Pegosaurus
Banned
why did Huffman step down in the first place, and why is he coming back if he stepped down?
Just curious, I actually know nothing about him.
Just curious, I actually know nothing about him.
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Reddit CEO Pao steps down
- Thread starter Guevara
- Start date
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Yup. They had it coming so hard. And it's not like this was the first occurrence of sub-banning. /r/niggers got banned for the exact same reason (harassing other users) about 2 years ago, so before Pao came on board.
See above ^
Is that true? I feel like I've always noticed a downturn in discussion and posts on the weekend. Reddit seems like the ultimate "Fuck work, I'm internetting" site.
Gentleman Jack
Member
That just makes her seem criminal. Do people know what words like 'megalomaniacal' mean when they throw them around?
Ivan Amiibo
Banned
All those redditors thinking the next CEO is going to be on 'their side'.
haha exactly
every subsequent ceo is gonna be "how do we milk this bitch"
The FPH and assorted bans were done because the forums were actively supporting harassment of individuals - those had to be done, and any crap she or Reddit got for that was completely undeserved. That part of this whole mess was 100% a-hole trolls.
On the latter part- she came out looking terrible in her sex discrimination case and the resulting appeals process. That case and her rationale behind banning salary negotiations appeared to create a pattern of invoking/leveraging identity politics for personal gain. She's also married to this guy.
On the first part- she recently fired the person who was basically handling EVERYTHING regarding Reddit's AMA organization with no transition plan in place. It ended up causing a near-sitewide shutdown in protest for a day, as a lot of people had relied on that person for an enormous amount of back-end support.
On the latter part- she came out looking terrible in her sex discrimination case and the resulting appeals process. That case and her rationale behind banning salary negotiations appeared to create a pattern of invoking/leveraging identity politics for personal gain. She's also married to this guy.
Don't know on why he left- but he's almost certainly coming back because of the community issues. They did the exact same thing at HD when Nardellli left- brought on a founder at HD until they thought they were in a good place going forward.
You can milk it, but athe least communicate you are doing so and you'll be fine. They put in one of reddits founders. Good move.
The discontent with Pao exist before that. Specifically her co-opting a feminist shroud to guard against criticism of her previous lawsuit and scandals and in turn castigate her former employers. Then in turn mandated a sexist policy that denied the entire workforce of reddit from negotiating pay.
Then her rhetoric when closing the sub-reddits was extremely divorced from understanding the community. Even though I think closing hate sub-reddits was extremely good, it was a nightmare to watch it unfold. She baked in so much vitriolic shit against the community for what should have been a very professional policy.
Well yeah, but they're terrible people anyway. It was the second ordeal that pushed the petition for her to step down from a few thousand to 6 figures.
Her history before Reddit and a few of the stories that came out about her tenure in the past few days means that hopefully she's never working at that level for any company every again.
hitsugi
Member
Might be the worst summary of events I've seen thus far. Nice work.
Are you trying to apply logic and rationalized thinking to things Redditors care about?
Good luck stump.
Battersea Power Station
Member
TouchMyBox
Member
Reddit is happy about this? Then this must be a poor decision.
gamechanger87
Member
I wasn't saying they used the correct term. I was just stating facts about who she is.
Holy, she sounds like an utter jackass. Seems hardly qualified to manage a fucking retail store.
Cherry-picking perhaps, but that article certainly paints a certain picture.
Actually that was one of the ones that really started all of this when they posted a picture of an underage transgender girl.
There are always going to be splinter groups on a site focused on community creation but reddit didn't go through a crazy or thing after some of the subreddits got taken down before.
It's odd because reddit was built on openess and allowing groups to have the freedom to post what they want but in actuality people don't want complete freedom of speech in that way. Or at least if you want to say something that would clash with laws or publicly held bell's on how you should treat people that you need to do that on your own dime. If there really is such a demand for a place like fat people hate that can form their community outside of reddit paying the bills for server upkeep.
When they cracked down on the other subreddits recently they didn't go all of the way. Their were groups posting horrible racist content that were left alone.
When deciding on how to moderate a community it's like sticking your dick in a dick in a gloryhole. You might as well go all the way because it could either pay off or you are gonna have some nut try and cut you up. No middle ground.
Soyongdori
Member
I've heard Pao was responsible for firing Victoria who was in charge of celebrity AMA after that last trainwreck of AMA. Hence the people against her in Reddit grew in quadruple.
Ivan Amiibo
Banned
the milking will rile the chicken coop no matter how classy/subtle it is and no matter how well it's communicated. there are a lot of nuts on that site.
I see. I browse Reddit frequently and didn't hear the name "Ellen Pao" until I saw the front page of /r/all covered in swastikas because of FPH getting justifiably banned so I suppose that was the tipping point. If she actually was a shitty CEO and there are legitimate reasons for people wanting her gone besides just attaching a face to outrage, then I agree that yes, it's a good thing she's stepping down and hopefully the returning CEO does a better job running the community how people want it.
I've skimmed people posting evidence for her being terrible on Reddit but I always thought it was a Feminist Frequency type deal where people just decide they hate someone so dig up everything they can on them. Kinda hard to seriously read into people's complaints when they're frequently coupled with racist imagery, I suppose.
gamechanger87
Member
If yo read any other stories about the case it's a consistent theme. There is a reason she lost. Much of what KP wanted to use against her as reasons for her not moving up the chain was disallowed. She was unqualified and a poor employee and not a people person. When she saw that she wasn't going to move up she started saving everything so she could file a lawsuit.
I still have no idea why she was hired in the first place. No board would ever hire someone with her baggage and temperment unless they thought they would get good PR out of it.
There are so many good qualified candidates out there with relevant experience and were not essentially fired for being a poor employee.
PastorOfMuppets
Banned
Reddit addressed the fatpeoplehate and coontown "double standard".
The problem with Fat People Hate wasn't that it was hating on fat people. It was actively harassing people with implicit support from the mods.
Right before they were banned, FPH posted pictures and names of the Imgur staff on their side bar all while underneath having rules against harassment. This wasn't the first time they did it either, the mods there would leave posts up from people who posted pictures of Facebook screencaps without names and pictures blurred out. On the sidebar they had rules against doing that but I suspect that it was only done to throw people off their tails. They rarely ever actually enforced their own rules. As a result they were banned.
Coontown maybe a racist sub but they largely kept to themselves. They never went as far as posting people's private names and Facebook pages like FPH did. Anything on their sidebar or in their posts were pictures of black people who were prominent and out in the public eye. FPH was doing this stuff to private civilians.
While her push for better moderation was A Good Thing, Pao herself was a Grade A jerk who was only harming Reddit as assuredly as the jerks who post the racist and sexist messages.
Realistically, though, those people they want to get rid of are the reason Reddit is so popular. As far as a moneymaking business goes, it's completely dysfunctional and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Flying Toaster
Member
Regardless if you like her or hate her. If you want to know how she is as a person or if she is CEO material do some research. How her lawsuit against her former employers went and what she recently did to persuade them for her to stop with the appeals process.
Her lawsuit was listened to by a jury and even said jury disagreed with her.
I am not pro or anti Pao but I am certainly pro read the facts and make your own decision. She was never the correct choice to be a CEO of a community based business as her actions at her prior job clearly shows she was not a practitioner of communicating with her fellow employees.
The racist remarks and the actual hate based on lack of facts and hate without representation of why the hate is there is utter bullshit. Reddit has a chance to be better than that as a whole but I highly doubt it will happen.
Her lawsuit was listened to by a jury and even said jury disagreed with her.
I am not pro or anti Pao but I am certainly pro read the facts and make your own decision. She was never the correct choice to be a CEO of a community based business as her actions at her prior job clearly shows she was not a practitioner of communicating with her fellow employees.
The racist remarks and the actual hate based on lack of facts and hate without representation of why the hate is there is utter bullshit. Reddit has a chance to be better than that as a whole but I highly doubt it will happen.
BUNTING1243
Banned
This is going to give a minority of douchey hateful assholes a sense of vindication that they don't deserve and really really shouldn't have.
That's what kevin rose tried to do with with with having news outlets kinda having more power over user submitted shit.
If I were any business that was centered around creating a community I would always be parnoid of becoming with.
Imagine if neogaf suddenly got rid of the ability to post text and the only way to communicate was with macro images.
Such a drastic change in a site that goes against what users are used to or what they want would probably lead to a mass exodus and some neogaf spinoffs or another videogame forum getting a big boost of users.
Lawsuit data dump hadn't happened at the time she was hired.
the thread for the announcement is at 20k upvotes now and rising, that's not a minority.
that probably had nothing to do with her firing.
it seems like she was fired because she was opposed to the monetization of ama's. which makes sense considering how Pao was brought in to try and make reddit profitable. the real problem was that they horribly misjudged how important and liked Victoria was to the community, so when they fired her everything fell apart. They didn't tell the community, they didn't tell the mods, zero communication. Everything went through Victoria regarding ama's so all the subreddits were left scrambling. Cue the uproar.
its true that the venture capitalists arent gonna stop wanting to make Reddit a cash cow, so who knows if Pao stepping down merely delays the inevitable. Theyre gonna have to find a way to make the site profitable without alienating the community. Although it does seem like the total lack of communication from the admins and higher ups is largely the cause of this. If they had just prepared for Victoria leaving properly all this would have been likely avoided.
NYR
Member
Baahahahaahahaha!
NYR
Member
If her last name was Pow and was white, no one would be making that joke.
The similarities to Digg's history w/ bringing in a interim CEO to do unpopular things makes me think that the board is interested in Digg's endgame as well- i.e., selling it to a buyer and making stacks of cash while its hot.
graywolf323
Member
they brought back the original CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman which seems like a good move IMO
Spyder_Monkey
Banned
Was Pao even that bad or was her reputation tarnished by a bunch of racists/misogynist. I mean getting rid of FPH is a plus in my book and and it wasn't her fault Victoria was fired. I wish she stayed that way asshole redditors don't feel smug about the damn thing.
I thought the "chimpire" liked her because they card to be indirevtly endorsed by her
Wtf? I swear I've been on there as a kid. I might even have used it for assignments...
This sounds like a warning to me. I haven't been following this closely but maybe she got scared from all the backlash and tried to backtrack but the board kept pushing her forward towards the gaping mouths of angry redditors.
Haha, god damn. Well did you get a good grade?
- She treated fellow employees like shit at her previous workplace (screaming matches, berating a secretary who was late because her landlord was in a car accident)
- She sued her former workplace for sexual harassment. This may have been legit, but she lost (and she's appealing), and she sued for an amount extremely close to the amount her husband is being sued for fraud.
- She terminated an employee at reddit for having leukemia
- She implemented a policy that no one is allowed to negotiate their salaries or raises at reddit. She may have had the best of intentions here, but it was an extremely unpopular move that gave the company more power over its employees
By all accounts she wasn't liked by the employees, or the community, and I've seen nothing to indicate the board has ever been happy with her either.
Messypandas
Member
You might be thinking of Encyclopedia Britannica, which its a parody of.
Giolon
Member
All those redditors thinking the next CEO is going to be on 'their side'.
Yeah, unfortunately as the site grows, the tensions between free speech and needing to appear respectable and palatable enough for advertisers is always going to be a battle where the user base loses out.
However, the executives at Reddit should realize that their users are not a captive audience. Take a lesson from Digg and see what happens when you displease them sufficiently - they evacuate. There isn't the same kind of social glue that Facebook has to keep unhappy people around.
It sounds like she's putting the blame on someone else to me.
She's the type to do so.
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