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She was CEO at a time when Alexis Ohanian terminated Victoria Taylor.The Reddit userbase was very much under the impression that it was Pao's decision to terminate Taylor, not Alexis'. Pao was acting CEO, ordinarily that would be a CEO's decision, not the board's, and Alexis never really took responsibility for the termination except for one vague comment which most people took to mean that Alexis was responsible for the termination after all.
The timing of the termination was unfortunate, because it followed immediately after an AMA with Jesse Jackson in which some of the comments Taylor would have forwarded to him were pretty inflammatory. Initial suspicion on most of the site was that Pao terminated Taylor because of that AMA, which fit nicely into the narrative of Pao that much of the userbase had been building.
> She was a principal in a high-profile gender discrimination law suit against a giant venture capital firm where she previously worked. One wonders what this had to do with her tenure at Reddit...
Reddit has two different very vocal groups on it that have slightly overlapping opinions: the MRAs and the anti-SJWs (whatever they call themselves, I dunno). Both groups see any attempt to make a gender discrimination or racial discrimination claim as worthy of ridicule.
According to their story -- and this was stated outright in a lot of high-score comments before the Taylor termination, as the KP lawsuit was unfolding -- Pao is an untalented woman who was using her gender as a weapon against an innocent business in retaliation for being fired, while also attempting to rescue the financial disaster that her husband-in-convenience-only was facing. (Their words, not mine.)
So, to them, they see their worst nightmare helming one of the few sites online where they can all congregate semi-freely.
> She presided directly over the termination of David Croach, who had leukemia. ... he was not --- as Pao's critics are very, very fond of saying --- simply fired "for having leukemia".
Right, but "he was fired for reasons we don't understand and we should all get on with our day or maybe find some other cause to be upset about" doesn't play nearly as well as "Feminist SJW fired an employee because he had leukemia".
Reddit is not exactly a pillar of intellectual discourse.
> She is also accused of having deleted posts critical of her and her husband...
Context matters: this is all happening around the same time as the tail-end of things like "Gamergate" and the whole Hugo Awards mess thing. In that context, the Reddit mass would easily imagine Pao as some kind of SJW version of Rupert Murdoch, where she wouldn't have to understand the workings of the site to make her desires known to the people who could remove content she didn't approve of.
> She presided over a policy that banned the FPH subreddit. ... FPH was banned for harassment, not for hosting hate speech.
Several people pointed that out at the time, but they were mostly drowned out by the outrage. This was the lynchpin that really made the Pao-is-a-social-justice-warrior narrative work.
And -- and I'm a little sick to my stomach for taking this position -- FPH wasn't the only sub that was banned, and there were other subs on the site that were guilty of harassment of some form or another (an oft-mentioned one is SRS), and some of the other banned subs didn't seem to be guilty of harassment.
Setting down anything resembling a sane and consistent policy on what is and isn't allowed behavior on Reddit has been one of its weaknesses for years now. Every time Reddit doesn't communicate clearly enough with its userbase to make sure all the gaps are filled in, the userbase responds by coming up with about the worst possible story that could feasibly fit what they think they're seeing.
There was also the sudden termination of the employee behind the redditgifts site and the huge secret Santa program (/u/kickme444), who, like Victoria Taylor, is seen as one of the few good parts of Reddit, and, like Taylor, can't talk about why they were suddenly terminated. In fact, nobody even knew it had happened until /u/kickme444 mentioned it in one of the Victoria Taylor outrage threads.
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So I think you're missing a little of the nuance and context for a few things, but most of all you seem to be expecting Reddit's most vocal users to make some kind of sense.
And they don't.
Reddit's user base is awful. They have been allowed to be awful for years, and they're getting worse, not better. There are some parts of Reddit that are really great, but those tend to be the parts that are mercilessly moderated.
The Reddit administration initially took a really hands-off approach to managing its user base, and now it's stuck with a mass of users that represent some of the worst parts of internet culture, all mingling and mixing genes with eachother. And the administration is now trying to figure out what to do about it, and they are just miserably ham-handed at it. They won't commit to making and enforcing clear guidelines that kick out the worst of their users, but every once in a while they find some reason to whack a bunch of them. That just pisses everyone off and creates situations that lead to things like Pao hatred. (And it was hatred.)
They keep trying to find some middleground between a 4chan-style free-for-all and being some kind of hub for kindness and intellectual discourse while hosting the biggest gathering place for internet scum, and it just blows up in their face, over and over and over again.
The fault for that certainly doesn't lie entirely at Pao's feet, I just think she had no idea how to handle a site like Reddit.