We apologize

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/

by nahiluhmot • 11 years ago

177 212 11 years ago

They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee their users loved.

amyjess• 11 years ago

Honestly, the much bigger issue was that they didn't tell anyone she was let go!

The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?".

That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.

Frenchgeek• 11 years ago

Not exactly : that employee was the sole line of communication for the most popular part of the site.

The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became.

The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening.

They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins.

So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting.

Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.

TarpitCarnivore• 11 years ago

Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.

But out of Reddit's entire user base how many are actually pissed off enough to go someplace else? Let alone how many are actually pissed off over this or other politics around Reddit and mods. I'd have to imagine the number is very small.

uxcn2• 11 years ago

I'm not sure this is accurate. Aside from the protest over the weekend, over 150k people (non-moderators) signed a petition to have Ellen Pao removed as CEO. That doesn't seem like a tools issue.

daviator88• 11 years ago

That's not really a logical reason to be upset since we don't know the reasons behind her termination. Even if it was a heartless business move, that's still not a very good reason for all the crazy levels of anger directed at Pao. She might be bad at her job, but a lot of it was way over the top.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit?

edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.

dominotw2• 11 years ago

I think they failed at being transparent on what they were doing like being arbitrary about bans/shadow banning ect.

MBCook• 11 years ago

No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them.

But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).

This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing.

Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.

pbreit4• 11 years ago

Of course they are allowed to. But if it's a bad decision or they handle it poorly, that is perfectly legitimate grounds for criticism.

LeoNatan252• 11 years ago

So you are saying they should have spun it and presented the moderator in bad light? Yes, they are allowed to fire her, but so is the community allowed to vocally disagree with the decision and other terrible management that has gone far enough on Reddit.

joeevans10002• 11 years ago

No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the community likes them.

Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's 'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of the users. I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they don't have control over their community.

This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.

rodgerd• 11 years ago

What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and dedicated employee

As far as you know. Last time a reddit employee was fired and there was a public discussion around it, it didn't go so well for the employee.

killface• 11 years ago

The AMA-specific portions were not (originally) the primary complaints. The mods reframed the discussion into "AMA liaison and mod tools" but it was about so much more than that. The admins would make certain users mods of subreddits, who then un-modded everybody else and basically took it over. The rampant censorship of non-mainstream opinions (even if you vehemently disagree with them), articles about Pao's shady business dealings being deleted, articles about the Ponzi scheme Pao's husband is involved in being deleted, articles about Pao's sleeping with married men (while married herself) to get ahead in her career, her trivial and frivolous "gender discrimination" lawsuit, the massive use of shadowbanning in the last couple years that is inconsistently applied, and the list can go on forever.

Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech.

It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.

westernmostcoy4• 11 years ago

Why did this apology come out today and not before Pao spoke to news outlets about this topic? Why wouldn't you try to talk to your upset users quickly and directly?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato... http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420...

McGlockenshire4• 11 years ago

If you note her account's history, you might notice that every single one of her contributions has been mass-downvoted, including earlier responses on the matter. Downvoted content gets hidden. There's an ongoing voting war over the submission itself, with only 61% upvoting. That's way, way low for reddit.

Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.

unmagnet3• 11 years ago

I had the same experience with my account https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain, where we essentially force you to pay for ads, to (add) justify your voice time and space, if you are unpopular.∫

Does anyone else find it interesting, if not as a legal-rational process, that a community-builder and or er community-leader is unable to be heard and read because of that lack of logy?

dredmorbius6• 11 years ago

Brigading and associated behaviors are at the core of many of Reddit's more significant problems. They were among the rationales for the idiotic Search rewrite over the weekend (since then an option to revert has been provided).

I think Reddit's existing moderation system's outlived its usefulness.

001sky• 11 years ago

Can't they just 'pin' the CEO's post to the top?

This reeks of lack of imagination.

DatBear• 11 years ago

They own the website. They can put whatever they want on the front page...

fjarlq• 11 years ago

Reddit co-founder and executive chairman Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) had something to say about that yesterday:

Monday is the start of a new week and I wanted to be sure everyone will be online (not on US holiday weekend) for a post.

-- https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/3c1m67/c...

westernmostcoy4• 11 years ago

Given the concerns over lack of communication, I wonder if that was the right move. I can see how hard this would be to manage on-site communications with everyone mass-downvoting anything from /u/kn0thing or /u/ekjp though, so I certainly don't have any better ideas.

iaw5• 11 years ago

That question is both posted and answered in the linked thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

westernmostcoy4• 11 years ago

Yep, wasn't as highly voted when I posted this (or my sorting settings are wrong -- I'm never sure what 'best' does). Thanks.

dredmorbius6• 11 years ago

Given all the timing, a Monday site announcement, rather than someting buried over the weekend, is sensible.

It would have been preferable if Pao hadn't shot her mouth off to The New York Times over the weekend, with some spectacularly inept remarks cocerning her company and Reddit users.

But timing of this announcement isn't something I'd criticise her for.

There's plenty else for that.

emehrkay3• 11 years ago

I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation.

As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.

Children are emotional.

McGlockenshire4• 11 years ago

Now, imagine what's going to happen as these angry users leave for somewhere else. They're going to take their attitude with them, and the admins of that future site are going to have to deal with the same exact mentality.

Communities that suffer schisms like the one reddit is working itself into don't fare well. You can't build a healthy community out of a mindset like "well, we aren't THEM". This has happened time after time, and I've been on both sides of the problem, sometimes as a user, sometimes as the admin.

Nadya2• 11 years ago

Victoria being let off ruined a lot of currently planned AMA's - because she played such a huge part in it all.

It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person.

With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase. AMA's on Reddit are a pretty huge deal. It's a large part of Reddit's popularity - such that even the POTUS has had an "AMA" on Reddit. So when you disrupt how they work and give absolutely no word as to why the person who played such a large part in many AMA's being scheduled, planned, and hosted: you're going to step on a lot of toes.

I read one story of a person flying to New York for an AMA. He had to change his plans and work with the person planning the AMA to schedule different interviews or sightseeing on his time because the AMA was cancelled due to Victoria being let off. That's a loss of a person's time and money with no explanation being given for why someone who was performing their job suddenly wasn't tasked with the job. I'd be pretty peeved myself. Luckily the man was very understanding it was outside of the moderator's control with Victoria being let off, but I imagine some mods aren't as lucky with their scheduled AMA's.

sp332• 11 years ago

Right, this isn't about firing the person but about the complete lack of communication with all the other people that action affected.

That said, I have to agree with most of GP's points. The amount of vitriol aimed at Pao doesn't seem to jibe with anything she's actually done.

jeletonskelly4• 11 years ago

AMA worked fine before all the organization and planning of celebrity appearances. If you're a celebrity or politician or whatever, just hop on, make a post, message a mod for verification or post something to twitter and have at it. The only reason it became so ridiculous is because the mods themselves wanted to feel important, like they were "running" AMA. If some "important" person can't use the internet, then don't do an AMA or find someone to help you. Why there needs to be an employee and all this formality is beyond me...

emehrkay3• 11 years ago

To me it seems clear that they've decided to dislike Ellen ( they have sub dedicated to portraying her as Hitler, for fucks sake). So whenever her administration makes a mistake their reaction is going to be bloody murder.

Yeah firing the woman without a backup plan for the scheduled AMAs or whatever else was going on was a mistake. But what does someone have to do in order to be fired in that manor? Are we to assume that Reddit didn't understand the woman's daily duties and what affect her immediate/un-planned absence from the company would be? We don't know why the woman was let go, could had been worth the potential of missing a few scheduled AMAs (or even this backlash).

jshen• 11 years ago

With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase

No it doesn't, and in most cases the company is protecting the privacy of the individual being fired. Can you imagine if she were fired for something like sexual harassment and reddit we're telling the world all of the dirty details? In all likelihood, saying nothing is what they should be doing.

jordigh2• 11 years ago

And they were attacking her with sexist and racist comments. Classic Reddit: 4chan 2.0

shock-value3• 11 years ago

It's the price that's paid to have a site that encourages anonymity. You can't deny that there are benefits to said anonymity at the same time though.

baakss• 11 years ago

I tend to (maybe unjustly) associate the Reddit community as being the Gamergate community.

I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.

pbreit4• 11 years ago

Very unjustly. That's a tiny percentage of overall usage.

LeoNatan252• 11 years ago

No, the hate comes from a frivolous lawsuit, terrible policies, terrible management and overall terrible CEO. None of that has anything to do it with video games, SJW or her being a woman.

Raphmedia2• 11 years ago

Disclaimer: I have been a moderator on a website of slightly less than a million registered users from 2003 to 2008 so I have my heart on the moderator's side.

The moderators of Reddit actually have very legitimate issues and are bringing points that need to be addressed. Moderators of websites as big as reddit should be managed correctly and supervised. They should also have a line on communication with the administrators of the website for issues such as this one.

They should also receive proper tools needed to ensure that their work is done correctly and in a timely fashion.

Reddit's moderators have even greater responsibilities than moderators of more normals websites have. Their efforts on this point should be rewarded or at the very least recognized. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.

Some subreddit are ecosystems that are bigger, better staffed and more organized that a lot of websites out there.

To say openly that moderators and content creators are simply creating a ruckus out of nothing and should be ignored is biting the hand that feeds you. Those people are people of passions, and people of passions will hate quickly and move on to a better suited ecosystem even faster.

The firing of that employee was only the bottlecap blowing out from all the pressure. She also ended up a martyr to push the strike into the mind of regular users. Otherwise, she is barely related to what happened on reddit recently.

SerpentJoe• 11 years ago

There are certainly legitimate complaints to be made about how Reddit empowers the volunteer work of moderators, but that is the least of the complaints that are clogging the site right now. There are three major objections being raised loudly and repeatedly:

1) Moderators, who provide a huge portion of the value of the site, are treated with disrespect by the organization.

2) An employee whose availability was useful to a few major subreddits was dismissed without warning, leaving those subreddits in the lurch, which is emblematic of the above disrespect.

3) Ellen Pao is CEO.

These are presented in decreasing order of relevance to the actual problem, and increasing order of urgency to those driving the discussion.

Pao needs to do an AMA. A small number of users is upset at her stance in favor of diversity and against sexism, and because she's historically refused to directly engage a community that's gotten used to having direct access to movie stars and presidents, those few have been able to convince many more that she's a cold bitch and doesn't deserve respect. She needs to be on the front page all day gracefully responding to the revolting things being said about her so that normal users can remember that she's an actual person and not an anonymous force of nature advancing evil in the world.

Edit: Seems that's what she's doing right now.

snowwrestler3• 11 years ago

I have to wonder how many of these issues are the result of poor allocation of limited resources.

Reddit runs on a shoestring for an audience that big, and still loses money. As I understand Victoria's position, a full salary went to hand-hold celebrities during AMAs. That's a lot to spend for a portion of the participants in one subreddit (I don't think every AMA got that support).

Given limited resources, that meant that a salary's worth of resources were not available to help pay a software developer who could be working on better mod tools--which would benefit every mod on the entire site.

That might be the entire story behind Victoria's dismissal: reallocating money from hand-holding to software development. Which is more in line with the typical Silicon Valley tech company way of doing things. Facebook and Google and Twitter spend a lot of money for software development, so they don't have to spend much on hand-holding.

It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.

Reading Pao's post, it looks like that was part of their decision. Since the value primarily comes from the users and mods, let them organize and run the AMAs from now on. Then the company can use that money to make better software.

Note: this is my own speculation based on public stuff I've read.

psychometry10• 11 years ago

One look at the completely irrelevant second sentence of the petition to remove her [1] should tell you everything to know about why users are actually angry at her. This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.

Reddit has harbored toxic subreddits for long enough that they've nurtured a huge user base of racists and misogynists. It's a demographic crisis and it apparently doesn't take much to incite these mobs. These vocal and active users hated Pao before she became reddit CEO and these events were entirely predictable.

[1] https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-red...

shock-value3• 11 years ago

You could say the same about Twitter's hosting individuals who espouse toxic views. I believe that Reddit essentially wants to be a Twitter for communities (as opposed to individuals), in that they aren't interested in guiding the moral ethos of its userbase (beyond removing illegal or harassing content). So, honest question, would you apply your criticism to Twitter? (and if not, why not?)

MisterWebz• 11 years ago

A bunch of misogynists who are upset that a female employee was fired. Right.

ub• 11 years ago

I disagree that it's all because she's a woman. Just read her statement here. http://www.thesocialmemo.org/2015/07/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-va...

She has no clue that the "vocal minority" is the one that creates the content that the majority consumes. She comes across as aloof, as if she's just playing out the role of the CEO without really understanding the soul of Reddit. Of course, the vitriol poured out by some of the users is misogynistic, but the larger backlash is really because of the way things were handled by the company.

fnordfnordfnord4• 11 years ago

It doesn't take a misogynist or a racist to be upset to see a well-liked person fired abruptly, especially with no apparent cause. There is a lot of stored-up discontent with the way Reddit is run, some of it even goes back to when Yishan was CEO. It's a fool's errand to try to please all of such a huge userbase, but Pao seems to have been able to unite some very unlikely factions against her.

mucker2• 11 years ago

Uh...no?

innguest2• 11 years ago

This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.

If the Reddit CEO were male AND their "failed lawsuit" were also about a dishonest attempt at smearing the name of innocent companies and people - like cowards and people without principles do - then I bet you the outcry would be the same.

Good people hate liars, and there's no coming back from playing the victim and seeking compensation unjustifiably.

I won't quote here but search for the points made by celticninja. It's incredible that we allow women to get away with so much that we even forget to acknowledge that liars and unprincipled narcissists come in all shapes and colors. Don't hate the gender, hate the (lack of) principles.

Lawtonfogle2• 11 years ago

As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired.

Supposedly she helped with setting up a lot of IAMAs as well as fighting to keep their integrity up (i.e. identifying when an actor's agent was posing as that actor as part of a marketing ploy). Even if you really liked IAMAs and what I've heard is completely true, these are benefits you wouldn't directly notice. It is like the average computer user feeling slighted by the Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or the average voter feeling slighted by the TPP. These have nasty effects, but they are not at all direct in the harm they cause, and as such people do not feel slighted even when they have been.

chaostheory2• 11 years ago

Was this why Victoria was fired?

forgottenpass2• 11 years ago

They're unpaid contributors to very general interest content, of course it's going to be full of low quality submissions and commenters. Hell, even blogs on general entertainment and "news entertainment" subject matter are full of catty assholes for paid writers. That's just the territory of targeting a wide audience on the internet, and you sorta have to accept it for what it is, because it isn't changing anything soon.

The worst thing you can do is let that behavior poison the well for you. There is always going to be someone who shares your opinions but you don't like their reasoning or the way they choose to share their reasoning. You don't want other people to write your ideas off because some people that agree with you are assholes, so extend the same courtesy to people you don't agree with.

I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.

Yes, you can. There is more than one answer, and 10x more people that are just into bandwagon shouting than thoroughly articulating their positions, but that doesn't mean you can't find it. It means you don't want to try.

tedks• 11 years ago

They have no real reason to dislike her.

Imagine you're a freshman in college. You join a club and make friends with the people there. Quickly, the club becomes the center of your social life as you make friends with other people there and most of your time, formally or informally, revolves around the club.

As you get older, the club changes as old members leave and new members come. In two years, you feel like things are "going downhill", but just try to do your part a little better, and while you don't feel like you can have any effect on the larger portions (like the big introductory events) you have a little social circle that enjoys what you do, and you focus on making that the best place it can be.

However, when you're a junior, the leadership of the club starts changing rapidly. In six months there are two club presidents, each less liked than the last. Because of the way the university is structured, it would be very difficult to start a new club, or to get members of the previous club to come to the new club, and you've built up a lot of credential within the organization that will evaporate if you leave.

You're in a difficult situation now. You've invested a lot in this community. But top-down changes, possibly combined with normal drift over time, make it look like this community is going downhill. Suddenly, you feel like your little social circle will become an island in a hostile place rather than a part of a bigger organism.

As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen

A casual X of any Y has no real reason to feel strongly about changes in Y. If I casually played golf, I wouldn't care if the rules changed. If I casually wrote iOS apps, I wouldn't care if Apple took a bigger or smaller cut. If I casually participated in politics, I would be unconcerned about changes that people who are above the level of casual are quite concerned with.

Deciding that because you do not feel personal investment with communities on reddit you are somehow above the "children" who do is misinformed. If you are a casual user you have no reason to be invested and no reason to care.

But to someone who feels close to a community that happens to live on reddit, these changes are scary. All of a sudden the administration team of reddit isn't the friendly, startup-vibe-having, tight-knight team of nerds that do cool april fools pranks and sometimes leave witty comments in pun threads. The Reddit admins have become depersonalized, and lately, they have been making changes that are very intrusive into the site. Whether you agree with those changes is immaterial. The fact is Reddit has moved from a mostly hands-off admin stance to a more hands-on one.

It's impossible to summarize this in a straight answer, because the fundamental reason why people are so upset over this (you are right that they are minor events -- only in the context of the larger reddit/community relationship do they become significant) is mere fear of change, and of the unknown. I think Redditors are very aware of the precarity of their communities. They don't want to lose them, but they think they might now, more so than they used to.

I hope this gives you a better idea of why Redditors might be upset. It's important to remember that every time we can't think of a likely true motivation for someone's actions, that is our own ignorance of human psychology, not a signifier of irrationality on the part of the person we observe. It's easy to write this off with bigotry or ageism, but that doesn't bring us closer to the truth.

dominotw2• 11 years ago

Not all of her answers are downvoted. This one from 15 minutes ago has 100's of upvotes. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

Get off your moral high-horse.

pbreit4• 11 years ago

She's not very likable. You don't see down voting like this for Alexis, Yishan or, elsewhere, PG and SamA. She still speaks more in MBA-ease like "providing tools" and "listening to users" and "communicated poorly", etc.

And the person fired was by most accounts a well-liked, very visible, performing employee. Dismissing someone like that with very little care was horrific management.

Edit: I don't know why I included Alexis since he also comes off pretty smug and user-hostile (e.g. "popcorn time").

iaw5• 11 years ago

I've met a lot of people I'd consider 'success' focused individuals in the Ivies, I suspect if I met her I'd consider her in the same group.

There is a focus on a narrow definition of success that is more important than anything else. How that success is accomplished doesn't matter, just that it is. The behavior is surprisingly irrespective of traditional intellect or competence, it's pure focus and drive. It also is not about doing anything well per se, it's just about gaining stature.

snowwrestler3• 11 years ago

When I looked at his account during the height of the anger, Alexis's every comment was below -1,000. He got downvoted hard.

onedev• 11 years ago

Kanye West is an amazing amazing figure, and a really interesting personality. If all you know about the man are his misplaced frustrations that manifest themselves in public ways, then you really don't know the guy or the influence he's had on millions over a decade.

He's produced greatness, but not only that, he's done so consistently. He's made some missteps along the way but if you really dig deep and watch his interviews over the years you'll start to understand the person he is.

People are very interesting, and it's so easy to characterize public figures in these black and white ways and dismiss their work, but it's far more difficult to truly understand the person, their motivations, and their frustrations.

I've watched hours and hours of Kanye interviews, listened to days and days of his music, and watched him grow as a person as he progressed through his legendary career. It's truly incredible.

I think there's something be learned from Justin Bieber as well, whose music I don't like and whose fanbase I dislike even more.

People are fascinating, you just have to dig deeper to find those parts, and put forth effort to learn something from other people. Even those people you don't like.

celticninja14• 11 years ago

but you can legitimately dislike someone, Kanye is incredibly conceited. I appreciate his music (well first 4 anyway) but his attitude sucks. Even at glastonbury he was stopping the performance to tell the crowd they were witnessing the greatest rock star ever. That just isnt true and if he actually believes it then he is making more of an idiot of himself.

You dont decide you are the greatest rock star, the people do, and they discuss it for a long time before they come to that conclusion. You need to be compared to historical greats to even come close. The only person I see talking about Kanye in that way is Kanye.

I should not need to wade through hours of footage to see him portrayed in a favourable light, if he acts a dick when he knows he is being watched/recorded/broadcast then it is a safe assumption to make that he is generally a dick.

bentcorner• 11 years ago

reddit seems to have a fascination with Kanye's "thug face". It's practically a meme where he's jovial and happy until the camera is put on him.

6stringmerc• 11 years ago

I've actively avoided digging "deeper" into the ego maniac that is Kanye West, but I do enjoy pointing out that he tried to rip off Aphex Twin by lifting a sample and not paying for the usage rights. Kanye is quite an inspiration though, in that if he can get ahead in this world with the limited talents and acidic presence, then there's hope for other, better people to achieve influence. I mean, it's not really difficult to find a snippet of music, loop it, add a beat that sounds like it came pre-programmed on an MPC, and claim to be a production genius, but it definitely takes some hubris.

thearn4• 11 years ago

I've been on reddit for a few years, but never really took in how toxic the community is until I started following this. I cannot for the life of me understand how seriously people take that site and the things that go on there. It's like middle school lunchroom politics.

emehrkay3• 11 years ago

Maybe I'd be as invested if my Reddit check stopped coming in or it started to look funny after Ellen took over.

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

I know you are trolling, but people legitimately are asking this question so I will respond.

I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset. they're they

Reddit is 160 million people because it is a huge online community. Calling them children and referring to them as a contiguous unit of alike individuals is laughable. So there isn't a straight answer why some subset of 160 million people are angry but a lot of them are for various reasons.

I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired

Brendan Eich was way more qualified to run Mozilla than Pao is to run reddit. He was really fucking good at his job and is one of the smartest engineers in tech. He couldn't effectively do his job and had to resign. It doesn't matter if the backlash was fair, it was impacting the company negatively. Pao is not the right person to run reddit, hasn't made great decisions, is followed by personal scandal and is generally detested by the community(which is reddits product). She has to step down whether you feel slighted about it or not.

nahiluhmot• 11 years ago

What makes you think parent is trolling?

psychometry10• 11 years ago

Don't you think you're being a bit premature in your assessment of Pao? She's an interim CEO who's been on the job mere months. Shutting down the subreddits she did needed to happen in order for reddit to be viable long-term. This latest issue is just about disaffected male teenagers looking for a reason to get mad at the new female CEO. It's so transparent and so pathetic.

ryanSrich• 11 years ago

Wow. I really didn't expect this type of shill comment on HN. I mean, I know YC has a vested interest in Reddit but this comment is just awful. Perhaps you should look into what real issues exist within Reddit before saying everyone who doesn't think favorable of EP is an angry "child".

celticninja14• 11 years ago

They have no real reason to dislike her.

I dont think that is true. I have used reddit for quite some time, probably since 2006. I have no personal animosity toward her however I dont think she is the right leader for reddit. And I say that as a user, not an owner, shareholder, employee etc. My reasons are because I like they way the old reddit operated. The reason that I say that is because when I started using reddit the free speech ethic was proudly trumpeted. This was around the time of the DeCSS key event that started the downfall of Digg.

Even up to as recently as 2012 Yishan Wong was reaffirming reddits commitment as a free speech platform. This was around the time of the r/jailbait takedown. But really that was the beginning of the end, r/jailbait was shut down because of illegal content being posted. I never saw definitive proof of that and I dont think any was offered. This was about the time that there was media interest in reddit (and to be fair r/jailabit was one of the more embarassing links that could and did show up on a google search for reddit). So it went and with it the start of a slippery slope of censorship began.

After r/jailabit (which the majority of users agreed with) there was the fappening, again a lot of users agreed, but all these agreeable users were relatively new, they were here for cat pictures and memes. They didnt care about reddit as a free speech platform because their interests were not affected. Then we arrive at r/fatpeoplehate being banned. This went because of 'harassment'.

Now we are at a stage where reddit is going to be kept clean and media friendly. It is not a free speech site (and I dont need to hear about free speech does not have to be protected by a businesss, i know that) even though it started off like that and it attracted a lot of users like that and those users built the communities that make reddit thrive.

I dont post that often anymore, i very rarely submit content anymore, I am not as attached to my accounts as I used to be. I am looking for alternatives because the site has changed so much (and so has the userbase) that the content it now has is no longer as relevant as it once was and this is only going to continue under the current leadership, and once a certain point is passed there is no getting it back. If she went now it may be retrieveable, if she lasts another 6-12 months in her position then it may not be.

x0x03• 11 years ago

You're making this far too personal. Reddit is and was a shitty business; afaik, they lost money every year at least through 2012 (Yishan released not raw numbers but a graph showing expenses > revenue).

Reddit has to change: at some point, they will either make money, become a billionaire's hobby or vanish. That's completely separate from the fact that certain people were happy to host jailbait and stolen celebrity titty pics and others are ashamed to be associated with people who do and/or support the former.

Ellen has little do with any of the above except her current remit to make reddit into a functioning -- that is, profitable -- business. But any ceo will have that task.

serve_yay• 11 years ago

If they're the problem, why is she apologizing to them for doing wrong by them?

Why is a supposedly community-based website run by someone the community hates?

You don't have to love reddit's community to smell a rat here. It's a complete shitshow.

psychometry10• 11 years ago

She's apologizing for the firing, not her existence. Reddit would seem to prefer having her apologize for an irrelevant lawsuit and then resign because the lawsuit conflicts with the personal beliefs of an ever-growing contingent of bitter, young males.

celticninja14• 11 years ago

The community is what you make it and who you enagage with. You see a shit community because you probably dont get involved in anything other than the default subreddits. You read the r/funny comments and see LCD comments for karma, that is a shit part of reddit I agree, but it is just a part of reddit it doesnt represent the whole community.

The reddit community just gets cherry picked depending on the view you want to put across. 'Bad Guys' - find an appropriate reddit, e.g. r/picsofdeadkids, or r/hangniggers or just go to r/SRS and choose a topic, sexism, racism etc, choose a particualarly vile comment from a single user and then say look this is representative of reddit, what a hive of scum and villainy.

'Good Guys' - go to r/randomactsofkindness or r/randomactsofpizza, or any local subreddit like r/oregon and find a heart warming story of a user sending another user a new laptop when theirs was stolen right before finals, or turning up with money for a hotel when a guy and his kid get stuck in a new city at night after a football game, or any of a hundred other amazing things that people do for one another just because they are a user of the same site.

Generalising like you have and saying you cant even get an answer about why they are upset is evidently trolling or laziness on your behalf as anyone with 10 minutes could find out the reasons behind the dislike of Pao just by reading the r/announcements and the user comments that go along with them.

arfliw2• 11 years ago

With regard to Victoria, she ran the AMA's and was very popular with redditors. Think of it like a sports team cutting a really popular player, without offering an explanation. The fanbase would be really unhappy about that. And this is what reddit does when it's unhappy about something.

The Ellen Pao stuff is complicated, she does have some fault for being the one who made unpopular decisions and the way she managed the process (particularly extremely poor communication) but in general I agree that she gets way too much criticism from the community. She's very unpopular for a bunch of things that are not actually her fault (like people who incorrectly think she censors reddit).

tripzilch2• 11 years ago

a bunch of upset kids with some "authority" in the form of votes or moderation.

In all fairness, a lot of their users are probably kids. Who are upset.

rdtsc• 11 years ago

That was actually a decent apology not the typical corporate "We are sorry you feel this way non-apology apology".

Yeah it came late. But better late than never.

forgottenpass2• 11 years ago

I dunno, she admits they broke promises and promise to do better this time.

Anyone who has been in that relationship knows it's entirely typical. They could change, but getting your hopes up is asking to get hurt again.

Also: they didn't pull the curtain back at all, so I still find it to be a bland corporate statement.

Eupolemos• 11 years ago

It was just classic HR-speak.

Promises following broken promises from and interim CEO, seemingly set in place to make Reddit-users into a more tasty product.

I don't blame anyone for not believing her and downvoting her, because the only thing they want from her is a farewell note.

revelation• 11 years ago

It reads like full-bore PR nonsense to me.

jonjenk• 11 years ago

This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the failures directly. Just look at the language in the post...

"We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..."

This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.

A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.

x0x03• 11 years ago

Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during Yishan's tenure?

DanBC2• 11 years ago

And to be fair to her she does take responsibility:

and the buck stops with me.

omouse• 11 years ago

If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.

Actually that's the typical corporate apology. The whole team gets the blame when you're playing the blame game! However CEOs and executives like pushing shit downward.

Employee vs CEO is a big difference in status and the type of apology to write.

heuermh• 11 years ago

Proper Apologies have Three Parts

1. What I did was wrong. 2. I feel badly that I hurt you. 3. How can I make this better.

(yeah it's from a sign on the wall at Jimmy John's)

istvan__• 11 years ago

I guess they had a look to the key performance numbers at Reddit after the blackouts, and finally understand that Reddit with new regime control kills popularity, sub-reddits going black can cause a pretty visible dip in the visitor stats. I guess this happens when you move from community driven to profit driven with a site like Reddit.

jeletonskelly4• 11 years ago

As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like a bunch of people on a power trip who didn't want to step away because that would be relinquishing some sort of internet "status." When did it get so complicated?

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked.

Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people would feel great about.

chapium• 11 years ago

Nor would most spend their time doing so.

Lawtonfogle2• 11 years ago

It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to replace them...

But they still are part of the backbone. No single mod is, but the ever changing group of mods as a whole are very important. Cease all moderation and what will eventually happen? Some self moderation by means of the voting system will keep everything from going completely crazy, but smaller communities could be crushed. Consider how making twox default would've worked if there were no mods.

jeletonskelly4• 11 years ago

To be clear, I meant the current unionized group of mods who staged the major sub strike in that statement. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be moderators.

aeturnum• 11 years ago

there are thousands to replace them

I don't think Reddit management (or anyone who's familiar with online communities in general) is worried about the mod 'chair' sitting empty. However, I think they are worried about the kind of person they have running large sections of their website. They've had moderators get caught favoring racist ideologies, sell access to large subs, general icky stuff that Reddit doesn't want happening. Then there's the ability of mods to simply "turn off" huge sections of the site to blackmail the owners. I think the incentive for the management to avoid that is obvious.

The current 'set' of mods are, as far as I can tell, saying: "We're pretty good at this, we're doing our best, but we're gonna get fed up eventually - the next set may not be so cooperative." I think that's a reasonable position to take in their situation, and is a position Reddit management would do well to pay attention to. It's a lot easier to create a environment where good mods stay and eject the ones you dislike than to conjure up smart, dedicated, hard-working people who don't demand a paycheck.

Reddit is not the first site that struggles to keep the paid employees and volunteer moderators happy. There are countless other examples which have had various outcomes.

dgcoffman• 11 years ago

Reddit users are too stupid to effectively use reddit.

glorien• 11 years ago

Why do people moderate large subreddits? They don't get paid... what are they actually getting out of it? Why continue to do it?

"fuck you, pay me"

jeletonskelly4• 11 years ago

Exactly. Just walk away and make it someone else's problem. Someone is always there to fill their shoes. I suspect that being a "mod" boosts one's internet ego and letting go makes you just a "pleb user" again.

Nadya2• 11 years ago

As someone who moderated a large forum (not a subreddit) of >100,000 users (with ~15,000 active users at peak and rarely dipping below 3,000 users at inactive times) a large part has to do with community.

The difference decent moderation can make in a large community can vastly impact a community. There's a lot of networking that happens because of it. I was an extremely well-liked moderator who would take over "dying" sections of the forum. I was even given the nickname "The Lifegiver" because any board put under my control would go from 10 posts/week to 100s of posts/day. I made a lot of friends whom I still talk with to this day, nearly a decade later. That is what made being a moderator worth my time.

As to what jeletonskelly commented in response to you - no. There isn't always someone willing to "fill the shoes". The boards I was left in charge of were dead precisely because nobody wanted to fill the shoes. Many members of those communities were asked if they wanted to be "promoted" to moderate their board: they always declined the position. Sometimes a board is dead and nobody knows how to solve it or what it would take to revitalize it. Not everyone is a leader.

Moderators who are bad with community management have their lives turned to hell. Death threats from users who dislike your actions, dealing with community drama (having to mediate between two users in an argument without pissing either side off), dealing with 'staff' drama (mods who disagree with how another mod handled something usually) is not worth "being in power" or any "ego trip" you get from the position.

Moderators are not too far off from the founding administrator when it comes to forums (or subreddits): They enjoy the community and want to help have a part in the creation of the community.

Every good moderator I've dealt with has always put the community before anything else.

It's when money does get involved that moderation and administrative decisions become questioned. The decisions are no longer What is best for the community? but What is best for my account balance?

vacri• 11 years ago

Do you have children? Pets? Do you charge them for giving them a hug? Do you go out for a beer with friends? If so, do you charge them for your time?

"Fuck you, pay me" is about not letting people demand your professional skills for free or letting payment slide because [excuse]. It's got nothing to do with voluntary contribution.

Jerry2• 11 years ago

Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people leave.

iaw5• 11 years ago

This is the first thing I've seen from Ellen Pao that looks like a step in the right direction. There area few challenges she faces at reddit that I don't envy. It is an unfortunate consequence of her lawsuit that she gained enough notoriety to be disliked by a portion of the male cohort of reddit. She is now in the awkward position of both trying to address real problems with the site that have gone unaddressed for a long time and mitigating the damage that her personal brand is causing by being associated with the site.

Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her interactions with the reddit community.

oldmanjay3• 11 years ago

well, the harassment standard is worded in such a way that's it's purely subjective, so I predict the continuation of inconsistent application of the policy.

also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies are a serious mistake.

on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all popcorn-munching entertainment to me.

vonklaus5• 11 years ago

We are sorry -Reddit Corporate
Prove it -Reddit Community

There is no point in analyzing the apology, only the actions that occur over the next month.

GuiA• 11 years ago

This is just a testament to how most MBAs are incapable of seeing past the blinders that were put on their eyes in B school. Anyone who's been in Silicon Valley long enough will have seen this in many other forms (I know I have), although perhaps not as high profile as this one.

The success of Reddit is directly attributable to high profile subs (/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/AMA, /r/ListenToThis, etc.) and less visible but still well run subs that cater to more niche interests/topics (/r/MakeupAddiction, /r/PersonalFinance, etc.). Those subreddits would not exist without the thousands of man hours put in by moderators who are volunteers (modulo a few exceptions, such as Victoria). Anyone who has moderated an internet community knows how much sweat, effort, time, and pain go into maintaining a high quality community, and how crucial it is to keep your moderators happy and make them feel like their effort is valued.

The fact that the people running Reddit do not seem to realize that is a perfectly valid reason for the user base to be angry. A lot of Silicon Valley executives like to think of their company+product as some neat little money making machine that sits in a vacuum and that they can tweak and modify as they like. But the reality is that building a community platform like Reddit is very different from running a sausage factory. You can run your sausage factory in to the ground, and the sausages won't complain (the workers might, but the US does a pretty good job at avoiding that through strict control on labor unions). But when you start shitting on Reddit, the users will complain and protest - after all, you might control the code and the servers, but the community as a whole has contributed much more than you have to the end product.

You can't separate "reddit" and "the community" like some commenters here are doing. This dualism makes no sense - reddit and its community are the same thing. You can't have the thoughtful, well run threads on /r/AskScience without the dumb jokes on /r/funny.

Ellen Pao and friends do not seem to grasp those subtleties (this apology is just damage control), and it lead to the complete disaster we are seeing right now. This isn't rocket science - in fact the Reddit community is quite predictable. Any Reddit user would have been able to tell you how the community was going to react to these actions. The fact that Ellen Pao has some shady connections (her husband not being in jail because he has enough money is a good first example) is just more fuel on top of the fire. This was extremely easy to predict, and the fact that the Reddit leadership seems to be completely clueless about it is a very bad sign for things to come. The reddit community didn't have a problem with kn0thing, yishan, and others because they were first and foremost reddit users and know how to interact with the community. It's not the case for the current people in charge.

The community has every right to be up in arms. And if you think that the Reddit community is shit and don't spend time there, like some commenters here state, then what makes you feel like your input has any sort of relevance?

This isn't a technology or management fiasco - it's a political debacle. At a community interaction level, it's not very different from taking someone with arbitrary credentials and putting them in charge of a country they're completely unfamiliar with in the hope that they're going to make that country a peaceful democracy. It just doesn't work - you need the leadership to come from the community for it to have any lasting chance.

noahlt• 11 years ago

Your opening potshot at MBAs detracts from the meat of your comment, which contains at least two important insights: (1) the Reddit "product" and community are inseparable; (2) to manage a community you must understand the community, which almost always requires participation in the community.

sergiotapia• 11 years ago

"Popcorn tastes good." - Never forget that. Personally, I've moved on to Snapzu. Peace out Reddit, it's been real. :)

http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg

paulpauper• 11 years ago

A lot of Reddit users forget or don;t realize that Reddit is a business, not a non-profit.

For all we know, it may not have been Ellen's fault...a lot of people jumping the gun

jgrowl• 11 years ago

I feel bad for Pao on a personal level, but I feel like she is too divisive to be an effective leader of a site like reddit. All people deserve respect though and should not have to put up with hateful personal attacks.

I think mainly this underscores the need for the internet to evolve. Sites like reddit and twitter are too important to be controlled by a single for-profit entity.

We need distributed systems that respect anonymity and privacy that prevent censorship. We also need the ability for groups to form where content can be curated.

I think there are a number of projects in development that have potential. It will be interesting to see where things go.

anthony_romeo• 11 years ago

There were a few components associated with this recent upheaval.

- Earlier that week, reddit modified the search function which (though I don't know the details as I am not a mod and really don't care) apparently affected or limited the moderators' abilities is some negative manner.

- The banning of harassing subreddits, though none of the lurkers cared at all and the majority of active users did not care, left a sour taste in many users' mouths.

- The firing of that employee apparently greatly affected the ability to facilitate the most popular subreddit on the website, as well as a few others.

When the mods of IAMA closed shop for a while due to the third issue, the powder keg exploded, leading others who disliked the treatment of mods and those who irrationally hate the reddit CEO to make a hullabaloo for eight hours.

Frankly, I deleted my reddit account due to this. Not for any dislike the CEO or a desire to stand up for mods' rights, but rather because I genuinely do not care about the drama anymore and would rather focus my attention on more important things[1] and more interesting topics[2].

[1] Such as commenting on Hacker News.

[2] Such as discussions about Reddit.

:-)

noarchy• 11 years ago

This post regarding the apology is fairly new, with a lot of points and comments. Yet it has already sunk to page 2. I assume that reddit-related posts are given a negative weighting of some kind on HN, of late?

bmm6o3• 11 years ago

It's crazy to me how poorly this whole recent "revolt" was handled. The only thing of value to Reddit Inc is the community, so you think they would be more proactive about everything, that they would be hiring more community managers rather than firing key ones. Is this their Digg moment? Probably not, but how many more fuckups like this can they make before the users leave for good?

I've cut Pao a lot of slack in the past, but this makes her look like she has no idea what she's doing. No communication for days? Speaking to outside reporters before speaking to her community? It makes no sense to me.

calcol2• 11 years ago

She did, in fact, attempt to reply to early discussions on Reddit but she was downvoted into oblivion (e.g. -5500+ down votes) and she wasn't ever going to be heard, no matter how relevant or important her discussion was. So she probably thought it was smarter (and would get better exposure while the community cools down a little bit) to communicate with Buzzfeed et. al.

bmm6o3• 11 years ago

Yeah, I've heard that, and that's crazy too. The community actually has a veto on communications from the CEO? Absolutely nuts. They couldn't just hack the backend to give her a billion upvotes?

calcol2• 11 years ago

Looking past the vitriol towards Ellen Pao, this seems to be primarily due to a history of miscommunication between moderators, who feel they should have more power and better ways to handle the communities they support, and the admins of Reddit. While I think that there are definite issues on both sides -- I'm not a moderator, especially not of a big subreddit, so I don't know how disrespectful or how much the admins ignored the moderators requests, so my perspective is of an outsider -- I really feel like this is all just a temper tantrum that the moderators handled poorly, potentially purposefully. The users by and large did not need to know that Victoria was fired, and it's a shame that the moderators 1) let that information out, and 2) by letting it out, effectively let it be used as a base for a parade against Ellen Pao. It can't be argued that the moderators didn't/couldn't know this would happen because this kind of shit happens on Reddit all the time, and the more vocal parts of the community will cling to their dislike of Pao with this.

I think that the admins should have handled it better, for sure -- they could have at least given the moderators that relied on Victoria's help the heads up of, "hey, we are going to transition to a new community manager, for the time being X, Y, and Z are going to occur," but the backlash from the community and that the moderators are effectively using the community for their own gains instead of trying to handle it internally is a pretty bad reflection on how the community is structured as a whole. All I can think of is that this is basically 4chan and social media combined.

lno• 11 years ago

Serious question about my use case and opting for a substitute: I use reddit to learn and interact with a community about my interests or things that I want to learn. Reddit has been fantastic for this and about 75% of the time the users of specific communities are great resources that I really can't find anywhere else.

Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that drama around and within reddit is ruining this - all I want to do is learn and engage - it's impossible now to avoid it. Any alternative that keeps the quality high and the format similar without all the ugly dramatics?

chr• 11 years ago

Maybe it was laziness, but till now I've been expecting good things from companies backed by YCombinator. Ekjp and kn0thing are eroding the brand value of YC.

MY 2 cents, seen from far away.

We apologize

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