They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.
But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).
This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing.
Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.
Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's 'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of the users. I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they don't have control over their community.
This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.
I think the issue is that Pao (et al.) genuinely don't understand their community. That's the major source of the friction. Consequently, they can't figure out a realistic plan to build a healthy business around it. They seem to manage to piss a large percentage of their community off with every minor change they try to make. It's a bit sad because it's a huge community.
Possibly Aether (http://getaether.net/) might be something like what you have in mind.
The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became.
The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening.
They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins.
So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting.
Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.
But out of Reddit's entire user base how many are actually pissed off enough to go someplace else? Let alone how many are actually pissed off over this or other politics around Reddit and mods. I'd have to imagine the number is very small.
Keeping the minority of users that are actually producing content happy is what they have failed to do and is the real risk - if there's nothing to look at, the rest of the userbase will follow the content somewhere else.
The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?".
That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.
edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.
The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense. > The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO.
I have a hard time attributing recent events directly to Pao, though with her being CEO I guess ultimately the buck does stop with her.
> I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
That could well be the case (though I fail to see the connection), but that still does not explain why she was initially picked and that's what my question is about. I can't imagine it was just a roll of the dice.
It seems from easily available evidence that Reddit's core business challenge was taking a runaway successful online community and reliably monetizing it. If the CEO role at Reddit was primarily responsible for dealing with that problem, it's not surprising that the kind of person who filled it might not be congenial to message board nerds. The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.
The knee-jerk response to this obvious point is that someone brought in to monetize a community could easily damage it by being tone-deaf or compromising it in pursuit of profit. But most of the things Reddit Inc did to damage its community predate Pao, often by many years.
This is the stuff I think about when people point out that Pao was a terrible CEO for Reddit Inc because she didn't know how to send a private message.
I wonder if this is part of the problem. This is one reason why problems with Yishan-style CEOs needs to be fixed I think.
Human beings are poor at grasping complex and sometimes chaotic systems. Hence we concentrate our emotions on a single target. The amount of vitriol in this instance may or may not be warranted, but I'd hope that someone who took the job title of CEO was prepared for it.
As far as you know. Last time a reddit employee was fired and there was a public discussion around it, it didn't go so well for the employee.
Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech.
It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.