Did Reddit Boss Coverage Cross a Line? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Did Reddit Boss Coverage Cross a Line? (2015)

nytimes.com

37 pointsapsec11254 comments

Knowing what we know now, I'd say the sexism angle holds up. Pao was treated viciously during a short tenure during which she didn't do very much. She was blamed for problems that predated her, like mod support and relations, which had been going sour for years. She was blamed for things she didn't do, like firing Victoria (done by Ohanian). She was blamed for relatively mild and obvious moves to prevent abusive content on the site.

Steve Huffman was greeted as a savior when he replaced Pao. But he has been far more aggressive in curbing nasty content, and done nasty things himself, like secretly editing other users's posts directly in the database. And yet, he is still CEO. And people don't post nasty and abusive things all day about his looks, his sex life, etc.

The Ellen Pao tenure was not the Reddit community's finest hour.

Ellen Pao is not a particularly good icon if you wish to discuss sexism.

She filed a sexual harassment lawsuit over a relationship that she agreed was consensual. Once you decide to start sleeping with coworkers, you're pretty much sunk in a sexual harassment lawsuit irrespective of whether you are male, female, defending or prosecuting.

Contrary to what you might think, women do not need to comport with your ideas of how they should conduct their personal relationships, in order to expect fair and professional treatment in the workplace and the world in general.

You probably think you're making some kind of point that sexism wasn't an issue in how Pao was treated--when actually you're providing a good example of it.

Contrary to what you may think, sleeping with your coworkers is a Bad Idea(tm) and puts you in a vulnerable position irrespective of gender.

Pao probably was treated unfairly at Kleiner-Perkins. However, sleeping with a coworker meant that she was never going to win that in court.

My point is that if you want to pick a poster child for discussing sexism in this industry you need to pick someone much less vulnerable to countercharge.

There was a reason that they chose Rosa Parks instead of Claudette Colvin for the bus boycott.

His comment was specifically addressing all genders.

Irrespective, sleeping with coworkers is not a smart choice for anyone and the issue supersedes womens' right to "conduct their personal relationships."

It's honestly none of your business who she sleeps with.

And what you're implying--that because of a personal issue in her past, it was ok to harass her out the door at Reddit--is offensive and a classic tactic against women in the workplace.

How many coworkers has Huffman slept with during his career? You don't know, because it never comes up, because he's a white guy. But we know that in his actual job as CEO as Reddit, he has abused users' trust in the system for his own benefit; but apparently Pao is still a worse villain. The double standard stands intact.

This is beyond Pao, recognize that.

People may have sexual-liberty, just as they may have the freedom of speech. But, freedom from consequences is not guaranteed under these liberties.

If you sleep with the boss (man or woman) or a co-worker (man or woman) you are putting team dynamics in jeopardy. Likewise, if you openly bash your place of employment and revel in hate speech, you are putting the company's image in jeopardy.

I'm not fond of the SJW rhetoric, but I will acknowledge it when it contains rational arguments. Using the guise of liberty to mask irresponsibility is not a rational or useful argument.

Couldn't agree with this more

Well said.

She definitely has skeletons in her closet, ranging from past litigation to her husband, and isn't a great icon for women in male dominated fields.

That being said, her short time running reddit and what happened after she left (a flood of subreddit deletions, founders retaking control of the site only to ignore the major issues & laugh at her demise) shouldn't reflect on her. The founders of reddit used her as a sacrificial lamb to create an uproar resulting in her removal, that then gave them cover to ban a bunch of subreddits.

I still hope that there will be a large split, similar to /r/Seattle vs /r/SeattleWA, whereby a successor to reddit takes the lions share of the active posters and commenters, though I don't see that happening soon sadly.

You are encouraged to read the facts:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pao_v._Kleiner_Perkins

Thanks.

The interesting points are that this had no sexual harassment claims but did have gender discrimination claims.

In addition, the claims only needed preponderance of the evidence, and her claims didn't even meet that.

Pao already had a pretty explosive reputation before she took the helm. That reputation certainly stems partially from her being a woman but specifically she was an extremely high profile litigant.

Imagine if some other Valley insider with an explosive reputation had been put in charge of reddit at that time and made similar moves. For instance, imagine if they had brought in Kevin Rose. I expect that you'd see a similar pattern of reactions from the community.

I've also always had a bit of trouble reconciling the Pao controversy being about sexism with her most controversial move: firing a well-liked female staff member.

> I've also always had a bit of trouble reconciling the Pao controversy being about sexism with her most controversial move: firing a well-liked female staff member.

OP mentioned that it was not Ellen Pao who fired her, but Alexis Ohanian. This has since been confirmed by Ohanian, so it seems pretty believable.

> ... This has since been confirmed by Ohanian,...

Do you have a source for this?

"It was my decision to change how we work with AMAs and the transition was my failure and I hope we can keep moving forward from that lesson."

I guess the quote is a little less concrete than I remember, but given the context I don't know how else to interpret it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

Yishan Wong (ex Reddit CEO, and thus someone who would be in a position to know) said Ohanian did it as part of an attempt to change how Reddit handled AMAs, and criticized Ohanian harshly for his actions and failure to defend Pao.

Ohanian, for his part, has never denied it, and in fact has apologised for the "decision to change how we work with AMAs" as "his failure".

I personally consider that confirmation.

AFAIK it was never proven beyond doubt, it just looks that way: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-abo...

It's absurd to suggest that because User A wants one female to keep her job, that means that User A isn't mistreating someone else in a sexist way.

It's not absurd when the argument is that reddit didn't like Pao just because she's a woman. Demonstrably there were women with authority on reddit who were well liked by the community. So her gender was at most a partial explanation for the reaction.

I won't say the sexism angle is bunk, but the difference in attitude also strike at the very question of what the role of a CEO is. Just with a reddit-y spin:

Are the CEOs ultimately responsible for the behavior of the company beyond simple profit/sustainability? (This is a series of rhetorical questions, but do remember that your position for Pao/Huffman also applies to Kalanick). Is it their job to jump on the grenade so the area is clear for everyone else to pick up the pick up the pieces and move a never version of the company forward? To eat the problem so the baggage doesn't weigh on the company forever?

I think under Pao, we saw a reddit userbase that expected the CEO to be a leader. A case where forcing a CEO to confront the dissent and dissatisfaction would compel action. In the wake of her ouster, and under Huffman it has become known the top brass DGAF. They have an addicted userbase and will skirt ownership and responsibility of the orgnization's actions like weasly middle managers (or politicians). The userbase appears to have adapted to operating under those terms. Why would the userbase maintain the same dissent towards Huffman? That would be insanity (doing the same thing, expecting different results).

Pao had no business running reddit, everyone could tell early on.

She didn't understand reddit and made very hasty unpopular decisions, well intentioned as they were, reddit was not used to censorship at the time and the execution was terrible. She also didn't understand how to use reddit, I remember her trying to post messages from her own inbox.

There were a couple of other factors that contributed. They weren't very nice to her that's for sure but I wouldn't call it sexism.

> She also didn't understand how to use reddit, I remember her trying to post messages from her own inbox.

That was debunked, admins have that ability on private subreddits and she just posted in the wrong tab.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

The Ellen Pao tenure was not the Reddit community's finest hour.

Reddit stopped having a "finest hour" years ago, as is the way when online communities grow very large.

From everything I read about it, Pao was hired (knowingly or not) as a scapegoat. Reddit had started to get a bad rap in the media due to certain sections of the community (eg. /r/fatpeoplehate, various racist subreddits) and had been told by investors that they had to clean up their image. So they hired Pao, had her make the changes (banning a few obnoxious subs, updating site code of conduct), and then fired her (without rolling back the changes) to appease the more vocal members of the community.

Catering to the lowest common denominator is a large reason why the quality of news networks have tanked in the last decade. Why wouldn't the same drop in quality occur with Reddit?

It's quite common to hire an interim executive to take unpopular but necessary actions and then leave, taking a large chunk of the ill-will with them and clearing the way for the new management to move forward. If you're the sort of person who can handle being the bastard everyone will hate, then it's a great way to make money.

Hey, OP here. I don't really care about Pao, but posted this again because of the details it provides on how the NYT operates in general. In particular, there's this paragraph:

"I often hear from readers that they would prefer a straight, neutral treatment — just the facts. But The Times has moved away from that, reflecting editors’ reasonable belief that the basics can be found in many news outlets, every minute of the day. They want to provide “value-added” coverage."

If there was a good post analyzing this, with lots of links to primary sources, without getting bogged down in other distractions, I would've posted that instead. But I unfortunately haven't seen one yet.

Yes, this frank description of NYTimes' journalistic philosophy is vastly more important than the Pao controversy.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that their coverage did cross a line.

The coverage of Pao's ouster in general crossed all kinds of lines.

We now know that most of the public ill-will towards her was completely unfounded. It's the nature of internet media in general. Everybody wants to be first. Being correct and balanced are nice-to-haves that I'm not sure any media outlet cares about anymore. This goes for online and other media. Even journals target studies with eye catching headlines.

This all goes to problems with advertising revenue. Page views and clicks generate revenue almost blindly. End users are engaging not based on trust or value, but based on common themes. It's not sustainable, and if it is sustainable it's not right.

The same goes for VC money. I suppose _most_ investment money has been forever broken because they target generic measurable milestones and not quality or long term sustainability which is difficult to truly analyze. I suppose that's why most big silicon valley companies are housed in the shells of former big silicon valley companies. I'm stereotyping here, and yc could very well be much different, but this is definitely an impression that I have. I've never gone after VC money myself, so I could be off base by a long shot.

No idea why this is being upvoted here now, but it is a reminder of all the internet culture wars that I think had a big effect on the lead up to Trump's victory. Agree or not it is an amazing revolution. The young male gamer culture won.

I thought Trump voters skewed older.

They do, but he has a very vocal base among young people (much more vocal than young people for Clinton).

The young male gamer culture isn't so different (with respect to gender issues that affected the election), from older male(+female) conservative culture.

I'm curious. In what ways are they similar?

it has been reported in recent years that Generation Z is more conservative than Millenials in all ways except socially (e.g. they hold positive views about transgender rights, marijuana legalisation and same-sex marriage).

see https://www.quora.com/Is-generation-Z-more-conservative-than...

There's a community of screaming angry children (not an insult, I mean literal teenagers and younger) who've got some sort of persecution complex and complain often about "censorship". Almost uniformly, the work of these people is not useful to anyone but them. And it is only useful to them in a sort of self gratifying perpetuation of their beliefs coupled with outrage.

If you're an individual, I would advise steering clear of these groups. It's not productive to be a member.

I think it's today's variant of the BSD v GPL, or Linux v Microsoft flame wars. It's an addictive thing to participate in. You have a team and you strongly present membership and identity.

It's less about the principles behind it and more about which principles you can bring to serve your identity as part of the group membership.

For an individual, this is a mental trap. You expend a great deal of effort on identification and none on being better. It's not worth it.

I think the Ellen Pao thing was one of these identity rites. She was the opposite, and things others could be forgiven for would be heinous crimes if she'd done them.

An us-vs-them mentality definitely amplified the outrage, but it began for legitimate purposes. Reddit really was a bastion of free speech in its early days, which was fantastic because people with thoughts that didn't align with the PC culture could find a place they liked. The community was afraid the changes implemented by Pao would be a slippery slope to conforming to the mainstream PC culture and reacted accordingly. And looking at how Reddit has changed in the last few years, I would say those fears were not unfounded in the least.

My favorite part is the section at the bottom that says,

> A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 19, 2015, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Did Reddit Boss Coverage Cross a Line?

I wonder if the Times even modified this Op-Ed between print and web!

That's some automatically generated text footer, it's common on NYT.

This is news again why?

Without questioning the appropriateness of the story, I would be interested in hearing from OP what prompted the re-posting.

HN's front page is as HN's front page does....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13694142

Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com