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Comment by darkwizard42 | Hacker News Reader

If they were able to add extra protections for this employee, they surely must have done a Google search at the least to see why... and then promptly realized the controversy/issues with keeping an employee with this kind of history in charge of subreddits like /r/teenagers

The end result is fine, removing the employee for failing even a cursory background check in relation to their work, but how on earth did this slip through? Will all employees have their background reviewed more thoroughly?

This strikes me as classic "we got caught, sorry" instead of proactively taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

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One of the worst tings about this is the kind of protective actions they employed. It seems like they made a filter that automatically banned anyone mentioning a certain name, in order to protect that person from harassment. They didn't care about whether the comment was harassing or not, they didn't warn the person making the comment, they simply removed it and banned them. Very heavy handed and sloppy, and I think there's something they're not telling. They knew there would be reactions about this person and thought they could hide them. The person got employed in December and the filter was added in March.

Even worse...the filter was added March 9 and the employee removed today March 24. So they either were grossly incompetent about the issue or they thought this "shadowbanning" was an effective solution!

Exactly. They went to extensive lengths to set up complex filtering to suppress linking any information about this employee's background. Yet, at the same time, they claim that the employee's background came as a surprise to them. It's bordering on self-contradictory.

> They went to extensive lengths to set up complex filtering to suppress linking any information about this employee's background.

Except they didn't.

They turned on the same bots that they'd use for any internal employee who wasn't any sort of public figure.

So assuming you aren't a public figure, this is the same bot that they'd deploy to prevent you from coming under fire from a doxxing campaign if you were working there.

And whatever your political leanings you should imagine the worst of the opposite extreme edge of the political spectrum deciding to attack you -- possibly for entirely boston-bombing-level of fake manufactured controversy -- using blogs with hastily written posts on them to attack you to try to get around reddit banning mentions of your name.

If you worked there and people decided they hated you and went after you, this is the system you'd want to have deployed to protect you. It wasn't specifically designed for this employee (in fact since it was buggy when used for this employee it was very obviously not specifically designed for this purpose).

If you worked at reddit as a community manager and you were being attacked and doxxed would you not want them to go to these kinds of levels to support you?

Having gone through Ellen Pao's tenure as CEO, perhaps Reddit took away the lesson that they need to protect employees from harassment by the community.

I don't know if that's the right lesson, and I don't work for Reddit, but as a manager I'd never expect my employees to put up with death threats from customers.

This is an extremely valid point. What happened to Pao was an absolute horrible stain in that community's history. The fact that their board succumbed to the mob was a huge let down. Folks don't realize this but from here on out, reddit will absolutely lock down and protect any public details of their admin team. It is now on its way to become as opaque as Facebook or Twitter's moderation. I hope redditors are content with this outcome.

There's....middle ground, though, y'know? Between "tolerate death threats to employees" and "programmatically ban any user mentioning the name of a particular employee".

Like surely the employee must have mentioned to HR something along the lines of "people are harassing me, it should stop" and HR might go "okay we will look into that" and someone should have looked into it to see what all the controversy was about...like even a little?

Reddit job descriptions promise pseudonymity protection.[1] Seems like harassment is common.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20210325002519/https://boards.gre...

I don’t know much about how Reddit mods and Admins are organised but I have been an active Reddit user for 15 years (which is scary to admit).

What’s clear is these days the popular parts of Reddit are very much “controlled discourse” which largely follow the same narratives as mainstream media. I think the tipping point was Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, where Reddit showed it could have a significant impact on voting. After that it slowly merged with mainstream media Opinion.

What enabled some of that could well have been the vetting (or lack of) of admins / employees who in turn have some ability to influence who the moderates big subreddits.

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