Related, over 10k people has petitioned for her to step down from her position at reddit:
https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-red...
https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-red...
In any case, 10k "people" (it's easy to game these things) is just a drop in the bucket of reddit's userbase.
So this whole Ellen Pao thing is just a bunch of nerds eating popcorn. It's our version of a celebrity magazine.
So in that sense, more gossip about Ellen Pao's personal life/actions at reddit (which she is ruining) are completely par for the course.
It does not add value to me to have subreddits Ellen Pao personally disagrees with be banned. Rather, it takes away value.
And now that the precedent has been set, the same will be the case with future reddit leadership.
> What planet are you from that you think a company is run that way?
Well, not a planet where I try to persuade people of my views by sarcastically asking what planet they're from. That is not an argument and it's devoid of intellectual content.
> Ellen
So you are on a first-name basis with her? Maybe you can tell us the inside story. Otherwise, calling someone by a first name alone is vulgar.
Given that those comments don't actually violate any of Reddit's stated rules, there aren't many other reasonable explanations.
Then again, I called every single one of them liars, publicly, by name, after the recent subreddit closing drama, and I'm not shadowbanned so, who knows.
To put it as charitably as possible, the facts that came out during the failed lawsuit (and later attempt to get 2.7M out of the company to get her to go away) do not paint Pao in a good light.
Calling her a scam artist is putting it mildly, IMO. Real gender discrimination cases are tainted by this kind of BS.
That's related to Reddit drama and Reddit drama alone.
The imgur alternative I mentioned is apparently slimgur.com. Here's a post with the story, this is where I read it from: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/39nang/reddi.... As of now, it has over 4k points, a mod presumably sharing the details (comments with slimgur links have to be approved by moderators). It was at the top of /r/all/rising when I saw it a few days ago
Did they rig things? That would make sense.
Frankly it's fine with me. I was worried I'd have to stay off Reddit for a few days until the juvenile hate-mongering died down. I've had to do it before.
I'm with the GP. Every time one of these things happen I get more and more uneasy about Reddit. This, the jailbait thing, Boston Bomber witch hunt. Every time 'the community' speaks up I end up disgusted and a little sick.
Most of the subs I'm in are too small for this garbage, so it often passes me by, thankfully. But then some event reminds me of the putrid filth just out of sight.
Comes down to a debate on censorship, which is admittedly quite divided. I don't condone hate speech, but its also sometimes tricky to separate hatred from a rational opinion about something. Ultimately you can't control the voices of people, they will find creative ways to broadcast their message for better or worse (as we saw when reddit shut down FPH). Censorship really only hits the beehive and makes the bad people more visible. As one example of this, I had no idea that FPH existed until Reddit shut it down.
Yeah, people complain once they realize walled gardens like Reddit start censoring whatever they choose only /after/ they get too big to stop. Same goes for closed ecosystems like the App Store and Google Play. Guess you should have read the fine print before giving your unquestioned allegiance to all these closed platforms.
I yearn for the days when the Internet was truly open. You can still launch any kind of site you want. But the truth is there is an ever shrinking number of players who now get to decide what content should or shouldn't be seen, and who should get referral traffic. The censorship I see is both ideological and business motivated. A relative few will control all of the information everyone gets to actually see, because no one will bother to look elsewhere. Sad really.
When was that? Back in the early days, ISPs and hosts would shut down sites with very little provocation. I remember big outcries around sites being taken down by their ISP and/or having their domains seized by the FBI for file sharing and/or hate speech.
In fact, you could argue that the internet is more resistant to censorship now than it was back then. The ISPs in the early days had fewer customers and more competition, making them vulnerable to bad press. They pretty much had to act on any crank who complained about objectionable content hosted on their servers. ISPs today are bigger and have de facto monopolies (TWC and Comcast), so they don't respond so much to bad press. While that may be bad news for customer service, it's good news for the conspiracy theorist who wants to discuss which Rothschild is behind 9/11. Also, ISPs don't have to take sites down as often as they used to because most of them are hosted through third party companies like wordpress and google (blogspot).
The Internet used to have more of a creative and community driven focus when people ran their own websites and found information through link networks. Now it's a continuous stream of information fed through a few closed platforms. If you don't submit yourself to the follies and whims of these platforms, you will never be seen.
I think that's most of what made Reddit so successful which is reminiscent of the old days-- its subreddits and link network of those communities.
I wish RSS, or something like it, hadn't failed.
Hate speech is an easy target. But the censoring and anticompetitive practices have spread further than that.
Google, Apple, Facebook, can change their ToS to bring down potential competitors. They can remove your app for any reason, block access to their APIs, and ban you for posting content that leads to your own external page. It's happened plenty, and Reddit is no exception. These guys want you to live in their closed ecosystems where they control who the winners and losers are and what information is seen.
Makes it REALLY HARD to support anonymity online, as it often seems like more people get horribly harassed or SWATed than we get benefits from anonymous whistleblowers and such.
Don't know what else to do. Can't ignore it, and it's not getting better. Posting about how it's bad isn't useful/doesn't accomplish anything. Actively engaging has proven to very dangerous to people and doesn't seem to have helped.
Sometimes the call for censorship is a purposeful play to stamp out or control a group, sometimes it's just exasperation at a lack of any other idea of how to deal with a situation.
A controlled burn of the forest if you will.
'it' is humanity. If you can't handle looking at a true reflection of humanity then you're worse than the bigots, IMHO.
If we plug our ears and hum, "la la la" to the uncomfortable opinions held within pockets of society, we remove all possibility of discourse on the topic. No one should ever be so sure that they're right and others are wrong to take that leap. Even with racism, sexism, fat-hate, and so on.