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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

You're not trying to say the two are comparable are you?

In what way are they not?

Objectively? Pao was criticised for her present actions while at the job, Eich because someone pointed at his past.

... and he did a good job for years while she doesn't have much to show. What's your point?

edit: i figure u re saying one was harassed more than the other?

I was just answering your question. Some might think that context matters. As in, what happened to Pao just comes with the job while what happened to Eich was purely personal.

Ha. Maybe we need language to evolve the way we now have "rape" and "rape rape." I propose "harassment" and "har-fucking-rassment."

Not sure what circles you hang around with if you often find the need to differentiate between different levels of rape..

From my reading, this wasn't about harassment. It was about missteps, many of them. Needless to say, her various apologies were not spurred by harassment.

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.

> Part of the user base did both.

Wait, what? You can raise "reasonable" concerns while harassing someone? Harassment makes raising "valid concerns" not well-argued or reasonable.

It's possible to post a perfectly calm, sensible, well-argued comment in one place, and post a spiteful, obscenity-filled rant in another place (or possibly the same place), so, yes. If you want to get fancy, you can use two computers and click "submit" on both simultaneously, so, yes, you can, even for pedantic definitions of "while".

> You can raise "reasonable" concerns while harassing someone?

Yep. You can write two paragraphs of well-articulated critique and then write something like "this bitch should die and rot in hell" in the end.

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.

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