »

adventured wrote: post #217
AUmrysh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really sad is that reddit and Alexis were, arguably, the most successful Y-Combinator startup, and now they've fallen by the wayside as cronyism and personal agendas take over. Alexis let this happen, though. Not that I blame him, I'd have taken the money too.

By far and away, Airbnb is the most successful Y-Combinator startup. It's not a close race between Reddit and Airbnb. After that is Dropbox and Stripe perhaps. I don't think Reddit ever quite stacked up to these types of companies in terms of potential. Reddit is a link-aggregator, the very definition of a poor business opportunity (they don't own anything, and hardly control anything on their own site). Airbnb is ca…

reddit was the first to release anything online[0]. It's probably fair to say at that point, they were the most successful. I think it's arguable that reddit is still the most successful of those, though Loopt may have been acquired for more money. Here's what happened to the rest:

* Memamp - desktop search: failed to launch, remaining founder hired by reddit

* Infogami - something between a blog and a wiki: merged with reddit, became reddit wiki

* Firecrawl - security software: pivoted and became TextPayMe - mobile payments: acquihired by Amazon, merged in to Amazon Payments

* Loopt - mobile location sharing: acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million

* Kiko - online calendar: launched shortly before Google Calendar, sold to Tucows for about $250k

* Clickfacts - advertising fraud detection: operated independently for years; now appears defunct

* Simmery - can't find anything on what this company was making: defunct

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/vJmLVd9lJyk/1...

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#612

Post by derpherpderp »

pron wrote: post #481
vonklaus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basically everything you said It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you. > this is a huge vote of "no confidence" toward…

They're not "limiting free speech" in any way or form. They're moderating what gets published on their platform . That's a totally different thing. You got anything to say? Print out a pamphlet or host a blog on your own server. Nobody's stopping you. As to ambiguous decision making -- you're right about that, but they have a problem. Reddit has a largeish group of teenagers, unemployed white men living in their moth…

Are there really a lot of teenagers on there? When I was in high school almost nobody knew about Reddit, it took until college for most of my peers to find out what it was.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#613

Post by chernevik »

geofft wrote: post #602
chernevik wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a demonstration that the Reverend doesn't much care about fairness to individuals, and so would not feel qualms about insisting someone be fired because he was embarrassed.

OK, and why would Reddit go along with that? IAmA was one of the most monetizable parts of Reddit, and it needed a full-time staff member to work. The site was already vaguely unhappy with the admins (though maybe those folks were leaving). Jesse Jackson's personal support doesn't mean much to Reddit, I'm pretty sure. Even if it made sense for him to want Victoria fired, which I'm not sure it does, and even if nobody…

"[T]he suggestion that this was the reason for Taylor's firing does seem tenuous at best, and outright ridiculous in reality." That is an assertion, and one without any argument or evidence. The other two theories mentioned by the article (anti-relocation, anti-commercialization) aren't consistent with such an abrupt and poorly handled firing.

Now why would Reddit fire Victoria over the AMA? There are many _possible_ reasons. Here are some speculations.

One, no company wants to be the target of Reverend Jackson or his supporters complaining that they treated him in a disrespectful or racist fashion. Look at how some of the various tech diversity controversies have played out, and how quickly. Reddit may well have worried that _not_ firing Victoria could have put them in a "Reddit is racist" cross-hairs that could quickly have spun out of control. Especially given how much of exactly that sort of material is floating around on various subreddits. Given how those controversies can roll, reasoning like this may even have been in some sense correct. Lose the whole company in a Twitter storm? Or fire a popular employee and irritate a bunch of mods?

Two, CEO Pao is on record talking about the importance of diversity at Reddit. It may very well be that she felt the AMA was cross-wise her own values, and those she wants to promote at Reddit.

Three, CEO Pao may also regard the Reverend and his supporters as important allies for purposes of her own, apart from her role as Reddit's CEO. She's certainly out there as interested in diversity issues, and admired by many for that. It isn't hard to imagine that she would be concerned about that image.

Four, others at Reddit may have felt the AMA didn't represent their values. Silicon Valley is notoriously progressive, and when dealing with political questions people often don't think straight. The conflict between "AMAs can be rough" and "Reverend Jackson deserves more respect than that" creates cognitive dissonance. That makes decision-making very hard. Add in some pressure from Jackson or his people -- whom many in Silicon Valley _want_ to perceive as reasonable and intelligent folks, and exposed to a lot of unreasonable criticism -- and good choices start to get difficult.

We don't _know_ anything, of course. The basic point is, the Jackson AMA created a _political_ situation for Reddit. Political decision-making is already hard, and the thinking about it easily confused. Reddit may have made a political choice driven by business concerns. Or it may have made political choices based on its employees personal agendas or outlooks.

Or, the timing of the firing and the AMA were completely coincidental.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#614

Post by likeclockwork »

lingben wrote: post #138
flashman wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is. Being a Reddit admin must be really frustrating.

It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach. When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, th…

Yeah, if she laughed at herself, and appeared human and submissive to the masses they'd stop calling her a cunt.

Imagine being responsible for a platform where every time you post something people come out of the woodworks to call you a cunt and a stupid bitch.

Really, I don't know how she puts in an honest day's work and I really don't know what anyone expects of anyone in that situation. Were I in that situation I'd be thinking 'This house is infested, burn it down.'

She banned a few people? What, that's an abuse of her power? They used to decapitate people for saying less offensive things within someone else's domain.

I wonder how some people (not you) survive the cognitive dissonance of believing simultaneously that the right to free speech and the right to private property are the most important things ever of all time.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#615

Post by andreyf »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #396
andreyf wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email. Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine. Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to…

If I want to see how a url will appear to someone before I send it, I open an incognito tab in chrome and paste it there. It doesn't have access to any of my currently open sessions, cookies, etc. so I see exactly what someone else will see when they click, and I send or don't send (or modify and send) accordingly.

I do that too sometimes, but I wouldn't equate someone not doing it to "my grandma sending me the local path to a file".

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#616

Post by geofft »

chernevik wrote: post #613
geofft wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, and why would Reddit go along with that? IAmA was one of the most monetizable parts of Reddit, and it needed a full-time staff member to work. The site was already vaguely unhappy with the admins (though maybe those folks were leaving). Jesse Jackson's personal support doesn't mean much to Reddit, I'm pretty sure. Even if it made sense for him to want Victoria fired, which I'm not sure it does, and even if nobody…

"[T]he suggestion that this was the reason for Taylor's firing does seem tenuous at best, and outright ridiculous in reality." That is an assertion, and one without any argument or evidence. The other two theories mentioned by the article (anti-relocation, anti-commercialization) aren't consistent with such an abrupt and poorly handled firing. Now why would Reddit fire Victoria over the AMA? There are many _possible_…

Even if you grant one through four, the role of AMA facilitator is incredibly monetarily important for Reddit, and also incredibly politically important for Reddit as a platform. Victoria was their one paid control of AMA. The mods (as we saw) are volunteers and answer to nobody. Reddit's management isn't dumb, they know that.

(Speculation one also seems somewhat unlikely given that, for instance, /r/coontown is still around. They'd be an obvious scapegoat if you wanted to curry favor with Jackson or with the Twitter folks who were already saying that Reddit was racist. And they're far less valuable to Reddit than an employee was.)

What they could have done, if they really wanted, was to trump up some charges against the AMA mods (perhaps for not moderating that AMA well) and replace some or all of the mod team. That would have placated Jackson, or Twitter, or Pao's self-image, or whomever, while cementing control of AMA in the future. Reddit continued to have an employee involved in running AMAs, and she could have been pressured into keeping AMAs reflect the message Reddit wants to send.

So even if someone (Jackson, Pao, someone else at Reddit) felt like Something Needed To Be Done in response to that AMA, it's far from obvious that firing someone would have been a response that occurred to them. What we're assuming here is not just poor decision-making blinded by ideology / political exigency / whatever, but poor decision-making in the face of other, obvious, obviously better options. That's what makes it so hard to believe.

We know that Reddit already implemented a move-or-get-fired policy. We know that Reddit is bad at handling employee termination (and lots of companies are, to be fair). We know that, fairly recently, Reddit terminated an employee for not moving, and handled it very abruptly, too, without contacting the subreddit they were assigned to work with. "Management decided to fire the employee for standard company-politics reasons, and did a bad job of it" seems perfectly within reason.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#617

Post by zobzu »

istvan__ wrote: post #395
DanBC wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have evidence that people did not hire / promote you because you are white you should totally sue. Perhaps your recent experience has opened your eyes to the difficulties black people have had for very many years. It is hard to get evidence of discrimination; that makes it hard to bring and win a case; lack of won cases is used as evidence of a lack of discrimination. Edit: added promote

He did not mention hiring anywhere in his comment. Can you actually reply to him instead of giving words into his mouth?

To be honest hiring or promoting is probably similar so I wouldn't bash him.

It's just unfortunate that the way we "fix things" is never fair. I'd rather we be transparent in the hiring, promoting, and salaries. I'd rather we attempt to fix the social pressure issues.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#618

Post by chernevik »

geofft wrote: post #616
chernevik wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"[T]he suggestion that this was the reason for Taylor's firing does seem tenuous at best, and outright ridiculous in reality." That is an assertion, and one without any argument or evidence. The other two theories mentioned by the article (anti-relocation, anti-commercialization) aren't consistent with such an abrupt and poorly handled firing. Now why would Reddit fire Victoria over the AMA? There are many _possible_…

Even if you grant one through four, the role of AMA facilitator is incredibly monetarily important for Reddit, and also incredibly politically important for Reddit as a platform. Victoria was their one paid control of AMA. The mods (as we saw) are volunteers and answer to nobody. Reddit's management isn't dumb, they know that. (Speculation one also seems somewhat unlikely given that, for instance, /r/coontown is stil…

Or, you've generated Scenario Five: Reddit wanted to remove a mod in connection with the Jackson AMA, Victoria refused to cooperate, they fired her instead.

But I would definitely agree that what looks like conspiracy generally turns out to be stupidity.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#619

Post by baby »

blhack wrote: post #33

It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users ke…

I think no one really knows why the community is getting pissed off constantly. Right now it's just acting as an angry mob with no brain. And if you follow all this drama, you will see that they bring a lot of golds (so a lot of money to reddit) and that they die out in a day or two.

Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#620

Post by baby »

natrius wrote: post #234
kefka wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' : “We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices betw…

As someone who loves reddit, this dichotomy is the clearest sign that it has no future. Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls on top of platforms like IPFS and Ethereum's Swarm. Every attempt at building a reddit clone fails because reddit enjoys tremendous network effects. But decentralization yields its own network effects—you don…

> Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls

This would be worse than 4chan, that has moderation as well (although more laxed than reddit or HN), why would anyone go there instead of reddit?

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