Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum | Hacker News Reader

Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

nytimes.com

302 pointsuptown305 comments

"We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less."

I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to NY to meet with Victoria and was told that the meeting was cancelled. As expected, panic ensued among the subreddit's moderators. Whether the firing was justified or not, the fact that Reddit's leadership didn't immediately see the consequences of their action on one of their most popular communities just shows their disregard. Or even worse, they realized the consequences and just didn't bother to help facilitate them. I mean these are real people with real meetings spending real dollars for the community, which is all run but volunteers, and Reddit's leadership didn't feel it was important enough to communicate with them to help avoid unnecessary consequences. I understand the frustration.

Ignorance more than callousness appears to be the sin here. From snippets of communications posted with the mods it looks like they weren't really aware of what Victoria did for the mods.

Since the community is their "product" I find it disconcerting that they're not more familiar with the details of how these relationships work and what Victoria actually did. I would actually find it more comforting if they were aware of all of this and made a rational business decision that may have been seen as callous, but they appear to have had very little clue as to what was actually going on. That doesn't bode well for future business decisions if they really don't understand their product.

Devils advocate, that is partly Victoria's fault. If your managers don't know what you do all day, I don't think it is surprising that you are fired. Yes, it is a sign off bad management, but it is also a sign off an employee not communicating up to management.

EDIT: The downvotes seem to indicate I wasn't clear. I'm not saying the Reddit management team thought Victoria wasn't doing any work. However, it was clear that Victoria was spending time doing things that management didn't know about. From the sound of it, Victoria saw work that needed to be done and did it. Her job responsibilities likely continued to expanded as IAMA grew. However if management truly didn't know how involved she was in that, that is a failing of both management for not staying involved in the process and her for not communicating up the extra work she was doing.

> If your managers don't know what you do all day

If your managers can't tell what you do all day when they merely need to go to reddit.com/r/IamA and see dozens of upvoted posts from celebrities whose top comment says, "Victoria is here helping me...", then I don't think you can really blame her for that.

I don't expect my boss to dive into my commit logs to figure out what I am doing. I instead tell him.

Do you tell your boss about the code you don't commit?

The code you don't commit is guaranteed to be bug-free, something you can't say about the code you do commit.

I am so reluctant to code now thank you.

If I expect this code to be relevant to my job and their evaluation of it: Sure. Why wouldn't I?

So I did the same when I was an employee, but I'll point out that this introduces a pretty strong adverse-selection effect. Time spent managing up is time not spent doing your job or building value for users. If managers rely simply on what their reports tell them, they select for people that can navigate internal politics well, not ones who do their job well. Over time the organization is filled with people whose attention is always focused upwards, not outwards, and then the company becomes bait for a startup.

A skilled executive makes sure they have a pulse on what's going on inside their organization beyond what they're told. Relatively few executives are that skilled.

I'm so glad you posted this. This has practical applications for just about anyone, especially those in enterprise environments (like me). I have been noticing this phenomenon but hadn't quite put it into words yet, and you've perfectly described it.

Really? I don't go bug my boss about everything I do. We have regular one-on-ones so that we can bring up any new issues, but he trusts me to get my job done and let him know if there's anything that needs doing/knowing. If everything was going well in the AMA scene, there seems little reason to waste time discussing it.

That said, they fired Victoria and didn't replace her with anyone. That tells me that they both didn't know what she did in her role, and also didn't care. Anyone assuming the role, even temporarily, even without any of her notes/schedule/documentation, could have just checked the AMA schedule to find out that an AMA was scheduled, and contacted the mods to see what the arrangement was. No one did.

This isn't your boss not knowing what your code does because you didn't tell him. This is your boss firing the IT guy and not telling anyone until someone's laptop needs fixing before a big meeting and there's no one who knows how to do it.

Devil's advocate here. If your boss doesn't check your commit logs, you should tell him what you're doing, and tell him that you're also doing things that you aren't actually doing.

I expect my boss to know that some people engage in dubious ethical practices to advance their own careers.

After all, if it were my job to do my boss's job, couldn't my boss be my boss's boss instead?

Your boss don't really need to see every commit to know what you are doing. It should be visible/understandable from the product. And most people who are beating the drums talking about what they are doing at micro level are more focused on making themselves look good than doing the work. So its a bad thing to rely upon.

And you should be fired first from your managerial post if you fire someone yet not know what kind of work they do and what they are responsible for. For that matter you should be blacklisted from holding any managerial position moving forward.

I've read reddit on and off for years and have never even noticed that.

We need to differentiate between fault and responsibility. Victoria may very well have been at fault, but the responsibility for steering the ship was management's and they appear to have been unaware that you needed someone in the engine room to make sure everything kept working.

Even if Victoria hid everything she did and didn't document anything, the tone of the initial response was one of surprise that seems to indicate they didn't fundamentally understand how everything worked.

This is the fundamental problem. This seems like the community equivalent of firing the IT guy and not telling anyone until someone's laptop needs fixing right before an important client meeting and finding out no one knows what to do about it.

If your managers thinks your're not contributing, then their first step should be to ask you, and ask your co-workers what it is you're doing, and to figure out if there's something that needs to be improved.

If their first impulse is to fire you if they think you're not really doing anything, then they're not doing their jobs.

EDIT: And this is part of the reason why I prefer to live somewhere with tolerable worker protections. E.g. in large parts of Europe it would be illegal to fire someone in this hypothetical situation without going through a proper process of issuing warnings and consulting with the employee to ensure the facts of the situation are on the table.

If you don't know what your direct reports are doing, why the heck are you their manager? If she's spending so much of her time dealing with AMAs, surely it's worth sitting down and going over her process regularly and how it's changed over time. If her management didn't take an interest in how the system worked, that's on them.

That said, it honestly seems like they didn't know or care. No one told any of the subs she helped moderate (not even one of the largest on the site) that Victoria had been let go. If they had any idea what she did at all, and had any interest whatsoever in keeping the community together, they would have at least tried to get that information to the people who would be affected. Instead, they shoved her out the door and called it done until a celebrity showed up at their door with an appointment and no one knew what to do.

Anyone taking over her role should have immediately checked to see what was happening. Even if she left no notes or schedule whatsoever, they could have checked the AMA schedule, talked to the mods, and gotten some kind of temporary plan in place. Instead, they just let the whole thing collapse and then tried to sweep it under the rug later. It wasn't that they didn't know what she did, it's that they didn't care and didn't think it needed doing.

To be fair, I don't think the full reason why they were let go was ever disclosed, just hearsay and rumors.

I've observed situations where people had to be let go immediately (e.g. deceitful resume) even though they were in some pretty critical positions that set us back after losing them.

There could have been a reason for the suddenness.

This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replaceable if the site rules didnt protect them. The moderators think they are special, the admins see them as interchangeable. Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. It is a task that could be crowdsourced better so more people are doing less work. Slashdot had better moderation tools than reddit. When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced. The reddit admins should fear the power they have given the moderators, and are probably brainstorming ways to reduce it.

The "woe is me" cry of the moderators doesnt resonate with the majority of the userbase, because the moderators volunteered. The apathetic majority doesnt comment in situations like this, so you wont hear their voices. In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out. But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power. Theyre not fooling me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

> Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators.

They care about the quality of the comment they see on the subreddits they follow. That transitively means they really care about the plight of the moderators. They just don't know it.

> Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters.

On the well-moderated subreddits—which are increasingly the largest ones—they do a hell of a lot more than spam filtering. Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit.

> When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced.

I'm not saying they couldn't be replaced. But if you do that, those subreddits will fundamentally change. And, in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.

> In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out.

I don't think reddit needs to worry much about moderators leaving. But they should really worry about content contributors leaving. The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.

>they really care about the plight of the moderators

no they dont. its like henchmen in a movie. if some fall more will take their place. its a thankless task. they dont care at all about the individual, they just care that the group functions. the group will function without the individual as long as there are reenforcements.

>in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.

probably to another subreddit, like when /r/trees replaced /r/marijuana (thats still a win for reddit corp)

>no they dont. its like henchmen in a movie. if some fall more will take their place. its a thankless task

I find most people who say things like this have 0 moderating experience, or at least no experience handling communities larger than 100 (or even 1,000) people.

Administration connection with moderators is important. If it's lacking, people willing to moderate will go to sites with better tools and better access to administration. There are "alternative Reddits" popping up, such as voat.co, to fill that position.

Mods aren't as easy to replace as people think they are. Finding someone who fits and follows the community culture, is able to act as a mediator in case of community conflicts, and enforce the rules with as little bias as impossible is actually quite hard and a moderator unable to do this can easily kill a community.

There is a fine balance in the relationships between lurkers::creators::mods::admins.

There was a post on reddit by a user emphasizing your reasoning but reaching a different conclusion. The user argued that he didn't not care about the plight of the moderators or content creators in one bit, he just wanted to selfishly consume his content.

He recognized the importance of the people that do care in creating the community that provides the quality of experience he desires and he was quick to emphasize that the second the quality drops he will find a new community.

The quality in subreddits are a direct function of the capabilities of their moderation staff.

thats the post i linked to at the bottom of my comment

> The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.

I'm tired of that false comparison being repeated over and over again.

* reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0]. Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster. If anything, Digg v4 can be looked at as a failed last-ditch effort to stop the bleeding. Honestly, reddit can't die yet because there's nothing there to kill it. It's the same reason Facebook is still the king of social media even though everyone hates it.

* Digg had a number of other problems, as well. People had lambasted Digg for years due to power users and a culture of vote manipulation. I remember from that period, almost every post on Digg's front page was from the same 4 people or so. Digg also allowed and encouraged vote brigades: they had a site feature allowing you to send vote requests to anyone on your friend's list, and the power users mostly operated by using pyramid-like organizations where they'd send a link to a group of people, each member of that group would pass the link on to another group, and so on (this was mostly done through offsite tools like AIM and IRC, not the site's vote request feature). Digg was A-OK with that: their only rule was against automated voting using bots (Mark Cuban's brother got banned twice for violating that). At Digg, there was a widespread (and true) belief that if you weren't one of the fabled power users, you'd never get anything on the front page. This is one of the reasons reddit has a site-wide rule against vote manipulation. If you notice, reddit still has a wide variety of posters making the front page.

* Digg was all about the front page, and there was no real community aspect. Digg had a small handful of admin-created categories (which launched with v3), and you could browse the new queue, and that was it. The whole site was about mindless link propagation. On the other hand, reddit's signature feature is its user-created subreddits. Rather than just being a place for people to share links, redditors organized into communities based on things like shared hobbies (think places like /r/makeupaddiction and /r/blacksmith), fandoms (everything from /r/comicbooks to /r/mylittlepony to /r/kamenrider), and support groups for marginalized communities (e.g., /r/asktransgender, /r/actuallesbians). Digg had nothing of the sort. That's a fundamental incentive for people to stay on reddit: even if the front page goes to shit, you're not going to see something like the trans community or any of the numerous fandoms that have a presence on reddit pack up and leave. With Digg, wrecking the front page wrecked the whole site.

* Digg v4 drastically changed the site functionality. They stripped out a huge amount of site features, including downvotes on posts, friend pages, and categories (none of which HN has, by the way), and articles by mainstream publishers were weighted over other links. Nothing reddit has done has changed site functionality like that.

[0] http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/10/04/digg-vs-reddit-traff...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/03/digg-... (published over two months before Digg v4 launched)

[2] http://mashable.com/2010/07/16/reddit-traffic/

The digg exodus didnt happen overnight, I agree. But the v4 was the final nail in the coffin. It really started around the time digg banned anyone posting the DeCSS key. A lot of users started trickling away or splitting their time between reddit and digg. Reddit promoted itself as a free-speech platform at the time. Reddit self posts got posted to digg more often and more digg users came to reddit. After v4 there were some new accounts but actually the trickle had been going on for some time.

Whilst digg changed functionality reddit is trying to change its ethos, something that is much more dangerous than changing functionality. its ethos is what brought users in and people are more likely to leave because of changes to the fundamental ethos of a site rather than the functionality of the site.

I don't think most of reddit's content creators care one iota about freedom of speech.

Most people are used to vBulletin/phpBB/etc. forums that are strictly moderated. Besides, while the admins might have previously held a hands-off attitude, the subreddit moderators don't. Most subreddits have strict requirements for what can and can't be posted to them; go look at the sidebar of a big default like /r/pics or /r/askreddit. In this sense, reddit is far more restrictive than Digg, which just had a handful of site-wide admins (again, Digg had nothing like subreddits) enforcing a small amount of rules.

I can tell you right here that most of the people posting cat pictures to /r/aww, memes to /r/adviceanimals, discussions on /r/askreddit, etc. couldn't care less about their freeze peaches. They're not posting their cat pictures to /r/aww because of some mythical commitment to free speech; they're posting their cat pictures to /r/aww because that's where people post cat pictures. And the same goes for people who post to smaller, community-oriented subreddits: they're posting to these subreddits instead of various forums because they can reuse their existing reddit account and the subs are easily discoverable (Are you a fan of something? Then put an /r/ before it and you'll probably find a subreddit dedicated to it!). Probably the single biggest barrier to posting on forums is having to register a new account for each forum, and you don't have to worry about that on reddit.

In fact, "free speech" can be a detriment. Lots of people were turned off to reddit when Anderson Cooper brought /r/jailbait to the public eye. People who could've been posting cat pictures to /r/aww instead hesitated and said "nah, I'm not gonna post this to the same site where people post sexualized pictures of children". I'm active in some IRC channels, and whenever reddit comes up, I always have one or two regulars saying things like "reddit is a shithole because they allow /r/coontown and /r/picsofdeadkids" (VERY VERY NSFW do not browse at work).

For every freeze peaches zealot lost when /r/jailbait was banned, they gained a dozen more users who didn't want to be associated with borderline child porn. If most people cared about freedom of speech above all else, 8chan would be the most popular site on the Internet. But instead, 8chan has a reputation for being a cesspool, and admitting to being an 8channer is a good way to become a pariah.

I think a fair amount of people were perfectly fine with the company promoting free speech, while also encouraging heavily moderated subs like /r/askscience. the two preferences dont conflict at all.

> reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0].

I'm not sure exactly what that graph is showing. Is it just referrals to the author's own site? If so, that's likely biased.

It doesn't seem to line up with the numbers in your second link.

> Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster.

Digg had started to dip, but I think that was mostly from removing the DiggBar and Google's ranking changes. It had definitely plateaued before v4, but I think v4 was the tipping point where the critical mass of users abandoned Digg and (for better or worse) arrived at Reddit.

> On the other hand, reddit's signature feature is its user-created subreddits.

Yes, this is the smartest thing Reddit has done. I remember at the time people saying subreddits were totally broken because you had to submit a link to multiple subreddits separately. They argued that you should submit a link once and "tag" it to be in multiple subreddits.

I knew that they were deliberately decentralizing their communities so that each could develop its own personality and culture. It was an incredibly smart move.

At the same time, there is a lot of interaction between subreddits, and reddit still has a front page that is viewed heavily by lurkers. This means "global" things can still affect reddit as a whole.

> That's a fundamental incentive for people to stay on reddit: even if the front page goes to shit, you're not going to see something like the trans community or any of the numerous fandoms that have a presence on reddit pack up and leave.

That's only true for users that actually have accounts and tune their front page. I think a surprisingly large number don't do that.

Also, the social reputation of the site as a whole affects how people use it. 4chan also has a few nice subcommunities, but you don't want to tell your friends how much you like 4chan because they associate that name with its most toxic elements.

"Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit."

I don't see how this is the case. Replace spam with 'off-topic' and you have it. It really isn't an earth-changing thing to filter spam/off-topic/rude/offensive commentary (and it could be argued that even on the larger sub-reddits, that a good job isn't necessarily being done of that).

"Instilling the voice and culture" sounds like self-aggrandizement to me.

But I would be willing to be corrected.

As a counter-example I give /r/AskHistorians. I am not a historian and not affiliated with the site. It is very tightly moderated and it works. Questions and comments that are off-topic or low-quality are removed. Answers must meet quality standards. The repondents take more time and effort in the answers than your average university teaching assistant. If you want to tell jokes or puns there are many other subreddits to go to. The result is one of the best forums I've ever seen on the internet. I'm not even a history buff but I admire that subreddit.

I will agree that few subreddits reach this level. The moderators of AskHistorians put in the effort. The responders put in even more.

askhistorians is one of the only counter examples to my point, specifically because moderators have domain knowledge. they are nowhere near as easily replaceable. iama mods are not expert interviewers, they are trash collectors and coordinators.

something else you will notice about askhistorians is that it doesnt have the usual guard. you dont see greatyellowshark, britishenglishpolice, klyde, krispykrackers, manwithoutmodem, maxwellhill, agentlame. the same reoccurring 100 people have taken control of a large portion of reddit (measured by subscriber)

I think part of the reason askhistorians works so well is because it exists outside the influence of that cabal. They come to their own decisions instead of blanketing policies over hundreds of subreddits at once.

> it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike

Unionized laborers collectively bargaining for more money from the company they work for is almost the exact opposite of unpaid volunteers maintaining the profit making infrastructure of a for profit corporation.

you clipped the second half of the sentence ... "people who thought they were above being replaced"

Sure, I wasn't trying to be disingenuous. The difference I was illustrating was that asking for respect and communication is different than money and benefits.

They are certainly replaceable, but they just as certainly not fungible.

Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else)

They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things can improve.

I agree with this. Many social networks (friendster, myspace, Digg, etc) die of community collapse. If someone funded voat.co so they could keep their servers up and the mods and community jumped ship reddit's business would take a serious hit.

They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process.

I'm not holding my breath. Reddit has promised moderators better tools and users better transparency and more features for months and years. So far, all those promises have been completely empty, and I see nothing to suggest things will be different this time.

Put more crudely, at least two people on the reddit staff, Ohanian and Pao, are completely full of shit.

That's also possible.

I totally agree that Reddit is an old boys club. But this is how all online communities seem to work: age = power and respect. How would you solve this problem? It's been like that since newsgroups. It seems to be just a human tendency.

slashdot randomly assigned the task of moderation to logged in users. that moderation was then metamoderated. it was just part of your duty as a logged in user to contribute a little metadata about content. http://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml

The Reddit equivalent to this is voting, and then the Reddit equivalent to meta-moderation is moderation.

Not really. Reddit's system is a pale shell of Slashdot's system and doesn't have any kind of "watching the watchers" features.

Imagine how Reddit would be if you could pick reasons for votes, and then, say, filter posts so you see things which were upvoted for being insightful, rather than being merely funny.

Reddit moderation is about controlling submissions, not voting on comments.

Last time I checked slashdot's submissions are controlled by its staff.

Not sure why this got downvoted. IMO this was probably one of the best ways I've seen moderation done on comments online. When you got a chance to metamod you took it seriously since there was no guarantee that you would consistently get it.

That worked great for a vertical focus. Not sure how it would work with as big of horizontal focus as reddit.

Slashdot's sortition was reasonably decent. Its moderation system, based on finite bounded votes (-2 - +5) though was inherently cripling, as well as the lack of convergence. Any one moderator could shift votes by a full step, regardless of how many others had moderated.

Despite a low (<6 digit) userID, I abandoned moderation a long time ago.

More recent developments have further deteriorated the site... Oddly enough, also utlimately trust-related.

And, it turns out, based on trust violations of another Dice property, SourceForge.

Fair points, but the comment "because the moderators volunteered" made me cringe.

I have a great deal of respect and sympathy for mods because I've helped moderate other forums and the task is both rewarding, unrelenting, and filled with ceaseless drama. Even though they volunteered I still give them a lot of credit if they're running a successful board. It takes a lot.

I'm really intrigued to see if you're correct and we will eventually see mechanisms to replace mods. StackOverflow has moderator elections yearly, but the company has a tight control on the direction of the product. Mods have a lot more freedom to dictate the course of a board so I don't think elections would work for every board. Would be interesting to see though.

> But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power.

I was a moderator and I left...

Also League of Legend mod left not too long ago, he had other responsibility and being a moderator was taking a toll on him and LoL is a big subreddit compare to my subreddit.

So you're argument doesn't hold for all.

It also ignore the fact that Reddit is partly run by volunteer people, moderators. You can't just handwave this fact by saying people are power hungry. The fact is if people leave like Digg then Reddit would be screwed.

if every iama moderator stepped down, new ones would assume the mantle

> Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. It is a task that could be crowdsourced better so more people are doing less work.

Like an upvote/downvote system.

I guess the only concern I can think of is that if the majority of content submitters are angry, they may become less involved, switch to being commenters/lurkers, or move on to another site entirely. If the content diminishes, then the users might frequent the site less or look elsewhere.

I'm not trying to make any predictions of doom or anything (frankly, I think this kerfuffle is just a flash in the pan), but an unstable community can have an impact on the majority of users if enough people get fed up.

Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club

Many reddit moderators have caused many subreddits to feel like webforums from the early 2000's. Many are heavy-handed and feeling their power a bit. There are some subreddits where a newbie can carefully read all of the instructions about posting, try their best to comply, then still have their post removed or down-voted, then be told that all such posts should be in a certain weekly discussion.

Part of the challenge with that is the available tools.

If there were more tools for re-parenting, editing and revising, or otherwise going through an editing process for submissions, the process could be far less confrontational. Medium operates in this manner, from what I understand.

On Reddit, there's no such cycle. There's no concept of an editorial submission queue (though some subs can and do hold all submissions for approval via AutoModerator hacks). Moderators cannot edit self-posts, even to correct obvious issues (misspelling, broken formatting, broken links). Not even the submitter can correct errors in titles, for which the only option is to delete and re-submit content (losing, of course, all discussion). I'm OCD enough that I do this, though my own subs are small enough that the content loss isn't overly significant.

In other words: many of the apparent limitations of Reddit moderation are the result of poor and or outgrown moderation tools.

Though even at best, the editorial process is brutal, and for newbies can be quite frustrating. Take a look at Wikipedia, where even with collaborative editing, revision history, controls, etc., I'm told that conflicts occasionally occur.

I've had the same thoughts through this ordeal. If it's such a burden go ahead and stop being a mod. There's plenty of users that would gladly take your place. Yet I've not heard of any doing so.

Letting Victoria go probably sucks since she helped coordinate so much. But that kind of chaos or disorganization happens in any company I've worked for when a key employee is let go. Large corporations with paid employees don't always get this right. So to me Reddit's actions were no surprise, once the decision is made the employee is notified and shown the door.

Most companies will make plans to deal with associated problems, though, particularly when the company dictates the timing. I would expect problems if an employee suddenly quit without notice or became somehow incapacitated, but reddit seems to have made no effort to cover her job. It's as if they didn't realize what she was doing.

Reddit's moderator system isn't perfect, by a long shot. As with its voting systems, it's subject to abuse: calous moderation, power-tripping, and a lack of integrity, if not outright corruption. Reddit's own rules make ensuring quality moderation difficult -- admins cannot remove moderators unless they violate site rules. This leads to situations such as /r/xkcd being overtaken by a group of neo-nazi holocaust denying anti-semitic MRA promotors. Eventually resolved (see the subreddit's wiki for details).

But: Reddit absolutely relies on moderators. Which means that it's putting power in the hands of an unpaid workforce.

I actually find Reddit's moderation tools and systems pretty useful and better than most, though I manage only two small subs (each <300 subscribers)

So, no, individual Redditors may not individually care about the personal plights of moderators, much as you probably don't put much thought into the working conditions of the person who installed and adjusted the brakes of the car heading toward you. But you absolutely have a vested interest in the consequences of their work.

More on what does and doesn't work well at Reddit, from about a year ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...

But that's exactly why the moderators are important. Overwhelmingly most redditors are lurker content sponges. As soon as the people who invest in making the content and maintaining the content sources leave, so will the vast majority of users who consume it.

actually there have been plenty of rebuttals to this sort of statement, so I will briefly paraphrase the general content for you. Most users dont care, they dont care about reddit, they dont care about the mods, they dont care about the drama, all they want is their new content. They have no loyalty and would jump ship to an alternative site quite easily if the content was appearing elsewhere first. So if those mods/content creators to go to voat.co, or whatever alternative is being suggested, so will apathetic users who dont care where they get their fix.

Redit wasnt the first social media sharing site, digg.com was way pout in front for a long time, then came along v4 and killed the site dead in its tracks. Users fled because they changed the way stories were submitted and who submitted them. All those apathetic users jumped ship to mainly reddit and whilst reddit was growing and catching digg in term sof page views etc, Digg's failure is what boosted reddit to the number 1 position and the same thing can happen again.

> They are landowners

Landowners who don't actually own the land they spend so much time improving.

So more like sharecroppers, actually.

The negative tone of this comment may be off-putting for some, but aside from that, this is very insightful. Calling "we do this because we love the community" a veneer especially makes a lot of sense to me, based on what I've seen of Reddit mods.

Please don't quote South Park.

It's interesting that you're quoting that line as "the heart" of the piece, when it's the one line that seemed to reveal a less-than-reasonable motive: most of the rest of the editorial was about the way Taylor was fired, but this line was complaining that she was fired at all.

As an outsider to this drama, it sure sounds like people are angry mainly because this person was fired, and they liked her. They're clinging to the details of the way she was fired to give some weight to that indignation.

I have yet to see anything that looks like disregard for reddit's business. On the contrary, everything I have seen has implied that reddit is trying to monetize the community, and the community does not like it.

Of course, I don't have any inside information, so I could be wrong on all counts, but the rumor is that Victoria was fired for resisting turning AMAs into a revenue stream. I have seen other moderators complaining that they have been feeling a push to monetize their work, and have been strongly resisting it as it would hinder free speech.

While the moderators are probably correct, it points more to a basic disagreement about what the site is. Most redditors feel that the site is all about community, and maintaining said community is the #1 goal. But the actual management team of the business surely needs to be looking at monetization.

That is the core disagreement - it is not about recent events, it is about the fact that one side wants to monetize reddit, and the other side does not.

Again, not actually knowing anything, this could be way off base... it is just my perspective as an outside observer.

Just a later note... since I wrote this, Sam Altman and others have repeatedly stated that they are not worried about monetization in the short-term. So I was way off-base...

Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management.

This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. That too is a legitimate complaint, one that shouldn't be shouted down or conflated with shameful behavior on the part of relatively few individuals in the community.

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. The subreddits shut down last month were all hate groups that were targeting individuals for harassment and posting their photographs without permission in order to attack them. I've personally seen my pictures posted by one of these groups twice, and the day before those subs got banned, there was a very upset mother asking what recourse she had because these hate groups were posting pictures of her underage child and refused to take them down (and I distinctly remember this because I was one of a handful of people who helped teach her how to message the admins).

> The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.

>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power users to treat the majority of users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing the majority of users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of the entire Reddit community.

So it's okay when reddit does it because they're a private corporation and can censor whatever they want, but when the mods of a subreddit censor themselves there's a problem?

Hypocrisy and double standards.

I don't think you're correctly characterizing the subreddit shutdowns.

When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.

Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy.

As such, it was entirely justified.

You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit.

The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again.

Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.

You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the company?

so everyone who visits the Daily Mail website is part of the community?

I would say any regular visitor is part of the community. There is no requirement to give back to a community in order to be a member. It is just a group of people who share a connection due to common interests or objectives.

It doesn't matter if the 90 don't feel strongly. What happens when the 10 move to another site?

And what site would they move to given the current options? Reddit might as well be the only game in town now a days pretty much.

I remember when Slashdot seemed like the only game in town. Things can reach a tipping point very quickly.

What was the proper successor to Slashdot? Digg?

I somewhat lost touch during that period. When I came up for air, it seemed to be HN, StackOverflow, and Reddit (~2009 or so).

SA and Fark were both pretty big internet communities back in the prime of Slashdot. In that I remember there were quite a few friendly (and less than friendly) rivalries going between the three.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

People have been exploring options for years. I've got a few spots / candidates myself.

I guess I was thinking of a site that the of entirety (or nearly all of) the 10/101ths of Reddit users which make up the theoretical strong feelers would move to.

As in order to attract most of them a single site would need to both be able to handle the traffic and have a broad appeal across subjects. Maintaining such a site with that much headroom for users with only their current user base to generate ad revenue I assume is problematic and I would be surprised if any single site currently could handle a mass migration like that (except maybe Tumblr which I have my doubts would appeal to this portion of the Reddit population).

So while a mass exodus could take place people would likely scatter to different sites, which might not make any single other site 'it' enough to attract the remaining masses. Or the exodus takes place over time, which I consider the likely situation, having seen the effective death of many internet communities prior to the beast which is Reddit.

If they leave over time Reddit doesn't need to ask what it should do when the 10 leaves, it needs to ask what it should do when the 10 starts to leave.( my guess would be they need to get them to stop leaving, or get others to step up and take their place as people that feel strongly about the site in its then state, or buy the site they are leaving to).

They don't necessarily have to have strong feelings about the community, but if you annoy the 9 + 1% of content creators (curators, submitters, whatever), there's nothing left for the 90% to do, and they'll move on to the next big thing out of a lack of interest.

The people who are complaining the loudest about the site's failures aren't members of the 90% of lurkers - they're members of the 9% of occasional contributors or the 1% of prolific contributors. And they're the ones that will make or break the site, so blowing them off as "not the majority" seems like a really awful idea.

> It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.

Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?

I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.

Subscription numbers on a default sub are useless.

> and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?

And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number.

Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.

It's very possible that the majority didn't support the shutdowns, but that support went far beyond the moderators is a fact easily ascertained by looking at the threads.

Voting on Pao's comments visualised:

https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png

From https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ell...

> Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.

To be honest, it's hard to argue either way. Going by your indication, if we look at /r/all the past week and all the submissions comparing Ellen Pao to Kim Jong-Il or Mao Zedong, would you say reddit widely supports this comparison?

Meta-observation: the fact that it's difficult to divine the intent of users on a site who'se primary claim to fame is being able to divine the intent of users suggess problems with the mechanisms in which the intent of users is divined.

Pretty much the point I'm planning on making to /u/krispykrackers the /r/modnews thread.

I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.

One of the point of subreddits is to let people create their own rules (whatever those rules might be) and enforce them at their own discretion. As long as people aren't breaking reddit's global rules then subreddits should have the right to implement whatever rules they see fit, including heavy moderation. What the parent post was complaining about was censorship performed at the admin level (reddit's management), not the moderator level. Stuff like shadowbans (which have been increasing a lot lately), removing posts from /r/all and so on.

It's a cognitive bias. The assertion from the admins was pretty clear regarding the harassment of individuals and threats of violence, but rather than acknowledge their prejudice, some have tried to make it into a first amendment issue. On a privately owned website.

There is no public ground on the Internet. Everything is owned by someone or some corporation. Our ideas about free speech will have to adapt to that reality, or they will be lost entirely.

Part of the problem was that there was no transparency and almost anything can count as "harassment" - for example, I've seen journalists accuse people of harassment because they've searched their name on Twitter and found people mocking some of their more ill thought-out articles. If you actually dug into the details it was obvious why the admins banned /r/fatpeoplehate, but few did and those details didn't make the news either.

Key distinction for sure, but how would transparency impact the people affected by the prejudice?

If you had evidence of harassment and violent threats against individuals and factored it into your decision to close a 150,000 community, would you release the information about the evidence?

Just because the Amendment doesn't apply doesn't mean the ideals behind it are irrelevant. I could choose to exclude all individuals of a certain race from my home. No law could prevent me from doing that. But people would still be against me for the same reasons that there exists laws that prevent discrimination by government or businesses. It just seems most people do not articulate the difference between 'wrong because I like the First Amendment' from 'wrong because I like the ideals behind the First Amendment'.

Yes it does. If you banned vandals and violent people from your private property for their malicious behavior, people would not band against you or cry about first amendment "ideals". Ignoring select information, such as the reasoning behind the bans, is exactly what cognitive bias is.

If you honestly think that what Reddit did is the equivalent of racism, then that is very clear proof that you have a bias.

>If you banned vandals and violent people from your private property for their malicious behavior, people would not band against you or cry about first amendment "ideals".

The government is allowed to ban such people from its premises as well. You choose a poor example.

As for the reasoning behind the bans, you are ignoring the unequal application of those bans which shows such claimed reasons to have been lies.

>If you honestly think that what Reddit did is the equivalent of racism

I never called it the equivalent of racism. I used racism as an example of where the ideals that ban the government, while not banning the individual, can be used to cast moral judgment upon the individual. That you could confuse these gives evidence to your own strong bias.

It's a perfect good example because it's analagous to what Reddit did, and you're splitting hairs because it doesn't fit your own narrative on racism and moral judgement that you crafted for your own personal reality.

You even admit that you don't think that what reddit did is the equivalent of racism, so you admit your analogy isn't even relevant to the situation. Just as if you gave the analogy of "people judge a bar that doesn't let you bear arms because of second amendment ideals!", it's still moot, because while yes, they do pass moral judgement, it's completely irrelevant from people selectively ignoring safety reasons behind the firearm ban.

Passing moral judgement that resulted from a bias is still a bias.

I don't know, quite a few users were in full support of the move. The likely ones who were not simply knew nothing of what is going on as a great many users are simply not interested or unable to understand.

It was selective censorship. There are many subs,some quite well known, who are more flagrant than some of the subs shut down. FatPeopleHate was the most famous that was canned and it was likely at the request of IMGUR staff as they were having a pissing contest with content posters. There are quite a few very racists and sexist subs left so this was highly selective. As, a SJW dream hit which many labled the Reddit Wedding.

Personal stories aside, individual posters are who should be banned for violating site rules, not entire subs and certainly not their mods as many of them were trying to enforce rules only to be shot down by reddit admin

Your language is pretty strong and one-sided -- 'petulant moves...to treat their users as pawns'? Have you even been paying attention? A lot of those moderators actively sought the opinions of their subreddits before blacking out. It was often the communities, and not the moderators, instigating those decisions.

The censorship claims do not just apply to the hateful subreddits that were shut down -- censorship happens in more insidious ways, too. A lot of posts involving the Reddit debacle have been swept away, comments deleted, users shadowbanned. I think this is the kind of censorship that's being highlighted.

Because the language on the other side is, what, carefully reasoned and neutral in tone?

> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

Well the moderators say that was only part of it, but after reading your whole comment it seems you're just here to push your authoritarian political agenda under the guise of social justice by ignoring half the facts.

>And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing.

Half your comment history is disturbing. I support the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate, but you're trying really hard to paint the parent comment in bad light to push your political agenda. They never said they support FPH, but you make it seem as if they must be a "disturbed" individual. They said that the censorship is heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently.

It would be pretty hard to push your authoritarian political agenda without demonizing others though.

> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

As stated in the article, this was one of the reasons. The other reason is as you would suspect:

> The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.

No, it was supported by a loud and vocal minority of witch-hunters.

Most people just want to use reddit normally.

How do you know that?

I don't think poster knows for sure but you can assume based on traffic levels to comments and just general web stats. A majority of users don't comment on anything. Most people don't even create an account to vote. They probably don't even know what was going on.

That seems like a pretty silly argument. You can literally use it as an argument against any sort of change because "most people don't vote."

In fact they do vote, not with upvotes and comments but with their views. Those views indicate the place is somewhere they like spending their time, which is primarily a function of the moderators and the people posting content to the subreddit in the first place (the "vocal minority"). Since they already show they appreciate the work of those people by regularly viewing the content, it's actually more likely they agree with that minority by default than disagree.

Maybe they do agree? We don't really know because they are the "non-vocal majority". I'm willing to bet a large portion have no interest in reddit's internal politics or the mods struggle. They just want their cat pics. I do agree that they find value in the content or they wouldn't keep coming back and that the content comes from the minority. Reddit is really walking the edge. Things like this are why a bunch of users switched to reddit from digg in the first place. I don't think they will hesitate to do it again. They will follow the content submitters.

Most social sites seem pretty similar as far as user interaction other than click through. I got 60k page views from one top HN post, a couple hundred upvotes, and probably less than 100 comments on the thread and my blog.

If they contribute nothing to the community, then why should I care how they feel about the blackout?

That really echoes the response by Ellen Pao herself in the New York Times article [1]:

> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that most of Reddit users were not interested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.

That may be true as the "lurkers" main interest is to consume the information made available by voluntary work of the contributors and moderators) and they, of course, don't benefit in the short term from the blackout.

But it is important to remember that this "vocal minority" is the part of the audience that contribute the most to the success of the site, and they > do it for free.

And, being charitable and assuming that the demands of these volunteers are valid, the shut down was a minor inconvenience to the passive audience but one that can bring change and improvement in the long term.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato...

It's not as simple as that. I'm a moderator on several subreddits and, via moderator mail and private messages, monitored events during the shutdown. The impression that I got from speaking to other moderators and users of diverse subreddits across the site is that many of them feel a sense of pent up frustration toward Reddit. The mismanagement of AMA was the straw that broke the camel's back, and so many of them closed in solidarity with IAMA, and as a form of protest. It was not a witch hunt by any means, but simply an expression of "We're all fed up with this. Something needs to change". The protest was effective at getting Reddit leadership to rethink their actions and change course.

It's true that many Reddit users are "lurkers" who simply read the site and never contribute. These people probably never have had cause to become frustrated by the Reddit admins. However, among those who actively contribute, a surprisingly high fraction, from my personal observations, seem to be upset.

I can also say that there was debate among moderator staff on a number of subreddits. It's not as if everyone went along with it unilaterally. However, when moderators of other subs learned how poorly the situation was being handled, and learned how condescendingly Reddit staff responded, the backlash surged. Take for example the snide comments that Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanion wrote to users who expressed concerns: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...

Or the unhelpful, brusque way that Reddit handled AMAs during that time: http://i.imgur.com/ICSz7Xp.jpg (After reading, compare to statements from AMA mods about how helpful, supportive, and responsive Victoria was.)

I was initially skeptical about the shutdown, but seeing this evidence with my own eyes was enough to swing me into the "pro shutdown" camp or at least the "I don't oppose the shutdown" camp.

The responses from the community in these threads does not give me the impression of a witch hunt:

https://www.reddit.com/r/modtalk/comments/3byqjc/we_hear_you...

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

Reddit and Alexis subsequently apologized and said they didn't realize the "depth of the frustration", but actions like this certainly contributed. Treating people with contempt is always going to make a situation worse. If Reddit had responded promptly, professionally, and respectfully, I doubt so many subreddits would have shut down, and it would have been resolved much sooner. I personally had no complaint with Reddit staff prior to the shutdown, but their handling and response to it concerned me. A company's staff should never treat their users that way. It should not take a massive backlash for admins to think, "Maybe I shouldn't be snide and condescending." The people running an organization need to be the mature ones in the room. The shutdown was Reddit users calling them out on their behavior.

Edit: Why the downvotes? Is this comment not constructive?

> They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.

r/Cooking went down. They had a vote, and 209 out of 230 people voted to go dark. That sounds like an overwhelming majority! But when you realize that the subreddit has 310,000 subscribers, it means that it went dark because less than 0.1% of the subscribers wanted it to. You can't draw any conclusion of support from that.

Hey, not much different from US federal elections!

From what I saw the shutdowns began on Friday evening and subs started coming back on the Saturday morning (EST, and it was a holiday weekend in the US).

As it was a spur of the moment thing, subreddit mods couldn't have polled users for more than an hour or two or the momentum would've been lost

Yeah, that comes across as a hand-waving dismissal. 203 out of 230 voters in a one hour window in a community of 31,000 is -not- indicative of consensus, no matter how you slice or dice it.

Aggrieved users are welcome to take it up with the mods of /r/cooking, or make their own spinoff sub - that's the beauty of reddit.

Can't edit my original post, so here will have to do.

Do you honestly think that every sub which went dark for a few hours (when a large percentage of their users were probably asleep) should've held a week long 'should we go private or not?' poll?

How many of those 310,000 evens till go to r/cooking? This is like some app promoting it self based on total users instead of active users.

Given a population of 310,000 and a sample size of 230 you would have 95% confidence that 91% +/- 7% of your userbase is in support of shutting down the subreddit with your numbers.

So yes, you can draw a conclusion of support from that. This is how polling works.

If it was an independent sampling, maybe. Which it absolutely was not.

The problem with shutting down the hateful subreddits is that they didn't communicate clearly. In that, they left a lot of room for rumors and speculation about why that sub was shut down for "harassment" when others that seem more harass-y were not targeted. Remember, most users never visited those subs, and weren't in the know about their modus operandi. Those rumors led to the takedowns looking like censorship of distasteful content to many users. If it was censorship of distasteful or rude content, then there are many other subs that should fall alongside those taken down.

I think if they had said that the people in those subs were posting pictures of people and not responding in a timely manner to legitimate requests by aggrieved people portrayed on those subs, the users who don't really care about those subs would have brushed it off.

It's quite obvious that you have a greivence against part of the reddit user base since, as you mentioned, you have been the focus of their hate before.

I appreciate your opinion on why the other subreddits were taken offline but I must remind you it's just that, an opinion - only that, it means nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

As opposed to everyone else here, who is offering unequivocal fact? No, wait, everyone else here is offering opinions, too.

>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

Reddit is a free chat site with a decentralized power structure (in theory). Reddit can be useful, and I know there are supportive subs there, but /r/gaming and /r/science going down for a day was not harmful. People probably got a bit more sun that day.

The other subs shutting down "in protest" I found laughable. I had a hard time understanding what exactly they were protesting and the vocal minority sounded like a lot of people just raging against the machine. Reddit the company is the power structure and people just want to tear them down.

But why exactly? Not sure. This reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street. People see one protest breaking out then pile on with their own grievances. There was a lack of communication to the /r/iama mods about Victoria being let go...ok...now we're complaining about mod tools and censorship??

This has been building up for a long time. Recent events was just the catalyst.

I'm sorry that you were harassed by Reddit users; I certainly don't approve of that behavior. Like I said before, however, conflating those rotten actions by certain individuals with the larger ideological issues is not constructive. My complaint wasn't against censorship per se, but rather against what appears to be biased censorship. Certain harassment subreddits continue to exist, and it appears that they do so because their ideology is more closely aligned with Reddit management/admins than the ones that were banned. Rules need to be applied equally.

> Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause.

Why can't it be both?

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it is.

What evidence?

"Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause."

Anyone that makes these sort of decisions based on absolutely no evidence besides that she was fired, is childish and should not be a moderator.

"The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management."

They might be physically adults, but emotional intelligence for many of the mods seems to be lacking.

"particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently"

The mods are just as bad when it comes to censorship...decisions based on pure emotion, political views, and personal grudges. Exactly what you don't want when it comes to someone moderating a community.

Reddit is what the world was like in the middle ages and the reason we don't solve all of our issues with a lynch-mob.

Many don't see it because they don't like the people that are being silenced, bullied, and marginalized.

They fired the relationship manager for the AMAs. The way the did that harmed/ruined some relationships. The 'how' is as important as the what in that case, so your comment seems bizarreley off base.

This is a wholy different issue that the dust up a month ago. Thats why a petition for the CEO's resignation has 200,000 signatures. The incident 1 month ago promted onlt 10K or so, so this latest issue is a 20x increase in pissed off people.

"The 'how' is as important as the what in that case, so your comment seems bizarreley off base."

You forgot the 'why'. Why was she let go? Reddit, the company, was paying her salary and they have the right to let her go if they feel she isn't doing her job. You don't even know the whole story. You are defending the mods based on biased and one-sided information.

"Thats why a petition for the CEO's resignation has 200,000 signatures"

This can easily be manipulated online, so I don't even know if I can trust it.

They're not mad that she was fired. They're mad because she was fired aND reddit leadership had no plan to help the communities that depended on her work. Instead they left them high and dry. That's a very important distinction.

You like many people seem to not realize something that the other side is saying: WE KNOW REDDIT HAS THE RIGHT TO FIRE THEIR STAFF, AND NO ONE IS COMPLAINING BECAUSE REDDIT CHOSE TO RESTAFF.

Now, go back and read the all caps like five times, because people keep trying to say that to you, and you keep shouting about how reddit has the right to fire people.

People are upset because reddit corporate did a shitty job of managing reddit corporate, and it caused reddit corporate to fall through on several plans they had made with the public and other parties.

This particular instance of shitty management and execution on the part of reddit corporate is just the latest in a long string of bad management, and people finally got sick of it.

"People are upset because reddit corporate did a shitty job of managing reddit corporate, and it caused reddit corporate to fall through on several plans they had made with the public and other parties."

Shouting louder and using caps doesn't make me believe you or add to the discussion.

I just don't think this was a planned and orchestrated protest as a result of mis-management. There might have been 1 or 2 mods that felt this way, but the rest did it in "solidarity"..more likely a pure emotional decision to feel like they were part of the group (reminds me of the occupy wallstreet mentality..which accomplished nothing and just made the protesters look foolish).

If they really wanted to make a change, they should have all gotten together and contacted management..like mature adults. But this takes intelligence, discipline, maturity and doesn't give them the desired effect of rebellion. It feels good to rebel because it gives a person a sense of power that they probably don't normally have in their life.

It's the difference between a government discussing change and a mob of people burning down the city because they aren't getting what they want. A step back in terms of social change.

I also didn't see any of the explanations that you claim when it was happening. It's just back-pedaling to try to justify the actions of the mods.

Most inexperienced people don't don't how to play politics...and may get what they want in the short-term (the company just wants to put out the fire until they can figure out a good strategy) but will be pushed aside in the long-term.

The mods have no leverage except the power to make a sub-reddit private...and that can easily be taken away. If they let all of the mods go today, there would be people lining up to replace them tomorrow. But, this would be a bad PR move for Reddit...so it won't happen this quickly.

This actually reminds me of when Unidan was shadowbanned.

Unidan was a super-popular redditor who loved educating people about science, and he would pop up everywhere and deliver useful information written in a way most laymen can understand. People loved him.

He got banned right after getting in an argument with somebody, where he was being really aggressive and heavy-handed. A lot of people flipped out and claimed he was banned just for getting into a heated argument. They attacked the admins, and then they proceeded to stalk and harass the girl he got into an argument with. They followed her around, downvoted all her comments into the negative triple digits, and effectively made her account useless.

A day later, it turns out that for his entire history as a redditor, he had been using five sockpuppets to upvote his posts and downvote all the posts around him so his posts could become more visible, and that was why he was banned.

So the community turned against him. All his posts on his new account were being aggressively downvoted, the word "Unidan" entered popular use as a slang term for someone who uses vote bots to puff up their karma, and he ended up pretty much disappearing from reddit after a while (he tried to come back a few times, but nobody wanted to hear what he had to say anymore).

As for the girl who got stalked, the admins removed the limits on her accounts placed by the downvotes, the community followed her around upvoting her for a while to restore her karma, and the devs introduced new anti-brigading measures to make sure an organized downvote brigade like that can never fuck somebody's account up again.

I have a feeling that when we find out why Victoria was fired, the community will turn on her and start apologizing to the admins, because this sounds like the exact same situation.

And at a minimum, it'd mean that reddit is poor at handling communication. Most likely that they aren't paying attention past, just stepping into things now and then. Who the hell bans Unidan just like that? You couldn't put some checks into your bot?

Vote manipulation is a serious, big, huge, possibly the single biggest no-no on the site.

The difference between a post never making it to the front page and making it to position #1 can be as small as one or two votes when the post is new. Unidan selfishly crowded out other content for his own, and the ban was fully justified.

I'm saying they should have let him know first and promptly responded rather than an auto shadowban.

The fact that Victoria was canned accounts for maybe 10% of the outrage. The other 90% is the way the firing was done (uncommunicated, disruptive, and all around poorly handled), and is what led to the annoyance boiling over.

Oh, that's a perfectly valid complaint, and it's one I agree with.

But there are a large amount of people treating Victoria as a saint. I've seen a lot of posts going "They fired the one admin everyone actually liked!", and I'm worried there's going to be a huge backlash when the reason she got fired leaks out.

Backlash against who?

Never surprise your team.

This incident looks like it comes from inexperienced, counterproductive leadership, as do the several incidents leading up to it and that will follow. Or maybe authoritarian. Several days after a firing, people are complaining in the NY Times that they are still surprised.

Not surprising your team is one of the top principles I've learned in teamwork. If, as a manager, your firing someone surprises them or their team, you almost certainly mismanaged the process. If you have a reason for firing someone, you should be able to create a process everyone understands even if they don't agree to it. The people left should certainly not be surprised, especially after the firing.

If your team is surprised by your strategy, if your customers are surprised by your product, and so on, you probably managed poorly. You should only surprise your competition.

At least the rest of us can learn from Reddit's management what not to do: motivating competitors to satisfy their users and customers while they're alienating them.

>Never surprise your team.

It's never been more clear that the managers of Reddit Inc. do not consider the moderators of their most popular subreddits to be part of their team.

What really baffles me is the way reddit management handled this situation. There were many things they simply fucked up - They did not install the new AMA team properly (hell, the subreddit mods did not know about it), they reacted childish to the shutdown (something along the lines of "popcorn tastes good" - one of your biggest communities just shut down because you failed to do basic management, in what universe is this a proper response?) and they won't address the real issues, it's all PR speech (take a look at the "we' sorry" post, a lot of important questions raised are not answered).

This is just horrible - You cannot anger your community in such a "business model". reddit depends 100% on their users and especially the content creators and moderators. They do very little by themselves, and most of it is stuff around the core functionality only a small percentage is even using.

"Popcorn" as a metaphor for drama is a daily in-joke at SubredditDrama, where that comment was posted. What kn0thing didn't count on was that a lot of readers had never been there before and instead took it at face value.

The way I took this statement was roughly "I will enjoy watching this drama unfold, but I won't do anything other than watch". Is that inaccurate?

I just saw it as someone throwing out a joke in the middle of handling a stressful situation. Reading his retrospective post on the matter, it sounds like he'd been trying to understand and address the situation all day and hadn't realized that the userbase at large didn't know that.

Given that most of the popular subreddits were offline for the day, I can't imagine anyone would seriously think they didn't care at all. Failing to address that situation would have been a great way to kill the site entirely.

I believe it was the opposite, people got outraged because they got the exact meaning of the joke.

People were expressing loud and clear their grievances and one admin response was in the lines of "we know about it, let's do nothing and watch the drama unfold, it will die down".

And, to be fair, it did die down. Even though there's still some aftershocks to the initial revolution, reddit seems to be mostly back to normal now.

Except, you know, Reddit moderators having editorials run in the New York Times.

And reddit alternatives growing like crazy.

That's a fair point, but if you read the article, it reads like a post-mortem: "this is what happened, this is why it sucked, life goes on, let's try to not do this again."

Maybe competing websites (Voat in particular) got a bump because of what happened, but at the end of the day redditors aren't an activist crowd (or rather, they are a slacktivist crowd.) I doubt this will have any big consequences.

If he demands to be the front-and-center face of reddit, he should act like it.

By that description, I think everyone understood the sentiment exactly.

When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions.

Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know.

Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.

The responses to this event are entirely unjustified, because there is no information at all to base a reaction on.

I don't know if you deliberately haven't been reading anything or what, but it wasn't just in reaction to the firing. This is just the straw the broke the camel's back.

People keep saying things like this, but what exactly was on the camel's back in the first place? "Bad communication"? Can you give me any specific, concrete examples?

Bad communication.

Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly.

Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way".

A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job.

Literally none of these are specific or concrete.

"Bad communication" - they fire Victoria without telling IAMA moderators

"Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly." is very concrete and specific

"Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way"". - banning of "hateful" subreddits such as /r/FatPeopleHate

"A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job." - that is very specific and concrete

What else are you looking for?

>Bad communication. - they fire Victoria without telling IAMA moderators

I asked for things that were already "on the camel's back".

>Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly.

They are volunteering for a for-profit company. What are some specific concrete examples of mods being treated poorly? I'm a mod of two subreddits (20k and 8k subscribers) and I've never once been "treated poorly".

>Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way". - banning of "hateful" subreddits such as /r/FatPeopleHate

Who gets to decide what "the reddit way" actually is? My reddit account is nearly seven years old now and I say "good riddance".

>A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job. - that is very specific and concrete

That's laughable: it's not specific or concrete at all. It's an unsubstantiated, open-ended subjective opinion.

> Who gets to decide what "the reddit way" actually is? My reddit account is nearly seven years old now and I say "good riddance".

reddit admins used to say that they would never ban content as long as it was legal. Well /r/jailbait was technically legal, but they banned it. Then came FatPeopleHate and others. Some people think hardcore freedom of speech was the reddit way. It is no longer. Of course it's hard for a rational person to defend leaving those up, but it's just how some people feel about free speech.

Oh and then Pao used the phrase "safe spaces" which is a total shift from their previous stance.

bad communication - when mods email admins they are unlikely to ever be responded to. Victoria was the one point of contact within the admins that did respond to mods and try to resolve issues, other than her they were left to deal with issues themselves. SOmetimes that just wasnt possible. Honestly if you care look into some of the blackout threads plenty of mods will give you concrete examples of poor or non-existent communication, and we are not talking a mod of small subreddit with ~1000 subscribers, but reddits with 100k+ subscribers.

As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is not a campaign to bring her back personally.

Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.

>Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all.

What if she did something really bad and was fired on the spot? How could they "have a plan in place" for a situation like that?

It would take only a few minutes to come up with a simple last-minute backup plan (pick an employee to temporarily handle Reddit<->AMA, mods communication, and then tell the mods about it). That would be enough to give Reddit enough time to sort out something more permanent.

Jumping to conclusions aside, wouldn't they communicate that?

You should always have some kind of plan for what to do if key employees get run over by a bus.

The problem seems to be that reddit didn't have a plan for when the users started believing it wasn't a bus at all, but a conspiracy.

Well, that's the point of a contingency plan. Where I work, we have an emergency evacuation plan. They don't only start coming up with that plan when the building needs to be evacuated. They have it in place in case they need it.

Their backup plan was to email immediate issues to ama@reddit.com, but that didn't satisfy the nerd rage, so the users had to go into nuclear mode.

Ok, but that doesn't answer all of the communication points. They had an email set up (despite being a communication platform, but if that's how they needed it, ok) and then they didn't tell the mods what that meant. Are they each supposed to send a question about everything they thought Victoria was going to be doing over the next month to that email?

Sure? Questions go there, then the person will follow up with whatever human replies and act appropriately. People leave companies all of the time unexpectedly, the world ending drama made it hard for most people to take seriously. Any immediate issues could have been handled with some speedbumps, if the mods were willing to act reasonable and proceed forward.

But they didn't tell anyone this plan until way too late, so it failed. It's not even clear that they came up with that until the site was deep into the protests.

they didnt communicate the back up plan to anyone that would have needed it. In fact details of the backup plan only surfaced some 12-24 hours after the sacking and the subreddits going dark. SO whether there was a backup plan in place prior to this occurring is difficult to say for certain, that they have one now is not in dispute.

If you read the modmail leak from elsewhere in this thread it didn't satisfy mods who were trying to pick up the pieces either

Nothing short of an immediate team of people to replace her, and an entire site revamp to address their issues was going to calm any of their rage.

One person in, one person out?

As long as her replacement was engaged this whole mess probably wouldn't have happened.

> As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter

It absolutely matters. If it was something egregious and for cause, the company probably wouldn't have a choice but to terminate her on the spot. There are a lot of scenarios where they also wouldn't be able to disclose why she was terminated. If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened. They could have been scrambling as much as the community was.

Now, I hope that's not the case because I like and respect Victoria. And the way people like Alexis "Popcorn" Ohanian commented suggests that this really was a case of Reddit's admins not giving a shit about the community. But to my knowledge Victoria herself has not commented on the reason for her dismissal, so it's hard to know whether Reddit had a choice about how to transition.

Anyway my point is the circumstances around the termination do matter in evaluating the way the company acted.

If a single person is necessary for maintaining one of the most important parts of your website, you need a plan to handle their absence. It doesn't matter if she was fired, or if she quit, or got hit by a bus. A single person leaving your company should not be able to cause a breakdown of this scale.

> If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened.

> Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.

When you have people travelling from out of town specifically to meet the person you are about to shitcan, you're damn well right you need to do something like that. Either that or delay the action until such time as it will not disrupt something like this. Making the first notification of this be when said person arrives at your front desk is unprofessional and unacceptable, period.

Did you consider that it might not have been an option? That maybe it was an unexpected termination, and they didn't have a way to know about or contact the people arriving from out of town?

You don't have enough information to speculate like that.

> Did you consider that it might not have been an option? That maybe it was an unexpected termination, and they didn't have a way to know about or contact the people arriving from out of town?

Then you get a substitute for the appointment, even if you have to delay it. You don't just tell the client that the appointment is cancelled and to have a nice day.

> You don't have enough information to speculate like that.

There is no information that can make the way the out of town guest was treated acceptable.

> There is no information that can make the way the out of town guest was treated acceptable.

Sorry, but is this guest the Queen of England or the Pope? Did the mods pay for his/her way to New York? As the GP said, this is an overreaction -- the mods act as if insulting one celebrity means that IAMA, a subreddit that was originally populated by regular reddit users, has been inconvertibly sullied. Or that they, the mods themselves, spent their lives savings to fly that celebrity into town. I'm not saying that the celebrity deserved to be snubbed, but non-conspiracy-shit happens, and firing/rehirings can be a chaotic process that yes, sometimes lasts longer than a couple of days.

> Sorry, but is this guest the Queen of England or the Pope?

Irrelevant. You make a commitment to someone, you keep it or make alternate arrangements.

> Did the mods pay for his/her way to New York?

Completely irrelevant, as this is about how the company treated a guest.

> As the GP said, this is an overreaction -- the mods act as if insulting one celebrity means that IAMA, a subreddit that was originally populated by regular reddit users, has been inconvertibly sullied.

I would argue that it has been. To what degree, and whether it materially affects the sub, remains to be seen.

> Or that they, the mods themselves, spent their lives savings to fly that celebrity into town.

No, they aren't. Not even close.

> I'm not saying that the celebrity deserved to be snubbed

No, but you are implying that it is a trivial occurrence.

> but non-conspiracy-shit happens, and firing/rehirings can be a chaotic process that yes, sometimes lasts longer than a couple of days.

I know shit happens. I almost used that phrase myself above. However, there is a proper response to shit happening. In this case there should have been some sort of alternative arrangement made for the person coming in, even if it was just a managed delay to figure something out. You do not just turn someone who came to town to see someone at your organization out on the street on their own.

Irrelevant. You make a commitment to someone, you keep it or make alternate arrangements.

How is it irrelevant? It's absolutely relevant.

When you make a commitment to someone to do a heart transplant, you better move heaven and earth to keep it and prepare for every conceivable contingency.

When you let go a public-facing employee, even if you mishandle the communication about it and a few people get briefly inconvenienced as a consequence, it's a regrettable mistake of the sort that unfortunately happen sometimes.

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith has a considerable staff who would have managed the situation with their customary grace and good humour. Piss off Prince Philip however and you could be in for a hard time.

http://i.imgur.com/ICSz7Xp.jpg

Image of a now deleted discussion between the Science moderators and the chap who runs Reddit posted down the screen. The bit that caught my eye...

"We were right in the middle of setting up an AMA with Steven Hawking when I don't know what happened"

This organisation has problems.

Wow. I thought maybe it was just one comment, but Alexis really has been doing a job on reddit's PR. Why wouldn't you be more open an honest with people running the best known feature of your site?

In the end, the mods ditched reddit for actually handling AMAs, so I guess that's a good thing. Plus it'll mean reddit simply won't have monetization options as far as commercializing r/IAmA.

Having celebrities is more than commercialization. It's legitimacy...I've never liked (most) of the celebrity AMAs, but saying that you had President Obama logged in, however nominally, goes a long way to counter the perception that Reddit is just a place for Coontown and The Fappening.

OK, $FamousPerson shows up at reception asking for an employee who has recently been escorted off the premises with their possessions in a black plastic bag (been there, got the video and t-shirt). You sort of know that random $FamousPeople showing up is part of $BusinessAsUsual. You have just realised that you have apparently no procedures whatsoever for booking appointments for personal visits to the building (e.g. popping something on a corporate Google calendar or Outlook).

So, you get $HighRankingPerson - preferably one with good empathy and small talk skills - to meet $FamousPerson, explain that, unfortunately, there has had to be a change of plan today. Meanwhile $TrustedPersonalAssistant has Googled $FamousPerson, worked out likely food preferences and made contact with $FamousPerson's PR people/publisher/agent/whatever. Nice restaurant booked for lunch. $FuturePlans discussed over (rather good wine | excellent smoothies | extremely expensive vintage cheese and crackers | exceptional artisian toast). Limousine booked to get $FamousPerson back to airport in time for trip home.

Not rocket science is it really? (I speak as one who has been told to F$$k Off by Royalty).

Do you see any famous person bitterly complaining and starting petitions because their AMA fell through? It was probably quite inconvenient for the few people who got affected by this at the time but it hardly merits a subreddit let alone sitewide meltdown.

$FamousPeople over here never complain in public. But, you know, the temperature changes. Small signals &c. Perhaps it is different in US.

I personally have no big interest in this but Steven Hawkins is a National Treasure and we do need to present a positive view of science to the yoot.

Several celebrities and scientists complained on twitter because their IAMAs were abruptly interrupted or cancelled.

Based in schedule and timing should we be able to figure out who $FamousPerson is/was?

OT, but is there somewhere I can read your story of having been told to to F$$k off by Royalty?

No.

This will give you an idea...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/prince-philip-quotes-re...

Edit: apologies for duplicate. Could not see the original reply

This is comedy gold.

As an American who isn't an Anglophile, I didn't know that Prince Philip was so "colorful". People used to make fun of George W. Bush, but Philip takes it to a whole other level. In half of those comments he's just the village idiot, in the other half he's a master of British humour.

Edit: of course, opinions will vary as to which comment belongs in which category.

Two things they should have done:

1) had a transition plan in place for key employees, especially the most prominent public-facing employees

2) communicate after the fact; basically get all hands on deck to find and handle each of the AMAs happening that day and in the next few days, make a single point of contact to triage those needs and tell the mods

> Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee?

Reduce single points of failure, broadcast schedules and meetings.

Before the termination is complete have the replacement with an action plan.

Overreacting by immense proportions is what reddit does.

I do not know any details about Victoria's firing and I do not care about them, but obviously somebody up there did a terrible job managing the whole situation.

I've seen high-level departures from corporations for years and recently have been on the inside track of one (i.e. I knew about the departure before it was public knowledge).

From the time that I was told to when it was made public was weeks.

What was done in the interim was make sure nobody was left hanging. Key individuals and customers were called, things coordinated so that there would be no backlash.

Take a look at Microsoft and Gate's departure. Ballmer's departure. Apple and Jobs's.

I get that at-will employment means that either part can walk away at any time, but that doesn't resolve the company from dealing with the ramifications of said departure.

That's what this is about; that Reddit thought so little or had a thorough misunderstanding of her position as to not key in the mods, or otherwise coordinate handling of her duties is the straw that broke the camel's back.

>> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity...

May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.

Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.

Given how bad the public reaction has been, if it was something "quite bad", one would think they would tell people about it so as to pacify the crowds. (I understand there could be repercussions for doing this but it would seem to be worth the risk.)

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/reddit-victoria-tayl...

> One of the criticisms of the Jackson AMA was that, in some cases, his responses seemed out of sync with the questions. But this wasn't the standard AMA format, wherein an interviewee reads questions off the screen and types in answers directly. As often happens with other celebrity AMAs, Taylor selected Redditors' questions and asked them to Jackson live. She then transcribed his verbal responses and posted them on his behalf. Yet Jackson's AMA was even more complicated than usual because it was also one of the first in a forthcoming series of video AMAs to be released this fall. In this setup, he answered the questions in front of a camera in a ballroom in Los Angeles' Hyatt Century Plaza while Taylor communicated with him remotely from New York...

> ...Taylor asked Jackson the upvoted question despite its confrontational nature. It was hard to blame her, since Reddit does call it "Ask Me Anything." Jackson's response was criticized as rambling and nonsensical, and to an extent it was, but the critics may not have realized that he didn't hear the full question. Out of politeness, perhaps, Taylor had paraphrased it to omit the most incendiary language. It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.

As the Mother Jones article quotes Reddit's execs as saying, this purportedly didn't have anything to do with Victoria's firing. While I still think there's a need for a community leader like her, I wasn't aware how much of her job was being the transcriber and translator between celebrity and fans. Frankly, I think Reddit's IAmA would be much better off without this kind of arrangement...this isn't a statement against Victoria's performance, but against the whole dog-and-pony show in the first place. IAmA's give the appearance that the questionee is deciding which things to answer...as the MJ article describes, not only was a Reddit employee acting as a filter, but was paraphrasing both question and answer.

That to me kills a bit of the spirit of Reddit IAmA's...again, there's obviously a need for Victoria in a community leader role, but I'm happy if IAmA's go on without a Reddit employee acting as a translator for celebrities. If that means fewer celebrities do IAmA's, whooopteedoo. The best IAmA's have always been the non-celebrities, like the vacuum repair technician, or the woman who fought off a bear who ripped her face off, or the guy with two penises.

> It's also worth noting that Taylor's transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.

This is an incredibly dishonest thing to say. There's only one reason to publish someone's verbal responses verbatim, which is that you're trying to make them look like an idiot. Someone who gave verbal interviews and published the responses verbatim would be totally unfit for their job.

So television interviews...?

Television interviews aren't read, they're watched (and more relevantly, heard). Transcriptions of television interviews aren't verbatim unless they're made for the purpose of research.

I think "incredibly dishonest" is overstating it. I've worked in journalism, I know that what we print as reporters is often not "verbatim", such as not including "ums" and ahs". I'm assuming that the writer of the MJ piece has also done enough journalism and so when he says that things weren't verbatim, it's possible he is applying this same level of tolerance and standard.

Given the recent push for monetization of Reddit, it's also entirely possible that she put her foot down against some kind of hair-brained scheme for monetizing AMAs, and was summarily dismissed for refusing to go with the flow.

It's also possible that she murdered 14 children, but it's all conjecture unless an actual reason is released.

You say "few things get you fired immediately" but I'd say it depends. If you're at a big relatively stable company few things get you fired immediately. If the company is small or in flux (as Reddit appears to be) it can be a lot easier to be fired quickly.

But that doesn't change the logic of how stupid it would be to fire someone with so many loose ends and contacts depending on her.

An employee would need to commit some very serious transgression to justify the urgency, and the destruction that results from such abrupt removal.

"Disagreement about the general direction of a feature" isn't even close to meeting that standard. It was extremely irresponsible.

This is probably just a rumor but I recall reading it she wasn't comfortable with the monetization strategy of that subreddit

Rumors abound. The most prominent rumor is that it was because of a bad public reaction to a Jesse Jackson AMA. Some leaked info from a supposed disgruntled Reddit admin says it's because Ellen Pao pressured Victoria into pushing an NDA + promise of a cut of future sales resulting from AMAs on the AMA subjects, which Victoria disagreed with a little too loudly.

The moderators of IAmA have said that they believe the decision was made to fire her before the Jesse Jackson AMA happened.

EDIT: whoops, didn't mean to downvote you. mobile misclick :(

Which is still speculation.

Sorry, I was a little vague. The mods of r/IAmA have been in contact with reddit admins about the situation, and from how the timeline was explained to them by reddit staff, the decision was made before the Jesse Jackson AMA even happened.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/3bw7ms/top_mod_of_r...

No one outside of the company knows right now. To protect her privacy, they said that they are not going to publicly say why. All the current explanations are just rumors and speculation.

They claim they wanted to change the positions they had altogether so maybe not.

I believe she claimed she did't know why it occurred. But she has barely said a word about it. Reddit has actually terminated a lot of their own employees in the last year or so, so actually in this case her getting suddenly let go isn't that strange. Reddit seems to be trying to move IAMAs into some kind of team structure (ama@reddit.com, etc).

It's a personnel matter, so reddit will never tell you, and she's likely bound by an agreement to never disclose.

My guess is not censoring the Jesse Jackson AMA when the users got nasty. I have another comment on this site that details what I suspect went down. You can search it out if you're really curious--I don't know how to permalink here.

Not as of yet. It's all being kept above board, so maybe there are NDA type things preventing anyone form talking. Also, last night a series of posts on 4chan by a person claiming to be an admin at reddit said that more changes are afoot, including heavy facebook integration. As with everything on 4chan, it is likely a steaming pile of BS:

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/3cih4x/reddit_employ...

Not confirmed, but the rumor was because she was based in NYC and Pao demanded that all employees move to SF.

There was additional speculation that it was the result of the (failed) Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm doubtful of that.

I wonder if the authors of this NYT piece (the Reddit mods) know what happened (or at least know her side of it). I wonder if they are in communication with her. By making this such a high-profile thing, they draw attention to it, which could hurt her if the story eventually comes out and it's unflattering to her.

On the same day the admin responsible for reddit gifts was always let go. And over the last 6 months there has been a lot of turnover.

Isn't it more likely than not that she was dismissed with good cause? Otherwise, why so abruptly and without explanation from either side? Presumably reddit for legal and other reasons didn't want to kick her on the way out, but what else explains her relative silence?

"but what else explains her relative silence?"

Non-disparagement clauses as part of a cash settlement are a thing. This proves nothing but does fit the evidence.

Yeah, but that doesn't explain the abruptness, or reddit's continuing silence. If it was a disagreement over policy or direction, it doesn't seem worth the PR hit not to try to explain it. On the other hand kn0thing's "popcorn" comment suggests it couldn't have been that embarrassing.

management explaining firings hasn't gone well for them in the past

https://www.quora.com/Should-Reddit-CEO-Yishan-Wong-regret-h...

Right, "sign this, stay quiet, we'll give you a year's salary." It's hard to turn that kind of an offer down unless you have a lot of money in the bank.

We're not really sure what she was fired for, she may have actually done something really bad that warranted her removal. If not and it was just a case of management being out of touch with the community then it would seem that the backlash would be justified. We don't know the full story so it's hard to say at this point.

People often say that the users of a site like Reddit are the product, not the customers. In the case of Reddit moderators, they are also essentially employees. Employees who need to be treated more as customers, due to the fact they're volunteers.

Anger the masses of Reddit all you want, but don't piss off the volunteers that hold your product together.

The problem with volunteers is that you can't easily fire them. It's great that reddit gets a lot of free labor from moderators, but their sense of entitlement is a huge drag. Regardless of why Victoria was let go, it's very difficult to run a business when you can't make staffing changes without threat of open revolt.

I would hire a replacement for Victoria and swap out every moderator of /r/IAmA who was part of this coup. It's not their property, it's reddit's. It will be ugly (not that it isn't already), but in the end there are a few moderators and millions of users who literally could not care less and just want to read interesting stories.

Apparently Reddit has exactly 2 board members: Alexis and Sam Altman [1]. Why would Sam Altman, and by extension YC, have thought that Ellen Pao would make a good ("interim") CEO for Reddit?

This scenario should really be causing shareholders/board members to think about how dependent Reddit really is on moderator goodwill [2]. There needs to be a CEO and leadership team that can at least create a credible perception, if not the reality, that Reddit values moderators who donate their time to make the business viable.

For this purpose, it would seem you want a CEO who is going to be non-inflammatory (i.e., not Pao) and perceived as a relatively neutral arbitrator between the needs of shareholders for monetization and the needs of moderators for adequate support (i.e., probably not someone from a VC background). Considering how little it should actually cost the company to provide a reliable support network for mods, including honest, non-HR-speak communication, this hardly seems like a demanding task, but somehow they continue to manage it very poorly.

Does anyone know if there have been public comments by YC about any of these issues?

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?p...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

A discussion between an admin and the science mods leaked: http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_...

Not just an admin. YC alum and cofounder Alexis Ohanian. This conversation tells you everything you need to know. They aren't sorry. This wasn't bungled. They are doubling down on their lack of communication.

I feel bad posting it because it's a leak but it informs the conversation.

Rambling and self contradictory (presumably even after editing).

"We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest."

"The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that ..."

Own up to one or the other.

How so? Their community shut down to regroup and protest, without anticipating others doing the same.

And "The secondary purpose" was a protest, contradicting the claim protest wasn't one of their purposes.

They didn't claim they didn't want to protest, they claim they didn't expect their protest to have followers.

Yeah, it's interesting that right after the shutdown they said that they were closing it down merely to figure out how to operate without Victoria (what would they have done if she caught the flu?), not protesting. The shutdown was fairly brief (less than a day, it seems). Now days later they're coming back with, "eh, that thing we did a few days ago, it was also a protest." Doesn't seem terribly effective.

How hard would it be to fork reddit AMA on a third party site? I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board, a lot of the mods/community would follow.

Certainly some custom support for the AMA would be nice, like getting cleanly summarized final outputs and highlighting direct conversation with the askee, and making it easy to find highly upvoted non-answered questions.

I imagine it'd be extremely difficult. It's the users that give reddit its power. You can set up another site but if it hasn't got the readership, fewer people are going to do AMAs there. There are already several reddit clones but they are nowhere near as successful.

When Barbara Walters switches networks viewers and celebrities follow her because they like and trust her, people feel the same way about Victoria.

This is pretty much what voat is. The biggest issue is handling the traffic. Only a fraction of users went to voat and it was offline for days, crippled by the traffic.

edit: I previously said Voat was a reddit fork, that wasn't correct.

> This is exactly what voat is, a Reddit fork

Voat mimics Reddit functionally, but I don't think it's a fork

That's correct...Voat is written in C# ASP.NET MVC 5.

https://github.com/voat/voat

Ah whoops! I'll correct it

Nearly impossible.

Nearly impossible. The code is the easiest part by far. Much, much harder is getting viewers and then subjects.

Nearly impossible. The code is trivial. Getting the viewers and subjects is the hard part.

> I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board

Very doubtful she'd work for free, so that rules out owners that can't afford at least a full-time salary.

Find someone willing to risk ~$50-100K just on the IAmA coordinator alone (who may not be able to attract celebrity talent to an unknown site), on the hope their site displaces Reddit (a very slim chance), and that they'll somehow then magically make it all profitable without chasing everyone off, and it's doable.

Article>The issue goes beyond Reddit. We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers — and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant.

It's time for companies to stop treating the free work of contributors as a given, and pay them for their contributions: http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-sam...

Based upon the facts if and as described here, I would have to consider Pao entirely incompetent in her current role. Regardless of how one feels about her as a person.

I regret a bit jumping on the bandwagon, here, but if things occurred as described, the facts alone are damning.

P.S. I also have to question what the hell Alexis is up to. I've read elsewhere that he conducted the actual termination. Is he really so clueless at this point about his own site? (Even if he agreed with the termination, for whatever reason, its manner and fallout is just simply unacceptable.)

There has to be some serious dollar play behind this. Which does not speak well for the future of reddit; it may make it to the other side, but only based upon the gigantic momentum it has built that may sustain it through to some better policy -- if Management has the brains to see the light.

P.P.S. Is voat back up, now?

Yes voat is back up.

I can't believe people take reddit so seriously. Its amazing to me.

Some people have been on that site for 10 years.

That's fine, but it's effectively a giant forum with volunteer moderators. I feel like it can best be described as the social equivalent of trying to steer a boat that's really 30,000 small boats all tied together.

They have volunteers with the ability to simply turn off huge traffic parts of their site? How is this a for-profit company?

I'm guessing they will take that power back from the community, under "responsibilities for default subreddits".

But if they would update their site (vs relying on 3rd parties) and update stuff and actually talk to these volunteers, they wouldn't be in this position. It's pretty impressive how they've managed to give an appearance of not caring.

I've been there five years, and really have no attachment to it whatsoever. You can say, "why go back?", but I'd just say, "why not?" It's pretty much because it's there.

Either way, I imagine a lot of people feel the same about it as I do. And when your product is that dispassionate, you risk everyone leaving for the "next big thing."

It's certainly happened many times before: Digg, Livejournal, Myspace, etc.

I'm not sure how you can really build a lot of commitment and loyalty from a community that basically just submits links and comments on them. Moderators, absolutely. But regular users?

Reddit varies widely on quality. Some forums on reddit are the best source of info on their particular topic. I don't really care for reddit as a whole but I would miss it if some of the the subreddit communities I follow were to disappear with nothing to replace them. Albeit none of those subreddits are the type that would end up on the Reddit ban list I presume.

Why is it okay for a corporation to do it, but when mods do it everyone accuses them of pushing their own agenda?

This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit, which isn't the case. This is the problem, actually. Because it's not a paid position, the company can't use that as leverage in situations like this. The moderators essentially have nothing to lose.

Even in the article, it states that it was shutdown because of the abrupt termination of Ms. Taylor. Anybody that makes these sort of emotional decisions shouldn't be anywhere near a position of power.

If I were the CEO of Reddit, I would be making it my next goal to slowly take away the power away from these moderators.

Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run, and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power".

The average Reddit user doesn't know or care where the content comes from or how it's moderated, and they similarly have no loyalty to Reddit. If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded.

They are curators, not creators.

And the talk about being democratic is kind of wishful thinking at best. Did the moderators got elected in a qualified voting process?

"Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run"

I disagree. Most content on Reddit is copied/pasted from elsewhere.

"and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power".

There have been many other successful communities that didn't give so much power to moderators. The moderators at HN, for instance, are paid employees.

"If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded."

Users fled Digg because it made a really bad experience for the average person going to the site. Moderators are a minority and can easily be replaced. As long as the average user experience is un-changed, Reddit will remain popular.

When a large company replaces the management team, most people are un-fazed unless it actually effects them in some way.

The moderators made the mistake of using the nuclear option. A bad strategy in the long-run.

Another simple solution is to make it so the moderators can move a sub-reddit to private, but if the community has over a certain amount of subscribers, it's pushed up to a paid employee before it is activated.

This removes 90% of the mods power with very little effort. Most might not even notice until they try to changing the sub-reddit to private, which for the most popular ones, is rare.

You think they should begin paying moderators? Any suggestions where that money should come from? Any thoughts on whether it will lead to conflicts of interest on the larger subreddits which could harm the site (such as, and especially, IAmA)?

Paying the moderators was not the suggested solution...

I think that's very short-sighted. The moderators represent and manage a good portion of the content creators that draw users to reddit.

They shut down AMAs because they were left hanging with several upcoming high-profile guests. The person that had arranged and managed guests in the past was suddenly gone, and there was no communication from Reddit as to what the transition plan was.

Personally, I don't think that's unreasonable at all.

> This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit

How do you get that impression? Second sentence of the article is: "We volunteer our time to help manage the subsection called IamA?" Other phrases include "We donate our time and talents to Reddit".

Nothing in the article suggests employment by reddit.

If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg.

The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators. Developing an adversarial relationship with the community or the moderators is the absolute fastest way to torpedo the site.

In addition, as a few other comments on this article have pointed out, the shutdown was not a reaction to the (sudden) firing of a (vital) employee, but to years of serious issues and mismanagement.

The first subreddit to shut down did so because it literally couldn't keep functioning without Victoria, and the rest saw an opportunity to finally voice their complaints and be heard.

"If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg."

If I ran Reddit, it would be just as popular and much more profitable. The mass Digg exodus happened because their decisions ruined the content and the average user got tired of the bullshit. This has nothing to do with moderators.

"The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators."

Are you a moderator? Do you really think the moderators create content?

Here is an example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics

Everything on the front-page is taken from other sites. The moderators created nothing. The users even posted the links..so they didn't even do that.

"but to years of serious issues and mismanagement."

Why no protests before this incident then? and why are there so many people protesting her firing?

"The first subreddit to shut down did so because it literally couldn't keep functioning without Victoria, and the rest saw an opportunity to finally voice their complaints and be heard."

Well, you shouldn't base your entire success on 1 person. A smart moderator would have multiple backups.

How do you have "multiple backups" of a full-time, paid staff position at a company you don't work for?

Perhaps the AMA mods shouldn't have let Victoria take on so much work and responsibility, but she was explicitly put in that position by Reddit-the-company. Removing her from that position without warning was a disservice to Reddit-the-community, even if the AMA mods should have been better prepared.

And no, I'm not a Reddit mod, I wouldn't even really call myself a Reddit user. I prefer HN and other niche forums for coherent discussion and imageboards for "internet culture" (and shitposting), and personally find Reddit to be an awkward hybrid of the two.

That said, this situation has the potential to bring important lessons about online communities into the mainstream, so I think it's worth correcting folks who are blaming the wrong people.

EDIT: and to clarify the dig at Digg, the Reddit mods are not the only ones getting upset. The userbase has rallied behind the mods because of their own long-standing issues, mostly regarding Reddit-the-company censoring Reddit-the-community to appeal to advertisers.

> moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators.

Moderators create very little content. Most of the content is taken from other places, and most content is posted by people who are not mods.

You're right, I phrased that poorly. I'm aware that most posts are links to other sites, what I meant was:

- Some of the "flagship" subreddits, and AMA in particular, only work because of constant effort from admins/mods, with the bulk of community contributions ranging from useless to toxic.

- What differentiates Reddit from, say, 4chan is having some semblance of community, coherence and civility. This is partly due to the karma system, but mods play a big part in this too. "Content" was the wrong word to use, but good moderation is (IMO) as important as good submissions in many cases.

I think the management is doing the right thing for the long term. They will try to make it more and more social and maybe even try to act as a news portal; things that bring in profits. It should attract a lot of new people. It won't be the reddit you remember but it will be a more profitable reddit. On a personal note I feel nothing as I find reddit to be quite a distraction to my productivity and many subreddits of my interests are dead.

There seems to be an incredulous "we gave our time to a for profit company for free and got fucked" attitude that I can't help, undoubtedly because I'm a bad person, but think 'duh!'.

http://str8c.me/

Could you provide some details on this rather than just a naked link?

An article critical of reddit? Let's see how fast this is taken out of HN frontpage.

Edit: Same as top post (NYSE) 1h and same votes, and it's at 9th position... Bring me your downvotes. Truth hurts?

These threads are pretty toxic, so it's not surprising they get flagged.

Also, your comment got downvotes for baiting.

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