Hacker News Reader

Comment by gesman | Hacker News Reader

>> ...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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com