Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/opinion/why-we-shut-down-reddits-ask-me-anything-forum.html

by uptown • 11 years ago

302 289 11 years ago

gesman• 11 years ago

> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity...

May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.

splitbrain• 11 years ago

Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.

_dark_matter_2• 11 years ago

Given how bad the public reaction has been, if it was something "quite bad", one would think they would tell people about it so as to pacify the crowds. (I understand there could be repercussions for doing this but it would seem to be worth the risk.)

Iuz• 11 years ago

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/reddit-victoria-tayl...

ajford• 11 years ago

Given the recent push for monetization of Reddit, it's also entirely possible that she put her foot down against some kind of hair-brained scheme for monetizing AMAs, and was summarily dismissed for refusing to go with the flow.

ritchiea• 11 years ago

You say "few things get you fired immediately" but I'd say it depends. If you're at a big relatively stable company few things get you fired immediately. If the company is small or in flux (as Reddit appears to be) it can be a lot easier to be fired quickly.

wnevets• 11 years ago

This is probably just a rumor but I recall reading it she wasn't comfortable with the monetization strategy of that subreddit

Zikes3• 11 years ago

Rumors abound. The most prominent rumor is that it was because of a bad public reaction to a Jesse Jackson AMA. Some leaked info from a supposed disgruntled Reddit admin says it's because Ellen Pao pressured Victoria into pushing an NDA + promise of a cut of future sales resulting from AMAs on the AMA subjects, which Victoria disagreed with a little too loudly.

ihuman• 11 years ago

No one outside of the company knows right now. To protect her privacy, they said that they are not going to publicly say why. All the current explanations are just rumors and speculation.

emodendroket• 11 years ago

They claim they wanted to change the positions they had altogether so maybe not.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

I believe she claimed she did't know why it occurred. But she has barely said a word about it. Reddit has actually terminated a lot of their own employees in the last year or so, so actually in this case her getting suddenly let go isn't that strange. Reddit seems to be trying to move IAMAs into some kind of team structure (ama@reddit.com, etc).

ForEnglandJames• 11 years ago

It's a personnel matter, so reddit will never tell you, and she's likely bound by an agreement to never disclose.

My guess is not censoring the Jesse Jackson AMA when the users got nasty. I have another comment on this site that details what I suspect went down. You can search it out if you're really curious--I don't know how to permalink here.

Balgair• 11 years ago

Not as of yet. It's all being kept above board, so maybe there are NDA type things preventing anyone form talking. Also, last night a series of posts on 4chan by a person claiming to be an admin at reddit said that more changes are afoot, including heavy facebook integration. As with everything on 4chan, it is likely a steaming pile of BS:

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/3cih4x/reddit_employ...

ianhawes• 11 years ago

Not confirmed, but the rumor was because she was based in NYC and Pao demanded that all employees move to SF.

There was additional speculation that it was the result of the (failed) Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm doubtful of that.

haberman• 11 years ago

I wonder if the authors of this NYT piece (the Reddit mods) know what happened (or at least know her side of it). I wonder if they are in communication with her. By making this such a high-profile thing, they draw attention to it, which could hurt her if the story eventually comes out and it's unflattering to her.

wvenable• 11 years ago

On the same day the admin responsible for reddit gifts was always let go. And over the last 6 months there has been a lot of turnover.

twoodfin2• 11 years ago

Isn't it more likely than not that she was dismissed with good cause? Otherwise, why so abruptly and without explanation from either side? Presumably reddit for legal and other reasons didn't want to kick her on the way out, but what else explains her relative silence?

VLM• 11 years ago

"but what else explains her relative silence?"

Non-disparagement clauses as part of a cash settlement are a thing. This proves nothing but does fit the evidence.

kenrikm• 11 years ago

We're not really sure what she was fired for, she may have actually done something really bad that warranted her removal. If not and it was just a case of management being out of touch with the community then it would seem that the backlash would be justified. We don't know the full story so it's hard to say at this point.

zedpm2• 11 years ago

Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management.

This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. That too is a legitimate complaint, one that shouldn't be shouted down or conflated with shameful behavior on the part of relatively few individuals in the community.

amyjess6• 11 years ago

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. The subreddits shut down last month were all hate groups that were targeting individuals for harassment and posting their photographs without permission in order to attack them. I've personally seen my pictures posted by one of these groups twice, and the day before those subs got banned, there was a very upset mother asking what recourse she had because these hate groups were posting pictures of her underage child and refused to take them down (and I distinctly remember this because I was one of a handful of people who helped teach her how to message the admins).

embik2• 11 years ago

The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.

flatline• 11 years ago

I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

I don't know, quite a few users were in full support of the move. The likely ones who were not simply knew nothing of what is going on as a great many users are simply not interested or unable to understand.

It was selective censorship. There are many subs,some quite well known, who are more flagrant than some of the subs shut down. FatPeopleHate was the most famous that was canned and it was likely at the request of IMGUR staff as they were having a pissing contest with content posters. There are quite a few very racists and sexist subs left so this was highly selective. As, a SJW dream hit which many labled the Reddit Wedding.

Personal stories aside, individual posters are who should be banned for violating site rules, not entire subs and certainly not their mods as many of them were trying to enforce rules only to be shot down by reddit admin

joshie_woshie• 11 years ago

Your language is pretty strong and one-sided -- 'petulant moves...to treat their users as pawns'? Have you even been paying attention? A lot of those moderators actively sought the opinions of their subreddits before blacking out. It was often the communities, and not the moderators, instigating those decisions.

The censorship claims do not just apply to the hateful subreddits that were shut down -- censorship happens in more insidious ways, too. A lot of posts involving the Reddit debacle have been swept away, comments deleted, users shadowbanned. I think this is the kind of censorship that's being highlighted.

zxcvcxz4• 11 years ago

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

Well the moderators say that was only part of it, but after reading your whole comment it seems you're just here to push your authoritarian political agenda under the guise of social justice by ignoring half the facts.

And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing.

Half your comment history is disturbing. I support the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate, but you're trying really hard to paint the parent comment in bad light to push your political agenda. They never said they support FPH, but you make it seem as if they must be a "disturbed" individual. They said that the censorship is heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently.

It would be pretty hard to push your authoritarian political agenda without demonizing others though.

jperras• 11 years ago

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

As stated in the article, this was one of the reasons. The other reason is as you would suspect:

The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

mason2402• 11 years ago

They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.

jonlucc5• 11 years ago

The problem with shutting down the hateful subreddits is that they didn't communicate clearly. In that, they left a lot of room for rumors and speculation about why that sub was shut down for "harassment" when others that seem more harass-y were not targeted. Remember, most users never visited those subs, and weren't in the know about their modus operandi. Those rumors led to the takedowns looking like censorship of distasteful content to many users. If it was censorship of distasteful or rude content, then there are many other subs that should fall alongside those taken down.

I think if they had said that the people in those subs were posting pictures of people and not responding in a timely manner to legitimate requests by aggrieved people portrayed on those subs, the users who don't really care about those subs would have brushed it off.

smudgy• 11 years ago

It's quite obvious that you have a greivence against part of the reddit user base since, as you mentioned, you have been the focus of their hate before.

I appreciate your opinion on why the other subreddits were taken offline but I must remind you it's just that, an opinion - only that, it means nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

worklogin2• 11 years ago

The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

Reddit is a free chat site with a decentralized power structure (in theory). Reddit can be useful, and I know there are supportive subs there, but /r/gaming and /r/science going down for a day was not harmful. People probably got a bit more sun that day.

kevdigital2• 11 years ago

The other subs shutting down "in protest" I found laughable. I had a hard time understanding what exactly they were protesting and the vocal minority sounded like a lot of people just raging against the machine. Reddit the company is the power structure and people just want to tear them down.

But why exactly? Not sure. This reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street. People see one protest breaking out then pile on with their own grievances. There was a lack of communication to the /r/iama mods about Victoria being let go...ok...now we're complaining about mod tools and censorship??

zedpm2• 11 years ago

I'm sorry that you were harassed by Reddit users; I certainly don't approve of that behavior. Like I said before, however, conflating those rotten actions by certain individuals with the larger ideological issues is not constructive. My complaint wasn't against censorship per se, but rather against what appears to be biased censorship. Certain harassment subreddits continue to exist, and it appears that they do so because their ideology is more closely aligned with Reddit management/admins than the ones that were banned. Rules need to be applied equally.

nilkn2• 11 years ago

Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause.

Why can't it be both?

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it is.

Karunamon6• 11 years ago

What evidence?

paulhauggis6• 11 years ago

"Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause."

Anyone that makes these sort of decisions based on absolutely no evidence besides that she was fired, is childish and should not be a moderator.

"The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management."

They might be physically adults, but emotional intelligence for many of the mods seems to be lacking.

"particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently"

The mods are just as bad when it comes to censorship...decisions based on pure emotion, political views, and personal grudges. Exactly what you don't want when it comes to someone moderating a community.

Reddit is what the world was like in the middle ages and the reason we don't solve all of our issues with a lynch-mob.

Many don't see it because they don't like the people that are being silenced, bullied, and marginalized.

001sky• 11 years ago

They fired the relationship manager for the AMAs. The way the did that harmed/ruined some relationships. The 'how' is as important as the what in that case, so your comment seems bizarreley off base.

This is a wholy different issue that the dust up a month ago. Thats why a petition for the CEO's resignation has 200,000 signatures. The incident 1 month ago promted onlt 10K or so, so this latest issue is a 20x increase in pissed off people.

amyjess6• 11 years ago

This actually reminds me of when Unidan was shadowbanned.

Unidan was a super-popular redditor who loved educating people about science, and he would pop up everywhere and deliver useful information written in a way most laymen can understand. People loved him.

He got banned right after getting in an argument with somebody, where he was being really aggressive and heavy-handed. A lot of people flipped out and claimed he was banned just for getting into a heated argument. They attacked the admins, and then they proceeded to stalk and harass the girl he got into an argument with. They followed her around, downvoted all her comments into the negative triple digits, and effectively made her account useless.

A day later, it turns out that for his entire history as a redditor, he had been using five sockpuppets to upvote his posts and downvote all the posts around him so his posts could become more visible, and that was why he was banned.

So the community turned against him. All his posts on his new account were being aggressively downvoted, the word "Unidan" entered popular use as a slang term for someone who uses vote bots to puff up their karma, and he ended up pretty much disappearing from reddit after a while (he tried to come back a few times, but nobody wanted to hear what he had to say anymore).

As for the girl who got stalked, the admins removed the limits on her accounts placed by the downvotes, the community followed her around upvoting her for a while to restore her karma, and the devs introduced new anti-brigading measures to make sure an organized downvote brigade like that can never fuck somebody's account up again.

I have a feeling that when we find out why Victoria was fired, the community will turn on her and start apologizing to the admins, because this sounds like the exact same situation.

paulhauggis6• 11 years ago

This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit, which isn't the case. This is the problem, actually. Because it's not a paid position, the company can't use that as leverage in situations like this. The moderators essentially have nothing to lose.

Even in the article, it states that it was shutdown because of the abrupt termination of Ms. Taylor. Anybody that makes these sort of emotional decisions shouldn't be anywhere near a position of power.

If I were the CEO of Reddit, I would be making it my next goal to slowly take away the power away from these moderators.

Zikes3• 11 years ago

Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run, and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power".

The average Reddit user doesn't know or care where the content comes from or how it's moderated, and they similarly have no loyalty to Reddit. If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded.

mxfh• 11 years ago

They are curators, not creators.

And the talk about being democratic is kind of wishful thinking at best. Did the moderators got elected in a qualified voting process?

paulhauggis6• 11 years ago

"Those moderators are the content creators that make Reddit run"

I disagree. Most content on Reddit is copied/pasted from elsewhere.

"and Reddit runs only because those people have "the power".

There have been many other successful communities that didn't give so much power to moderators. The moderators at HN, for instance, are paid employees.

"If those moderators get upset enough with the way the site is run and go elsewhere, the rest of Reddit's users will likely follow suit, just like they did when Digg imploded."

Users fled Digg because it made a really bad experience for the average person going to the site. Moderators are a minority and can easily be replaced. As long as the average user experience is un-changed, Reddit will remain popular.

When a large company replaces the management team, most people are un-fazed unless it actually effects them in some way.

The moderators made the mistake of using the nuclear option. A bad strategy in the long-run.

Another simple solution is to make it so the moderators can move a sub-reddit to private, but if the community has over a certain amount of subscribers, it's pushed up to a paid employee before it is activated.

This removes 90% of the mods power with very little effort. Most might not even notice until they try to changing the sub-reddit to private, which for the most popular ones, is rare.

deciplex• 11 years ago

You think they should begin paying moderators? Any suggestions where that money should come from? Any thoughts on whether it will lead to conflicts of interest on the larger subreddits which could harm the site (such as, and especially, IAmA)?

Retra• 11 years ago

Paying the moderators was not the suggested solution...

cblades• 11 years ago

I think that's very short-sighted. The moderators represent and manage a good portion of the content creators that draw users to reddit.

They shut down AMAs because they were left hanging with several upcoming high-profile guests. The person that had arranged and managed guests in the past was suddenly gone, and there was no communication from Reddit as to what the transition plan was.

Personally, I don't think that's unreasonable at all.

cowsandmilk• 11 years ago

This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit

How do you get that impression? Second sentence of the article is: "We volunteer our time to help manage the subsection called IamA?" Other phrases include "We donate our time and talents to Reddit".

Nothing in the article suggests employment by reddit.

lmartel3• 11 years ago

If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg.

The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators. Developing an adversarial relationship with the community or the moderators is the absolute fastest way to torpedo the site.

In addition, as a few other comments on this article have pointed out, the shutdown was not a reaction to the (sudden) firing of a (vital) employee, but to years of serious issues and mismanagement.

The first subreddit to shut down did so because it literally couldn't keep functioning without Victoria, and the rest saw an opportunity to finally voice their complaints and be heard.

paulhauggis6• 11 years ago

"If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg."

If I ran Reddit, it would be just as popular and much more profitable. The mass Digg exodus happened because their decisions ruined the content and the average user got tired of the bullshit. This has nothing to do with moderators.

"The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators."

Are you a moderator? Do you really think the moderators create content?

Here is an example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics

Everything on the front-page is taken from other sites. The moderators created nothing. The users even posted the links..so they didn't even do that.

"but to years of serious issues and mismanagement."

Why no protests before this incident then? and why are there so many people protesting her firing?

"The first subreddit to shut down did so because it literally couldn't keep functioning without Victoria, and the rest saw an opportunity to finally voice their complaints and be heard."

Well, you shouldn't base your entire success on 1 person. A smart moderator would have multiple backups.

DanBC3• 11 years ago

moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators.

Moderators create very little content. Most of the content is taken from other places, and most content is posted by people who are not mods.

nanny5• 11 years ago

When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions.

Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know.

Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.

The responses to this event are entirely unjustified, because there is no information at all to base a reaction on.

_dark_matter_2• 11 years ago

I don't know if you deliberately haven't been reading anything or what, but it wasn't just in reaction to the firing. This is just the straw the broke the camel's back.

nanny5• 11 years ago

People keep saying things like this, but what exactly was on the camel's back in the first place? "Bad communication"? Can you give me any specific, concrete examples?

joosters4• 11 years ago

As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is not a campaign to bring her back personally.

Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.

nanny5• 11 years ago

Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all.

What if she did something really bad and was fired on the spot? How could they "have a plan in place" for a situation like that?

peeters3• 11 years ago

As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter

It absolutely matters. If it was something egregious and for cause, the company probably wouldn't have a choice but to terminate her on the spot. There are a lot of scenarios where they also wouldn't be able to disclose why she was terminated. If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened. They could have been scrambling as much as the community was.

Now, I hope that's not the case because I like and respect Victoria. And the way people like Alexis "Popcorn" Ohanian commented suggests that this really was a case of Reddit's admins not giving a shit about the community. But to my knowledge Victoria herself has not commented on the reason for her dismissal, so it's hard to know whether Reddit had a choice about how to transition.

Anyway my point is the circumstances around the termination do matter in evaluating the way the company acted.

vonmoltke3• 11 years ago

Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.

When you have people travelling from out of town specifically to meet the person you are about to shitcan, you're damn well right you need to do something like that. Either that or delay the action until such time as it will not disrupt something like this. Making the first notification of this be when said person arrives at your front desk is unprofessional and unacceptable, period.

nanny5• 11 years ago

Did you consider that it might not have been an option? That maybe it was an unexpected termination, and they didn't have a way to know about or contact the people arriving from out of town?

You don't have enough information to speculate like that.

jonlucc5• 11 years ago

Two things they should have done:

1) had a transition plan in place for key employees, especially the most prominent public-facing employees

2) communicate after the fact; basically get all hands on deck to find and handle each of the AMAs happening that day and in the next few days, make a single point of contact to triage those needs and tell the mods

smileysteve• 11 years ago

Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee?

Reduce single points of failure, broadcast schedules and meetings.

Before the termination is complete have the replacement with an action plan.

yiyus• 11 years ago

Overreacting by immense proportions is what reddit does.

I do not know any details about Victoria's firing and I do not care about them, but obviously somebody up there did a terrible job managing the whole situation.

16bytes• 11 years ago

I've seen high-level departures from corporations for years and recently have been on the inside track of one (i.e. I knew about the departure before it was public knowledge).

From the time that I was told to when it was made public was weeks.

What was done in the interim was make sure nobody was left hanging. Key individuals and customers were called, things coordinated so that there would be no backlash.

Take a look at Microsoft and Gate's departure. Ballmer's departure. Apple and Jobs's.

I get that at-will employment means that either part can walk away at any time, but that doesn't resolve the company from dealing with the ramifications of said departure.

That's what this is about; that Reddit thought so little or had a thorough misunderstanding of her position as to not key in the mods, or otherwise coordinate handling of her duties is the straw that broke the camel's back.

robrenaud• 11 years ago

How hard would it be to fork reddit AMA on a third party site? I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board, a lot of the mods/community would follow.

Certainly some custom support for the AMA would be nice, like getting cleanly summarized final outputs and highlighting direct conversation with the askee, and making it easy to find highly upvoted non-answered questions.

joosters4• 11 years ago

I imagine it'd be extremely difficult. It's the users that give reddit its power. You can set up another site but if it hasn't got the readership, fewer people are going to do AMAs there. There are already several reddit clones but they are nowhere near as successful.

hoopd3• 11 years ago

When Barbara Walters switches networks viewers and celebrities follow her because they like and trust her, people feel the same way about Victoria.

habitue2• 11 years ago

This is pretty much what voat is. The biggest issue is handling the traffic. Only a fraction of users went to voat and it was offline for days, crippled by the traffic.

edit: I previously said Voat was a reddit fork, that wasn't correct.

joshuapants• 11 years ago

This is exactly what voat is, a Reddit fork

Voat mimics Reddit functionally, but I don't think it's a fork

pbreit5• 11 years ago

Nearly impossible.

pbreit5• 11 years ago

Nearly impossible. The code is the easiest part by far. Much, much harder is getting viewers and then subjects.

pbreit5• 11 years ago

Nearly impossible. The code is trivial. Getting the viewers and subjects is the hard part.

byuu2• 11 years ago

I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board

Very doubtful she'd work for free, so that rules out owners that can't afford at least a full-time salary.

Find someone willing to risk ~$50-100K just on the IAmA coordinator alone (who may not be able to attract celebrity talent to an unknown site), on the hope their site displaces Reddit (a very slim chance), and that they'll somehow then magically make it all profitable without chasing everyone off, and it's doable.

imjk• 11 years ago

"We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less."

I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to NY to meet with Victoria and was told that the meeting was cancelled. As expected, panic ensued among the subreddit's moderators. Whether the firing was justified or not, the fact that Reddit's leadership didn't immediately see the consequences of their action on one of their most popular communities just shows their disregard. Or even worse, they realized the consequences and just didn't bother to help facilitate them. I mean these are real people with real meetings spending real dollars for the community, which is all run but volunteers, and Reddit's leadership didn't feel it was important enough to communicate with them to help avoid unnecessary consequences. I understand the frustration.

ChrisPebble3• 11 years ago

Ignorance more than callousness appears to be the sin here. From snippets of communications posted with the mods it looks like they weren't really aware of what Victoria did for the mods.

Since the community is their "product" I find it disconcerting that they're not more familiar with the details of how these relationships work and what Victoria actually did. I would actually find it more comforting if they were aware of all of this and made a rational business decision that may have been seen as callous, but they appear to have had very little clue as to what was actually going on. That doesn't bode well for future business decisions if they really don't understand their product.

slg5• 11 years ago

Devils advocate, that is partly Victoria's fault. If your managers don't know what you do all day, I don't think it is surprising that you are fired. Yes, it is a sign off bad management, but it is also a sign off an employee not communicating up to management.

EDIT: The downvotes seem to indicate I wasn't clear. I'm not saying the Reddit management team thought Victoria wasn't doing any work. However, it was clear that Victoria was spending time doing things that management didn't know about. From the sound of it, Victoria saw work that needed to be done and did it. Her job responsibilities likely continued to expanded as IAMA grew. However if management truly didn't know how involved she was in that, that is a failing of both management for not staying involved in the process and her for not communicating up the extra work she was doing.

basch8• 11 years ago

This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replaceable if the site rules didnt protect them. The moderators think they are special, the admins see them as interchangeable. Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. It is a task that could be crowdsourced better so more people are doing less work. Slashdot had better moderation tools than reddit. When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced. The reddit admins should fear the power they have given the moderators, and are probably brainstorming ways to reduce it.

The "woe is me" cry of the moderators doesnt resonate with the majority of the userbase, because the moderators volunteered. The apathetic majority doesnt comment in situations like this, so you wont hear their voices. In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out. But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power. Theyre not fooling me.

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

munificent3• 11 years ago

Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators.

They care about the quality of the comment they see on the subreddits they follow. That transitively means they really care about the plight of the moderators. They just don't know it.

Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters.

On the well-moderated subreddits—which are increasingly the largest ones—they do a hell of a lot more than spam filtering. Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit.

When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced.

I'm not saying they couldn't be replaced. But if you do that, those subreddits will fundamentally change. And, in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.

In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out.

I don't think reddit needs to worry much about moderators leaving. But they should really worry about content contributors leaving. The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.

vonklaus3• 11 years ago

it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike

Unionized laborers collectively bargaining for more money from the company they work for is almost the exact opposite of unpaid volunteers maintaining the profit making infrastructure of a for profit corporation.

VonGuard• 11 years ago

I totally agree that Reddit is an old boys club. But this is how all online communities seem to work: age = power and respect. How would you solve this problem? It's been like that since newsgroups. It seems to be just a human tendency.

ChrisPebble3• 11 years ago

Fair points, but the comment "because the moderators volunteered" made me cringe.

I have a great deal of respect and sympathy for mods because I've helped moderate other forums and the task is both rewarding, unrelenting, and filled with ceaseless drama. Even though they volunteered I still give them a lot of credit if they're running a successful board. It takes a lot.

I'm really intrigued to see if you're correct and we will eventually see mechanisms to replace mods. StackOverflow has moderator elections yearly, but the company has a tight control on the direction of the product. Mods have a lot more freedom to dictate the course of a board so I don't think elections would work for every board. Would be interesting to see though.

digitalzombie• 11 years ago

But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power.

I was a moderator and I left...

Also League of Legend mod left not too long ago, he had other responsibility and being a moderator was taking a toll on him and LoL is a big subreddit compare to my subreddit.

So you're argument doesn't hold for all.

It also ignore the fact that Reddit is partly run by volunteer people, moderators. You can't just handwave this fact by saying people are power hungry. The fact is if people leave like Digg then Reddit would be screwed.

conradfr• 11 years ago

Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. It is a task that could be crowdsourced better so more people are doing less work.

Like an upvote/downvote system.

anthony_romeo• 11 years ago

I guess the only concern I can think of is that if the majority of content submitters are angry, they may become less involved, switch to being commenters/lurkers, or move on to another site entirely. If the content diminishes, then the users might frequent the site less or look elsewhere.

I'm not trying to make any predictions of doom or anything (frankly, I think this kerfuffle is just a flash in the pan), but an unstable community can have an impact on the majority of users if enough people get fed up.

stcredzero• 11 years ago

Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club

Many reddit moderators have caused many subreddits to feel like webforums from the early 2000's. Many are heavy-handed and feeling their power a bit. There are some subreddits where a newbie can carefully read all of the instructions about posting, try their best to comply, then still have their post removed or down-voted, then be told that all such posts should be in a certain weekly discussion.

kevdigital2• 11 years ago

I've had the same thoughts through this ordeal. If it's such a burden go ahead and stop being a mod. There's plenty of users that would gladly take your place. Yet I've not heard of any doing so.

Letting Victoria go probably sucks since she helped coordinate so much. But that kind of chaos or disorganization happens in any company I've worked for when a key employee is let go. Large corporations with paid employees don't always get this right. So to me Reddit's actions were no surprise, once the decision is made the employee is notified and shown the door.

dredmorbius7• 11 years ago

Reddit's moderator system isn't perfect, by a long shot. As with its voting systems, it's subject to abuse: calous moderation, power-tripping, and a lack of integrity, if not outright corruption. Reddit's own rules make ensuring quality moderation difficult -- admins cannot remove moderators unless they violate site rules. This leads to situations such as /r/xkcd being overtaken by a group of neo-nazi holocaust denying anti-semitic MRA promotors. Eventually resolved (see the subreddit's wiki for details).

But: Reddit absolutely relies on moderators. Which means that it's putting power in the hands of an unpaid workforce.

I actually find Reddit's moderation tools and systems pretty useful and better than most, though I manage only two small subs (each <300 subscribers)

So, no, individual Redditors may not individually care about the personal plights of moderators, much as you probably don't put much thought into the working conditions of the person who installed and adjusted the brakes of the car heading toward you. But you absolutely have a vested interest in the consequences of their work.

More on what does and doesn't work well at Reddit, from about a year ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...

Aaronontheweb• 11 years ago

But that's exactly why the moderators are important. Overwhelmingly most redditors are lurker content sponges. As soon as the people who invest in making the content and maintaining the content sources leave, so will the vast majority of users who consume it.

celticninja4• 11 years ago

actually there have been plenty of rebuttals to this sort of statement, so I will briefly paraphrase the general content for you. Most users dont care, they dont care about reddit, they dont care about the mods, they dont care about the drama, all they want is their new content. They have no loyalty and would jump ship to an alternative site quite easily if the content was appearing elsewhere first. So if those mods/content creators to go to voat.co, or whatever alternative is being suggested, so will apathetic users who dont care where they get their fix.

Redit wasnt the first social media sharing site, digg.com was way pout in front for a long time, then came along v4 and killed the site dead in its tracks. Users fled because they changed the way stories were submitted and who submitted them. All those apathetic users jumped ship to mainly reddit and whilst reddit was growing and catching digg in term sof page views etc, Digg's failure is what boosted reddit to the number 1 position and the same thing can happen again.

smacktoward• 11 years ago

They are landowners

Landowners who don't actually own the land they spend so much time improving.

So more like sharecroppers, actually.

jaawn2• 11 years ago

The negative tone of this comment may be off-putting for some, but aside from that, this is very insightful. Calling "we do this because we love the community" a veneer especially makes a lot of sense to me, based on what I've seen of Reddit mods.

dummy7953• 11 years ago

Please don't quote South Park.

timr• 11 years ago

It's interesting that you're quoting that line as "the heart" of the piece, when it's the one line that seemed to reveal a less-than-reasonable motive: most of the rest of the editorial was about the way Taylor was fired, but this line was complaining that she was fired at all.

As an outsider to this drama, it sure sounds like people are angry mainly because this person was fired, and they liked her. They're clinging to the details of the way she was fired to give some weight to that indignation.

codingdave2• 11 years ago

I have yet to see anything that looks like disregard for reddit's business. On the contrary, everything I have seen has implied that reddit is trying to monetize the community, and the community does not like it.

Of course, I don't have any inside information, so I could be wrong on all counts, but the rumor is that Victoria was fired for resisting turning AMAs into a revenue stream. I have seen other moderators complaining that they have been feeling a push to monetize their work, and have been strongly resisting it as it would hinder free speech.

While the moderators are probably correct, it points more to a basic disagreement about what the site is. Most redditors feel that the site is all about community, and maintaining said community is the #1 goal. But the actual management team of the business surely needs to be looking at monetization.

That is the core disagreement - it is not about recent events, it is about the fact that one side wants to monetize reddit, and the other side does not.

Again, not actually knowing anything, this could be way off base... it is just my perspective as an outside observer.

codingdave2• 11 years ago

Just a later note... since I wrote this, Sam Altman and others have repeatedly stated that they are not worried about monetization in the short-term. So I was way off-base...

mildweed• 11 years ago

People often say that the users of a site like Reddit are the product, not the customers. In the case of Reddit moderators, they are also essentially employees. Employees who need to be treated more as customers, due to the fact they're volunteers.

Anger the masses of Reddit all you want, but don't piss off the volunteers that hold your product together.

throwaway_972• 11 years ago

http://str8c.me/

dredmorbius7• 11 years ago

Could you provide some details on this rather than just a naked link?

embik2• 11 years ago

What really baffles me is the way reddit management handled this situation. There were many things they simply fucked up - They did not install the new AMA team properly (hell, the subreddit mods did not know about it), they reacted childish to the shutdown (something along the lines of "popcorn tastes good" - one of your biggest communities just shut down because you failed to do basic management, in what universe is this a proper response?) and they won't address the real issues, it's all PR speech (take a look at the "we' sorry" post, a lot of important questions raised are not answered).

This is just horrible - You cannot anger your community in such a "business model". reddit depends 100% on their users and especially the content creators and moderators. They do very little by themselves, and most of it is stuff around the core functionality only a small percentage is even using.

steve-howard2• 11 years ago

"Popcorn" as a metaphor for drama is a daily in-joke at SubredditDrama, where that comment was posted. What kn0thing didn't count on was that a lot of readers had never been there before and instead took it at face value.

tfinniga• 11 years ago

The way I took this statement was roughly "I will enjoy watching this drama unfold, but I won't do anything other than watch". Is that inaccurate?

luso_brazilian2• 11 years ago

I believe it was the opposite, people got outraged because they got the exact meaning of the joke.

People were expressing loud and clear their grievances and one admin response was in the lines of "we know about it, let's do nothing and watch the drama unfold, it will die down".

RyJones• 11 years ago

If he demands to be the front-and-center face of reddit, he should act like it.

pbreit5• 11 years ago

By that description, I think everyone understood the sentiment exactly.

hoopd3• 11 years ago

A discussion between an admin and the science mods leaked: http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_...

tmuir• 11 years ago

Not just an admin. YC alum and cofounder Alexis Ohanian. This conversation tells you everything you need to know. They aren't sorry. This wasn't bungled. They are doubling down on their lack of communication.

hoopd3• 11 years ago

I feel bad posting it because it's a leak but it informs the conversation.

throwaway_972• 11 years ago

I think the management is doing the right thing for the long term. They will try to make it more and more social and maybe even try to act as a news portal; things that bring in profits. It should attract a lot of new people. It won't be the reddit you remember but it will be a more profitable reddit. On a personal note I feel nothing as I find reddit to be quite a distraction to my productivity and many subreddits of my interests are dead.

spodek• 11 years ago

Never surprise your team.

This incident looks like it comes from inexperienced, counterproductive leadership, as do the several incidents leading up to it and that will follow. Or maybe authoritarian. Several days after a firing, people are complaining in the NY Times that they are still surprised.

Not surprising your team is one of the top principles I've learned in teamwork. If, as a manager, your firing someone surprises them or their team, you almost certainly mismanaged the process. If you have a reason for firing someone, you should be able to create a process everyone understands even if they don't agree to it. The people left should certainly not be surprised, especially after the firing.

If your team is surprised by your strategy, if your customers are surprised by your product, and so on, you probably managed poorly. You should only surprise your competition.

At least the rest of us can learn from Reddit's management what not to do: motivating competitors to satisfy their users and customers while they're alienating them.

dublinben• 11 years ago

Never surprise your team.

It's never been more clear that the managers of Reddit Inc. do not consider the moderators of their most popular subreddits to be part of their team.

theklub2• 11 years ago

I can't believe people take reddit so seriously. Its amazing to me.

darkstar9994• 11 years ago

Some people have been on that site for 10 years.

secstate• 11 years ago

That's fine, but it's effectively a giant forum with volunteer moderators. I feel like it can best be described as the social equivalent of trying to steer a boat that's really 30,000 small boats all tied together.

They have volunteers with the ability to simply turn off huge traffic parts of their site? How is this a for-profit company?

byuu2• 11 years ago

I've been there five years, and really have no attachment to it whatsoever. You can say, "why go back?", but I'd just say, "why not?" It's pretty much because it's there.

Either way, I imagine a lot of people feel the same about it as I do. And when your product is that dispassionate, you risk everyone leaving for the "next big thing."

It's certainly happened many times before: Digg, Livejournal, Myspace, etc.

I'm not sure how you can really build a lot of commitment and loyalty from a community that basically just submits links and comments on them. Moderators, absolutely. But regular users?

nkassis• 11 years ago

Reddit varies widely on quality. Some forums on reddit are the best source of info on their particular topic. I don't really care for reddit as a whole but I would miss it if some of the the subreddit communities I follow were to disappear with nothing to replace them. Albeit none of those subreddits are the type that would end up on the Reddit ban list I presume.

alecco• 11 years ago

An article critical of reddit? Let's see how fast this is taken out of HN frontpage.

Edit: Same as top post (NYSE) 1h and same votes, and it's at 9th position... Bring me your downvotes. Truth hurts?

DanBC3• 11 years ago

These threads are pretty toxic, so it's not surprising they get flagged.

Also, your comment got downvotes for baiting.

zxcvcxz4• 11 years ago

Why is it okay for a corporation to do it, but when mods do it everyone accuses them of pushing their own agenda?

jonknee2• 11 years ago

The problem with volunteers is that you can't easily fire them. It's great that reddit gets a lot of free labor from moderators, but their sense of entitlement is a huge drag. Regardless of why Victoria was let go, it's very difficult to run a business when you can't make staffing changes without threat of open revolt.

I would hire a replacement for Victoria and swap out every moderator of /r/IAmA who was part of this coup. It's not their property, it's reddit's. It will be ugly (not that it isn't already), but in the end there are a few moderators and millions of users who literally could not care less and just want to read interesting stories.

sparkzilla• 11 years ago

Article>The issue goes beyond Reddit. We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers — and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant.

It's time for companies to stop treating the free work of contributors as a given, and pay them for their contributions: http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-sam...

pasbesoin• 11 years ago

Based upon the facts if and as described here, I would have to consider Pao entirely incompetent in her current role. Regardless of how one feels about her as a person.

I regret a bit jumping on the bandwagon, here, but if things occurred as described, the facts alone are damning.

P.S. I also have to question what the hell Alexis is up to. I've read elsewhere that he conducted the actual termination. Is he really so clueless at this point about his own site? (Even if he agreed with the termination, for whatever reason, its manner and fallout is just simply unacceptable.)

There has to be some serious dollar play behind this. Which does not speak well for the future of reddit; it may make it to the other side, but only based upon the gigantic momentum it has built that may sustain it through to some better policy -- if Management has the brains to see the light.

P.P.S. Is voat back up, now?

theklub2• 11 years ago

Yes voat is back up.

jmount2• 11 years ago

Rambling and self contradictory (presumably even after editing).

"We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest."

"The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that ..."

Own up to one or the other.

Frenchgeek2• 11 years ago

How so? Their community shut down to regroup and protest, without anticipating others doing the same.

jmount2• 11 years ago

And "The secondary purpose" was a protest, contradicting the claim protest wasn't one of their purposes.

Chathamization• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's interesting that right after the shutdown they said that they were closing it down merely to figure out how to operate without Victoria (what would they have done if she caught the flu?), not protesting. The shutdown was fairly brief (less than a day, it seems). Now days later they're coming back with, "eh, that thing we did a few days ago, it was also a protest." Doesn't seem terribly effective.

xaa• 11 years ago

Apparently Reddit has exactly 2 board members: Alexis and Sam Altman [1]. Why would Sam Altman, and by extension YC, have thought that Ellen Pao would make a good ("interim") CEO for Reddit?

This scenario should really be causing shareholders/board members to think about how dependent Reddit really is on moderator goodwill [2]. There needs to be a CEO and leadership team that can at least create a credible perception, if not the reality, that Reddit values moderators who donate their time to make the business viable.

For this purpose, it would seem you want a CEO who is going to be non-inflammatory (i.e., not Pao) and perceived as a relatively neutral arbitrator between the needs of shareholders for monetization and the needs of moderators for adequate support (i.e., probably not someone from a VC background). Considering how little it should actually cost the company to provide a reliable support network for mods, including honest, non-HR-speak communication, this hardly seems like a demanding task, but somehow they continue to manage it very poorly.

Does anyone know if there have been public comments by YC about any of these issues?

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?p...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

kjs3• 11 years ago

There seems to be an incredulous "we gave our time to a for profit company for free and got fucked" attitude that I can't help, undoubtedly because I'm a bad person, but think 'duh!'.

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