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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

> More than 200k signed, so you're off by a factor of 10.

So half a percent of the userbase or so? I'd call that a vocal minority.

http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-...

> I don't think she was ever going to get back the community's confidence.

Likely true. Backing down here likely means zero chance of addressing toxic communities in the site for the foreseeable future.

I think you're overlooking the fact that all 36 million (or however many) people that visit Reddit each month are NOT equal....the active content creators are intrinsically more valuable to a community like reddit, simply because they make the community what it is. When the people that make the content (of which 200k is no insignificant drop) that attracts the other 35 million ad-viewers are unhappy, Reddit MUST do something about, whether this 'minority' is vocal or not.

How are you tying the petitioners back to Reddit accounts to gauge their participation rate on the site?

Logically those who care enough about Reddit to sign the petition would tend to be frequent users of the site and content creators, not casual users who probably don’t care about Reddit’s development at all.

>>So half a percent of the userbase or so? I'd call that a vocal minority.

By that logic, the people who protested during the Civil Rights movement were also a vocal minority. Doesn't make their grievances any less valid.

They were a vocal minority. So's the KKK.

This is why I'm contesting the idea that "a grassroots campaign" is evidence that someone was in the wrong. It's merely evidence that some people had an opinion about the situation.

Out of curiousity, I wonder how many of those 200k actually fork over money for the service? And whether the rate of subscribing was higher, lower, or similar to the general rate. I know we have no way of knowing, but it would be an interesting factoid.

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