Details Emerge About Victoria Taylor’s Dismissal at Reddit

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-about-victoria-taylors-dismissal-at-reddit/

by warunsl • 11 years ago

116 127 11 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Here is the permalink to the comment made: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

I'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?

xd19362• 11 years ago

This was my main takeaway from the article. Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash, but it sounds like she had nothing to do with Victoria's firing.

Someone12342• 11 years ago

Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash

What changes to "hate speech rules?" Reddit still allows hate speech. What they curtailed were subreddits who existed primarily to harass people both on and off the site (e.g. other Reddit users, YouTubers, game streamers, people with public Facebook profiles, random members of the public, the entire Imgur staff, several Reddit admins, you name it).

That's why whenever this topic gets brought up people link to e.g. racist subreddits which still exist today, and then ask "well, why was XYZ banned, if those aren't?!" while entirely ignoring the fact that the banned subs were banned for HARASSMENT, not for having controversial opinions.

Subs still exist with the same controversial opinions as those who got banned. The difference is that the mods in the ones which survived actively follow Reddit's rules and don't harass innocent people. The mods on the banned ones were actively involved in the harassment and frankly should have been banned.

smacktoward2• 11 years ago

On the other hand, the CEO of a company should at least be vaguely aware of personnel changes that would affect strategic parts of their business. And AMAs are definitely strategic to Reddit.

The question then becomes whether Pao didn't know about it because she wasn't paying attention to her business, or because Ohanian and/or other parties deliberately hid the information from her until after the proverbial stuff had hit the fan. I'd consider the latter a fireable offense, but YMMV.

theseatoms• 11 years ago

There's no way that the already-satiated angry mob about-faces like that. Though, I'd be impressed if it did.

mason55• 11 years ago

The backlash was centered around the lack of communication and heads up to the mod teams.

We don't know if it was "she needs to be fired right now, immediately" or if it was "she is not a part of future plans". If it's the former then you can put the blame on Alexis but if Pao was not being pressured to fire her immediately then she could have in theory worked with the mod teams before letting Victoria go.

ceejayoz2• 11 years ago

Frankly, if the mod teams were this disrupted by a single employee's departure, that's at least partially their own fault.

If she'd been hit by a bus or she'd had a personal/family emergency (hell, upcoming AMAs would've been potentially problematic even if her laptop just got stolen), they'd have been just as fucked - and no one to whine at.

They failed miserably at disaster planning. They got very lucky they could shove the blame off on someone else.

tptacek15• 11 years ago

Ohanian himself said he was responsible for the firing! There's no "if" here.

mason240• 11 years ago

Alexis has kind of always been unpopular on the site.

efuquen2• 11 years ago

And yet he has never received the sort of backlash or vitriol that Pao has. I've always been up and down about how much gender and sexism has played a part in all this, outside that it a "small" minority of Reddit is influenced by it. But the idea that while not always popular but Alexis always seems to get a pass from the Reddit community (at least compared to how Pao was treated) is really telling.

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

I'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?

Yes and no. Yes there should be outrage directed at him but the buck ultimately stops with the CEO and the firing was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I have not doubt Alexis shares some of the blame but Pao had failed the moderators and the community at large in other ways and her leaving was probably best for Reddit.

gkoberger2• 11 years ago

Don't forget that Alexis is both above AND below Pao in the org chart. He's an employee, but also is the Chairman of the Board.

EDIT: Sources that Alexis reported to Ellen Pao:

From Alexis: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

From u/kickme444 (previous employee; fired last month): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

rodgerd3• 11 years ago

Alexis isn't a woman

jonlucc2• 11 years ago

This is very similar to one of the reports swirling before. If true, it is pretty awful for Alexis to keep letting Ellen Pao take the hit for it. There are other reasons that people dislike Mrs. Pao, but she doesn't need this final straw if it is truly Alexis' straw to bear.

exstudent24• 11 years ago

It is the nature of the role of CEO that you're going to take the heat for all company decisions. That's one of the justifications for their outsized compensation. Greater risk = greater reward. No one is forced to be CEO and being an executive essentially means you live your life on the line every day. It's not for everyone.

There was another thread on this earlier today and I think my comment there is applicable here too...

Yishan seems to love to do stuff like this. While I personally find it interesting, it also seems pretty unprofessional. Some issues with this particular comment:

1. Yishan no longer works at Reddit so I don't think he can be considered an authoritative source for what happened.

2. Yishan appointed Pao so isn't unbiased when discussing her.

3. The CEO's job is to represent the company. The chairman's job is to appoint the CEO. The outcome of events seems correct even if what Yishan says is true. reply

PhasmaFelis6• 11 years ago

It is the nature of the role of CEO that you're going to take the heat for all company decisions. That's one of the justifications for their outsized compensation. Greater risk = greater reward. No one is forced to be CEO and being an executive essentially means you live your life on the line every day. It's not for everyone.

I rather doubt that Ellen Pao's job description included "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them."

Stop making excuses for assholes.

exstudent24• 11 years ago

We don't actually know if that's what happened, this is based on a potentially disgruntled opinion of a former CEO.

Secondly, "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them." is almost the precise definition of what the CEO role is. You represent the whole company for better or worse. You are the face of the company.

okasaki2• 11 years ago

Ehm. This was known since the beginning: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0hcz/welcome_back/

Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by /u/kn0thing.

PhasmaFelis6• 11 years ago

Interesting. It's the first I've heard of it.

IIRC, it was also known from the beginning that the r/ShitNiggersSay et al. were banned, not for being offensive, but for doxxing people in violation of Reddit's few explicit rules. Once the mob locks on target, inconvenient little details like that tend to vanish.

pavedwalden• 11 years ago

It was known, but oddly not widely known. During the r/jailbait shutdown, Reddit was more successful in getting the word out about exactly where the line was drawn.

This time around many users claimed that it was the beginning of a clean-up campaign instigated by Pao. I don't know if the administrators failed to get their message across or if they were simply out-shouted by the mob.

okasaki2• 11 years ago

Subreddits can't break rules, only users can. And the admins normally deal with this by banning the users.

But occasionally they ban entire subreddits for what some users do. Curious, isn't it?

api• 11 years ago

Interesting. I had a strong feeling this whole 'censorship' controversy was bullshit manufactured by trolls, especially given the very trolly nature of the banned subs.

jn1234• 11 years ago

Except /u/kn0thing reported Ellen according to a former SVP, /u/kickme444 who was the other employee getting fired that started this whole thing [1]. Additionally, Dacvak was fired by Ellen for having cancer proving Ellen was making the personnel decisions. His comments were deleted due to a non-disparagement clause but could be found here [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

[2] https://archive.is/kfrFM

PhasmaFelis6• 11 years ago

So the Reddit mob was utterly wrong about Ellen Pao's complicity?

And they had such a good track record up 'til now.

solve• 11 years ago

Just doesn't make sense. Sure, quickly eliminate someone's role, but why immediately fire the person? Why not even try to transition the person to a new role? Was she employed as an independent contractor?

Reddit clearly has both plenty of money, and plenty of work to be done. This explanation doesn't add up at all.

fuejduxhebd• 11 years ago

Alexis Ohanian has long been a proponent of viral marketing and native advertising on reddit. It's a very common thing for companies and movie stars to do AMA's in order to promote whatever they're working on. I'm willing to bet Ohanian wanted to make AMA's of this sort pay to play if they already weren't, which led to some friction with Victoria. (Of course this is only a theory.)

Here's him talking about marketing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IyyIGg12QZw

imron• 11 years ago

but why immediately fire the person?

Move fast. Break things?

If so, they certainly achieved both objectives.

markbnj2• 11 years ago

In what sort of corporate governance model does an executive chairman make an operational decision to fire a line employee?

habitue• 11 years ago

This is in direct violation of the Chain that Binds.

tptacek15• 11 years ago

A weird one, which the chairman has also taken an operational role managing one of the most visible and important departments in the company:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9880953

http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit

markbnj2• 11 years ago

You're right, that is weird. However, since he had operational responsibility for "community" it sounds like it was his call.

protomyth• 11 years ago

Reddit isn't Twitter or Facebook where a post on the wall is fine. Reddit is a discussion platform which requires a bigger time commitment.

Having the goal to have celebrities / famous figures be part of the reddit community seems rather naive. Given the time commitment, it would seem that the pool of potential AmA's would dry up. Also, having Victoria do the leg work would seem familiar to celebrities who would view it as normal to have an event handler.

gadtfly• 11 years ago

Yishan Wong 2 days ago:

Here's one.
In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

amyjess3• 11 years ago

Yishan is almost terminally stupid.

If this isn't a joke, he and a ton of other people are going to be sued into the ground for this. If it is a joke, then he and a ton of other people are going to be investigated and possibly sued anyway.

kordless• 11 years ago

He's saying publicly that Ellen was framed, so yeah. It's probably not a joke.

http://www.businessinsider.com/yishan-wong-says-alexis-ohani...

cracell• 11 years ago

While I can see how this could hurt his future employment prospects what legal ground is there to sue over this post?

Seems like slander would be a very hard case to win and what else is there that you could sue him for?

revelation2• 11 years ago

Notice the AskReddit question this is in reference to:

Whats the best long con you ever pulled?

rjbwork• 11 years ago

So cheeky. It really does make you wonder.

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

Reminds me of The Usual Suspects.

tptacek15• 11 years ago

It's interesting that people criticized Pao for not being very engaged with the Reddit community (she was famously dinged for not knowing how to send a private message). Yishan Wong's repeated indiscretions show the downside of having Reddit's CEO also be an active Redditor.

benihana2• 11 years ago

I don't necessarily agree. I think his actions show the downside of having a nincompoop as a CEO. I think the fact that he was an active redditor is circumstantial.

I mean, he went on reddit and had an argument with a former employee after that no remote work fiasco.

nostrademons3• 11 years ago

"Downside" depends on which side you're on. From the perspective of an ordinary Redditor, Yishan forthrightness and transparency has probably been quite refreshing. From the perspective of the board, I bet they very much appreciate Ellen Pao's professionalism and silence.

Reddit is basically a society of 36M people now, roughly the size of Iraq. If it were a country, it'd be the 36th largest, bigger than Canada, Venezuela, and Taiwan. r/IAmA alone has 8.6M subscribers, r/AskReddit has 9M.

The biggest challenge of a leader is aligning interests. Many of those "citizens" are not aligned with the board, and are not even aligned with each other. It's no wonder that they keep burning through CEOs. Yishan may have been more aligned with the Reddit userbase (although even then, a good portion of the site hated him) and clashed with the board, while Ellen tried to please the board and ended up pissing off the whole userbase.

fnordfnordfnord2• 11 years ago

Nit-picking here: Prior to 10 days ago, Yishan had been making about one post per month for the preceding six months or so; not what most would call an active redditor.

pvg• 11 years ago

I think what this shows is the downside of having Yishan Wong as your CEO or ex-CEO, more than anything else.

gkoberger2• 11 years ago

"Is this a joke?" is the wrong question. Yishan believes this is what happened. Rather, the question should be "is Yishan's perception of the events what actually happened?"

Remember, Yishan is biased. He quit under fire from the board, and is a big fan of Ellen Pao. That doesn't make him wrong (or right); just biased.

fnordfnordfnord2• 11 years ago

Wait until you see who is the top replies to /u/yishan's comment.

techman94• 11 years ago

My suspicion is that Victoria was terminated for entirely legitimate reasons unrelated to the operation of /r/IAmA. She was a valuable employee and community member, and I don't believe the Reddit administration is foolish enough to remove her just because they wanted to modify (and possibly monetize) the format of AmAs. Much of the Reddit community frequently forgets that Reddit is a business (owned by a multinational media conglomerate, no less) that sometimes needs to make business decisions.

mikhailt• 11 years ago

I don't think the community forgot Reddit is a business, I think it's the other way. Reddit's management forgot that the community is a huge part of what makes Reddit successful and if you go against them, you're not going to have a fun time.

That's why they kept bringing up the situations with mod tools, lack of communication, and so on.

techman94• 11 years ago

The Reddit community is not the customer. They're the product. It's just like Facebook or Twitter or any other social media website. Think about the real, cold-blooded economics of it. Reddit can afford to piss off the community, because, even if a small number of people leave, there will still be plenty to view advertisements and the controversy and publicity may even drive more traffic. Sure, moderators can take subs dark and post long rants against the Reddit staff, but ultimately, most people WILL keep visiting the site.

Reddit (the company, not the community) is NOT your friend and has no obligation to the community. Just like every other social media company out there, their fundamental goal is to make money, and serving the community isn't always aligned with that interest.

rodgerd3• 11 years ago

Reddit's management forgot that the community is a huge part of what makes Reddit successful and if you go against them, you're not going to have a fun time.

The community around /r/askscience or /r/askhistorians perhaps. The community around /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, and /r/creepshots probably not so much.

glibgil2• 11 years ago

"owned by a multinational media conglomerate" What?

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006, and the team moved to San Francisco.
On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

PhasmaFelis6• 11 years ago

My suspicion is that Victoria was terminated for entirely legitimate reasons unrelated to the operation of /r/IAmA.

If so, I really don't understand why there hasn't been an official justification yet. So much of the rage could have been defused by a prompt and earnest explanation of why she was fired. The fact that that hasn't happened seems to imply that the real reason would only make people angrier.

techman94• 11 years ago

Perhaps it was for a reason that both parties want to remain confidential?

If she was terminated for cause, Reddit has no obligation to reveal what that cause was, and neither does she. Leave them be, it's not really any of our business anyways.

balls187• 11 years ago

The fact that that hasn't happened seems to imply that the real reason would only make people angrier.

That is a non sequitur.

tptacek15• 11 years ago

I don't understand why people seem to believe that if they just keep angrily asking about it, the company will divulge the reason for Taylor's severance. It is extremely atypical for companies to reveal why they've chosen to let employees go.

It is also, literally, none of our business. Did Taylor ask people to dig into her personnel story? In a situation involving something as private and sensitive and reputational as a termination, you would want more than tea leaf reading: you'd want an overt affirmative consent from Taylor that she wanted the world talking about what happened to her at Reddit.

Apologies if that's what's happened, but I haven't seen it.

technotony• 11 years ago

there are often legal issues around firing someone and explaining why. it's common for both sides to sign a confidentiality agreement on something like this.

itsdrewmiller• 11 years ago

This is in the new york times?

The protest was the latest episode in nine months of tumult for Reddit, a highly popular internet message board which has more than 160 million monthly visitors. Under Ms. Pao’s leadership, many users of the site have been upset with what they have perceived as major challenges to free speech and a lack of censorship. In May, Reddit users revolted when the company instituted stricter guidelines against prohibiting harassment on the site.

bpicolo• 11 years ago

No, it's on a blog hosted on the NYT website

scott_karana• 11 years ago

I think he was trying to point out the contradictory and incorrect sentence that got by whoever copyedits the blog.

yellowapple• 11 years ago

The first emphasized sentence makes sense (barely); the challenges are to both free speech and a lack of censorship. The wording sucks, but it could be worse.

The second sentence, on the other hand, is plain nonsensical.

codingdave• 11 years ago

Why is an ex-employee (even if ex-CEO) being treated by the NYT as an authoritative source?

revelation2• 11 years ago

I don't know, because this is the NYT and they will treat anyone as a source? Frequently granting them anonymity when their position neither deserves nor requires it?

gesman• 11 years ago

Would be nice to hear Victoria's story from Victoria.

Regardless, I think with her reputation and respect - she'll likely be doing something even more exciting.

She's wisely avoiding stirring muddy waters for now...

Zigurd• 11 years ago

At the time I pointed out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9827489 that it was Alexis Ohanian who fired Victoria Taylor and set off the "blackout."

Ohanian seemed content to use Ellen Pao as a meatshield, whether she deserved it or not.

Imagine that: A Silicon Valley soap opera with no heros.

tptacek15• 11 years ago

Why would Reddit have had a hard time simply installing Ohanian or Huffman as the CEO? Why would they need covert machinations to put the founders back at the helm?

AndrewKemendo3• 11 years ago

Notice also that this thread is now on the 5th page with 106 points at 9 hours at time of writing 12:59am EST 7/14.

In comparison there are currently older posts with less points or comments on the HN front page.

Obviously someone at YC/HN is driving this story down.

throwaway47386• 11 years ago

I was waiting for somebody else to notice this.

thaumaturgy3• 11 years ago

You're not new here, so you probably already know this, but when HN users flag a story, the story gets demoted. A sufficient number of flags kills the story altogether.

This is a very flaggable submission and that's probably what's happening.

AndrewKemendo3• 11 years ago

Great point about flags but why is this story "very flaggable?" I don't see anything that breaks the guidelines.

Details Emerge About Victoria Taylor’s Dismissal at Reddit

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