Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin
reddit.com
reddit.com
"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.
I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).
She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost:
Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh.
This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction.
For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all.
She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension?
Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times?
Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey.
An intelligent person would make their choice.
A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc
TL;DR reddit needs a 'bee whisperer'
Who would have thought that the minds responsible for redpill, mensrights, and coontown might make a community less than enjoyable?
That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
They certainly do. My better half tried using reddit for a couple days 4 or 5 years ago, encountered some vile / bitter people, and decided that it just wasn't worth it. She won't go near it again.
I was close to losing all hope just before they banned it. It would not have surprised me to see Conde Nast pull the plug on reddit before the end of 2015 had they not banned it.
FPH was somehow slowly taking over reddit. Probably because its members had more free time on their hands than average redditors. Also, there were 150.000 of them.
http://recode.net/2014/09/30/reddit-raises-50m-plans-to-shar...
Advance notes that they are affiliated with reddit, but that is aboot it:
>also, there were 150,000 of them.
Probably explains why you saw tagged users 'invading' subs you use.
In particular, Victoria had the job of making AMAs happen smoothly, and /r/IAmA is this very weird subreddit, operationally speaking (how many other subreddits have their own mobile app?), that clearly needs a paid staff member. Ellen has the job of being the final say on anything that happens, controversial or otherwise. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that an AMA needs to happen, Victoria does it. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that a subreddit needs to be banned, Ellen does it (or at least takes the blame for it).
If Victoria had done her job with condescension towards mods, if she had been haughty in her communications, arbitrary and non-transparent in her decision making, etc. then you can bet your bottom dollar that she would not have been so valued by the mods and the wider community.
This isn't about making 'difficult decisions' but about how they are made, communicated and implemented.
That is why I added the bee analogy in my previous comment.
I'm one of the "nicer" mods on my subreddit because I'm polite and very careful and careful in how I construct my responses to actions.
But at the end of the day I'm also liked because I'm not the most active mod. The very act of exerting power over another user, especially someone who has never stopped to think about the rules or the site history, results in resentment.
The better your mod team is at being able to implement the rules, the more friction there will be.
People will also come out to complain more than compliment.
This results in distancing from the community, just because of how painful it can be.
Good tools to moderate create more ways to censor people, track them, decide what words are ok and others which are not.
In short, Victoria is far removed from the kind of things which make people hate admins.
Why the past tense? Did people suddenly stop loving Raymond Chen for some reason?
Imagine being responsible for a platform where every time you post something people come out of the woodworks to call you a cunt and a stupid bitch.
Really, I don't know how she puts in an honest day's work and I really don't know what anyone expects of anyone in that situation. Were I in that situation I'd be thinking 'This house is infested, burn it down.'
She banned a few people? What, that's an abuse of her power? They used to decapitate people for saying less offensive things within someone else's domain.
I wonder how some people (not you) survive the cognitive dissonance of believing simultaneously that the right to free speech and the right to private property are the most important things ever of all time.
I left a comment in that thread, but wasn't one of the hateful ones. While I don't think saying those hateful things are justified, I can see where they're coming from. This was right after the whole scandal with the banning, i think within 24hrs of the announcement, and a lot of them were passionate about the site, so they weren't really being friendy toward her
Given her recent gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins and potential appeal, it would have made strategic sense to block anything sexist. I don't know if that's what was in the content of the replies - just guessing.
Also guessing it was pretty racist, and <checks underpants - yep, white penis> I can only imagine that shit got old more than a century ago.
I checked out the reddit for the top level posts and it appears that many of them, even the ones that posted the most mean spirited comments in that thread, seem to be active. Most of them have plenty of recent comments with votes and replies.
Maybe the banned had their comments deleted? I don't think that's how it works though.
Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine.
Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to confuse a private message with a public reply.
i think it's the same with different technologies, it all depends on the user :p
It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you.
> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general
I couldn't agree more
Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
It's like a sea lion colony in here.
Fallacy of relative privation, much?
but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that:
1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily.
2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired.
>content has been sliding >doxxing has gone up >several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down >community is faltering >no side wants to compromise
tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
I mean yeah, bigger fish to fry and all that, but it's still a problem for a lot of people - other problems existing doesn't change that. I'm sure "we" could fix the bigger issue at large but who's "we"? Who's working on that, and why does it invalidate incestuous and unpublished conflicts of interest?
But hey, kids need to feel important too, and nothing gives you a sense of belonging as a manufactured conspiracy and a sense of persecution.
This is a basic emotional need, why are you mocking it?
[1] http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...
[2] http://www.redditblog.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-reporting-f...
Even /r/askscience supports this move [1]. It is one of the most heavily moderated subreddits on the site, with professional staff. These aren't rabblerousers, they are very hard-working volunteers who are fed up with the administration.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_messag...
It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the moment:
1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
2. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even if AskScience's mods are professional scientists, they're still volunteer AskScience mods.]
The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits. In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints. You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're doing an awful job on the other.
By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1 (including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits) may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.
I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.
(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)
That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I think both sections of the site are vile, but I vastly prefer a uniform standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about ____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.
I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).
Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer-term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say, the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a huge surprise to a lot of people.
Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit, Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to put that, and I'm stealing it.
But it clearly was. Reddit should just release some of the brigading details - and that has always been something that can cause your sub to be closed and your account to be shaddow-banned.
I do not understand how you can use the existance of vile groups as evidence of Reddit squashing free speech - doesn't the fact that those vile groups didn't get closed (unless they brigaded) evidence that Reddit allows free speech as far as possible.
That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even solve that problem in general?
I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Reddit accounts. We've long observed 4chan/goon "Redditors" in YouTube comment threads. I'm with you on releasing how they got there, and I think it would provide a lot of clarity.
One last thing, I have to correct you: I never said Reddit was squashing free speech. I wish they'd pick a consistent value on it, that's all, and I pointed out specific things said in the press about free speech. I'm less concerned about FPH than I am about something like /r/jailbait, which got removed because it became the squeaky wheel due to CNN attention. There are worse subreddits regarding sexualization of children, and Reddit fails to uphold its own standard there, which negates the standard itself. That's my problem.
1) don't brigade.
2) don't dox
3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding
4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of rules.
Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of comments. In smaller subs this is very destructive. That is very clearly reddit activity that can be tied to FPH posts and FPH subscribers.
And if Reddit did apply their rules consistantly it would result in a lot more subs being closed - the pro-self harm subs, the pro eating disorder subs, and the pro suicide groups are clear contenders for banning. (To be fair the suicide groups do get banned. I think they've worked out an equilibrium of being as pro suicide as they can without getting banned).
(I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)
Thanks. I'm used to it, honestly, because it's become obvious over time that holding an opinion in contrast to what HN wants to hear is a nearly guaranteed ticket to comment illegibility. HN is the only forum on which I participate where disagreement is acceptably expressed as making someone's thoughts more difficult to read.
I'm merely presenting my (long earned) observations on Reddit. I absolutely think it's a shitshow, a terrible place full of terrible people, but I suspect I'm being punished for daring to suggest that there is something wrong with the site itself. In the smaller subreddits, there are absolutely small embers of really powerfully rewarding conversation. There is stuff worth saving on Reddit, and I think the loud stuff drowns it out. I've had extremely fulfilling conversations about network security, application security, game modification, and polyamory in the various communities of which I am a part, and I've learned a lot. My experience isn't representative because I subscribe to nearly zero default subs.
To your point, I think SRS serves as the complete counterexample to everything you're saying. The entire purpose of SRS is to brigade and single out individual Redditors, and I've seen the results firsthand. If FPH was doing it, there isn't a universe in existence where SRS gets off that hook and it makes sense. Transparency is important here, as you say.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/rules/ [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta...
EDIT: Subs encourage use of non-participation links because for ages Reddit has banned subs that brigade.
Until now I assumed it was gathering lots of users to harass people IRL or on other web sites, but I guess I'm mistaken?
/r/ThisSubReddit exists. There's a post in /r/ThisSubReddit that someone doesn't like. They post a link to that post to /r/OtherSubReddit, sometimes with commentary (eg, "look at this idiot!")
That causes a bunch of people from /r/OtherSubReddit to visit /r/ThisSubReddit. That's okay, unless they start voting; or insulting; or harassing users.
The voting is not okay because often the brigading sub is much larger than the sub being brigaded. (FPH had 150,000 subscribed users) People generally agree that the heavily modded subs are better. Brigading makes it really hard for mods to do any modding. (If just 1% of FPH subs decide to vote that's 1,500 people. If your sub is only 800 subscribers you're going to get crushed by FPH.)
The harassment is not okay because, well, fuck those people who think it's okay to visit a self-harm support sub and tell people to kill themselves.
That kind of brigading has been risky for subs for a while now; plenty of subs got warned, temp banned, or permanently banned for this.
fatpeoplehate was warned multiple times about brigading. But the problem with FPH was not just on-Reddit brigading. They took it to facebook, youtube, a bunch of other websites. They also, if the admins are to be believed, took it AFK to people's IRL work / school / homes.
Even if the "position" in statements by the administrators were "consistent" (doubtful, but that's besides the point), the application of these rules is manifestly not.
Do you include TIL among those? I do. Best sub there is.
The only they they use 'extensive vigorous modding' for is verifying whether titles follow the rules. And ~100% of that is based on user reports, they just double-check.
Aside from that, there is 0 moderation, other than for sitewide rule violations. You can say anything_you_want in comments and they will take no action.
It would have been a far, far more effective message if they said "We have banned FPH and the moderators due to their brigading and doxxing. Let this be a lesson to all subs: if you do these things, you will be disbanded." and then left alone all of the other subs that superficially looked like FPH but didn't engage in that specific behavior.
Instead they got a minor revolt, and the latest revolt seems like a manifestation of a lot of the hard feelings from that attempt.
Why was that a surprise to anyone?
You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]
kn0thing is, for all his original talents at communication with the reddit community, pretty bad at handling these flareups. Here's his initial response to todays goings on. [1] How tone deaf is that? How did the guy who talked about letting users take control at TED turn into the guy who says:
"We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after."
He went from a guy you thought was one of you to a guy who spews platitudes like he ate a dictionary in a country with bad water.
Something is rotten in the state of reddit. The common narrative of that site has become one of managerial incompetence. Whether or not you agree with their strategy, I think it's hard to deny that their tactics are in the bottom decile.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
I think she's singularly incapable of solving it, but that's fine. I don't think it's reasonable to expect her to be. She should be running a company and building a team that can solve it.
Yes, that's a bit of stupidity in her posting a link to her own inbox.
Pao may or may not be an idiot in the same league as Fiorina, Apotheker, and - arguably - Whitman and Ballmer.
But I think the Reddit flareup is part of a more general disgust with emotionally damaged management culture which is devoted to profits before people, but is so bad at people that profits tank too.
There's a point beyond which being rich and powerful doesn't protect you from shooting off your own head. Reddit management seems to have crossed that line, and the content farm idea stops working when contributors stop feeling like they're a part of a community and realise they're really just unpaid employees on a profit production line.
So it's not just about the AMA editor. It's about the fact that management is trying to control a community it doesn't pay and doesn't really own. The "Do what you like, but give us clicks" deal has been changed to "We run this farm, we tell you what you can and can't post, but give us clicks anyway, because $business$ - oh and by the way, fuck you."
The prospects for the future are not good, IMO.
Dude, what profit?
It could be that he's not allowed to say anything about the matter. It reads to me more like an honest attempt at damage control while at the same time not divulging anything about the situation. So far his communication has been the most reasonable and levelheaded of all the reddit admins. I doubt he's lost his touch with the community, rather that he's been gagged and cannot say more than he does.
I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:
"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"
Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).
Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.
But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.
I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.
I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.
One last thing:
> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.
I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.
But that Alexis appears to have "matured" into a vanilla businessman, and that's fine. What isn't fine is the mass exodus of admins who were actually redditors, the bringing in of a CEO whose goals clearly align more with monetizing than nurturing, and a series of decisions that have shown the remaining braintrust at reddit to have grown further and further away from the community.
It's fine to monetize reddit. It's fine to run it like a real, live company. What's not fine is to do that to the exclusion of all else, and risk jeopardizing the very community that gives the site value in the first place.
What we've seen from the actions of the executive team at reddit in recent months suggests that they simply don't understand how their actions are being perceived. They've either lost or pushed out the people at the company who had a finger on the pulse of the community, and now they're flying blind. It seems that the only thing keeping reddit going right now as a community is the lack of a viable alternative, and that's a very dangerous place to be for a company like reddit.
I don't know whether the executive team at reddit sees this episode as just another fire to put out or as a portent of things to come. What I see, as an active participant on the site, is a restive user base that increasingly sees itself as neglected and taken for granted by a dismissive and aloof leadership. There are many things keeping the user base in reddit's orbit, but most of those things come down to inertia and lack of a better alternative. If the latter is solved, the former will take care of itself, and reddit will hit a tipping point whereby its most engaged users leave en masse.
It's not there yet, but it's an existential threat that it doesn't appear the reddit brain trust is taking seriously.
Raldi had a really good idea of creating an office of Public Advocate: someone in the company whose job it is to argue for the users in any meeting. That's a fantastic suggestion, and could go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of resentment among the user base.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/3c1m67/c...
They don't sound unrelated: both complaints seem to point towards a fundamental disconnect between reddit's management and its userbase.
So yes, they're disconnects. But one is a disconnect between a userbase / the moderators of subreddits that Reddit the company is not very invested in keeping, except to the extent that in general, they want to keep subreddits that don't break rules. The other is a disconnect between subreddits that Reddit relies on.
That's why when tension 1 flared up a few weeks ago, Reddit banned some subreddits and implicitly threatened others with banning, and when tension 2 flared up yesterday, some other subreddits threatened to shut down and successfully forced Reddit to care.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ju5cf/goodbye_iama_it...
I have found the issue to be not so much a matter of the two factors that you've outlined, but more a consistent downward trend of the admin staff, towards a stronger disconnect with the community. There has been less communication, and the communication that has happened has been less clear and less consistent. Even in this entire drama, reddit's response has come through a single point of contact.
For a site like reddit to work, the administrators really need to be able to also participate in the community at large. They need to have firm, definite rules and guidelines of what they will and will not do, and how they will or will not help. They need to make themselves available to the volunteer staff that help run these numerous communities.
This I think is the root cause of both of these tensions. The community simply doesn't know what to expect from the admins anymore.
>tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding
It has festered for years, we're watching it explode right now.
That's a contradiction, not many people (especially internet people) understand that freedom of speech and freedom of expression do not cover a conspiracy to be harmful.
However, Reddit certainly doesn't have [correctly defined] freedom of speech - which I have a problem with: Reddit has a certain sway over the way that people think and a world where unpopular or culturally immoral opinions are muzzled is not a world where ethical progress can be made.
The real problem is that the definition of "abusive" is hopelessly vague and the process for determining what constitutes "coordinating abusive action" is opaque and untrustworthy.
Not remotely fair to accuse people of trying to protect "coordinating abuse" without clarifying what that actually means.
As to ambiguous decision making -- you're right about that, but they have a problem. Reddit has a largeish group of teenagers, unemployed white men living in their mother's basement and techno-libertarians, that have turned the site into a cesspool of xenophobia, misogyny, wingnut conspiracies and most of all -- lots of eighth grade drama . Those people, of course, don't matter (advertisers don't care much about them), and nobody in the real-world (not most Reddit users) care or even notice the imaginary armageddon taking place in those kids' heads, but the problem with them is that 1) they're unreasonable, and 2) they have the time to make the lives of the site administrators miserable (it would make their day -- they've got nothing more exciting to do).
So the people running Reddit are scared. They've invited the devil -- worse, teenagers -- into their home for an endless party, and they know they'll trash the place even more if the party were to end. So they're sending mixed messages. They're talking about respect, but they allow CoonTown and "men"'s rights groups. It's time for Reddit to grow some balls, kick the misbehaving kids out, shutdown not a few, but all hate subreddits, all without issuing as much as a press release. The kids will talk about their judgement day (that nobody in the world would notice) for years, the grown men in their mom's basement will feel like they're actually being hunted, and everybody would get exactly what they want.
This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever).
Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
Granted, that sort of thing apparently is uncommon because the people who did it were apparently almost immediately banned... but that's rather the point, isn't it? You don't see it because they ban it.
It's a capitalistic relationship, certainly. But it's very different. reddit volunteers provide their efforts to improve reddit's brand, for free, generally just for personal gratification (from people who will turn on you and drive you to suicide the moment you make the wrong move). Thos efforts are exploited by reddit, rather than rewarded.
Twitch has also many volunteers. Just look at this guide on how to become a Twitch admin: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2f77aw/how_to_becom...
"That means that being a Global Moderator is not something you get paid for."
Saying that the gamification of subscriptions is good for the streamer is the same as saying that games with micro-transactions, designed to be addictive, are good for the developers. Of course it is, but someone is paying for it...
some would go back even further and talk about the Aaron Swartz days...
Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organi...
The thing is, the power doesn't rest on the CEO or the company, it rests on the user base. Redditors can migrate to any other website they choose to, just like Digg users migrated to reddit some years ago. The people have the power in the end.
Usually these attempts fail and the company is dead within 24 months having burned the village in an attempt to save the village.
However a counter-point is that its quite possible that they are trying to pivot reddit into a mainstream site, and thus are more than willing to burn most of the current user base.
They don't need/want hard-hitting questions during AMA's, nor do they want freaky fetish subreddits, nor long winded post describing the intricacies of the Federal Reserve.
They want cat pictures, pictures of freshly baked cakes, celebrity soundbites, and lots of comments that go "that cake looks delish!" and "Love you Miley!"
In short, an internet version of "The View".
Regardless, I think it will fail, if thats even the case. However, ideas such as these are the exact type that tone-deaf MBA types think up lots of times.
The sense I get among most of my friends "in real life" is that they read reddit but would never post to reddit. A driving force behind that is the fear of being seen as a "redditor," which is an image generally associated with neckbeards (ironically a term popularized by themselves).
It could certainly follow an 80/20 rule, i.e. 20% of users post 80% of content, but 20% of users also cause 80% of the disruption. I mean ultimately, normal people are outside living their lives, not fussing over reddit drama. Much of the controversy is definitely stirred up by a "vocal minority." But are they necessary? That's the question. If the upvote economy is zero sum, why would you want to waste so much of it on loud muckrakers?
You might very well be right. Perhaps the reddit leadership realized they have an aggressive vocal minority that is actively damaging their reputation, so they don't mind culling it from their ranks. That would explain Alexis' overt willingness to sit and watch. He literally doesn't care, because why would he? It's all part of the plan to get more cats on the front page, and money in his pocket. (I don't blame him in the slightest.)
You mean pseudonymous humans? Reddit has a karma system, people can see your comment history and so on.
In my personal opinion, they are less abrasive. But I think I am definitely in the minority there. I think that anonymous sites are popularly known as more abrasive.
Seems pretty 'mainstream' to me.
I'm sure reddit would be super tore up if the fat haters, racists, and jailbait traders left :rolleyes:
I would start with rewarding administrators with payment (akin to youtube, somewhat proportionally to views -- this creates a strong incentive towards fidelity), revamp post priority algorithms, and add some basic functionality that you need to install an add on (!), RES, to get (what other top 100 website needs this?).
If this happened, Internet would explode from all the rage.
I'm aware it was invested in at a 1/2 billion valuation, and good luck to them, but I stand by my analysis.
Reddit is growing and would continue to grow really quickly. There's no competition in sight. Owning the discussion backbone of the internet is massively valuable, comparable at least to WhatsApp I'd say.
Can it die out due to massive exodus? Sure, but something similar will replace it. And for each iteration (slashdot,digg,etc), those websites have become larger and more consolidated. It's fair to assume at some point it will reach long term stability (particularly if it's properly managed).
As far as reddit growing, is the plan to lose money on each pv but make it up in volume?
Even stack overflow seems to have trouble monetizing, and that's both brand safe and targeted to a valuable audience.
The company wants to grow and become more profitable, the community wants to preserve what it has.
I don't know if a site like this can really be run as a for profit company, at least not a growth oriented one. The obvious monetization schemes will be met with resistance. Even though its attracted a lot of users, can it really ever make money?
And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?
By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.
How is this going to help increasing their profit?
The possibilities should be endless. One thing I could have imagined would be cooperations with companies that have products which reddit user value and use heavily. Take Valve's Steam, for instance. Reddit could have offered those companies a service to buy a sub that is especially tailored for the company's needs so that they could turn their sub into a tailor-made r&d lab (with special features as required...). Those who love their products would be thrilled to develop ideas and share their user knowledge with their favorite company.
As long as they would've selected companies carefully and resist from interfering with other parts of reddit no one would run away. If anything, those "special sub" could be a gateway drug for new users.
The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.
http://live.fastcompany.com/Event/Chat_with_reddit_co-founde...
If something really becomes a central medium of communication such that it's hard to avoid it, like the telephone system, internet infrastructure (backbones, DNS, etc.), and so on, then it starts to be a different issue imo. Then regulation as some kind of content-neutral common carrier might be in order. But does Reddit really play such a role? Twitter or Facebook seem closer to filling such a role, if we were going to pick one of those platforms.
That's a pretty cool respelling of fiefdom!
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
1. https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t...
2. http://www.fastcompany.com/3036716/fast-feed/how-meta-reddit...
3. http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523434/violentacrez-mich...
once something start to be massively as "bad" and the content is generated by those users seeing it as "bad" it just stops being what it was. It's like saying Firefox or IE aren't good browser. IE is a pretty good browser nowaday, but that's an unpopular opinion.
It feels like reddit is going to reach this point now...
You really don't think it's an architecture problem?
Do you really think "all" we need is "good tech" and "good people"? Everyone thinks that, and thinks they have that when they start something.
What we need, I think, is a forum/thread/whatchamacallit protocol, like IRC is that protocol for chat.
Am I crazy?
Back in the dialup days, they had NNTP servers available, pulling nearly all the NGs. As time went by, alt.binaries took over 99% of the bandwidth, along with a nice cornucopia of pirated content. It was rather awesome.
When DSL/Cable took over, those companies axed their news servers, if they had any at all. And your server choice was to use a non-binaries carrying, post limited free server or paid server.
That's how it was killed.
Any criticism I've read seems to be based around how she's a woman and she used her womanness to get ahead.
Nothing she has done as the CEO of Reddit is evidence of the need for the awful insults and copypasta I've seen lobbed at her. And these aren't hidden in the recesses of MRA subreddits, they're the top comments on any thread with any mention of Pao.
It's like being a software engineer and getting a new manager that previously worked at Goldman Sachs, wears expensive suits to the office, asks you for help using Microsoft Word, but then tells you to switch from IntelliJ to Borland JBuilder because he owns some shares in Borland. He doesn't get the culture, he's an outside and is making decisions to actively ruin your environment. That's how it feels.
Oh wait, they don't hate Victoria. Huh...
This was awesome. The employee started the trash talk, fully expecting Reddit not to defend itself (as expected of bullshit corporate america). It was perfect /r/justiceporn when Wong came out swinging in response. Glorious to see.
I got the impression then, and I definitely get it now, that the management has little respect for their employees. In the case of Yishan's spat, it was definitely relatable, but it definitely had the smell of the company that view employees as assets to be managed and controlled rather than people with emotions and opinions.
> Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there.
This is true, and all the more worrying. It has a track record of being unsuccessful both at the managerial level and a financial one.
> look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments
"popcorn tastes good" -670 karma
With submissions frozen on top subreddits, massive community backlash against the CEO, and a huge schism forming among communities he decides to antagonize a bit and keep his head down.
> the celeb nudes debacle
reddit is 4chan with a better layout. It is frankly absurd they didn't have a contingency for this, and that they didn't communicate it well. This is hallmark of the company ethos of a lack of preparedness, lack of consistency and above all, a failure to communicate.
> CEO Yishan Wong
Unprofessional for a CEO to go into a thread and blast an employee publicly. At least it felt that way as he never seemed to post visibly but did this simply to settle a score. Also said employee claimed his questioning of allocating 10% of all revenue for the year to charity. Whatever the reason he was fired, if your company is struggling an not posting acceptable profits it is irrational to give $0.10 of every dollar away and operate close to a loss.
>jailbait
This was sort of the beginning of when free speech really came to a head against morality. They have made no progress on this front. Also, jailbait was probably a little closer to black and white than things like gamergate and this adolescent namecalling.
Conclusion
So those massive problems, which are mostly unreseolved, or are symptoms of unresolved issues, have culminated in hiring of techs most hated person of 2014-2015, who has no credible qualifications to run this company. Compounding those issues, she really failed to connect with the community and I would suspect (guessing here) that the transition has been tough in the office as well. The only thing that has kept reddit working this whole time were moderators and the community which have now totally turned on it.
tl;dr arguing a company has a track record of being run poorly but still managing to survive, doesn't seem like a great argument for its success.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...
Airbnb is carrying a $25 billion valuation, and has a legitimate shot at justifying it in the coming years. They own their segment like an eBay or Uber, their network effect has won.
Was Reddit once the top start-up out of Y-Combinator, years ago? I'm skeptical of that having ever been true as well.
Although they're really really really not by today's standards, as you point out.
* Memamp - desktop search: failed to launch, remaining founder hired by reddit
* Infogami - something between a blog and a wiki: merged with reddit, became reddit wiki
* Firecrawl - security software: pivoted and became TextPayMe - mobile payments: acquihired by Amazon, merged in to Amazon Payments
* Loopt - mobile location sharing: acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million
* Kiko - online calendar: launched shortly before Google Calendar, sold to Tucows for about $250k
* Clickfacts - advertising fraud detection: operated independently for years; now appears defunct
* Simmery - can't find anything on what this company was making: defunct
[0] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/vJmLVd9lJyk/1...
Enjoy my special occasion popcorn /u/kn0thing
http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po
10 years of reddit. Funny that 10 years of reddit gold is equivalent to 1 hour of Pao's $600/hour rate. That was before she was CEO.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-ban...
But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left.
They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever.
Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipulate.
Is there anyone left NOT mad at reddit now? Maybe SubredditDrama....
So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao.
Food for thought
That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger numbers of people. Meaning that there's a higher probability of receiving a hateful email from the 1 crank in a group affected by a decision you made.
In contrast, men have no problem being liked and respected in positions of power. Women managers tend to be viewed as nurturing pushovers or bitches.
It would indeed be simpler if liking decreased as social distance increased, but the world is not always so simple, and a thousand years of gender stereotypes and oppression don't end in a century.
On the contrary, compare her reception to that of powerful men who behave badly, and she seems to be benefiting from favorable treatment. Powerful men who have attracted the internet's ire by abusing the legal system with frivolous lawsuits, such as Darl McBride, Jack Thompson, or Charles Carreon, have attracted a lot more hate than Pao, and that's just for their legal hijinks, not to mention that they didn't do anything approaching what's happening to Reddit.
Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing why the powerful deserve special sympathy, especially when compared to the non-powerful.
The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all.
Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough?
It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.
This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.
Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.
It's even worse than that... the firing seems to have been related to friction about monetizing AMA's
And a number of other subreddits, all fairly large, and all now without a way to fulfill promises made because of this. You don't get it, because if you did, you'd realize why it was more than just /r/IAMA.
So, you should do some reading until you do understand it, because right now, everything you just said screams ignorance.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...
They needed Victoria to function, without her they are scrambling to figure out how they will do any upcoming AMAs.
The current AMA schedule (20 AMAs) will be scrapped.
"a load bearing wall in the house of AMA has been removed"- Knothing.
R/science had a similar problem, based on what a mod said in the original out of the loop thread.
As for The other subs, they may be doing it in solidarity.
That is a quote by karmanaut not kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian). The comments by kn0thing have been in some cases just fuel for the fire.
(and foursquare, etc.)
On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media.
To quote a reddit comment chain:
> Fuck Pao. I'm leaving Reddit.
> > No you aren't.
“We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.”
To the current CEO, Ellen Pao:
It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.
http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...
reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.
I suspect one of the network effects is simply that people have Reddit accounts and know how the site works; it's not yet another site to sign up for, for a small-ish community of people interested in a thing. I think that's the sole reason, for instance, /r/rust works as well as it does; philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole. I suspect that it's not users of any particular other subreddit (not even /r/programming) who are there, but people already using Reddit for many many other things. It's become one of the bigger discussion forums for the language, especially since the closure of the rust-dev mailing list.
If you can build a decentralized Reddit-like system with no per-community account system and also with no spam problem, you may stand a decent chance at replacing it.
Because that is what Reddit is serving, as well as the previous board sites the people came from.
Usenet was decentralized, no logins, and some were moderated. But this is what the people want, yet they do not know the name.
Most NG servers are shut down.
One such technique was a crypto method, similar to what has been recommended in reducing spam in emails. The client has to do some lengthy crypto transform for the message(and NG) they send. On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message. Small amounts of messages would get through, but spammers would be unable to bulk-send without some sort of supercomputer.
The appropriate algo could be agreed up and updated to increase the amount of time for the message. Even in worst cases, you're utilizing a slow computer for a second or 2. Solves the spam issue.
So if I want to post from a mobile device, I have to wait considerably longer? And if I hijack a lot of computers for a spam farm, I can send as much as I like?
Spam is not only defined by bulk. You still need moderators, and that means a process for establishing and maintaining who moderates a particular group. You need people to delete the child porn and the death threats, and that means a process for deletion. (Signed cancels were a pretty good solution in the end). You probably want some means for identifying persistently troublesome users and their sockpuppets from legitimate new users.
You need hosting so that people can effectively access it despite firewalls and on mobile devices. You need a means of paying for that hosting.
Not really. 300 messages a day would only be a few minutes of compute time and could seriously disrupt a large number of small group.
It's true. I for example was off-put by what I perceive as forced niceness. While it shouldn't matter on a subreddit dedicated to a programming language it's, at least for me, an illustration of culture conflict on Reddit.
Very small example: there was a poster claiming that we shouldn't use a word "guys" when referring to mixed groups and the moderators were willing to grant that request/encourage different ways of addressing mixed groups for some completely bs (in my view) reasons like the equivalent word in German being used only to address male groups.
Well, my preferred way of dealing with such requests is: "We don't mean to offend anyone but this is English so deal with it, using a word guys to address mixes groups is completely standard"
I find the culture of forced niceness and political correctness off-putting and it is reason enough for me not to engage in certain communities (/r/chess is another one I stopped posting in because of it). I think a difference in views on this matter is also why some Reddit communities are perceived as hateful while I not only don't see any hate there but I often see the critics as hateful authoritarians (one example: r/mensrights)
While that might have been true when you posted this comment, I have trouble believing that it could be true for anybody right now. At least a half dozen defaults have gone private an the majority of posts on the signed-out home page are about this story.
Looking at all of my subscriptions, it looks like exactly one of them, /r/linux, is currently private. /r/bayarea previously was. Places like /r/debian or /r/AskNYC or /r/SandersForPresident or /r/osdev just don't care -- or at least, they care less than they care about keeping their community open. There's a post each on /r/Christianity and /r/Catholicism saying thanks to the mods. There's a post vaguely about the subject on /r/networking, but it veered into discussion about the community.
As I mentioned elsewhere in these comments, yesterday's issue was specifically about the tensions between large, default sub volunteer moderation and Reddit the company. Most of the subreddits I read are small communities without these problems. (And they don't see themselves at risk for being banned for harassment / political incorrectness / what-have-you, so they're not concerned about that, either.)
This would be worse than 4chan, that has moderation as well (although more laxed than reddit or HN), why would anyone go there instead of reddit?
We want to be a profitable platform and some of you have to go for that to happen.
The timing of the iAMA admin's removal coincides all to well with the recent Jesse Jackson AMA that went exactly as AMAs do and not how politicians want things.
Most celebrities can handle abuse and such, but there are certain one's and definitely more politicians who will not tolerate it from the rabble. To them they are royalty and damn if they will suffer humiliation, rudeness, or the like, from anyone. So likely we will soon have amusement park reddit, where there is a hint of roughness but everything is policed, scripted, and shadowbans go out like candy on halloween. AMA will likely come back as service to "the important people" Ellen and her like want to associate with to the point all posts will be so filtered it should be renamed "Ask Me Approved Questions"
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
The current Reddit management doesn't seem to be handling this well.
Some portions of the Internet have culture in much the same way that food you forget at the back of your fridge grows culture. And they should be treated much the same way.
P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.
Those who fail to study their Internet history are doomed to repeat it, it seems.
I've never been content with the centralized nature of Reddit as an Internet forum - for me this moment of truth has been bound to occur.
What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.
Once high speed (DSL, cable) took over they axed all Usenet servers. Unless you had Hampster continuously scouring for insecure and open servers, you had to pay for a SuperNews account.
That's how Usenet died.
And once that happens, it is pretty much game over for the community, no matter what technology is being used to sustain it.
Fundamentally there isn't much difference between your reddits and slashdots and USENETS .. and HN's .. in the end, the community is only as valuable as it perceives itself to have value. And then when the value becomes something that is co-opted by others who desire to exploit that value, a self-awareness of that value by the collective becomes its own worst fault. Reddit is clearly being invalidated by people who don't want the value they create to be valued differently by people who have what they consider to be differing values.
So it goes. I hope the next forum where people can creatively contribute to the dialog is not centralized. But that's hard - you have to have somewhere to meet, after all ..
It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for whom it isn't endogenous - at its best, it combines a commitment to free expression, a geeky pride in understanding how things work, a strong appreciation for authenticity, a pushback against attention seeking, and an embrace of a multitude of interests.
At its worse, well, it's really bad - you get the opinions of minorities dismissed, and you can have people doing all sorts of heinous stuff (revenge porn, etc) under the guise of free speech.
However, to horribly paraphrase Whitman.. it contains multitudes. Watching what used to be a beloved site being run by people who don't seem to even understand the ideals of their users is very grating.
As an analogy, imagine if the editor of the NYRB somehow ended up as the director of the organization that runs Nascar. Personally, I've never watched a Nascar race in my life and I doubt I ever will - but there are people that are fanatical about that culture, who would resent having a complete outsider who looks upon their hobby with contempt running the show.
Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.
"This seems to be a seriously stupid decision. We have several AMAs upcoming in /r/books and have no idea how to contact the authors."[1]
They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support. Given that the key feature in ensuring the quality of Reddit is the moderation "donated" by the community, this is a deeply dangerous move, especially as many of the moderators are already irritated.
If Reddit forcibly take control of the subreddits, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a Reddit civil war.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
kn0thing is a play on Alexis' favorite Metallica song....
"King Nothing"
https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing?count=25&after=t1_cslum...
This seems over blown
Which is actually important; if you run the site and your comments have a -2000 karma your users are telling you a very clear message that something isn't right.
"At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it’s time to get Reddit functioning again"
And downplays it as just a moderator-reddit communication issue. Right.
Reddit's major liability (and yet, one of its strengths) is the devolvement of responsibility to moderators. Without their volunteer work, the site couldn't have grown as big as it has. But mods have the power to utterly trash the site through collective action.
The admins have spent years saying that moderators are responsible for the content and direction of a subreddit. I wonder whether they'll keep that line now that moderators of several key subreddits have effectively gone rogue.
This is actually a much bigger threat to Reddit than the recent revolt over the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits.
I'm not active there, but it does seem to me like reddit owes possibly as much to the community as vice versa.
Yeah that will go over well.
It sound like this started the same way it would if someone was hit by a bus. All owns sudden they were just GONE.
Unless the firing was REALLY fast this hasn't been handled well. It's obvious she was important and did a lot of work. If Reddit knew even one day in advance they should have had some sort of plan on how to handle her workload l. Basic business continuity for others.
Instead it sounds like everything got dropped on the floor and Reddit is rushing to pick up the pieces and it's clearly not working.
There was no transition or contingency plan announced to the mods[2]. At first, the admins responded dismissively[3][4], but afterwards they took the issue more receptively[5].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
A community like Reddit is incredibly challenging to keep balanced long-term. Services like it just tend to blow-up eventually. The upside is, innovation will probably come out of its meltdown, new types of services will bloom, and wipe out what's left of Reddit's value proposition.
I can imagine that people will stop thinking of "Reddit" as a website that everyone visits with "default subreddits" et al, but they will possibly continue to associate the name with the platform.
No, bozarking deleted his account in January 2010.
Not a great moment for anyone: The AMA didn't always feature the Reddit community at its best, but the Reverend didn't show at all well under the spotlight of Radical Transparency.
Given all that, the timing and speed of the admin's firing hardly seems coincidental. Reddit seems to have blown up a number of ongoing events, and upset an important chunk of its community, which hardly suggests that her firing relates to some long-term issue.
I can see why Reddit might feel the event wasn't handled well.
But it is also very plausible that Jackson and his camp were deeply embarrassed, and insisted that someone be punished for that. So plausible, in fact, that I think Reddit really should give some account that demonstrates that this is _not_ what happened -- or admit that it did.
It is very surprising that this whole thing hasn't gotten more coverage in the tech press.
'Have you felt regretful for rushing to judgement after condemning the "perpetrators" of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal during 2006-07?'
'No, the pattern is consistent. And we never want injustice to occur. But the pattern is fairly obvious, and a very obvious pattern that must be ended.'
The Reverend isn't interested in fairness to individuals, he's interested in "patterns". If he feels himself subjected to a pattern he feels unfair, well, fairness to any individual is less important than ending that pattern.
The Reverend is not the guy you'd want arguing with Yahweh to spare Sodom and Gomorrah lest He unjustly punish the innocent with the guilty.
Or did he not actually answer the question, and did someone else answer in his place? Or is there more going on, like he regretted that answer?
I do. But I was jailed in 1960. For trying to use a public library. And that caused more good than harm. I marched to end segregation. The day Dr. King spoke on Washington, in 1963, I was there for that speech. That day, from Texas to Florida, you couldn't use a single public toilet. We could not buy ice cream at Howard Johnson's, or stay in Holiday Inns. We fought to bring those barriers down. And because those walls are down, all the new interstate construction across the South - the new bridges and ports, and seaports - that's progress. You couldn't have teams behind the Cotton Curtain. You couldn't have had Olympics in Atlanta behind the Cotton Curtain. You couldn't have Toyota, and Michelin, behind the Cotton Curtain, so we pulled those walls down. So our work has been beneficial. And it seems to me that people who benefit from that work ascribe it to the wrong reasons. When the laws change to make the South more civil, that brought in more investment. So we've made America better. All these changes have come from our work. Our work has bene good for the South, and good for America. My goal is to expand our consciousness, to create as big a tent as possible, as we fight for justice and world peace. I was able to bring Americans home from jail, from prison, and gaining those freedom of those Americans was the highest and best use of my talents and time.
Quoting the International Business Times: "The AMA in question, which took place just two days before Taylor's firing was revealed, was widely regarded to be nothing short of a disaster. When the top question on the AMA calls the person answering questions 'an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain', you know you are in trouble. [...] However the suggestion that this was the reason for Taylor's firing does seem tenuous at best, and outright ridiculous in reality." There are some more plausible reasons in that story. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reddit-revolt-why-was-popular-direc...
Now why would Reddit fire Victoria over the AMA? There are many _possible_ reasons. Here are some speculations.
One, no company wants to be the target of Reverend Jackson or his supporters complaining that they treated him in a disrespectful or racist fashion. Look at how some of the various tech diversity controversies have played out, and how quickly. Reddit may well have worried that _not_ firing Victoria could have put them in a "Reddit is racist" cross-hairs that could quickly have spun out of control. Especially given how much of exactly that sort of material is floating around on various subreddits. Given how those controversies can roll, reasoning like this may even have been in some sense correct. Lose the whole company in a Twitter storm? Or fire a popular employee and irritate a bunch of mods?
Two, CEO Pao is on record talking about the importance of diversity at Reddit. It may very well be that she felt the AMA was cross-wise her own values, and those she wants to promote at Reddit.
Three, CEO Pao may also regard the Reverend and his supporters as important allies for purposes of her own, apart from her role as Reddit's CEO. She's certainly out there as interested in diversity issues, and admired by many for that. It isn't hard to imagine that she would be concerned about that image.
Four, others at Reddit may have felt the AMA didn't represent their values. Silicon Valley is notoriously progressive, and when dealing with political questions people often don't think straight. The conflict between "AMAs can be rough" and "Reverend Jackson deserves more respect than that" creates cognitive dissonance. That makes decision-making very hard. Add in some pressure from Jackson or his people -- whom many in Silicon Valley _want_ to perceive as reasonable and intelligent folks, and exposed to a lot of unreasonable criticism -- and good choices start to get difficult.
We don't _know_ anything, of course. The basic point is, the Jackson AMA created a _political_ situation for Reddit. Political decision-making is already hard, and the thinking about it easily confused. Reddit may have made a political choice driven by business concerns. Or it may have made political choices based on its employees personal agendas or outlooks.
Or, the timing of the firing and the AMA were completely coincidental.
(Speculation one also seems somewhat unlikely given that, for instance, /r/coontown is still around. They'd be an obvious scapegoat if you wanted to curry favor with Jackson or with the Twitter folks who were already saying that Reddit was racist. And they're far less valuable to Reddit than an employee was.)
What they could have done, if they really wanted, was to trump up some charges against the AMA mods (perhaps for not moderating that AMA well) and replace some or all of the mod team. That would have placated Jackson, or Twitter, or Pao's self-image, or whomever, while cementing control of AMA in the future. Reddit continued to have an employee involved in running AMAs, and she could have been pressured into keeping AMAs reflect the message Reddit wants to send.
So even if someone (Jackson, Pao, someone else at Reddit) felt like Something Needed To Be Done in response to that AMA, it's far from obvious that firing someone would have been a response that occurred to them. What we're assuming here is not just poor decision-making blinded by ideology / political exigency / whatever, but poor decision-making in the face of other, obvious, obviously better options. That's what makes it so hard to believe.
We know that Reddit already implemented a move-or-get-fired policy. We know that Reddit is bad at handling employee termination (and lots of companies are, to be fair). We know that, fairly recently, Reddit terminated an employee for not moving, and handled it very abruptly, too, without contacting the subreddit they were assigned to work with. "Management decided to fire the employee for standard company-politics reasons, and did a bad job of it" seems perfectly within reason.
But I would definitely agree that what looks like conspiracy generally turns out to be stupidity.
http://digg.com/2015/redditrevolt-victoria-taylor-ama-reddit...
I think it's increasingly hard to believe that this had anything to do with Jesse Jackson's AMA.
I think anyone could have seen that coming. Anonymous accounts with community voting and an API to boot? This is only asking for trouble - especially if the AMA was done by an individual who wasn't familiar with the personality of the community or internet etiquette in general. Assuming every other AMA was respectful/successful - they were just playing a game of russian roulette.
I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit - don't get wrong I love the idea of an exchange of comments between the common person and famous people but I certainly wouldn't want to do it on an anonymous posting site.
Edit: To the downvoters - I should point out that assuming that reddit has automated systems in place to detect fraudulent voting - someone with a botnet could easily defeat it. It's easy to detect when the same guy is upvotting posts from the same IP or same block of IPs - how do you detect that when the voting are coming from all over the world? It doesn't even have to be a botnet - how do you know that the android/ios game you just downloaded isn't making web service calls in the background to a site like reddit? If I was a bad guy - I would definitely outsource development of some useful app or game and embed my upvoting code into that once it becomes popular.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=jesse%20jackson&sort=byPopular...
Questions get voted up or down. Either Reddit has a problem with being gamed and trolls can successfully get their questions upvoted, or that's what the audience wanted.
Do not interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system. Don't talk about your score or your votes.
Some celebrities seem to be thriving on reddit. I've seen Arnold Schwarzneggar engage users on /r/fitness, and he has posted several videos (that tank one was one I saw recently) along with doing PR for his Terminator movie.
Whoever is helping him along seems to be doing a great job.
He got reddit gold, had a perfect response, and added a handwritten note (an effective way of showing that he was involved, not just his publicist).
He has the team in place to be notified of these things and hit it out of the park.
Celebrity AMAs more often than not go really really well, even for controversial figures like Obama.
Reddit just has a tendency to lash out at a) people who are obviously just using the site for PR (the Rampart AMA) and b) terrible people (Jesse Jackson) tend to go bad because people simply don't like them in general.
That is the "best" question according to Reddit's sorting algorithm. I think that easily qualifies as "overly disrespectful".
It one thing to ask tough questions. It is another to call a man an immoral race baiter, say he set back his cause years, call him an extortionist, chastise him for an affair, and then insinuate he is worse than one of the most notorious criminals in US history all within a single paragraph. That isn't a question, it is a personal attack.
I sadly don't think it is surprising that a comment like that is posted. But it is a black eye on the Reddit community that it was upvoted more than any other question in the AMA.
None of this is anything new though, it's widely accepted that Jackson is a demagogue.
There was no scenario under which Jessie Jackson was going to get anything but slammed (in semi-respectful and completely disrespectful ways). His profile is very, very polarizing to say the least.
Ultimately you either have a completely open community, or a tightly controlled community. Given a bit of time, there can be no middle ground.
I think it's pretty forseeable that an AMA would likely result in a lot of uncomfortable questions for a highly controversial figure like Rev. Jackson. That can be an opportunity, or it can be a disaster. It does not seem that he was properly prepared for it either way. That's not Reddit's fault nor Chooter's; it's his.
All that said, it's clear that Reddit is not a well-managed company, and this appears to have gotten worse since they hired Ellen Pao. So it's certainly possible that the people calling the shots over there don't get it, or are trying to reimagine Reddit as something it is not. If that's so, then your theory is entirely plausible. But it still doesn't explain the lack of communication or any semblance of a backup plan. If you're employing someone who has no alternate, and you have no plan in place to transfer that person's duties, the only reason to fire that person on the spot is that they're committing felonies directly related to the company or its business. Anything else -- and I do mean anything else; I don't care if they took a giant shit right on your desk -- can wait 24 business hours while you get some kind of continuity plan in place. As a manager, if you can't control your own anger or impetuousness well enough to avoid torpedoing your own business out of spite, you don't belong in your role. Ellen Pao, we're looking at you.
Hypothesis 1: Jackson's AMA went badly, he/his team was specifically pissed at Victoria and demanded consequences, threatening a public campaign against reddit.
Hypothesis 2: Conde Nast is not happy about the public perception of reddit as the biggest blob of hate on the Internet. So they might have given them a "one more headline news scandal" ultimatum.
In that situation, there are no winners, only losers, there is nothing to gain and there isn't even a 100% guilty party.
This is a very plausible conjecture, especially in view of admins' comments in wake of the fatpeoplehate ban explicitly permitting racist anti-black subreddits to continue to operate. This could have become an existential threat to reddit. In view of that, and their apparent weathering of past anti-user controversies, a user revolt would seem like the lesser evil from a short-sighted perspective.
/u/karmanaut, one of the most prolific moderators, gave some insight into why this is such a big deal: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
> We had a number of AMAs scheduled for today that Victoria was supposed to help with, and they are all left absolutely high and dry (hence taking IAMA private to figure out the situation) She was still willing to help them today (before the sub was shut down, of course) even without being paid or required to do so. Just a sign of how much she is committed to what she does.
> The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that [...] down immediately. We can't do that anymore. Part of it is also that Victoria is an essential lifeline of communication. When something goes wrong in an AMA, we can call and get it fixed immediately. Otherwise, we have to resort to desperately try messaging the person via Reddit (and they may not know to check their messages or even to look for these notifications).
In fact, it seems that they actually cut off active IAmAs in progress. https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745
If there's anything to be learned here for the larger technology crowd, it's this: There are human single-points-of-failure just like there are in hardware. And if you can't avoid having a SPOF, don't kick it in the face out of nowhere and expect the world to continue chugging along like nothing happened.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
Righteous firing or not, a lot of this is a lesson in avoiding a SPOF.
However, in human dynamics and the foundation of all leadership (and thus creating genuine followership), it requires a single point of accountability.
Leaders of any community are accountable to their followers. Leaders have to realize that the community and the purpose are always more important than them.
I think the reason why u/chooter was considered a leader (or top-notch liason between admins and mods) was because of her commitment to the quality of the AMA.
I think the reason why u/chooter is adored by readers was for the same reason, though typically expressed by her inate ability to capture the AMA guests voices, mannerisms, etc. She was being 100% accountable to the community and the purpose that she was serving.
This is a thing to be admired, encouraged, and emulated. Not scorned or spoken of in terms of an acronym.
I'm not picking a thread fight, as I think your perspective is very important within hardware networks and/or very relevant in process management, it's quite inaccurate when describing the human dynamics involved with building a community.
Doing that is usually a good way to make somebody seem rather illiterate. For example, people are much looser with the way they structure sentences and organize thoughts when speaking in an unprepared manner.
When you listen to audio of them talking, everything seems normal because we have different expectations for written English and spoken English. When you don't get to listen to the audio but only read a transcript, then you start to get problems because then you have written English that only meets a spoken English standard.
See here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png
I suspect that this had much more to do with the one thing that a management team is more interested in: money.
- AMAs are (or were?) probably one of the most visited subs on Reddit - AMAs readers are often on pages for hours - AMAs are on reddit-domained pages, so the "real estate" is valuable and "in-house"
If there was a management idea to "tweak" the AMAs to monetize it and Victoria thought it would not be true to the community, and spoke up, it would be easy to see why they would sack her.
This is much more likely to be the cause than capturing the typing down an AMA guest comments in the cadence they have been provided.
The only other two explanations I can think of are "Victoria was posting replies to the wrong comments" or "Jackson _actually_is_ illiterate".
Seriously, the responses were borderline incoherent.
It's not impossible that she is lying, but I think it is quite plausible that Marc's contact is not as authoritative as Marc seems to think. He is probably just repeating that person's speculation.
I'd also like to point out that if they fired Victoria for embarrassing Jackson, admitting that this was the case would be counterproductive because it would make a mob of angry redditors [even more] angry at Jackson.
> In fact, it seems that they actually cut off active IAmAs in progress. https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745
This seems to be due to the moderators setting /r/IAmA private, not Victoria being yanked away.
If you click on https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter now the most recent post is from 2 days ago.
However I visited this thread 2-3 hours ago and there were many comments from her from as little as 1-2 hours before that.
Reddit started going badly downhill (where it was a visible and public departure from what it was previously) from around the time that Sam Altman personally invested in the company nine months ago, an announcement that almost ruptured my cringe-pipes. I laughed internally at the notion that he thinks he's altruistic by giving 10% back to the users, whilst in the same announcement he mentions reddit reaching a billion users.
So, Sam was boasting that of his shares he owns 90%, whilst each of the "shareholders" (a reddit user) has 0.0000000001% – and that's exactly what I expect from investors.
Then Yishan Wong resigns, it felt more like a pushing, one month after Sam invests, and is replaced by Pao; who has a history of going after previous employers because she's angry that she's a woman. Nobody has the nerve to fire Pao because they're afraid of being called sexist.
This is Silicon Valley at it's most entertaining.
Not that I have an opinion on the subject of what reddit should do.
And they're just massively failing at every step. Out of touch, out of clue. Reddit the company is at this point completely removed from the actual site. They went back into startup mode but you would never know it looking at the site. No new features, same old shitty reliability, nothing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png
I consider him to be a reputable source and the claims are very plausible. Out of touch management never know how out of touch they are.
Also, terrible management? "You disagree with me? You're fired."
I'm not saying I don't believe it, just that I'm keeping my mind open.
I know this is much like watching E! entertainment, but wow reddit's management is hilariously bad.
I think the kind of "open" management recently seen with startups like buffer would really make things better if applied at reddit.
Alexis Ohanian's response: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
List of subreddits suddenly going private: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bxjyu/list_...
The doublespeak is weird. If it's a protest, say so. There's no direct relation between the employee getting fired and a subreddit that is not focused on celebrity PR going dark.
Clearly the people best suited to answer this question do not think they will be able to do what they have been doing.
> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing, we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the inconvenience to the community.
> The comments in this thread will be locked.
They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked the comments. Father knows best.
So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a reason to shut down the sub temporarily
[1] http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2015/06/update-on-plos-science-we...
They seem to be going through their own Digg v4 moment here, completely disregarding users because they think they're big enough to survive without them.
www.snapzu.com - Excellent content and friendly community. Has a unique XP/Leveling system and ability to post content into multiple subs.
www.empeopled.com - Gives you more influence based on the amount of up-votes you've received. Use influence to steer future of the site.
www.theneeds.com - Good content but a lot of it looks automated, possibly using bots. No discussion so you lose a lot of that community feel.
www.hubski.com - Classic alternative, been kicking it around for 4-5 years, but still little activity. Community is small but nice.
www.spreadit.it - A dark themed reddit alternative that is similar to reddit and easy to use. Content and community is lacking however.
Note: I didn't mention the voat boat because I felt they have a little too much hate/racism on there.
Anyway, +1 for Snapzu.
That said, does Azure play nicely with IIS? I bet it's expensive but can you scale that way maybe?
Snapzu gave me a db-error. Bad first impression...
spreadit address should be spreadit.io.
Hubski was the one I had the best impression of.
Many HN readers should recognize that as the words a certain admin of fark.com.
For those that don't recognize it, the short version of the story was the admins had developed a new front-end to Fark, but they didn't make a general announcement an update was going to happen. The just deployed it one morning... and left for a convention. When the change was discovered a little while later... well... lets just say it was not a popular change[1]. More importantly, nobody know what was going on, making emotions run even higher due to the lack of communication from the admins.
So after being left to stew for 4+ hours - and over 10k posts from confused and angry users - an admin does the absolutly worst thing possible, and made a single post with those four words: "You'll get over it". There were three main reactions to this. Many of us closed the browser and went back to work or otherwise avoided the drama. Maybe 10-15% of users spent the next day flaming the admins at about 10k posts/hour. Finally, about 1/3 close their accounts and left, permanently.
I suspect reddit is in the middle of a similar situation right now.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that the Fark story doesn't really end there. Years later, Fark admin Joe Peacock gave one of the more important talks[3] (at NOTACON 8) I've ever seen, about what exactly went wrong, and the bad decisions that made a catastrophe inevitable. Joe discusses what may be the most important lesson for anyone managing a place where users choose to spend their free time: if you don't involve your user in the decisions and changes that affect them, they wil simply find another place to hang out.
[1] which some of us still[2] partially-revert: https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme-un-v3-0-relea...
[2] when I remember; apparently haven't posted last year's fixes sigh
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI (in typical fark style, a few of the talk's slides may be borderline NSFW)
TL;DR - just watch [3], where a fark.com admin gives some *very good advice on how to interact with your users.
Yesterday, Ohanian appears to have made a similar comment, beginning to snowball in infamy:
Ohanian: "Popcorn tastes good."[1]
They do not think like a business. They are a storage mechanism for other peoples content which their users generously provide for them to index. They don't make content, they don't generate revenue, they are stuck in a web2.0 model being valued on a per user basis. Reddit probably can't recover as community, but almost certainly not as a business.
> What is Ellen Pao paying attention to
Ideally the calls for her resignation, but it is to little to late probably.
my post was a bit unclear, i meant they literally provide it to the site by finding it and posting it. They act as the first tier of the filtering mechanism(votes being secondary).
> The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.
reddit itself, and many other companies/communities are caught in the trap of placating a vocal minority and exercising to broad of a control on the culture. The Y-Combinator ethos is basically this. Make something that enough people love, rather than a lot of people really like.
This revolt is backlash against changing a well-ingrained culture to try an please discrete sub-groups. Whether these sub-groups are "right" or "wrong" was largely a question of the communities sentiment expressed in posts and votes. When reddit altered the culture here they lost critical mass.
It is happening on 4chan right now as well with people moving to various cloned image boards. Reddit needs it's users a lot more than users need reddit, so we will see what will happen. I am short on reddit and bullish on community choice though.
Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority? Indeed, they are the ones exercising a great deal of control over reddit and its community.
Critical mass is pretty ambiguous. Is it defined by people who run subreddits, people who visit them, people who vote on them, people who buy reddit gold?
I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators. It was possible because it was very hands off.
Even though reddit has a very open philosophy, moderators of subreddits are anything but hands off.
sort of, they def have power within their own space and can bargain collectively. People hate Pao for many reasons. She is changing the culture (not single handedly) but with special interests. There are social justice/politically correct views being handed down from the company thus removing certain subreddits and restricting topics. Various other interests like moderators and users oppose these changes. That is what I meant about special interest. Many communities within reddit are hostile to one another and have sort of been playing a proxy war. Although, gun to my head, i think many of the people that would happily trade insults with one another, have slowed for now to unite against Pao/Corporate Reddit.
> critical mass is pretty ambiguous.
yeah i was qouting another poster. I think it is just enough people to generate quality content and discussion and cycle through enough depth to not let everything go stale.
> I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators.
4chan had a coup d'état of sorts recently where many moderators and janitors were purged from the board. Moderation became much more strict and many were part of the social justice movement. They banned threads such as #gamegate briefly and some of the culture of the boards changed.
Also people are spreading to 8chan, wizchan, krautchan and irc further sharding out the culture that created many of the things that we regard as "internet culture"
Something Victoria opposed, so getting rid of her is part of the plan.
A lot of people said this was because Pao is a woman and reddit is sexist. But then explain this reaction to Victoria.
Here's a thought: the reddit community despises Pao because Pao is in no way part of the community. She's a bizdev-turned-investor corporate suit who seemingly came out of nowhere to now run the site.
She's posted very few times since becoming interim CEO. In fact, only 56 posts.
* 3 short messages when her interim-CEO position was announced.
* 9 when she posted the new privacy policy.
* 8 for Nepal earthquake relief.
* 9 posts for the reddit 10-year anniversary. This, to me, is lame. This is a classic senior executive move where they hide in their office all year round and no one has a clue what the fuck they do, if anything, but they emerge just during the victory celebrations.
Since becoming interim CEO, she has an average ONE post every five days. One posted message -- not even one submission every five days, which would be meatier. By contrast, Jack Dorsey has an average 5 tweets a day since twitter started. Is there any doubt Dorsey uses his own product? Well, we can see that Ellen does not use the product that she is running (unless she has some anonymous accounts). She made a gaffe recently where she posted a message publicly to a user that was meant to be private -- fair or not, that solidified the narrative that she is not a Reddit user.
Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision stays that way.
Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.
I think what you're saying is that you cannot conceive of a plan that will successfully implement the vision to make money.
I'd add that execution seems to be sorely lacking, whatever the vision or plan, assuming a real plan even exists (which I suppose it part of execution as well, "have a plan").
All of the admins that were any good at interacting with the community are on the "reddit alum" section of the admin list (read: former employes). And more often than not, the staff doing the high-quality and visible community management was strangely the sysadmins and programmers.
Edit: not strange at all, I just realized that they were probably the only admins that were legit users too. Which would explain why I'd lump pre-sale spez and kn0thing in with people who actually interacted, they posted with their real usernames while also running all the sockpuppets making the site look alive.
Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like reddit to have "public facing" administrators
Many of the biggest subreddits are revolting against the "governing" and gone private in protest, for example:
/r/Iama
/r/science
/r/movies
/r/gaming
/r/history
/r/art
/r/AskReddit
/r/law
Reddit is run by volunteers, remember...
Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.
I'm blown away by what Reddit has been doing in the last few months. I thought it was just me being a get-off-my-lawn old user (since I've been on Reddit like 7-8 years or something) but then I had a young copyrighter (early twenties) talking to me about leaving Reddit for "other places" and that blew me away. I hadn't realized it was starting to trickle down for lack of better words.
Let's think about the fact that this is possible for a company to do this to a full-time employee with several years experience next time an election comes up.
Unfortunately, not all of us get the luxury of advance notice on firings/layoffs
It's like firing someone, then all of the sudden you realize that you need to hire a team of people to replace them, all while your site is down and your servers are on fire (and all of the MBAs are busy looking for someone else to blame so they don't get fired).
Mostly filtering whichever collection of racists and woman-haters show up when they become defaults. So at least their moderators are getting a break from that.
If she has an area of expertise other than "diversity", she seems to be flubbing it.
They became good at money and bad at people, which usually happens. Unfortunately for them, reddit is little more than the people.
Seems likely to me that the problem is now too big for the admins to fix even if they wanted too. They couldn't moderate that many large subs, they don't have the manpower. There's going to be an impressive amount of bad publicity hitting reddit tomorrow, I hope to hell they have a good explanation lined up cause they're going to need it.
Reddit has too many shills, too many paid-for content and way to much thought policing. Time to go!
https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/192235
The problem is that the poster and everyone else was subsequently banned, which created a bit of a backslash.
I'm not even really sure why the anti-fem crowd hates her so much. But man...wow.
If some of the things that I've read today are to be believed, the firing of this admin was a stupid act. Reddit and several other "web 2.0" companies made it big on "user generated content" which always seemed like it had the potential to turn into a gross corporate overlord milking their user-cow for all it's worth.
It seems like there are a lot of valley companies that just want to slap a sticker on your culture and hand it back to you. Or they want to say that the rules don't apply to them because they are so new and communicate with their employees through an app or some other horse shit.
In the end, it sounds like this young woman (the admin they fired) did her job well and it sucks when people aren't rewarded for that.
Goes to show you just how powerful the MRA subreddits are. I used to be staunchly "free speech above all", but seeing how blind hatred can fester and spread has filled me with a lot of doubts about us, as a group of humans.
A couple of years ago a group of people that I was attracted to due to their professed reliance on reason and scientific method turned out to be virulently anti-female.
And then this fringe hatefulness just seems to have pervaded everything...even computing forums that are dedicated to what I thought were relatively dispassionate topics that are quite arcane have had death threats lobbed at people who just have a different opinion. It's fucking weird.
Within just a few months Pao made some major moves that directly impacted reddit staff and could be attributed to her presence - namely eliminating salary negotiations, which caused a big stir. The banning of specific hate-speech subreddits at her direction pushed large segments of the community against her for a variety of reasons - some cause they were just mad they lost a platform and other stating that it was anti-democratic censorship.
Her massive public lawsuit, which was panned as frivolous across the web, basically killed any remaining credibility she did have with the community. When she lost the suit it was like fuel to the fire.
Now pretty much anything she does is toxic.
I will miss it. As an Old Person™, reddit was the closest the modern Internet has come to replicating the heyday of Usenet in the 80s/90s. But because it's controlled by a single corporation instead of federating among all internet service providers, it succumbed to the corruption of the pursuit of captial. RIP.
An nntp2 / nntp3 could be brilliant.
I understand that if you're going to fire someone, you can't very well go around telling a bunch of people that you're about to do that. They still should have had a better plan in place to pick up the slack first.
People just don't like to see people that are clearly competent be fired. The reasons really don't matter to them. (and maybe they shouldn't?)
1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than just what relates to this specific situation.
2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit - there is nothing without them.
3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).
#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too late.
2. Most of the mods are realizing their mistakes right now, if you can see the subs who are coming back online they are just getting insulted and downvoted over and over for giving up on the black out
3. Use that + give them better tools to moderate their subs = you have the mods on your side
4. They need a martyr story, Ellen Pao is getting harassed all over the place, people trying to doxx her, people photoshoping her pictures over and over, people making bad jokes about her (racists, sexist, etc...). They need to make it look like this is a bad thing, like she's suffering, like the reaction of these people who are a minority of reddit are causing to the people administrating reddit. I think that would be good if it came from some mods of subreddits or from some rumors in random subreddits.
Seriously, I see Ellen Pao as the new Britney Spears. In a few years people will love her (if she hasn't killed herself from all of this harassment).
5.? They could fire Ellen Pao and hire someone from the community. But I doubt this would change something in the long run.
6.? They could make the whole management process of reddit more "open" like buffer does.
Eventually, things like that are doomed to happen. A company needs to fire people, needs to take decision that their users will not like so they can monetize their website, etc... It's also good to notice that things like that often goes away pretty quickly, the last drama lasted a day, I don't think this one will last more than a day or two either... Most people didn't even realize. This is an interesting topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bz9pm/how_...
This would be a good time for someone to figure out a decentralized solution to the links+comments app. There is lots of research into decentralized reputation and recommendation algorithms. Combined with cryptocurrency there could be some real potential.
The people who have closed the subreddits are the moderators. These moderators should represent the desires of the users. In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors. Even the AMAs are cut off. I think this is wrong.
Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
While I don't know Victoria so I cannot sympathize, I can at least understand the moderators' cause. However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.
> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
Why is that a problem? If the mods are actually acting in the best interests of their communities (which, in your scenario, are able to re-form on another site) then that's a positive result for them (in an altruistic sense).
As I user, I fully support the shutdown. I wish every major sub would shutdown.
You're thinking democracy. That's not how subreddits work. Some might respect the wishes of the community and try to work with it but they're not beholden at all.
> In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.
Your portrayal is not right. While it might be in some cases, there's pretty good arguments about why people are doing what they're doing and the subscribers for different subreddits have given an impressive amount of support to the movements so you can't claim it's some sort of ego power play without consent of other people.
> As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors
I find it slightly funny that you're talking as if this was some sort of humanitarian crisis or natural disaster. They can still message their friends and discuss in many subs that are not private if they're so inclined.
> Even the AMAs are cut off.
Well, one of the arguments is that the reddit administration didn't care about the AMAs when they made their decision of removing Victoria without consulting with any moderator (specially those that depended heavily on her).
> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
People can find alternate sites all the time. The "power loss" you claim is negligible and seems more like a scare tactic to force inaction. "Don't try protesting or showing anything is not in order because people might leave and you'll not be as important! Fall back in line!"
> However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.
The way they chose is absolutely effective with only the cost of a slight inconvenience. What the moderators represent to you is clearly not the popular opinion and the fact that many users seem to be overwhelmingly in support of this measures seems to leave you in a minority position.
At the risk of sounding harsh one could argue that your stance seems motivated by reasons of personal convenience that go against the best for reddit and the community as a whole.
So Victora didn't want the quality hurt for monetization purposes and was fired. Now the mods stepped up and said they don't want it either. Immediately we got a really high quality IAMA from a Reddit employee fired by Pao for having cancer. Do you think we'd ever see real back and forth about topics like that if it was just pre-scripted money making IAMAs left?
Victoria and the mods seems to do the absolutely best things they could do for the quality. If I just wanted advertiser sponsored content I'd still be a digg user, which is what that site turned into.
I can't think of another time I've been immediately like, "Why?!" in reaction to Reddit's actions. Usually when I see a new feature, direction, policy, etc, my thoughts are, "Huh. Makes sense"
But reddit on the other hand still seems to be growing and haven't hit an inflection point: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit
Even the recent fph drama barely caused a noticeable blip in traffic and was easily recovered from a few days later.
This event might be the start of the inflection point but reddit isn't going to die overnight anytime soon.
There was a story about how unprofitable Reddit is [1] and given that one would expect it to start running out of cash. And when that happens it has to either get more VC funding or go to the public for additional funding. But if you're going to file an S-1 you really have to get your SOX compliance in order, and generally that has things like executives swearing that there isn't any illegal stuff going on, with jail time penalties if there is. And lawyers tend to be really conservative when it comes to "illegal" (advising against anything even nominally bad).
I, of course, have no inside information, but I'm not the only one wondering about this. An inability to raise funds would kill Reddit, and this "strike" action would seem to just accelerate that (fewer page views, fewer ad clicks).
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-once-bowed-1...
All of the conditions of SOX seem to be about financial disclosure, with the most general "crime-like" thing having to do with financial fraud. I don't SOX has much to do with e.g. online harrassment or pornography. It was enacted in response to financial and accounting scandals around 2000. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
There is something to be learned there, not sure what it is though.
edit: Actually metafilter is older, but way less popular/influential.
On the other hand, so does Something Awful, and that site's significantly more popular than Metafilter.
4chan happens to be the least ambiguous community
Have Pao done anything good for Reddit since she's been appointed CEO?
It's been up for 9 hours and has 714 points but is lower on the front page than "What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?" which has been up for 18 hours and has less than half (307) the points.
What's going on here?
Might even be the right thing to do, since the whole situation is far from known and opinions boil over.
Who knows.
I think they prefer people to email these questions?
Who out there has a reddit clone ready to take up the torch? Communities are fickle, and if you fuck with them they will abandon you quickly and en masse.
Still, getting communities right is hard. Obviously. I have something in the works but, it's fairly different, and you know how these things can go south.
But i think this is good. it will spur innovation in the space, and thats good for everyone. Well, except reddit.
In any business, employees will be fired, employees will leave.
The weakness here was that Reddit seems to have no business continuity plan for the one subreddit that gets the best publicity. Anything that attracts presidents, and A-list stars should have been able to lose an admin with minimal chaos.
Misunderstanding the role of a critical employee lead to this and now they have to struggle to catch up and figure out what the heck Victoria really did.
The whole dust up over /r/fph and the few other little subs kinda horrified me. I think reddit has often veered too far into laxness (the LONG existence of /r/jailbait) and there is still an amazing ton of blatant rule violations going on.
The only problem I had with the /r/fph thing was how inconsistently enforced it was. It seemed like a ban against a relatively small group so they wouldn't have to deal with pissing off one of the bigger problem subs. It ended up looking like a fake token gesture.
I'm sure leadership is willing to gamble that they can disrupt the hive without killing it. But will the owners continue to go down that road?
"/r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/science, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos, /r/gadgets, and /r/movies have all made themselves private in response to the removal of an administrator key to the AMA process (... lots of other text ...) Major subreddits, including /r/4chan, /r/circlejerk and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, have also expressed solidarity through going private."
So you read the fist part, building a mental model of what's going on ("ok, so these subs went private, which means others listed did something different"), only to have to update it because someone decided to split the list in two, probably going for style.
I see this happening particularly in news reports and it's really, really annoying. You may actually fail to connect those two separate parts together if you're skimming.
If we do see another Digg-esque migration, where will those people move?
I've been looking at alternatives ever since all the stupid crap with mods came out (mods messing with submissions, resubmitting under their name, and deleting stuff they didn't agree with) and some of my favorite subreddits started to rot. And now, it feels like Reddit is really falling apart.
Any suggestions?
One of them will be lucky enough to gain enough traction to replace Reddit, though it will take a couple of years for the transition to complete.
I have next to no doubt that these are the death throes of Reddit. I'm not personally invested in these politics (though it is fascinating to watch unfold), but what I can say is that I'll gladly move away should the opportunity present itself. What I care about at this point is I would like to consume content and for some reason I can't. So now I'm sitting here writing a comment on Hacker News to publicly showcase my discontent when I could have been enjoying cat pictures.
Edit: Reminds me of HipChat. It went down on a workday for a long period of time and I knew about Slack, our engineering team was swapped over by end of day. I don't particularly care why your service is down, whether it's a service outage or a coup, I just care about how long it will be down for and whether or not I can expect this to be a pattern.
I've been disillusioned with reddit when I saw that the niche subreddits no longer get updated :/ and the bigger subreddits are ruled by an iron fist of mods. The content doesn't refresh as often as I'd like either (in the 2nd tier subreddits, the ones that aren't default but are still really popular).
Anyways, all good points. I used HC and Slack both and have to say that they seem almost identical to me.
I am with mine, and I encourage others to follow suite and try different tactics. Reddit is hardly the gold standard; but it is not without it's merits either.
[1] Only a week or so ago there was a huge outcry about censorship, which resulted in a lot of negative personal information being posted about the current Reddit CEO. Now we have this.
When she is involved in a AMA it seems to go well. Better than well, actually. When I see that she is helping out I pay more attention due to the fact there is someone helping guide the person in responses.
The AMAs are a big reason I enjoy reddit.
Does Reddit's competition of today have as much reach/popularity as Digg's did when that exodus occurred?
Imgur will probably see among the greatest benefit as Reddit erodes.
With Reddit's approach, you end up creating lots of competitors; given the right context, or given enough time, those competitors will bleed you out. Twitter figured that out with TwitPic et al.
If you want to see which default subreddits are running or down
/r/netsec and /r/programming are down.
I wonder it there's a market for a modern reboot of usenet.
They are pissing off the user base while not making any money.
Did they think a "lose/lose" solution was the direction to go in?
Regardless, they are just really fucking things up.
They can't seem to figure out what they are doing.
Do they even have a plan?
documentary about him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ
"As much as Victoria is loved, this reaction is not all a result of her departure: there is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits, which they feel is expressed by, among other things, the lack of communication between them and the admins, and their disregard of the thousands of mods who keep reddit's communities going. /u/nallen's response above is an example of one of the many responses to these issues."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter may help for the following.
We in Hacker News are a small percentage of the "Innovators" set. We are not who reddit is wanting to appeal to now.
Reddit started with Innovators like ourselves as a small site and grew to encompass "Early Adopters" from the other Internet communities, it has been growing out and nearly full of "Early Adopters" - it needs to get more people, and to do this it changes the demographic. It needs people like our relatives and co workers who just use Facebook. It needs to grow because more people equal more money. They can and do accept the loss of the original Innovators and some of the Early Adopters as part of the cost to draw in much more revenue.
Thus, removing hateful subreddits, cleaning up the place is part of that. Another is increasing mass market interests - adding celebs and politicians. Another is increasing revenue through sponsored posts, like what Twitter is doing.
Allegedly the reason why this admin was fired was because she was against increasing the amount of corporate sponsored/promoted AMAs, and she was more in favour of community friendly content.
Look at Google. France complains about Nazi related material. They block Nazi material in France. They index massive amounts of porn, and take down individual images that offend people. It's sub-optimal, but it largely works.
Now, the thing that has changed is that normal people have started getting a dose of the kind of speech that they consider "hate speech" IRL from sites like Reddit. What they are demanding is that fringe positions remain fringe positions.
Something as mainstream as Reddit will not be allowed to serve up red pill/racist/homophobe/far-right content. They will keep doing this stuff until that content goes somewhere else. Maybe that's a good thing...I don't know, but at least having it in one place made it easy to see what crazy people are up to these days. Know your enemy, etc.
As for the corporate thing...that's always going to seem schizophrenic...corporations aren't rational people. They make snap decisions that seem reasonable in the moment because they lack functional memories. Fuck em.
Want something different? Find a way to spread the cost of running something like Reddit over a larger group of people in a decentralized model. And then get ready for the us vs them to move to "inner circle" vs "outer circle"...
-- Technical challenges? No that doesn't seem right. Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this. The tools and technology are there.
-- Building a community is hard? This seems more in line with reality. Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?
-- Sites like this aren't the solution any more? This could be it. But if this isn't the solution, what is?
I haven't thought of all possibilities. But really, why not just replace it?
*edit: fixed typos, typing on phones is hard.
In general you do so with a huge corporate budget.
>Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?
That's the answer.
You only have a few ways to monetize the product. Direct advertising; banner ads. The ad market is going to crap though, everyone has them, large numbers of users block them, and payments are very low. Direct payments for features. Reddit has 'Gold' as a means to get premium features and help pay for the site. The other way that has been bandied about, but with no direct evidence that it occurs is indirect advertising. For example a movie star paying for an AMA to advertize for their new film.
Even then those things only work if you can get the people to come to your site in the first place. It's highly likely a large number of social sites have a good deal of vice in their founding. People come to the site looking for porn or other somewhat socially unacceptable topics, but end up staying for the other parts of the community. As the site grows you run in to the inevitable 'great purge' which can cause serious issues.
It costs money to run. Serious money if you're going to have employees. And, as voat have discovered, if you're going to become the favoured destination of the assorted gators, racists, pedo^h^h^h^hebeophiles, woman-haters, frozen peachers, and assorted bottom-of-the-barrel types that have been looking for reddit alternatives in the last few months, you may find it quite difficult to keep your hosting arrangements even if you can pay for them.
Does there exist good, empirical research on how different discussion models (linear vs. trees of comments, up/down-voting systems, etc.) affect quality of discourse, for some definition of quality?
I am curious, what are your thoughts on how one could go about attracting the best of reddit?
I am working on a personal project that is very similar, but I wouldn't try to compete with reddit to attract all the haters and celebrity-gossip kind of people. Do you have some ideas about what kind of startup could attract the most intelligent and creative parts of the community?
(right now my project is focused on writers, "reddit meets fictionpress", but it would be very easy to pivot into something broader, if I can come up with a smart way to do that)
Grid layout is still shit, It makes it harder to skim and keep track of where you were.
You might say: well, but it's important to explain our culture on the about page; to explain what we're all about. To that I say: no it's not, your users are not going to partake in, or come to understand, your site's culture via an about page. That happens on the site itself.
And even after going back to reddit I couldn't see any information on this until I cilcked /r/all.. looks like reddit censorship scandal is going out of hand :/
Those excellent people are the grassroots of the community you'd be joining.
It's why reddit and digg and facebook and twitter grew - they were better than the other sites, they pulled users in.
Voat is being used because reddit is pushing.
"I was subscriber to fatpeoplehate hate, so I did nothing; in fact I applauded it."
AMAgeddon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3byzzp/admins...
for extreme irony, compare this https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam... with this https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3bz8jp/right_now_admi...
I still don't know what to think of it, and I can't keep up with it either.. but I just hope it gets thoroughly archived and documented on sites other than reddit and imgur. Because while I won't condemn reddit on a whim and call it a bad actor, I also don't find any of this trustworthy at all. I'd even say, unless the /r/pics "takeover" was the "root mod" (or whatever it's called, I never made a subreddit) locking out all other mods, if this was actually admins protecting "their" assets, made by the community, that'd surely be crossing the line for me.
As would be paying lip service to mods as to how swell everything will be to get mods to get subs back up, while people with scheduled AMA still don't know how to get in touch with the people Victoria had the contact info for. I don't have a link for the last bit, and it was just a claim by someone anyway (didn't check if they actually were involved with AMA stuff), so don't take my word for it - but that mod mail really does read so fluffy while making no real commitments to anything, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Anyway, I would rather see blacked out subs in support of something I agree with, than active subs that are testament to a shameful episode and state of things. They have my support to black out all the things, for days, weeks and months. For how ever long is necessary. If reddit becomes a place putting effort into again, I'll enjoy it like nothing was ever gone. Otherwise, might as well go out with a bang and some pride. There is infinitely more where reddit came from, and maybe a better site will be born because of all this somewhere down the road. Maybe reddit can reform, but it clearly needs some boundaries, so this blackout has my full support. Enough already, users and communities are not dough to be shaped however one wishes, to be disrespected like helpless dependents. It's a bit like that Fight Club bathroom scene: "We cook your meals, we take care of you when you're sick, and we also make the sites that pay your salary worth visiting. Do not fuck with us."
Yeah I know I'm being a bit dramatic, please take this with a grain of salt. It makes me sad rather than angry or indignated. Still, I don't think this is cool, at all. It's just not on.
sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 http://reddit.com " >> /etc/hosts'