3 female employees gone from the Reddit team in such a short time. This could create the probably false perception that Reddit seems like a hostile working environment for women. I wonder what they'll do to address this probably false perception.
You know what's an equally likely reason that three women are gone from reddit? Reddit was employing many women, so when people leave, naturally some of those will be women.
It doesn't look like anyone was fired or made to quit because she's a woman, so let's not play the sexism card just yet.
And, yeah, the harassment of Pao was very misogynistic -- and racist to boot (people were calling her a "ching chong cunt") -- but there's nothing to indicate that the other two had any problems due to their gender.
That kind of destroys your premise, IMO.
The vitriol is terrible, but that's more a function of people being angry on the anonymous internet and saying whatever inflammatory things they can come up with to express that.
The fact of the matter is that we just don't know how or why Victoria was fired and we will likely never know. Everything so far is just speculation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
1. Person X stridently argues a position contradicted directly by the record, which they haven't taken the time to read.
2. Person Y rebuts X.
3. X demands a source from Y.
4. Y sources their rebuttal.
5. X recapitulates argument based on dubious, nitpicky reading of source, pretending they'd known the source was flawed all along.
The problem isn't that providing sources makes it harder to win arguments with lazy people, it's that it tends to introduce a second argument, over the interpretation of the source, as a smokescreen for instability of the first argument. It gets tedious.
I'm not saying that's what you did, just that I've been conditioned by message board nerdery to expect that to happen.
In this case, you can if you'd like just take my word for it that Ohanian took responsibility both for the reorg of AMAs and for the handling of the Taylor transition, not in a tea-leaf-reading way, but directly and overtly, prior to Yishan Wong's post, and in a public Reddit comment.
I wasn't trying to win or even have an argument with you. I was just trying to better my own understanding of the situation. I hadn't seen Alexis write that and couldn't find it despite spending way more time than I should be reading about reddit drama.
I don't know who you are or why I should take your word for it. I don't know why you'd expect me to take your word for it. That's something you do for people you know in person and trust, not strangers on the internet. That'd be a terrifying prospect if that's how we all did things online.
I, too, have noticed a pattern:
1. Person A writes something about a topic.
2. Person B writes about how bad something is which is related but orthogonal to the actual topic.
3. Persons C...Y have a heated debate of the orthogonal topic.
4. Person Z writes thoughtful comments about the topic but nobody reads it because the meta debate has drown out the actual topic.
A good name for it might be The Hacker News Comments Pattern. I'm not saying that's what you were doing.
(I seriously wasn't saying you were trying to bait me into giving you more ammunition for a stupid argument, but I'm pretty sure you really are implying that I introduced a bogus topic.)
https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_te...
(It's also linked in the top reply to the parent post of your linked comment, but it is not visible in the context= view)
That doesn't dispute the fact that Ellen was CEO and Ohanian's boss. He might have been responsible for the reorg, but as CEO, Ellen was ultimately responsible. Unless you think the CEO had no power.
That's why it's so weird he took an operational role in the company.
You based this on what specific information? The only insider information I read about this suggested that Pao was Ohanian's boss. Regardless, I still assert as CEO, Pao is the one responsible, and she had options to not put herself in that position.
No, I do not believe you have established with evidence or reason that the original premise of this subthread still stands.
Are you saying you need to be a crazy/malicious person to follow the above logic? Are all the 250K people who signed the petition crazy or malicious?
I wasn't the CEO of Matasano, and I fired people. And Matasano was not a big company.
Finally: people keep talking about Victoria Taylor as if she was somehow a key employee of Reddit. She probably was, but not by design. It was probably mismanagement of the AMAs that resulted in a single project manager becoming one of the most visible people in the most visible part of the site. At any rate: who was responsible for the operational organization of AMAs? Alexis Ohanian.
I interpret most of what happened very similarly to you but this part I think can't be right. Her original title was 'Director of Communications', it wasn't someone who started in the copy room and, by grit and luck, quietly ended up running one of the most popular subreddits. If the board is pestering you about growth, the chairman is back and has new plans for AMA, the AMA-person is about to be no-notice insta-fired on a Tuesday by said chairman, you probably know who that person is and what they do. If 'reddit didn't know who they were firing' is plausible then much of the stuff the crazies are saying would be plausible too.
So then there is no reason to believe that her leaving has anything to do with gender.
> and I object to the argument that I said anything of the sort. If you want to debate things with me, please don't start by imposing inflammatory and stupid positions on me.
I'm not the one that started by posting an inflammatory comment that suggested Bethanye left because of gender issues. If you didn't mean to suggest that Bethanye left because of gender issues, your comment should be corrected.
Please, share with me her quote contradicting that saying that her leaving has to do with gender.
Frankly, this has nothing to do with being a woman at Reddit, and everything to do with Reddit seeming like a hostile working environment. It just so happens that these 3 people are woman.