Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief | Hacker News Reader

Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief

nytimes.com

862 pointsjonmarkgo822 comments

I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community.

I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS:

> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.

All in all, a good day I think.

As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. I have no idea whether Ellen was a capable CEO, but the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally (through other news articles and here on HN) was absolutely appalling.

I'd rather have appalling speech than censored speech. The idea is to not confuse supporting a person's free speech with endorsing his views.

Also, reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.

At last, a voice of reason in hundreds of pointless comments.

Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censorship.

> I'd rather have appalling speech than censored speech

If we were talking about what's legal to publish in your own newspaper, I agree.

If we're talking about what's appropriate to force others to view by brigading with a small number of people to take over a website to use it as its own platform to harass its CEO, I disagree.

Free speech is between you and the government. If a company that runs a forum says it bans people for abusive comments there's nothing to do with free speech. We see with Reddit that the ugliest users are the ones that are the loudest and drown out everyone else.

>As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums.

It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong.

And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"

I'm a pretty regular user, but have unsubscribed from a number of the default subreddits. Still, there is often a feeding frenzy mentality that takes over there. The racism during Ferguson was appalling. I saw a Pao subthread where people were discussing how sexually unappealing she is. It degenerated from there. Pretty awful stuff.

> I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined.

Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.

one of the craziest things about all the racism is that much of it is trolling from non-racist or not normally racist people looking to get a rise out of people. I see the same thing on YouTube and Reddit all of these troll parody accounts created by ant-social 20-somethings in an attempt to get a reaction or "shock" people.

Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.

I doubt your last sentence, as I regularly use Reddit and never saw anything like the story you mention. Certainly there were bad comments in more sanely named threads, but no highly upvoted threads with that title like you mention here.

Mind linking it?

It depends on the subreddits. With my subscriptions I barely noticed the whole thing.

As I mentioned last time this was on HN, me three.

I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent.

On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page.

I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.

Honestly I'm so disappointed that Reddit's management allowed such a crappy culture to evolve in their forums for so long. I remember signing on in 2010 and just feeling really uncomfortable browsing any of the major subreddits. Why did it take so long to deal with characters like violentacrez?

> the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally... was absolutely appalling.

I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).

Hanging out on Reddit has made me understand and appreciate Linus Torvald's style of community management.

This is the best description of reddit I've found so far: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/619625808403894272

If you are only an occasional user why are you even commenting? I'm only picking on you because you are an easy target, but I have seen a number of HN posts from people who first state that they barely use reddit, then go on to blast all reddit users as vitriol spitting losers. What do you gain from getting on this bandwagon?

People behind internet coffers are quite nasty, even cruel at times. I guess that's what human nature is. Power corrupts anyone and everyone.

Agreed.

Some of the things I see people say on the internet makes me wonder what kind of social lives those people can possibly lead while being so hopelessly devoid of any empathy.

If you follows only subreddits focussed on interrests you have, reddit is a good source of information, not unlike Usenet 20 years ago.

I came this close to not even knowing about this, until someone posted something in /r/dataisbeautiful about Ellen Pao's comment karma over time.

Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.

That sounds reasonable; only observe one side of the conflict and none of what might have provoked it and base your whole opinion on that.

There was a lot of evil stuff spewing about relating to Ms. Pao. It was pretty sad, and those people should feel ashamed of saying those things about anyone.

On the other hand, I don't think that she did a very good job managing the crisis (the first one caused by banning certain douchy subreddits, and the second one caused by the firing), which is one thing a CEO needs to be able to do.

Yeah, exactly. Also, firing someone without some kind of plan for redistributing her duties is a Management 101 no-no. Ellen Pao failed as CEO of Reddit. That has nothing to do with the 1% or whatever of Reddit users who are racists and/or misogynists. That's just the real world; you have to get past the obnoxious idiots and focus on what matters. The reason Ms. Pao was fired (let's be honest) is that she failed to make Reddit more profitable, attractive to users, and generally awesome. Not because she's a woman, not because there are people out there who don't want to see women succeed. Make money and all is forgiven. Pissing off large, meaningful chunks of your user base is not conducive to making money.

Nevermind misogyny etc., you're pointing to two incidents of unknown magnitude (because you lack the data internal to the company) among an unknown number of other things she's handled and you claim she's failed as a CEO? That is ridiculously uninformed.

I personally think the criticism directed her way was warranted (as was that directed at Alexis, especially after his first responses), though I definitely don't think it should have taken the form it sometimes did (misogynist, racist, overly personal, overly reactive, etc).

I think the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet (though it has many positive aspects in other contexts) is wreaking havoc on our ability to debate some topics because you wind up with a situation where many people get upset about a legitimate grievance and some overly troll-y subset of those people goes overboard with their backlash and then the whole issue ends up in this very unfortunately binary "us versus them" where rational but legitimately upset people get painted with the same brush as the vocal minority of troll-y jerkwads (or alternately, they have to just excuse themselves from the debate to avoid being painted with that brush).

eg. "Gamergate" (there is an inescapable core truth to the fact that game journalism is broken, perhaps irreparably so, that got completely lost in all of the personal-level misogynistic bullshit) and this reddit situation where the community had every right to be upset at the recent moves they have been making (though to reiterate, I think some forms of the backlash were, as reddit's announcement stated, sickening).

I don't know if she was a bad leader or not.

My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.

I think unless they egregiously violate company policy or violate the law or do something which would bring damage to a company it should be up to the company to direct the fate of an officer... Not popular sentiment.

Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.

> Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.

Her job was to preside over that mob. And apparently to monetize it. Pissing off that mob means she failed at her job.

In addition, not understanding that you are firing a key employee shows a dramatic level of ignorance. Reddit has so few employees that even an adequate CEO should know what every single employee is doing. This is just basic Management 101--"Know What Your People Do" or its corollary "Never Piss Off A Secretary" aka "Know Who Has The Real Power In Your Company".

Finally, from her attempt at PR positioning you get headlines like this: "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit". Really? "Fighter of sexism". Um, she fired a woman, you know? And her behavior at Kleiner was far from exemplary. Her case for sexism would have been a whole lot stronger if she hadn't appeared to be sleeping her way up the corporate chain.

Overall, the problem seems to be the same tone-deafness as so many at this level of privilege: "The rules don't apply to me. How dare these plebeians attempt to make the rules apply to me!"

Well, this kind of looks like an egregious violation of company policy. It looks like she punished an employee for giving an interview to a famous minority politician. There has to be some company policy against retaliation on political basis.

Regarding "mob rule" this is a free country and people have a choice which website to read and to contribute to. If people want to go away from reddit that is their choice. The company that owns reddit does not need to follow reddit user wishes, but they have to face the distinct possibility that those users will leave and the consequences thereof.

You can call it mob rule, but other's can call it the matter of ordinary people exercising free choice.

If she weren't a woman, I would be tempted to say it's almost . . .

It's almost like she just sucked at her job and the public backlash and getting fired were both predictable consequences of that fact.

You mean the same mob rule that HN seemed to support to make sure Brandon Eich lost his CEO position?

> My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.

I think the line needs to be drawn more clearly than that, because we should have populist control over companies.

I'm more concerned about companies that really impact us, for example huge banks, energy conglomerates, people behind the TPP and TiSA.

But when the leader of a company who publishes the words of its' customers - a complex relationship, indeed - tries to curb some of the harmful speech of those customers, I don't think it's a reasonable populist standard to say that people supporting that speech can oppose it.

If you live by the public opinion, you die by the public opinion.

> I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective.

I think this was the right thing to do from a product perspective. Pao didn't really know how to use the site, and didn't ever particularly like the users. I don't know if Huffman likes the users, but one would assume that he would at least know how to use the site he helped build :)

Um, proof? The fact that she's been actually active on the site under her own account shows that clearly she knows how to use the site, so that argument alone is moot. I don't know how you can prove she didn't like the users unless she straight up said that.

https://np.reddit.com/r/FaithInHumanity/comments/39ee4c/char...

She tried to share a link to a private message. That's the equivalent of my mom emailing me and saying, "Here's the picture - c:\\user\desktop\pic.jpg" - it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works.

Then everyone who replied was shadowbanned and every post was deleted. So no, she literally didn't know how to use the site.

I'm curious about a few things, like just how many of the people on reddit making the noise are actually literally children. Probably quite a lot!

Did the "community" make death threats? I didn't see any, and I don't think the average redditor would approve those. There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion. The typical upvoted comments actually consisted of valid criticism against Pao and reddit's management.

I didn't really follow this subject, but I saw a lot of crude and frankly pretty racist joke images voted up to the front page.

I didn't see any racism, unless you consider characterizing her as communist dictator Mao Zedong to be racism?

"There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion."

Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.

That really is the case. Completely asinine, but if you are a public figure, the masses can be shockingly awful. There is an interesting article where Penn and Teller compare their rather large influx of death threats with Richard Dawkins[1], and from what I know, pretty much anybody in the public eye has to deal with this.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10836833/Penn-and...

So there will not be, but there was?

It's my estimation that if there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous or pseudonymous discussion comments it's very likely that a few individuals will a make death threat (which are likely not intended to be taken seriously). My point is that stating that death threats were made is not particularly interesting, as that's not a rare occurrence when we're talking about very large number of comments by very large number of people, some of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.

"Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here:"

Could you refrain from sexist comments like that?

Link to full statement:

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

It is a good read.

Redit isn't a community. It's a bunch of communities. Most of them, I more or less dislike, for various overlapping sets of reasons. But I support freedom of speech. Everyone is free to ignore whatever they dislike.

Also, in such communities, strong anonymity is prudent. It does protect griefers from consequences, I admit. But more importantly, it protects all users from meatspace risks.

Edit: This is an old discussion. Especially if one replaces "Redit" with "Usenet".

The childish and aggressive level of communication on Reddit led me to discover Hacker News while in search of quality and informed discussion. Admittedly I also use Reddit but more and more it has become a curiosity to see how people act when they think no one will know it's them. Occasionally I also engage in rewarding exchanges there but the few loud, brash and opinionated (but not well informed) users in the subreddits I frequent do lower my level of engagement and enjoyment considerably.

I think the subreddit system is a good way of categorising content and more importantly, behaviour. People are talking a lot about misogyny but its possible to avoid all the drama if you simply subscribe to smaller, more interesting, well moderated subs. I kept up with my favourite books, video games and other interests like history without being interrupted by Pao hate.

I think HN is great too. The knowledge of some of the commenters here can be very educational.

Yes. The smaller subreddits that make up most of my subscriptions are fine (programming languages etc) but the larger ones have a very high noise to signal ratio.

It will only be good if he unban the banned subreddits. If he leaves them banned it means that they did unpopular changes, laid blame on one person, remove the person but leave the changes.

You applaud them on a PR strategy that is akin to dictatorships all over the world denouncing opposition as "terrorists" and criminals?

The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.

The first rule of reddit is unsubscribing from all the default subs and searching for the ones most relevant to your interests.

The day I discovered I could do that quickly made Reddit my favorite site on the web (/r/NFL, /r/homeimprovement, /r/television, etc).

I'd love to see a discovery feature similar to that of Pinterest built into the signup process that algorithmically signs new users up for subreddits most related to their interests.

From the "PR" that treats the community as "a coherent block":

"Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful."

I don't think it gives the impression of organization at all. Rather the opposite: it gives the correct impression (unlike in the case of terrorists and criminals) that quite a large number of unconnected people were actively participating in attacks on Pao to some extent or other, rather than it being a smaller organized subgroup of the community, which frankly wouldn't be as bad.

The notion of group responsibility for individual actions is insidious, because it's too easy to mount a circular-logic based offense and also because it leads to humanity's favorite game, us v. them.

Most of the individuals that do death threats are doing it because they think that their peers would approve. The community effect is very powerful and sometimes the community deserves blame.

Well, somebody frickin' wrote those threats. It did happen.

And people who should have had the sense to see there were vile pighumpers in their midst did not moderate their nastiness.

wut

>I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS

Anything less doesn't get heard - or it gets ignored. A certain pirate group that asked the U.N for help, was ignored, and resorted to boarding ships and capturing prisoners comes to mind.

I've known very few people who cared to have Pao as CEO since her taking the position. Anyone who gave attention to Reddit Corporate disliked her being in that position and felt her politics would get in the way (and they did). The only people who seemed to like her in that seat were those with the same ideological and political leanings as her (not a big surprise there). [0]

The fact people had to get "up in arms" and make a huge fuss about her to get her out of the position shows action should have been taken sooner, rather than later. But nobody pays attention to the quiet protests. They only give notice to the extreme.

Yes - some of the comments against her were extreme, unnecessary, and irrelevant to her position and the problems surrounding her. I saw death/rape threats, totally uncalled for. Anything less was ignored.

[0] And her Karma tells the story. It's almost always been negative. https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png

> The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.

That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.

That's what internet anonymity does. Brings out people's true essence. You see it with road rage too. The protection of the vehicle and the quick flight make giving the finger in response to a reasonable mishap an easy answer. A "FUCK YOU" for accidentally veering into your lane. Sound reasonable?

Yeah there's a few Mother Teresas out there, but most of them are self righteous a-holes too. What a world.

> That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.

I disagree. Some people: yes. Average person: I don't know, I suspect probably not. I've met a lot of people from different parts of the US, Canada, and around the world. A great many of them have exhibited a tendency towards genuine empathy. That too is human nature, it's not all narcissism and self-interest.

Stop using Mother Teresa as a pinnacle of good. She was a terrible human who thought suffering was good and gave people a place to suffer, not to heal.

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." -- Oscar Wilde

Relevant as always.

Mother Teresa was a rather terrible person. She saw human suffering as a way to be closer to God and squirreled donations to her clinics away for personal bank accounts of her and her higher-class/political goons. She defended some rather evil characters and even kept a $1.25 million dollars donated to her from stolen money. When asked to return it, she simply ignored the request.

Humanity is also full of cynical assholes.

> I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS

You mean this?

> [1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.

All that opposition - strong enough to convince "Chairman Pao" to resign - reduced to death threats? All those arbitrary bans written off as a just punishment for criminal behavior? Something tells me that we haven't seen the last of "safe space" Reddit.

No one is "reducing" anything.

Altman is not justifying the arbitrary bans (or any Reddit admin shenanigans) here, that is not the topic of this sentence. He is talking strictly about one dangerous activity that gets offenders banned: death threats, which Ellen Pao (the human at the other end) received.

We don't know why Pao went out. We can suspect it was the backlash (more likely), or disagreements with the board [0] but we can suspect.

But that does nothing to make her opposition entirely legitimate, when at its strongest it was hijacked by namecalling, cyber-bullying, and yes, threats to Pao's life. The subset of Redditors who did this deserve to be told how shitty it is. The remaining, legitimate opposition should recognize the distinction.

[0] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddi...

Calling her "Chairman Pao" is racist, but moreso, reductive.

When will these people stop acting like our moral superiors. smh.

I don't like this at all.

Even if she wasn't the right person (I don't know), all the worst elements of the site are going to see this as a victory for their awful behavior and it's going to get worse.

The people who attacked her with sexism and comments about her personal relationships. The people who supported FPH even though they were attacking people in real life and off Reddit, not just posting comments in their personal corner of 'discussion'.

She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit.

I worry heavily that if the new person doesn't draw a clear line at the start things are going to get a lot worse in terms of hate/abuse/harassment.

EDIT: After posting this I saw Nilay Patel tweeted basically the same thing: https://twitter.com/reckless/status/619620964658245632

> but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit.

I'm baffled at how people misunderstand Ellen's actions in shutting down a few subreddits randomly.

She did not 'clean' reddit of the worst of reddit nor 'hate' subreddits. In fact, there are still dozens and dozens of really disgusting stuff on reddit like /r/gasthekikes and /r/coontown

Let's please stop this false narrative that she was a champion of some kind who came in and tried to 'clean up' reddit.

Not only are there plenty of reprehensible stuff on reddit still, Ellen's claim that she targeted behavior and not speech rang hollow for the majority on reddit because communities like SRS were and are getting away with the same or worse behavior.

Let's make three categories of things on Reddit. One is innocuous (or relatively so) like /r/knitting or even /r/politics or /r/atheism. Perhaps there are big arguments but in the grand scheme of things it's not bad.

Type two is /r/coontown or other hate subs. They're clearly offensive. I wouldn't let them on my site if I ran it, but they exist. The key here is they stay mostly to themselves. I wasn't aware of them before all this.

Type 3 are problem subs. Things like /r/FPH. There often offensive, but on top of that they branch out to act in the real world or in other subs. They don't stay confined to their one little corner but actually make things worse for everyone. Never if your topic isn't flat out offensive doxing or causing actual harm fits here.

What they did was a small hit against some of category three. It wasn't much, but it's the most I've seen in a long time on Reddit. Given the amount of stuff I've seen in the last year against various people in the games industry in other places, some of that organized on Reddit, I'm happy to see something done.

There are still tons of subs in category three that they haven't done anything too. The vast majority of them. And I really don't care about category two things, I'd be fine if I didn't wanted to ban those too.

By no means did she clear up Reddit. But at least I saw she tried to do something, dipping her toe into the battle. And I'm worried I'll be back sliding on that.

Just because she didn't completely clean Reddit doesn't mean she didn't attempt to clean some of it or make the decision to do so a bad move. The existence of some bad communities also shouldn't be used as an excuse to keep other bad communities.

>comments about her personal relationships

Is it not a relevant comment on her character that she has married someone who (allegedly) defrauded over a hundred million dollars worth of pension funds? That she later sued a company she was fired from over supposed sexism for the exact amount her husband needed for his legal defense fund? That she lost the case miserably due to a complete lack of evidence? (The case against her husband, on the other hand, looks like it will be quite the open and shut case with mountains of evidence)

I don't care about reddit at all, but I don't understand how anyone can defend her and her husband after one of them (allegedly) ruined the pension funds of thousands of clients who trusted them, and the other tried to provide him with the funding to get off scot free for the actions.

Would you defend Bernie Madoff or someone who had been complicit in trying to keep him unpunished for his crimes?

> I don't understand how anyone can defend her and her husband after one of them (allegedly) ruined the pension funds of thousands of clients who trusted them

This is 2015, I really hope you don't need someone to explain to you that women don't have to share the blame for their husbands (alleged) misdeeds. Disgusting.

> She didn't do a good job of it, but at least she tried to stand up against some of the worst of Reddit.

These are two separate things. The fact that she tried to stand up against some of the idiots that inhabit the site doesn't mitigate against the fact that she did not do a good job. She should have resigned or been fired for not doing a good job regardless of how well she coped with the jerks en masse.

They're not the same thing, my worry is that some Redditors (or employees) may not pay attention to the difference and avoid further cleanup.

He did call redditors out in the announcement though, maybe it'll be alright

https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_te...

" As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. "

I hadn't read his post yet, God I'm glad to see that. I hope you're right.

If Reddit can get back to focusing on positive things, like reddit gifts, admins with good community relations, and not firing people who have cancer, I think they'll be in good shape.

If Reddit continues to focus on cracking down on the negativity that exists on the site, it will give the negative voices a bigger stage.

I think they will be able to get back to doing positive, fun things, and the negativity will be drowned out.

I think it was the right move for many reasons.

Should someone hesitate from making the right move if vile people happen to support that move?

I think they should have waited for some cool off or had a 'shadow' CEO or announced this at the same time as a big cut off of some of the worst subs.

This can easily be interpreted as a repudiation of some of the things she tried to do to clean up the site, and that would be a horrible message to send.

“Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.

What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists

I don't even use Reddit and Sam's quote was so odd it caused me to comment below (probably turning more and more grey by the moment).

In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community.

I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.

Sam said it for PR reasons. He also posted this one a Friday afternoon!

Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.

Considering that it was Sam who brought in Ellen, what do expect him to say? if that isn't enough to warrant 'corporatespeak' over-drive, consider that Ellen really enjoys suing her employers and she still hasn't been able to completely pay her legal fees for the last case she lost.

Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?

I think it was Yishan (former Reddit CEO) who brought in Ellen.

Not speaking dishonestly would be nice.

She walked in to a hot mess of a situation after the previous CEO resigned on the spot and kept the company from falling apart (which I thought was a live concern at the time). You try doing that some day.

I imagine it's a lot easier to just have the cash and power to swap out those who threw their hearts out on the line. Big pictures obscure the small pictures of the lives caught in the meat grinder of the march of capital.

Becoming a VC has become the new beginning of the end for any humanity left in a human being.

It's hard to ignore the external circumstances that lead to the previous CEO resigning on the spot. Maybe not everyone needs to work in the most expensive city of all to keep a favorite pet startup in startup mode.

Reddit is a simple crud app that runs on amazon for scale. What could a CEO possible do?

I agree that nothing much as changed, but "majority"?

Not in the slightest, the majority could not care less about this ruckus and think those agitators are idiots.

Those people are a small, but vocal, minority.

Maybe. I'm sure a large amount of redditors (maybe not majority) appreciate a well-run IAmA which manages bringing in celebrities and other big names. Pao's actions as CEO directly impacted their ability to do that.

I don't understand that either. I can't think of a single thing that she has done to make reddit better.

Is that out of the ordinary? What has any reddit ceo done to make reddit better?

Banning fph was a good start. "The community" is actually Reddit's number one problem. It has allowed a large contingent of hateful assholes to congregate there. If this continues the company has no future.

I would love for sama to clarify this.

> piss off the majority of the community

I suspect she pissed off a very small, but very vocal minority. Most people (myself included) don't really know or care about Pao one way or the other.

Sam and the board are happy and pleased with her performance because she played the part of the suit pushing an over-corporate monetization-focused agenda and then eventually was offered up as a "sacrifice to the reddit ideals", and at the same time she moved the goal posts entirely so now the new CEO and board can "scale back" Ellen's initiatives but only part way, therefore simultaneously putting them in a more monetize-able position AND making them look like they are "fixing what Ellen did".

My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.

Supplemental note: I'm not saying they did this by design or that this means Ellen succeeded. The ideal outcome for her would have been to manage that negotiation and positioning herself, identifying and settling into the middle ground and coming out the other side still in charge - this didn't happen, and the turnover does not make any of the parties look good. Still, she tried and probably benefited the business-side of things in some way - the next 12 months will see whether these benefits outweigh the reputation costs.

With reddit gold most of Reddit has no problem with Reddit making money if they do it the right way. But if it means censoring content and speech and changing the community interaction that is totally unacceptable.

I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.

She managed to institute a phenomenally subjective harassment definition while simultaneously throwing free-speech under the bus.

Your precious freeze peach was not infringed one iota. If I'm wrong, please tell me where law enforcement was involved.

The job she did was sort of a phenomenon, in that someone like me who never even thinks of Reddit was reminded numerous times why that's a good thing. Most CEOs don't do that!

Right or wrong, fair or unfair, or whatever you think about Ellen, I think most people agree that she had become personally and professionally toxic to reddit as a brand and community and even if she did a great job from here on out, it was going to be an uphill battle to restore community confidence in her as a CEO.

I personally don't believe she had the right qualifications to lead a community-driven site like reddit as it is today, but would have the right qualifications if reddit was going to start making a serious pivot to a more lucrative money making direction via commercial partnerships, advertising, etc.

Reddit may still go that direction, but Huffman won't have the same baggage weighing him down.

(note: this will also likely feed the conspiracy that her turn in the head office was a convenience for her lawsuit, now that she lost, she has no reason to stay in that position)

I agree with other comments chastising the community for the racist/sexist/whatever nature of lots of the negative comments against her. It was childish and dangerous. She had enough issues worthy of reasonable criticism that it wasn't even necessary.

I think this is a good thing for reddit.

>Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board, said he personally appreciated Ms. Pao’s efforts during her two years working at the start-up. “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.

This is clearly nonsense, otherwise there wouldn't have been a grassroots campaign to remove Ellen Pao from her role.

If Sam Altman honestly believes that Ellen did a "phenomenal" job, he should reconsider his own position at YCombinator.

Seems like just yesterday!

http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit

> I am delighted to announce the new team we have in place. Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO. Because of her combination of vision, execution, and leadership, I expect that she’ll do an incredible job.

It is still incredible what she managed to do ...

Someone's ready for a career in politics.

Given her previous record with going after past employers I think Sam was just covering his back from a potential lawsuit.

Given her previous record with going after past employers

If I'm not mistaken, that's a record of one, unless you know something the rest of us don't about her time at Cravath Swaine & Moore, WebTV, BEA Systems, TellMe or Danger.

What? Do you expect Sam to slag her publicly? When was the last time any corporate board slagged a resigning CEO publicly?

Sheesh.

There is a difference between slagging - whatever that is - and not gushing corporate BS. How about he be honest instead of just a shill? Sam seems to be good at "playing the game" and this type of thing falls right in line with it.

Clearly a niciety. That said, it's possible that she did excel in other areas. She's CEO not community wrangler. As a casual user, I had no idea who the CEO even was until recently. Similarly, although I have a username, I couldn't name another user or mod on the entire site. Someone got fired? Ok. Doesn't effect me.

After you fire somebody you feel bad, so you say what a wonderful person they were. The fit just wasn't right, timing wasn't right, blah blah blah.

We'll have to wait for the movie to come out to know what really happened.

It's the Bay Area. Everyone is always talking in superlatives.

If he thought she did a phenomenal job, it wouldn't have been "a mutual agreement between her and Reddit's board" for her to leave. He would have fought to keep her.

I think he was just being polite but then who knows, we don't get to see what's going on behind the scenes, we just see the outcome of their decisions.

To say the contrary of what you think is not being polite, is a stupid communication rule that in other places of the world would just make things more complex to understand. There is the possibility to just express what you think in a balanced way. One can just say: she tried to fix a complex problem, that many experiences in the past proved to be very hard to fix. And she is stepping down now after the recent happenings. Or something like that, but to say he did an incredible job when all this mess happened is not a good form of communication.

> This is clearly nonsense, otherwise there wouldn't have been a grassroots campaign to remove Ellen Pao from her role.

When "SJWs" get someone fired we're told a loud, vocal minority has too much power and is dangerous.

The same folks seem to be calling the same thing in a direction they like a "grassroots campaign". I find that interesting. Pao's most downvoted posts still got only a few thousand of Reddit's tens of millions of users expressing their dislike, and petitions topped out at what, 20k of those tens of millions?

More than 200k signed, so you're off by a factor of 10. I think that's too many to dismiss it as a vocal minority.

I think a lot of things were incorrectly attributed to Pao. It doesn't really matter though. I don't think she was ever going to get back the community's confidence.

Maybe I missed it, but was there ever any information on why Victoria was fired, or whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it?

From where I was sitting, it seemed like no one actually learned the full story, which might be confidential or take time to contextualize/safely explain, and everyone immediately threw it on Pao's lap and downvoted any holding maneuvers she and the rest of the staff tried to attempt. It was poorly handled, sure, but it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening. For that matter, do we even know now?

If I'm wrong, though, happy to correct my ideas here. (grammar edit)

It was not made public why Victoria was fired. Neither of the parties are talking about it, so generally it's unknown.

The /r/iama mods were not upset that she was fired. They were upset that there was no transition plan in place.

> it seems like there was a lot of finger pointing before anyone knew what was actually happening

There was finger pointing because nobody knew what was happening. Functions that Victoria was performing fell through and — according to the /r/iama mods — jeopardized the functioning of the AMAs that week.

This is what many/most have overlooked. Victoria was the straw that broke the camel's back. Her firing was indicative of the lack of appreciation / recognition given to the moderator's, and was just another example of the disconnect and (perceived) exploitation of moderator time/effort without the proper support and tools.

> The /r/iama mods were not upset that she was fired. They were upset that there was no transition plan in place.

From what I saw it was both. They shut down over the latter because it left them unable to manage things to their satisfaction, but they seemed to genuinely like her and wanted her to keep her position.

I'm not sure how that squares with: "We mods truly feel that she is irreplaceable" or the many other similar statements from the mods.

Yeah, no question there. Things would have gone a lot smoother, explanation or no, if they'd had a plan to carry on without her.

This (deleted) Quora post is the best explanation I've seen thus far: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--N83GXLMb...

Which was explicitly denied by reddit and is no different than any other piece of baseless speculation.

Pao specifically denied this screenshot.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

> whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it?

Reddit only has around 70 employees, I would find it extremely unlikely a CEO at a company of that size wouldn't have been aware or involved in the decision (if only to rubber stamp it).

For better or worse, this is life for top executives. Example: the president of the US's popularity is correlated with the economy in spite of the fact that they have very little control over it. It's not uncommon for one executive to do something totally reasonable under hard circumstances only to get ousted anyway while the next person gets the credit for their actions.

"It happened on her watch."

All I know is I'm glad I never had hundreds of thousands of people demand to know the gory details of why I left my job. Unless Victoria wants to share it, it really isn't any of our business.

There isn't any beyond rumour; and those reasons aren't likely to be disclosed for a long time (probably never).

Yes, the whole thing stunk like gamergate imo. I honestly don't care about whatever minor offense pao did, I wanted her to stay just so that the vitriol and misogyny on the front page attacking her would not "win".

Ideologist will act like ideologists, they don't care about the facts, they care about their narrative. If the original narrative isn't strong enough they just fabricate one to legitimize their hate.

So caving in to those groups prevents nothing, it just makes things more toxic. As a tactical move, bringing in Steve Huffman might not have been the worst decision though.

It's very much like GamerGate. There is an attempt to deflect an overwhelming amount of legitimate criticism by pointing to a few trolls and characterizing all of it as "racist and misogynist".

On the reddit podcast Alexis said it was about wanting celebrities to be a part of the community.

Ellen Pao gives the reason for leaving on /r/self: http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...

> So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.

This is believable because there have been odd business decisions under her watch, not just policy decisions. RedditMade, one of the intended revenue-generating models for Reddit, failed while she was interim CEO. Alienating /r/IAMA probably did not help.

Reading between the lines and viewing her resignation in the context of what she's had to go through in the past few months, she was harassed out of the job by the user base.

Part of the user base harassed her. Part of the user base raised valid concerns about her performance as CEO in a reasonable, well-argued manner. Part of the user base did both.

Why do people here (in this HN thread) tend to pretend it's either one or the other? When you're speaking about a big amount of people, pretending like they all behave the same way is never a good representation of a situation.

E. Pao and Brendan Eich are the two polar examples why the word 'harassment' has lost its meaning.

That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there was more to it, and the image that she has on Reddit was certainly not helpful, but she wasn't fired because of the backlash from last week and previous, because if that was the case she would have been fired much sooner, but instead she stepped down, by force or not, because she wasn't able to guarantee good revenue for Reddit by past actions and admission of the above.

One way to grow reddit would be a gold for referral program.

This entire debacle and the 'communities' (the small vocal part that acted horribly) response pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for me when it comes to reddit.

With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna.

Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now).

Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.

"With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's"

Sometimes I don't recognize what y'all are talking about, and I almost want to defend reddit, then I remember: I've long since adjusted my reddit to be virtually nothing but niche. My largest is ~320,000, but it's just a "Deals" reddit. I've got two at 150,000, both very focused. And it goes down from there.

I'd hardly know this was going on except /r/blog is essentially forced on to your reddit front page.

It's just like Usenet was... subscribe to politics.vitriol.hate.anger and rec.sports.flame, and yeah, you're gonna get idiots. Subscribe to comp.lang.niche_language, get almost nothing but signal. Times never really change.

I think it's unfair to compare your un-curated Reddit experience - which you admit is pretty good in a few niche subs - with your highly curated Facebook feed.

It's like saying that food in New York is awful because you reached into a trashcan and found a rancid bagel, but is awesome in Chicago because you looked up the nicest restaurant and spent $500 on a meal there.

I agree 100%. Except for certain sub-reddits, I go to reddit when I want to see what the idiots think.

There was a time when I would read a news subreddit and reminded myself that every headline should be understood exactly in reverse. I stopped doing that because it's hard to keep up the mental filter.

I think the problem is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September - reddit is mostly made up of stupid and bored teenagers.

I think it's a little unfair towards Reddit. Any community large enough will be taken over by trolls if nothing else for the fact that they're the ones making the most noise. Subreddits are perfect way to contain those people away from others since the majority won't be posting in niché subreddits, and those few who do can be moderated.

If anything might be a lesson on community design it might be to put up a few more "barriers" between subreddits and the general population and think about how to control interaction between them.

Super good article about this:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-...

Facebook's shortcomings on privacy keep me away.

I'm glad that most of the communities I'm part of sat out of this mess.

The top subs I read and/or post to are /r/asktransgender, /r/ainbow, /r/comicbooks, and /r/kamenrider. None of them would've benefited from taking part in any kind of blackout (the first two of those function as support groups and any blackout could seriously hurt someone who needs help, the third is a mid-sized fandom where people care more about talking about their hobby than staging a juvenile protest, and the fourth is an extremely niche fandom so small that nobody would notice a blackout).

Nice comment, in the last couple of days I also have warmed again to Facebook.

It's safe - I know all the people we can still have arguments but they are well behaved ones.

Agreed. Reddit is, unfortunately, a cesspool now for many reasons.

Agreed. It's why I stay off Reddit.

Pretty much had to happen. To say that the Victoria situation was mishandled is a severe understatement. I wonder what will happen with communities like FPH and others (that have since moved to Voat). Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts?

Time will tell. IMO, the problem at hand is that reddit is still trying to make advertisers their bread and butter. And advertisers will never be overly attracted to censorship-free spaces.

Even though I may not agree with her aggressively politically-correct agenda (nor does most of reddit), I think it may have been a smart move from a business dev. perspective.

> Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts?

I doubt it. Garbage like FPH should have been dealt with much sooner. The reason there was a backlash about that at all, imo, is because they let it drag out too long. Reddit was the friend-parent for so long that when it finally came time to enforce some discipline, it came as a shock and felt like a betrayal.

Erm, why should there be any "discipline" at all?

Discussion sites (HN included) exist solely due to their users' laziness for using and/or creating better Free decentralized solutions and ensuing network effects. In exchange for this ease of use, the site inserts an epsilon of advertising and censorship. This is the extent of their value proposition.

Eventually business/legal skinjobs take over, mistake the community for an owned golden goose, and ramp up the amount of advertising/censorship. The illusion of openness is shattered. The users revolt and move to the next green pasture.

Where is the limit? Coontown, does that get banned? Sexwithdogs? Incest? SRS? They seemed to hide behind the vail of harassment and not peak behind the curtain of what reddit really is. Reddits problem is they said anything goes, and then years later they saw what they created.

True, although it's important to note that there are still many communities that are much worse than FPH on reddit.

You're talking as if Reddit is doing them a favor by providing them a platform. With your idea of "discipline", Reddit would never become the giant that it is today.

This ignores that advertisement is a good amount of revenue for Reddit (it took is over $8M last year from advertising)[1]. In any case, there definitely needs to exist a balance, and the announcement on Reddit makes no pretense that they'll allow any community like FPH to come back or exist going forward. Even if they didn't need to rely on advertisement, it's better for the community overall to have communities that are hurtful go somewhere else. In my opinion, if FPH etc. are fine at Voat, stay there.

1: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/

> “It became clear that the board and I had a different view on the ability of Reddit to grow this year,” Ms. Pao said in an interview. “Because of that, it made sense to bring someone in that shared the same view.”

Does this mean that the board thought Pao was being too aggressive in pushing growth or not aggressive enough? If it's the latter then the Reddit community is in for a shock.

Not aggressive enough:

> So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.

http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_tha...

I can see how growing users organically was going to be tough, especially with the new community guidelines:

1) Pushing commercial IamAs was going to have a two-fold effect: increasing revenue and increasing traffic. Traffic would have basically come from Fortune 500 brands paying to drive traffic to Reddit via TV, online ads, etc. Companies today drive users to their own sites or to branded channels on YouTube or Facebook but not to Reddit. Sponsored IAmAs might have helped create a new stream of mainstream users but would have generated a large backlash with the moderators and the current rules on IamA (non-commercial).

2) Banning morally dubious but wildly popular content - The Fappening BROKE reddit. It drove so much traffic and introduced reddit to so many new users that by holding themselves to now a different standard of community policing, they are also banning from content that drives a lot of traffic growth. Celebrity, gossip and scandal brings all the eyeballs and $$$ to the yard.

The only logical place for the type of growth they are looking for is mobile hence the push for more video content and anything that capitalizes on how people consume content now-a-days.

As someone who frequents only a couple of subs on Reddit (which were completely insulated from this fiasco), I have no idea why people were so pissed off.

So she made a bad decision. Big fcking deal.

"She's killing the community!". Well, if your idea of 'community' is making public rape threads (while you use a throwaway) and threaten to kill a person, then maybe your community deserves to die.

Reddit has a lot* of good. I've been there long enough to see it. But it has a lot of absolute low-lifes clogging its sewers as well.

I think users were pissed off because of the lack of transparency. No one knew what the admins were deleting. It was up to the community to find out which subreddits were banned and why. Further the admins never logically explained their decisions, for example, to ban fph over srs. From the outside it seemed like an arbitrary power trip. And for what? Reddit's moderation system is perfect: let users form their own communities and moderate them as they wish. Some of the communities will be terrible but that's the beauty of it; you don't have to go to them. This system is what let reddit grow to the size it is today. While hackernews takes a different approach (moderation at the admin level isn't unusual) that is only manageable for a site of a smaller size.

It seems to me that HN is more like a single subreddit than Reddit as a whole. The admin action on HN feels more like mod action on Reddit, because there is no larger umbrella above HN.

Being the CEO of reddit is a political position. And Ellen Pao has too much drama in her life to be a good politician. Losing a sexual harassment case, marrying a crook who stole millions...those are events that don't happen by accident.

Yup, she did awesome Sam. Especially recently. (Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.)

I didn't even know who she was until "the last few months." Which have been a parade of increasingly-negative press and idiotic behavior. And that's from reading Reuters and the NY Times -- I don't even use Reddit.

---

Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board... “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.

>Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.

Meh. It's traditional. There's nothing to be gained from running down your outgoing CEO. Besides, they hired her, so the worse she looks the worse their own judgement looks.

The one take away I have from this situation is that we have an honesty problem. People criticize Reddit as a platform of hate and vitrol, but as in reality this only partially describes the entirety. They complain that people on the internet are too free to speak their minds, but perhaps this is a reflection on our society a place where honesty and the free exchange of ideas is discouraged.

Response to material: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-is-a-shrine-to-...

Food for thought: https://www.facebook.com/psiljamaki/posts/10153334440110516?...

> “The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,”

@sama, how do you explain this claim without ignoring the community's enormous support for Victoria Taylor?

Victoria rarely expressed any of her own opinions, especially controversial ones. She was a facilitator for interviews.

Those two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

This is nothing unusual. Ballmer and many other male CEO's have been treated abusively. People only notice it more because she's a woman.

Sam has to say this or else risk Ellen suing him too. I wouldn't read into anything he says more than that.

Seems like Reddit hired Ellen without checking up her references at the previous job, ie. Kleiner, and now they harvest the same results - insufficient performance and high scandals.

(note: there is nothing about her sex here - just read the case materials and you'll see that she behaved just like a jerk at Kleiner - for God sake she complained there that some assistant was using company fax to send brain scans of dying from cancer mother)

If you read the case materials, you discover her peers and superiors generally rated her performance as exceeding expectations.

i did read the materials and discovered that they clearly understood that a rattlesnake they've got on their hands and were very cautious to not get that rattlesnake angry (and thus in particular very carefully worded reviews with nowhere close to real "exceeding expectations") and were just waiting for her to leave on her own ( they even paid her to do that if I remember correctly - ie. she was more worth to them being gone than working for them )

It's interesting how fast people go from hating[1] /u/kn0thing to love[2] him again

[1]: https://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...

[2]: https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

And then Ellen echoed his statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_th...

what is happening, not used to reading positive interactions on reddit with that account...

I think it has to do with how mob psychology latches onto whatever is bright and shiny. So a character with both pros and cons in the mass narrative is able to be demonized one day and lionized the next, based on whichever trait sparkled more that day.

I think it has a lot to do with how he handled it. He immediately came out after making that comment and said he screwed up big time and was really sorry. People took that as sincere, and I did too, since it was really only a single comment.

Isn't it already too late? How can a new captain save the sinking ship? The new CEO would be standing on a double edged sword. If he reverses course immediately claiming reddit an absolute free-speech enviromnent, the people who wanted a safe-space will be disillusioned, if he doesn't the rest of the users will keep seeking for another platform.

I'd suggest that the 'safe spacers' are on the wrong site.

When anything gets as big as reddit there will always be unsavory things posted - flying the banner of 'free speech' for so long and then suddenly doing a 180 is what has made people annoyed

Pushing hard on moderator tools. In the short term, Reddit should watch its moderators, look for usage patterns, and build systems to reduce moderation effort. In the long term, Reddit should develop artificial moderation (AM).

Reddit is the natural place for the discipline of artificial moderation (using AI / ML to help moderate public forums) to develop. For example, an automated "argument detection" bot could intervene when two participants start going down the warpath, acting like a janitor who pushes two rowdy students apart when they start fighting. Or, a bot could detect when a post consists entirely of one participant insulting another and take appropriate action.

These are difficult problems, but Reddit is sitting on a goldmine of training data in the form of the human-generated moderation logs. Reddit should either hire the talent to develop such systems or partner with those who already have (Google / IBM / ...).

Reddit would do well to hire someone with experience in the association management field. Those folks specialize in managing fractious communities such that the volunteers not only stick around, they're happy to pay for the privilege.

But where are they going to find someone like that? Guess it's time to put an ad on Craigslist.

Ellen Pao was a scapegoat. She was the face of a lot of changes that didn't sit well with the community. Now the people clamor, they remove her, and the people are happy again.

Notice how they didn't mention anything about reverting the bad changes to the website. ;)

So... who is replacing Steve at Hipmunk?

Announcement on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

Friday afternoon, eh? Someone took a PR class in college!

-- Top Comment on that thread

Will the anti-corporate brigades in these large community-driven sites make turning a profit impossible in the long-run?

I don't think so, because the degree of "anti corporate" sentiment varies dramatically from sub to sub. The thing is, it almost doesn't even make sense to talk about "The Reddit Community" as though it was any one, unified, cohesive whole, because it largely isn't.

No, the corporations will simply adapt and learn to play the anti-corporate tune to turn a profit.

See Continuum, American Odyssey, Mr. Robot, The Lego Movie, and so on. You want an anti-corporate message and you are willing to pay for it? There are corporations ready to fulfill your need :-)

I'm sorry to see it go down like this. Redditors treatment of her got really ugly (/r/all after the FPH banning was shocking) over the past few weeks, and it's disheartening to see people's bad behavior rewarded.

What about her bad behavior which affected many redditors?

As a CEO she chose to take actions in manner and method that allowed things to spiral out of control. It was her job to control the message and blowback. She failed at her job, therefore she needed to go. It is really that simple.

Wow, I applaud this development!

Now, if Victoria is coming back too - that's would be 200% right move for reddit!

Converting large-scale investor dollars into compelling returns using the world's most entitled and monomaniacal message board: not, in fact, an easy job. Pretty sure very few of us could do it either.

I think the take away may be that Ellen Pao is not the executive that someone's hype machine purports her to be.

I will be interested to see if anything changes regarding the management of Reddit or at least the communities opinion of it. I wonder if the community will chalk this up as a win and suddenly forget all of the reasons they have been complaining which really have nothing to do with Pao in the first place.

After seeing what Ellen went through, I think Sam will need to raise some more funds to offer a significant pay bump to entice even mediocre talent to fill her void.

I doubt it. In a lot of ways she created her own problems.

What they need is someone who focuses on the business side. People on reddit shouldn't care who the CEO is, and they wouldn't if they didn't feel the CEO was making the site worse.

Absolutely correct. There's no way that any moderately-intelligent woman would ever take the job now.

Perhaps a fairly dim, elderly man who doesn't know much about social media and therefore is immune to the storms of reddit.

So can someone summarize the ordeal?

Ellen Pao has been CEO of Reddit for 8 months. A month or so ago, Reddit banned several subreddits for organized harassment behavior. Since Pao had recently lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, aspects of the reddit community pattern-matched the occurances as "Social Justice Warrioring" and engaged in an organized hate-fest on Pao.

About a week ago, Victoria, the admin who coordinated Reddit's "ask me anything" subreddits (interviews with celebrities for the most part) was fired for unknown reasons. The optics of this were handled poorly, and the community got enraged. Since the buck stopped with Pao, and she was already weakened due to the backlash on the earlier issue, this second backlash revealed her to be politically compromised, and thus untenable as CEO.

Edit: corrected tenure

Two major publicly visible actions:

1) Banning of several 'hate' subreddits especially /r/FatPeopleHate for harassment. The harassment was kind of dubious, as while they certainly weren't saying nice things, it didn't seem like they were actively doing 'raids' or doxing. At the same time several significantly worse, but smaller, subreddits remained online (gore, racism, sexism, etc) More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa...

2) Removal of several employees, likely because they wouldn't/didn't relocate to SF. Notably Victoria, who coordinated numerous AMAs with key people, and her removal completely cut off communications with several planned AMAs, including several that were live. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...

Both events were followed by a large amount of anti-Pao hate and general massive amounts of spammy posts for 2-3 days taking over the front page of reddit. The first instance also involved lots of new subreddits that would get banned, before another dozen would appear in an endless game of whack-a-mole.

Whole situation started when reddit closed a few hateful subreddits (r/fatpeoplehate, and a few racist ones as well); a very vocal backlash came from the contingent of reddit that believes the admins have no right to 'regulate free speech'. The site was brigaded and flooded with anti-Pao posts (who they saw as their villain) which then turned to racist 'Chairman Pao' posts, posts with her and a nazi flag, etc.

After a while this calmed down.

A week ago reddit fired/let go Victoria, who was the liaison for hundreds of celebrities and reddit, often transcribing entire IAmAs (community interviews). Victoria's departure was immediate and caused a lot of planned IAmAs to be postponed or canceled, since she was the go-between (and in some cases the only point of contact).

A few major moderators were angry and posted about their displeasure at Victoria's departure and the general lack of interface admins have with moderators. This snowballed in to a 'blackout' of many major subreddits for about a day (longer for a few of the smaller ones). One of the admins posted a 'Popcorn tastes good...' comment when people asked him what he thought of the anger; which fanned the flames. The major protests died down after about a day or two, but a few subreddits spawned for the specific purpose of continuing the protest and to oust Pao. These people brigaded most posts about Pao and promoted the petition link calling for her removal. The anti-Pao rhetoric continued at full force (with the usual racist 'Chairman Pao' meme, nazi flags, posts of her photo to a subreddit called 'punchablefaces').

In summary: Pao and admins were wrong to not communicated with the moderators more, especially when it came to Victoria; the original protest had legitimate legs but then devolved in to the same 4chan-esque bile that happens any time reddit makes some sort of administrative move. That awful bile of protest is what kept the flames going which led to Pao stepping down.

Here's an analogy:

Imagine a pub (Digg) that everyone in town went to. Everything was great until the pub decided to try to make more money by forcing patrons to sit a certain way. Everyone in town decided to boycott this pub, and then they found another pub (Reddit), that didn't have the silly monetization scheme that the Digg pub had. The influx of new patrons turned this quiet little pub in the corner of the town into the main pub in town. Everyone was welcome in this pub - sports types, gamers, geeks, fitness nerds. Everyone had their own little corner, and for a few years the pub provided the town with a place to meet up with people of similar interest, even if the interests were darker in nature.

During the last year, the pub decided to hire a new manager (Ellen Pao). The new manager wants the pub to be a more welcoming place for people of all types so she decides to ban a group of rowdy patrons. However, other patrons felt that Ellen Pao intruded on their freedom to express themselves and their own opinions in the pub, and an uprising took place. To calm the uprising, Pao decides to completely silence people who talked shit about her (shadowbans, subreddit bans), and bans out even more groups of people. Patrons were NOT happy about this situation.

Then, the managers of this pub decided to fire a very well loved employee who contributed a lot to bringing awesome guests to the pub, without letting the patrons or the other employees know about it. This made other employees of the pub very angry, as they all loved what she does for the community. To make matters worse, the managers make snide comments about the situation. Due to the previous Ellen Pao bannings and the recent firing, everyone in the pub decides to riot in whatever way they can. They also consider moving to a new pub in town (voat.co) though the pub seems to always be full.

People were angry, and they knew they have the power to completely render Reddit unpopular, just like they did with Digg. Reddit listened to the community rather than got stuck inside their own views on what the website should or should not be and the resignation of Pao was the outcome; a good PR move.

Failure to understand Non-Profit 101. If you rely on unpaid volunteers, you can't afford to enrage them. It doesn't really matter if those volunteers are right or wrong.

She thought she could enforce her agenda onto an online community and it would all go well. Results as expected by anyone who has ever been part or observed an online community.

I wonder if a Law Degree runs counter to running a social network? Where authority bumps up against anarchy. Imagine Peter Thiel running reddit. Both Thiel and Pao have law degrees. Both have been lightning rods. I suspect a JD comes in handy for some ventures. Such as Thiel running Paypal or Pao sourcing funding for RPX. In both of those cases, it is about removing ambiguity. For social nets, the opposite holds true. Because, ambiguity is the main product.

Reddit: The world's largest drunken mob.

I'm not even going to debate whether or not she was an effective CEO. At the end of the day it's about the lawsuit, and I'm not going to argue the merits of that either. The only thing she should have realized from the start was that you can't have your cake and eat it too. You either choose reddit or the lawsuit. You can't divide your focus between both or you lose both.

Friendly reminder that this very website widely supported a campaign to make a black woman leave a board of a tech company. [1] And she actually didn't do anything questionable while being on board, to warrant such an outrage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069

Great to see Steve back in the fold

Deleted comment

It's remarkable how fast and how organized they were.

*Communities

So, there are two stories people use to sum all the affair up: either "the witch is dead", or "pitchfork mob got what they wanted".

But neither of these stories really fit the information we have right now. Both of them fit some of it, and look realistic — unless you look at the whole picture.

The best conclusion we can have here is that we don't actually know what's _really_ going on, just a bunch of facts and a couple of theories.

That article was more suited for editorial than technology. Pao was hated mainly for things either done by reddit before her, or done by her before reddit. Unfortunately, as leaders often are, she was held responsible for both. That being said she was interim, and was apparently not aligned with reddit culturally. That's an internet thing, not, as this article was so quick to claim, a gender thing.

In the 24th Upvoted by Reddit podcast, Steve and Alexis talked about all the great content and communities hiding within Reddit that go undiscovered. I'm excited to see how they'll try to solve that problem, and hope they find a great solution. Reddit is really great, and it's very cool to see both Steve and Alexis back to enjoy and advance it.

I posted this over on reddit but it got lost in the noise:

Cool, I guess. But after having spent some time on voat.co I think reddit will get less and less of my attention (not that anyone gives a shit about me but I suspect I'm not alone).

Reddit's management has destroyed any sense of trust I had in Reddit (I'm looking at you /u/kn0thing, it's not just Ellen, my understanding is you fired Victoria, right? And then grabbed popcorn [I know, cheap shot, but it appears like you really fell out of touch]).

It appears that it is all about making money which I think is going to be the end of Reddit for some of us. Reddit could have a decent revenue stream on reasonable ads but that wasn't enough, it had to be more. That is really troubling because the next thing you might decide to "monetize" is what each of your users reads. That would make the NSA look amateurs and would be a massive invasion of privacy. It would also be very easy to monetize. Given all that has been going on, it would appear to be just a matter of time before "user optimized marketing" appears.

Welcome back but the existing management has dug you a mighty big hole. I don't trust you any more.

Huh. I may have to walk that back. I just got back from cleaning up some Greg Chesson's computers (he passed on) so I haven't been watching stuff.

Caught up and read Steve Huffman's stuff, he seems like the real deal, he seems to care, be all over it, maybe he'll fix it. He at least sounds like someone who gives a shit about the right things.

So maybe I'm wrong, it happens.

Sometimes internet-hate is completely arbitrary.

Maybe she screwed up some things, I don't know, but from reading posts on reddit it felt like an arbitrary cat video going viral - the amount of attention was not warranted by the "causes".

Remember PG getting all the shit on twitter because of his misunderstood statement about women?

Outrage is a powerful emotion, and people enjoy participating in revolutions when it doesn't require any effort and can be done from the safety of a computer screen.

I'm pretty sure 99% of people participating in this shitstorm had no good reason to care about it at all, and did it just because it felt "fun" to participate in something like this.

Also - way to teach an angry mob that they can get what they want if they yell about it enough by giving in to their demands.

Even on the internet, mob mentality wins.

We keep hearing over and over again about how it's a small minority of vocal people who spew vitriol in any community, but how about providing some real, hard data?

Reddit has enough data and skill to identify approximately the percetage of users who engaged in this type of behaviour at the very least.

I'd rather see the numbers myself than read a press release simply stating something and being asked to believe it.

rough year for her

Perpetual PR nightmare averted.

That's what you get for trying to turn the internet into Disneyland.

Hey I've got an idea:

Let's all cry together because someone said something mean about a public figure. In fact, I'm incapable of discussing any other aspect of this event until this unspeakable atrocity has been addressed.

This NYT report is as much detached from reality and propagandist as reporting on support for the 2003 Iraq war. Is Victoria, the popular Reddit employee fired, in support of whom all this affair happened, a male?

Attempting such a propaganda in this connected day and age is supremely stupid.

quelle surprise

During the KP trial I had always kept an open mind towards her arguments...until I later learned she was married to Buddy Fletcher, one of the biggest scoundrels and thieves in the investment world in recent years. The character and judgment of a person who would fall in love and wed someone like that says more than I can articulate. It's oddly reassuring to see my (and many, many others') skepticism about both her judgment and motives validated.

Everything about their saga is bizarre. Did you know that up until his marriage to Ellen, Buddy had lived as a homosexual? he was living with a partner of multiple years (Hobart “Bo” Fowlkes) and was openly gay. Not that there is anything odd or wrong about that.

It is just rather strange how these two polarizing figures came together in a union.

For more info and details see:

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletch...

And then there are the KP employee reviews and other internal documents which became public as a result of the trial she lost that show Ellen Pao to be a thoroughly unproductive and toxic employee who was given every opportunity to shape up but was too busy engrossed in the internal office politics and making 'enemy lists'.

If someone made a movie about this stuff and the people involved, most would think it too unrealistic.

One of the issues during the trial was for KP to show that she had options outside the firm and that her dismissal was not detrimental to her career. The CEO of Reddit gig came in nicely to prove just that. Even if she was just an interim CEO. Now the actual CEO is in place, considering that she did not work out ok for Reddit.

Stop it. Woman do not somehow have to share the blame for their husbands alleged misdeeds. Seriously, this is 2015, not the middle ages where they'd burn a woman at the stake for something her husband did wrong.

The knife cuts both ways. The clickbait media and various groups are trying to paint the now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again. Over 200,000 people with legitimate concerns sign a petition to have Pao step down yet they still carry on with there charade.

People are sick and tired of the media and a small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with. They engage in all forms of harassment, trying to get people fired, posting addresses and family pictures etc. The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits. All of which is factual information available to the public and even the media has to admit these things are facts.

The clickbait media has to be called out more then anyone for trying to turn every issue no matter how banal into a black and white battle between good and evil and then fanning the flames on both sides. Its extremely cynical mostly to drive traffic to there sites. There is zero accountability in the media today and zero ethics. Everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations.

> . The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.

What about the subreddit comparing Ellen Pao to Pyongyang [0].

Jokes about Pao with over a +4000 positive score [1] [2] Jokes comparing Ellen Pao to Hitler. [3] I remember a post to /r/pics or /r/funny of Hitler's Wikipedia page, with Pao's photo instead of Hitler.

I ran into some old coworkers (who take Reddit WAAAY too seriously) at a bar during the weekend this whole thing was first blowing up. They were literally talking about how Pao needs to die. Then they got drunk, forgot they had ranted about her, and told me again how she needed to die.

This whole thing was really disgusting and made me hate the average Reddit user. I'll still browse some of the smaller subs, but I won't be touching the frontpage ever again.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/paoyongyang

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c03y8/ellen_paos_car...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c05wq/what_sound_doe...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3c0b5p/whats_the_diff...

> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits. All of which is factual information available to the public and even the media has to admit these things are facts.

Oh please. You can disclaim the disgusting statements made all over reddit recently as not part of a coherent community or whatever, but don't pretend they didn't exist at all.

As for the rest of this nonsense, the statement quoted had nothing to do with "clickbait media and various groups" (I seriously feel like we're in talking points memos territory with this stuff), this is a statement from Sam Altman, so take it up with him.

> There is zero accountability in the media today and zero ethics. Everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations.

I mean, seriously, what on earth are you addressing here? Who are you talking to?

My favorite thing about Pao's loudest critics are how bad they are --- like, "ethics in gaming journalism" bad --- at concealing their agenda. "there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits", "even the media has to admit these things are facts". Real slick, there.

I don't understand the preoccupation with the "media." It doesn't seem to me like news sites had much to do with this saga.

Is there a mountain of unfair coverage I didn't see? It seems kind of obvious that Reddit is much more "the media" than any clickbait news site. And wasn't the whole point of "blacking out" subreddits to gain media attention?

"No, don't you see? This is all about ethics in game journalism."

> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits

Why the fuck is someone else's sexual harassment lawsuit with their former employer any of your concern? Unless you have a political agenda against women who complain about sexual harassment.

Is there a larger red flag for the aggrieved tech male to wave these days than whinging about "ethics" in the media?

This comment has no relevance to the top comment it replied to. When we see people doing that, we detach the subthread from its parent.

> People are sick and tired of ... a small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with.

You're damn right people are tired of the shrill MRAs with their short-sighted, selfish, and immature wails, who can't think of anyone but themselves. They're a small group of militant activists crying over what amounts to a skinned knee, always trying to shout down other people, but never being pro-active and creating events of their own.

There are dozens of posts with 1000+ upvotes comparing Ellen with Hitler. As far as I can tell, there's something larger and terrible going on within reddit's community.

> now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again

This is a pretty accurate narrative. You may not agree, but casual misogyny is incredibly pervasive on most defaults, and it's fairly prevalent within the smaller, community-based subs as well.

> small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with

If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.

> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.

I'm not even going to address how laughably absurd your characterization of consistent harassment, abuse, and terrifyingly legitimate rape and death threats as "criticism" is. Most people were upset with Pao because she was part of an executive decision to shut down FatPeopleHate and a couple of other abusive subreddits. It's quite a stretch to say that she was solely responsible for this decision, and even then, it's sobering that people would respond with scathing, fiery, and highly toxic personal and threatening attacks on a decision that was intended to help people be kinder to each other -- and worse, lobbed on someone that had at most 2/5ths of the executive power to make that decision.

The media didn't turn the shaky relationship between reddit's users and their administrators into a black-and-white affair. Reddit itself did, by using Pao as a scapegoat to attack everything they saw as antithetical to freedom of hatred and abuse under the guise of "free speech."

PR that comes out of corporations cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Altman is being honest that he appreciated her efforts. We can't trust that her and her husband were in love. All of this that comes out of spokesmen is carefully crafted as a result of a numbers game.

When do we hear "so and so CEO did a horrible job and was forced out by the board."? Never. So are we to believe there is no such thing as a terrible CEO? Will we hear Sam saying "We made a terrible decision putting her in charge."? Never. Even if it was the actual truth.

Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman.

No one said give her a pass, it was simply said the 'vitriol was appalling.' That simply means that the denizens of the internet when taken as a collective are horrible people who can not voice criticism in a civil manner.

Assuming she was completely horrible and a terrible CEO... Assuming that! How could someone's lack of ability to do their job (or anything else for that matter) make the type of death and rape threats that this 'vitriol' was seen being expressed with less appalling?

You are falling into a common pit where you may think it was good she has been replaced, and you may be right, and gosh darn it you are certainly entitled to that opinion. But when you reply objecting to a comment that is basically just saying the type of hate a woman got on the internet was horrible, you become part of the problem by basically saying she deserved to receive those threats.

> We can't trust that her and her husband were in love.

What the fuck is this? And how is this relevant? And when was the last time you heard a similar comment about a man?

> Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman.

It seems like she's been the subject of vitriol primarily for being a woman, since a lot of the vitriol predates the past few days.

> Will we hear Sam saying "We made a terrible decision putting her in charge."? Never. Even if it was the actual truth.

She was previously fired from Kleiner Perkins for unsatisfactory performance.

Perhaps the Reddit board has come to the conclusion she might not be ready for a CEx position.

Skepticism in all things is great, but if it doesn't go both ways (like you're presenting here), then it's not skepticism at all but rather a bunch of preconceived notions about what's going on behind the scenes upon which you are projecting all of this bizarre vitriol. It's great that you are so skeptical of what Reddit management is saying, but you should be equally skeptical about all of this stuff that you're imagining is really going on.

> PR that comes out of corporations cannot be trusted

What does this have to do with the parent's post?

> We can't trust that her and her husband were in love.

We detached this subthread and marked it off topic.

I think the last line may resonate a bit negative (and possibly sexist) with people but I do agree with your larger point of: when do corporations actually tell us the truth about these ousters?

Corporations are like sea of cockroaches on the dark floor. They look vast. Roaches have their little fights and wars, but when they make some random noise and draw outside attention, it's funny to look how individual cockroaches run away from the spotlight.

Don't piss off Kleiner perkins, that's all I can say...

I am opening a bottle of champagne and at the same time answer my own question: it took 3 weeks for the community to get rid off a tyrant. Well done Reddit!

Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.

PG has posted on HN saying that downvoting for disagreement is fine.

Who is Ellen Pao?

She is Reddit's Chief.

I hope reddit has good legal representation...

The real question is will Ellen Pao sue reddit now?

I think most people just let out a sigh of relief.

There's a fine line between being polite and being so boring that it's stifling. Every commenting site has it's herd mentality and punishment of thought crimes.

Reddit users just wore it on the their sleeves and trying to suppress them was silly.

It might turn into DIGG 2 pretty fast and might not recover.

The investors and the "community" are just too far a part on this.

That was quick but the corporate agenda being pushed flew in the face of the Reddit community. Power to the people!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com