Reddit’s Chief Apologizes After Employee’s Dismissal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Victoria was the key person organizing IAMA guests across the whole of Reddit. She helped to enforced the strict policy that IAMA have that the person is actually there and not a PR rep fielding questions. And that the questions are real and generally keeping the quality and integrity high.
There has already been a number of high traffic subs that have decided to close down and move to voat.co or other sites.
It's telling that instead of addressing the community directly Pao and here group stage a PR blitz in the media trying to spin a false narrative instead of addressing Reddit first and dealing with Redditors concerns about moves to limit free speech. Commercialisation and firing of key community friendly staff. It shows total concept for Reddit users and the same sort of dishonest personality that would try to destroy the credibility of her former employer Kleiner Perkins with false gender discrimination lawsuits for 100 million. which she lost spectacularly with all 12 jurors siding with Kleiner Perkins.
Pao has shown on numerous occasions she is a toxic personality. And has no interest in Reddit and the communities there.
if anyone is planning on launching your FREEZE PEACH community platform NOW IS THE TIME...
The firing of the key employee may of been stupid, but not deserving of some of the hatred being gleefully promoted across Reddit. Trying to get her photo coming up for searches of Hitler, commenting on her physical appearance, all the horrible little shits on the internet are coming out in droves over this.
The petitions opening (and longest) paragraph is idiotic and attempts to assassinate her characters and it's sad that "censoring" a community promoting hatred of obese people is something that motivates people to take democratic action.
/u/kickme444 who have been running redditgifts, and have been running give-away events between users of reddit have also been fired, most notably the secret santa. He did a TedX talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phoUVH05kEg
It is an interesting move to lay-off your employees that are closest to the end-users, I hope reddit will survive their internal struggles.
It's sort of like a dream of every good employee that works for a shit CEO though. Perhaps there is some cosmic justice here and something that will be more common in the future. Where individuals are valued more and the leaders held my to account for all their tiniest failures. You know almost exactly the opposite of how reality works these days, where sociopath CEOs and founders ride on the coat tails of hard working employees and dump them when they've outlived their usefulness.
Please clarify this point as your slander changes direction at light speed. Is Reddit '50 racist neck beards' or 'all the little shits on the internet'?
I remember when this happened with Digg; Digg reached a certain level of success, but then discovered that it's existing users were a barrier to acquiring new users and getting revenue. They picked a fight with their power users, who left, but never got anybody to replace them, so then the spammers took over.
Digg users formed a diaspora and moved to reddit.
Many sections of reddit are overrun by the kind of people who hate Ellen Pao and everything she stands for. These people may have a point, but they are haters at the core and, like the Digg user base, they are a barrier to mainstream success.
I think reddit is going to look like a fight between an immovable object and an irresistable force and that just can't be good.
This is about a series of bad decisions by Pao and her 'new management' trying to make fundamental changes to how Reddit works which most Redditors think will damage the community and viability of the site. Possibly to the point of a mass exodus as Reddit is turned into DiggBook 2.0.
Narrative spinning about 'haters' and 'misogynists' is deflection. Trying to cover the bad decision making and contempt under a 'victim hood status'. Much like Pao used fake gender discrimination allegations to try and extort millions of dollars from her former employer. False victum hood and extortion is what Ellen Pao stands for. And perhaps anti free speach censorship and spreading toxic corporate marketing.
Now being a hater doesn't mean you're not right, but all of your valid issues are contaminated with the baggage that everybody involved is bringing in from the rest of their lives.
The site has been on a downhill slope for a while now and as shown, this isn't a localised incident, a lot of people are not only angry about the handling of Victoria's dismissal, but how the site is being run. Why now? Why is Ellen Pao only apologising for years worth of mismanagement of Reddit after the community took a stand? This goes beyond what just happened, this has been a long time in the making. It comes across as a forced apology because before all of this blackout controversy, they were doing nothing. The community was being ignored, mods were running rampant shadowbanning and removing threads, mad with power. And ironically mods want better tools and more power? The promotion of krispykrackers just goes to show how out-of-touch Reddit has become with its users.
It's great that they're acknowledging there are issues and that they will do better, but I think it is too late. Maybe I am wrong, but I just can't see things getting better or if they do, staying better for long. I have moved over to voat.co and when it comes back online, my 8 year old Reddit account will be nothing more than an effigy to a site that was once great. I personally have nothing against Ellen, the whole problem with Reddit goes well beyond her and members of the community also share in the blame. The centralised approach Reddit takes to management is its downfall and if they're not careful, we could see what happened to Digg when they messed over power users happen to Reddit as well (evident by the influx of users over at voat.co).
While Pao is also blamed, these problems are a reflection of a long-standing centralized management team.
Nothing drives Angry White Men on The Internet more ballistic than a woman or a person of color in a position of authority. You see the exact same thing with the sheer insanity the right-wing is driven to by President Obama's essentially centrist administration.
However, it seems quite clear to me that minorities in positions of authority or public visibility face a level of vitriol unlike that experienced by some boring old white guy. Look at the level of hatred directed towards Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama; look at the hatred directed towards a woman trying to present at a tech conference; look at the death threats Anita Sarkeesian has received for making YouTube videos on video games.