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

I think the kind of "open" management recently seen with startups like buffer would really make things better if applied at reddit.

2. Most of the mods are realizing their mistakes right now, if you can see the subs who are coming back online they are just getting insulted and downvoted over and over for giving up on the black out

3. Use that + give them better tools to moderate their subs = you have the mods on your side

4. They need a martyr story, Ellen Pao is getting harassed all over the place, people trying to doxx her, people photoshoping her pictures over and over, people making bad jokes about her (racists, sexist, etc...). They need to make it look like this is a bad thing, like she's suffering, like the reaction of these people who are a minority of reddit are causing to the people administrating reddit. I think that would be good if it came from some mods of subreddits or from some rumors in random subreddits.

Seriously, I see Ellen Pao as the new Britney Spears. In a few years people will love her (if she hasn't killed herself from all of this harassment).

5.? They could fire Ellen Pao and hire someone from the community. But I doubt this would change something in the long run.

6.? They could make the whole management process of reddit more "open" like buffer does.

Eventually, things like that are doomed to happen. A company needs to fire people, needs to take decision that their users will not like so they can monetize their website, etc... It's also good to notice that things like that often goes away pretty quickly, the last drama lasted a day, I don't think this one will last more than a day or two either... Most people didn't even realize. This is an interesting topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bz9pm/how_...

I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:

"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"

Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).

Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.

But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.

I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.

I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.

One last thing:

> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.

I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.

Raldi had a really good idea of creating an office of Public Advocate: someone in the company whose job it is to argue for the users in any meeting. That's a fantastic suggestion, and could go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of resentment among the user base.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/3c1m67/c...