Interesting read. I wonder if the "paid army of trolls" she mentions followed her to Reddit. That would definitely explain the campaign against her.
She banned a number of subreddits, including /r/fatpeoplehate and revengeporn. A move that strikes pretty deep at what people consider to be an open platform where votes define everything.
Subsequently she fired Victoria Taylor, an incredibly popular moderator at /r/ama.
This combined with the perceived idea that threads discussing these issues were being banned, caused a huge backlash against her.
She didn't. Alexis Ohanian did: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-abo...
She actually did very few of the things the Reddit witchhunt accused her of. The whole Pao affair was just another dark period that showed how insane online communities can really be.
No, based on the evidence she seemed to be the best person.
I don't have much of an opinion on what exactly happened, but your claim there is overly confident.
And yes, they may have said "she is the best", but that doesn't mean they actually got that right.
I have zero doubt that her gender/ethnicity was a major motivating factor for the majority of people involved in this backlash and that a white male in the same position would have pretty much gotten a pass from the same people.
/r/fatpeoplehate and /r/revengeporn where two incredibly toxic subreddits, and I was personally happy to see them go.
sangharakshita (a Buddhist teacher) preached that the central problem of the spiritual life – for most people at least – is to find emotional equivalents for their intellectual understanding. That is wise and true. But if it is misunderstood as a restrictive claim (this is only a problem for spiritual life, for the rest of life intellectual understanding on its own suffices.) then it is dangerously misleading.
It is not enough to understand calories in and calories out intellectually. You still have to cultivate the emotional strength needed to escape your own rationalisations, the rationalisations that other people push on you, and actually put down the fork.
Much of today's USA thinks that it is OK to eat yourself into an early grave. Gluttony has become so accepted and endorsed that getting fat has become socially contagious. When people reject this, there is a phase of being angry: how did I get sucked into such a dysfunction social consensus? One chocolate bar at a time? Then what? r/fatpeoplehate is angry and anger is ugly, but it is also important and necessary. People want to escape the social consensus and, people being people, they cannot do that on intellect along. They need space to vent and be angry.
You can see an example of fat-people-hate at https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 FPH is on the side of the people that it nominally hates. It wants people to change, to come to the light side of the plate. The people who banned r/fatpeooplehate don't literally have blood on their hands, that is not how type 2 diabetes works, but they ought to have gangrenous, amputated toes on their conscience.
I think also ultimately it is the choice of the person to find their encouragement, as much as it is very difficult. Diet communities are built around the idea of individual desire to improve (which is why posts like "Three weeks in and it's great!" get upvoted there) rather than having it 'forced' upon them.
I don't really buy it, it's transparently a post-hoc rationalization for a sub engaging in the age-old business of being nasty to low status people because it makes us feel good and superior.
You can click on "view the rest on the comments" on that voat thread he linked to to see what's it's really all about.
It's a pretty broad sampling of: - Laughing at fat people - "I hate this bitch in this picture"-style hatred - A post literally pointed at the victim at Charlottesville, "exposing the truth" that she was fat, saying they "wonder why" she died.
And in my memory, /r/fatpeoplehate was much more toxic than this at the time it was shut down.
(Something, by the way, I would have been afforded as a dude, and that Pao would have surely been ridiculed for until the end of her career. It's sad that institutional forces have forced her to act "distant, even a bit robotic" in these situations.)
Maybe, what I should be asking, is where you are getting these ideas from. What makes you believe that men can burn bridges and women can't?
I agree, but we were discussing motive. It's not unfair to expect reddit's leadership to have some insight into its userbase.
If I took ownership of vogue tomorrow and introduced articles about bmx racing, that would be a dumb move. I could complain that the readership doesn't understand bmx racing - but ultimately I hurt the bottom line.
I'd disagree, the fatpeoplehate subreddit is basically the same thing as /r/trashy /r/cringeanarchy and other other popular subreddits that are regular fixtures on the popular page.
It's a thoroughly unpleasant website.
Once that boundary is set it all becomes a matter of the viewer's morality. You likely think that it's wrong to dislike (or at least not to coddle and treat them like they're wonderful snowflakes) people who let themselves go and even glorify obesity; they did not. What's relevant is that as long as a group keeps to its own circle I feel we have no standing in judging them because my moral values are no better or worse than theirs.
Er, not from what I remember. And even still, if a subreddit, even without meaning to, encourages real-life harassment, that's toxic. The fact that they had to keep banning people for being toxic leads me to the conclusion that it just drew toxic pieces of garbage.
There are plenty of ways to encourage someone to lose weight that don't involve typing the word "hate" when you want to get to a community discussing weight loss. Or you could recognize that people have the right to eat and be however they like, even if you don't like it. You have the right to be an asshole and point at them and tell them they're fat and going to die early, but Reddit has the right to prevent you from using their platform for doing that.
There was an interesting idea that I heard last week regarding the whole Charlottesville Nazi incident. It was something along the lines of the Paradox of Tolerance. Essentially, being tolerant of intolerance leads to intolerance. So, in order to keep tolerance alive, you have to snuff out intolerance, before it becomes systemic. You have to become intolerant of intolerance.
Ellen Pao is (ostensibly) intolerant of intolerance, and that, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. I don't particularly like her, but enforcing Reddit's own rules was one of the better parts of her tenure at Reddit.
This view of Pao as an automatic victim is special pleading and ironically, denies her the agency of a full adult that feminists claim others refuse to grant women.
To Pao's credit, she was very hands-off when it came to trying to impose values on the social aspect of Reddit; given ample chance to change that like her successor did, she generally left the subreddits alone as long as they didn't blalantly violate the rediquette.
The only thing that was contentious that I can recall had absolutely nothing to do with Reddit the social community: she instituted a policy where contract negotiations were forbidden reasoning that because studies showed that women negotiated less, it was an advantage towards male workers (full disclosure: I do find that policy to be an aberration). But that policy had nothing to do with the website, it was a Reddit corporate thing.
I do believe that she was a strong proponent of Reddit being an open playground for discussion and where people of all beliefs could gather and discuss them, no matter how distasteful other people may or may not find them to be.
*Someone else took issue with the phrase "paid army of trolls". The existence of the gamergate/alt-right/etcetera troll army isn't really in dispute. Equally it's well known that actors foreign and domestic have been pushing these viewpoints with actual cash. So while I don't know one way or another whether the alt-right troll army that targets Pao has paid components, I don't think it sounds beyond the realms of plausibility either.
Pao got roasted on reddit because she became the figurehead for widely unpopular community changes. At best you could say she was set up as the patsy by Reddit's board.
GamerGate was a cluster fuck where existing troll groups like GNAA and BWC jumped in, as did the nihilistic lolcow milkers of baphomet and kiwifarms. But the whole thing was started by a scandal over an ex helldump member, whose anti harassment group was later caught doxing and harassing, and whose posse got caught false flagging in the Social Autopsy drama. To pretend like GG is a misogynist troll army means falling for the narrative set out by the media the movement accused while ignoring the realities of the spheres in which it took place.
GG is also not right wing, as Brad Glasgow's research showed, so associating it with the alt-right is more idiotic narrative spinning. Like when feminists lump together MRA, red pill and mgtow as some sort of unholy woman hating underbelly, instead of the 3 very different things that they are.
None of this has been objectively covered, nobody bothered to investigate, only to do what the article above does: feature one sided profiles of self declared victims who stood to gain a lot from that portrayal. Visit r/KotakuInAction for instance and observe how what was claimed to be a "smoke screen" for hate is still going 3 years later, still covering abject failures in reporting, while banning all harassment.
(Repost: stop flagging the truth, you cowards. What is it going to take to admit you got rolled by a sociopath and her pets?)
I'd be happy to see some examples of their actions.
She did no such thing. You fell for the rumors.
Unless she has proof, it's a conspiracy theory, "trolls" don't need to be paid to be trolls. People are naturally mean on the internet. Especially on reddit. So trolls paid by whom to do what? she didn't lose her lawsuit because of people on the internet. She lost because she didn't have a case.
The "I believe" is the operative phrase in this allegation. It's not implausible, however. Comments everywhere on topics where powerful agents have interests (i.e. everything) seem to be subject to a great deal of astroturfing. The existence of groups that do this is not disputed. The trend seems to be getting a lot more pronounced lately, just by my personal observation.
I do not know what happened or what people actually said, but I won't take the illogical step of inferring things about this case from the outcome of other cases or vice versa and I disliked the fact that this is a lot of scandalous, unverifiable anecdotes that she was not able to credibly establish in a court of law.
Harassment is real. I'm a victim of it myself and the guy who put his hands down my pants was fired for that, though I wasn't really working in tech at the time. I managed both to confront him and to prove it. Her claims, however, failed to be proven in court and therefore I do not find her credible, nor can I without new, verifiable evidence.
I know too well how high a bar that is, but I wouldn't see it set any lower, not even in my case.
Otherwise confirmation bias will simply take over and lead us astray. I mean, it's not exactly falsifiable. I could just as well say that most of the people I disagree with are actually just Perl scripts, not real people.
I doesn't make it a fact. It makes the author look like they are paranoid, and it has absolutely no bearing in the verdict of their case. But it says a lot about their personality. One cannot use that type of argument and be expected to be taken seriously, unless one actually bring evidence that a particular firm engaged in harassment, which is a serious accusation since I'm pretty sure it's illegal.
It's sobering to think about how easy it must be (for a sufficiently funded organisation) to effectively determine "public discourse" on a large number of topics.
Then again, never underestimate just how willing people are (all on their own) to grab their virtual pitchforks without much consideration.