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Comment by imjk | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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...

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