Alexis Ohanian asks to be replaced by black candidate as he resigns from Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Alexis Ohanian asks to be replaced by black candidate as he resigns from Reddit

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26 pointssandGorgon13 comments

Seems reasonable. A lot of white people are out protesting. Why not put your money where your mouth is even if it hurts your future? Though I suspect in Ohanian's case he'll be rich for the rest of his life regardless of what he does.

He is also using his position to promote Institutional Racism regarding his replacement: he already is defining the "right race".

I agree that's kind of shitty, but hopefully the board can just ignore his request. I rather like his larger idea though. If you honestly believe in something, then donate your wealth away to support it, rather than worsening wealth inequality by leaving it in inheritance to your children.

That last part is easier said than done because you also make non-monetary contributions to your children's life such as the love and care and attention you provide. So saying "no inheritance" is much like saying "I'll give you only the average amount of care so that I don't disadvantage other children."

You don't know what institutional racism is.

Seems like virtue signaling to me. It doesn't negatively impact him long term and it softens the impact of the people saying he didn't do anything meaningful to combat racism on reddit.

I think I’d disagree with this. It does hurt him, in that he’d earn more where he is. He will take a hit from this. Unless he’s entirely mismanaged his finances, it shouldn’t hurt much, but it will hurt more than it would otherwise.

True, he should donate more, to the point where he's in the same living situation as the people he's supporting.

I'm so sick of all these high level people resigning as if it's some kind of effective way of protesting.

It's not effective. You were in a position of power, and a place to actually make a meaningful difference, but now you have effectively relinquished your influence and power so it just can be handed off to someone else to abuse.

Quitting instead of staying and fighting for the good cause is straight up cowardice. Claiming that you are doing it as as protest is disingenuous.

They also announced a bunch more censorship on the website.

> I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug.

— Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder (1986 - 2013)

We have drifted far, far away from Aaron's ideals.

reddit threw away Aaron Swartz' ideals long ago. The current CEO is vehemently in favor of massive censorship, stealth edits posts he doesn't like and allows power moderators to blatantly peddle influence on the largest subreddits.

The top power mods, particularly the user /u/maxwellhill, spends their entire day spamming political articles to non-political subreddits he moderates in violation of his own rules. If I stepped into pure speculation mode, I don't think this account is even a single person. It's certainly compromised in any sense.

Then there's reddit admins (employees of the company) taking steps to remove and censor posts critical of China's coronavirus response after taking a huge investment from Tencent.

Isn't this antithetical to the ideals of equality (chosen by our merits rather than our skin color)? And isn't this sending a terrible message: "you weren't good enough for this job before as I was but now I feel sorry for you." Seems counterproductive.

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