Thought it was a reference/wordplay on the name Victoria.
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Reddit CEO Pao steps down
- Thread starter Guevara
- Start date
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Phat Michael
Banned
I disagree with you completely. So you are saying that of all people in an organisation, from the cleaners to the CEO, that of all these people that the CEO position is the least scrutinised or someone they spend the least time researching /interviewing for?
Im not saying there are not anomalies and I have no doubt that in the near future she will get another job, but there is no way that other organisations won't be warned over what she has been involved in within the last year or so.
Yeah I agree. I've seen CEO's dropped on a moments notice over scams. Sure some circles of CEOs are well looked after. But It's a bit delusional to think the entire collective pool of CEO's is part of some conspiring 1% gang.
CEO's get good compensation because it's part of the deal to attract them in the first place. But ultimately you may get a CEO that is just a bad fit for the particular business model and corporate climate. It's not like the come in like a bull in a China shop and put in their time until they get the golden chutes. It doesn't work like that for every single CEO position across America.
Dongs Macabre
aka Daedalos42
I really hope they will be even more ruthless under the new old CEO and remove all the vile and disgusting subreddits. It would be nice for the assholes on there to see that they haven't accomplished anything.
Tinfoilhatsron
Banned
Yes there is apparently. She might actually personify the worst villan sterotype ever. Not those Bond ones but like the rich corporate ones. Emotionless robot who is well, a total asshole to people. Though that doesn't excuse Reddit at all.
There is a Bloomberg article. On mobile so can't link. Sorry
I love how there are already "so when is fatpeoplehate coming back??" comments.
People really, honestly believe the delusional narrative that Ellen Pao was single-handedly pushing these changes...instead of the reality, where the board is trying to clear the pond scum out of Reddit, so businesses might actually want to associate and advertise with the site.
It's going to be a hilarious reaction when they put two and two together, no doubt. The shithole subreddits are going to continue to be stamped out, and eventually gears will start turning in Redditor heads.
Reddit would never let something like logic get in the way of a good-old-fashioned pitchforks-and-torches session, especially when the side dishes include sexism and racism.
People really, honestly believe the delusional narrative that Ellen Pao was single-handedly pushing these changes...instead of the reality, where the board is trying to clear the pond scum out of Reddit, so businesses might actually want to associate and advertise with the site.
It's going to be a hilarious reaction when they put two and two together, no doubt. The shithole subreddits are going to continue to be stamped out, and eventually gears will start turning in Redditor heads.
Reddit would never let something like logic get in the way of a good-old-fashioned pitchforks-and-torches session, especially when the side dishes include sexism and racism.
Yes, actually I am saying that. Again, if you don't believe me, google "golden parachute" and check them all out. All of them. In fact, it's literally one of the biggest issues with US companies right now.
johnnyfive
Banned
paos bio is that of a very smart person who has never accomplished anything but obtain distinguished degrees.
johnnyfive
Banned
paos bio is that of a very smart person who has never acco plished anything but degrees
tired of seeing meteoric bios without any real accomplishment.
tired of seeing meteoric bios without any real accomplishment.
Ingueferroque
Banned
This whole thing runs me the wrong way.
dr3upmushroom
Banned
i have little knowledge of these events but this sounds like Mubarack being overthrown by the Muslim brotherhood.
tearsintherain
Member
One of the main board members (who announced the new CEO and Pao's resignation) did an AMA today
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altman_reddit_board_member_and_president/
One of his answers further down was in response to what a board member does exactly, and he says they hire/fire the CEO, approve the annual executive plan, and set high level company goals. He also mentioned the board members of reddit don't get a salary, they probably get stock options. He also skirts around a lot of questions and says she was a good CEO who made a few mistakes, which is frankly a rare thing for a board member to say.
Its unlikely the board set any sort of direction like "get rid of the hateful subreddits", they don't have that sort of insight or interest in the company. They just tell the CEO "we want you to IPO/be bought in 2-3 years, make incremental growth of at least 20% QoQ for the next 18 months". Extremely high level goals based on their own past with what growth companies should look like financially for a prospectus/buyout.
All indications are Pao or Alexis are the ones who decided that reddit needs to start looking like a TV network, we'll see what the new guy decides. Could be the exact same business plan, could be something new.
American Eskimo
Banned
Wow I can't believe it.
See folks, protests work
See folks, protests work
funkystudent
Member
She seemed like a bad fit for the role and some real bad shit happened under her watch. Leaving was the right call.
That being said the new person in charge should continue shutting down the nasty subs. Shutting down a handful of them and not the others just highlighted the problem. The site will be fine without that stuff.
That being said the new person in charge should continue shutting down the nasty subs. Shutting down a handful of them and not the others just highlighted the problem. The site will be fine without that stuff.
Well that's disappointing.
Still interesting though how male CEOs never get this level of vitriol, isn't it? Certainly not gendered insults. And a few of those things (not the Leukemia thing) would be described as positive attributes if it were a male CEO doing them.
tkscz
Member
That was my problem with Pao. Besides firing people who seem to have done no wrong, she seemed to only close subs that bothered her, not really hate groups (several racist subs were still going). I'm still not gong to use reddit (get all information from reddit on GAF).
This dude you linked is the president of Y Combinator, a huge startup-aiding seed fund in Silicon Valley that has a ton of prestige. I can assure you that this man has plenty of insight and interest in how tech sites operate (especially one like Reddit, which largely depends on the classic case of majority support through ad revenue.)
Not that he needs it. "Don't scare off your advertisers" is Internet Websites 101. The only way you can stay controversial with the kind of profit/growth expectations Reddit has is via a hugely successful revenue model stemming from user contribution (and by all accounts, Reddit Gold is a miserable failure in this regard.)
monchi-kun
Member
The death threats worked!
twinturbo2
butthurt Heat fan
Hear hear.
chaobreaker
Member
The CEO that preceded Pao, Yishan Wong, was CEO when reddit rid of /r/jailbait when Anderson Cooper featured it on a segment on CNN. He also was around when they got rid of subs like /r/niggers and /thefappening (aka a sub all about sharing those celeb nude leaks from last year.) Of course there was a sizable amount of backlash when those subs were taken down but Wong didn't get his face plastered all over the front page with swastikas and racial and sexist epithets for an entire week.
Whether Ellen Pao is a terrible CEO or human being is irrelevant. She got especially shat on by the reddit masses because she's a woman.
There's always going to be a minority of people doing stupid stuff like sending death threats. The important point is that she was universally reviled for very good reasons, and the outcry worked.
m_shortpants
Member
She accomplished exactly what she needed to. Pao was an interim CEO after all, and was the perfect scapegoat. She did some things a few people liked, and some other things that people hated. She may have had absolutely zero to do with Victoria's dismissal. But it doesn't matter as she started the initial changes at Reddit, took the flak, and now she's being replaced by a "white-knight", crowd-favorite, new CEO who will look like a godsend but in reality will continue the same policies that people have been protesting.
Looks like she did her job iMO.
Looks like she did her job iMO.
Do you understand what CEOs are?
Not at all. Pretty stupid thing to say. It probably had more to do with her being what most would consider a bad person, if you read up on her lawsuit. The discovery on that was pretty damning. Her being a terrible person in the eyes of the public is entirely relevant. So is her being responsible for all the wrongdoings for the last few months in the minds of the users.
Unless you mean to tell me that people went out of their way to hate on (pretending she's not a CEO or terrible person) an innocent woman. Not buying it.
When that happened, the backlash was minimal. Only a handful of people even cared that those subs disappeared. Most agreed that it was a good thing, or completely understandable.
Pao has been outright censoring posts - even tame ones - about her case or her husband's case. She fired a beloved member of the community for questionable reasons, and had apparently been causing a divide between admins and mods for quite some time. The backlash was large because it was built up over time and included people close to the situation that couldn't take it anymore. It was a very large, very public meltdown.
Yes, but there's a difference between the idea that "you are a ceo, therefore everything goes through you, therefore you are responsible for everything" and being seen as introducing and enforce every decision unilaterally as a tyrant.
Reddit users, and the public, seem to assume Pao is the latter. You did not see that with the former reddit CEOs. They were all seen as acting in accordance with the vision of the company. See above example about the former CEO shutting down subreddits like r/jailbait. People were mad at "Reddit" and not shitting on Yishan Wong as an individual.
Yep. Its going to be nice to see the reaction to Reddit "censoring" more shitty subreddits and going through with other decisions that that audience won't like as part of strengthening its advertising value in the future. I bet Pao will still be blamed years later.
Reddit's most loved employee ever is also a woman. Stop being dumb.
chaobreaker
Member
Let me be clear: the kind of people who plastered the front page with pictures of Pao photoshopped to look like Hitler or Mao Zedong or make subs like /r/ellenpaoisacunt most likely didn't have her legal battles and her husband's ponzi schemes in mind when they lashed out over subs like /r/fatpeoplehate getting banned.
The reddit meltdown was not because of the handful of decisions Pao made in her short tenure as CEO. Reddit mods have made it clear that their needs that weren't being satisfied by the admins. The sudden firing of Victoria, who was essentially a liaison for the moderators to contact VIPs for AMAs, was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Pao was probably not responsible for the firing of Victoria anyway. That's all on the reddit board of directors. Besides, its unlikely that the CEO would oversee the firing of an employee that's that low on the company hierarchy.
because of the gaf illuminati
A Link to the Past
Banned
High highs, low lows.
A woman who endears herself will be very popular to these certain groups, particularly more so than a man. If that woman fell out of their good graces, the reaction would be similarly harsher than it would be for a man. It will be gendered, it will be focused. You look at groups like GG, and you see a non-trivial number of women who participate, some often being idolized by these groups (Christina Hoff Sommers comes to mind). I've also seen women in the group who step out of line get the most vile hate from that group, and I assert that the most loved female employee could - with only one mistake - lose that position.
Reddit's problem is that it relies on unpaid "pond scum" to do the heavy lifting and keep costs down. They are never going to be able to police everything when the entire corporate head count is ninety people. They are trying to have it both ways, and it blew up in their faces.
I don't know if keeping the CEO that was alienating the entire user base that your business relies upon and threatening to drive the site against a wall would have been the wiser move here
A Link to the Past
Banned
You gotta pity them a bit though, knowing that sometime soon they're going to realize that there were much more problematic elements in the high-ups at Reddit than Pao.
yeah, that's a rather likely scenario, but keeping Pao was definitely not an option anymore. It's just unfortunate that the bad part of reddit can claim a "victory" as well
RoninChaos
Member
Is there a cliff notes version I can read about the gives details on what is going on?
Suzushiiro
Banned
This is a little long for a cliffs notes version but:
-Ellen Pao became interim CEO of Reddit 9 months ago (I say "interim" but I believe she was on record as saying she wanted to be permanent.) She was someone from the venture capitalist world who didn't seem to really understand the site/community (most notably she tried to directly link to a private message.)
-Around that time she also filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer (which she lost) and ended the practice of salary negotiation at Reddit under the rationale that women weren't as good at it as men, so it was best to abolish it entirely (of course, the benefit this had to the company's bottom line surely had nothing to do with it.) This (on top of being a female CEO in general) made her the darling of one side of a particular culture war and an enemy of the other side. So basically there have been people hating her since day one.
-It should also be noted that 23 admins have left Reddit in the past nine months, ie roughly since Pao came on.
-Fast forward to about a month ago- a number of subreddits, the biggest of which was fatpeoplehate, were banned. While the stated reason for this (that the users were harassing the people being made fun of in those subreddits) was probably true, many still felt the banning was ideologically-driven and opposed it even if they didn't like the sub (ie "I hate what you're saying but I still think you should be able to say it.")
-And then the big bomb dropped on July 2nd- Victoria Taylor, a very popular employee among the Reddit users and the company's official liason for its Ask me Anything board that has done sessions with a number of big celebrities including a sitting president, was fired. The general consensus here is that she disagreed with where the admins wanted to take the program (ie they wanted to monetize it more somehow,) so they let her go. Regardless, the big issue was that this wasn't communicated with the volunteer moderators of the board at all, which was a problem for the AmAs that were scheduled to happen that day.
-This was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of the volunteer moderators of bigger subs who had issues with the Reddit staff as a whole for a while, so many of them went private (ie shut down) in protest for a day or so. Ultimately, the AmA moderators decided to cut Reddit's staff out of the AmA process entirely.
-Ellen Pao, meanwhile, dealt with this controversy in the worst possible way, most notably by talking to big news sites and saying it was "only a small minority" of posters who even cared before making a post on Reddit addressing it.
-And then yesterday, it was announced that she was resigning and being replaced by one of Reddit's original founders. The stated reason was that she didn't think she could grow the site's userbase by as much as the board wanted her to or something like that, which may have been somewhat true, but it's extremely unlikely that the shitstorm of the past week had nothing to do with it.
even more tl;dr version:
-Ellen Pao becomes CEO of Reddit, comes off as someone who doesn't really understand it and is more interested in making the site profitable than in making it good
-Ellen Pao is also (depending on who you ask) either a strong woman fighting the evil patriarchy in tech or someone cynically using identity politics for personal gain
-A lot of Reddit staff leaves/is fired over the course of Pao's tenure, eventually a very well-known one is fired and said firing is handled in the worst way possible
-A huge shitstorm happens, everyone calls for Pao's head, she handles it poorly and eventually resigns.
ItWasMeantToBe19
Banned
I am almost certain that no one who was against fatpeoplehate being closed had the "I hate your beliefs, but" mindset in reality.
Here's how reddit works, its a platform for allowing people to host their own communities if you will. Now the mods of a subreddit are in charge of enforcing what ever rules and ideals they wish on their own subreddit(as long as its legal). However the admins and higher ups get involved when they stray out of their lane and start fucking with other people.
To go with your example, if they were to try and take over r/pics it would be down to the r/pics mods to sort it out within their subreddit and the admins would go about closing down their subreddit.
RockTurtle
Member
and congrats to all the other people who had legitimate concerns who also pitched in!
Suzushiiro
Banned
Yeah, pretty much. While mods can basically have whatever rules they want in the subs they run, on the global level Reddit goes by the same two rules that 4chan does- don't post anything that they can get in legal trouble for hosting/linking to (doxx, child porn, etc.) and don't do things that actively make the site worse for everyone else (spamming, brigading, etc.) Aside from that, nobody cares how horrible the content you post is.
Yeah, I just don't get the racism/sexism complaints either. The CEO before her was Asian and that was never an issue. And the straw that broke the camel's back was the firing of a female anyway.
It seems pretty clear to me that she was so unpopular because she came in with what seems like strong-armed corporate tactics to a place that is decidedly anti-corporate.
Yep.
But really that's the folly of Reddit's owners. They've got an immensely popular site that is built on bedrocks incompatible with turning it into a moneymaking enterprise, and their only asset is those people that show up.
I really doubt there was any conspiracy. They just goofed and did something stupid, and like most people they tried to cover their asses and double-down rather than admit they were wrong, which just snowballed from there with every unpopular decision.
We will see what happens with the new CEO when the reddit administration eventually makes a grave mistake and compare reactions.
I largely expect more of the same from the community that gave me death threats for having the audacity to say that chocolate ice cream is superior to vanilla.
I largely expect more of the same from the community that gave me death threats for having the audacity to say that chocolate ice cream is superior to vanilla.
Suzushiiro
Banned
Well, like I said- there were a lot of nasty people who had it out for her since day one for various reasons, and they poured a lot of fuel on the fire of the past week. But there are plenty of problems that have gone on with the site since she started that have nothing to do with her or anyone else's race, gender, or personal ideology (most notably the firing that ignited this shitstorm in the first place,) so acting like she was ousted solely because of some vast misogynist conspiracy is ridiculous.
Startup L. Jackson put it best- Reddit is a collection of unpredictable self-organizing communities with a corporation awkwardly grafted onto one side.
RockTurtle
Member
new CEO AMA
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huffman_the_new_ceo_of_reddit_ama/
currently going on
EDIT:
already making some hefty promises
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huffman_the_new_ceo_of_reddit_ama/
currently going on
EDIT:
already making some hefty promises
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