So Reddit is in a tizzy again. This time, surprisingly, it’s not because Redditors are outraged that the site admins have hired a woman, or shut down one of dozens of subreddits devoted to, I dunno, stolen pictures of dead celebrity babies, or some other typically Reddity thing for Redditors to get outraged about.
No, this time Redditors are angry because Reddit seems have fired the one staffer who was genuinely liked by a wide swath of Redditors — that staffer being Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s Director of Talent, perhaps best known for keeping the site’s mega-popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) threads running smoothly, which extended to relaying questions to famous guests and transcribing their answers.
After learning of her mysterious departure yesterday, the IAmA subreddit — home to Reddit’s AMAs — took itself private as it tried to figure out how to operate without her. Other subreddits, including some of the site’s most popular ones, took themselves private in solidarity. It’s a testament to how badly site admins have handled this that both the Men’s Rights subreddit AND GamerGhazi — the main anti-GamerGate subreddit — have gone dark.
With no explanation of the firing forthcoming from the Reddit overlords, there’s a lot of speculation going on.
Some Redditors are convinced that Taylor’s apparent firing was a response to her perceived mishandling of a Jesse Jackson AMA (archived here). Reddit being Reddit — that is, a site that has been welcoming to trolls and bigots and other terrible people from the start — Jackson was peppered with an assortment of hostile and sometimes openly racist questions, including one lovely tirade that started by declaring him “an immoral, hate-filled race baiter,” before asking him “how is your relationship with the illegitimate child you fathered in 1998 while cheating on your wife” and whether or not “Al Capone would be jealous of your business model if he were still alive?”
Jackson’s response to that question was so bizarre that it seems clear that Taylor must have censored the question before relaying it to him. If true, this was a well-intentioned mistake that had the unintended effect of making Jackson look like he was admitting to being an extortionist.
But of course the outpouring of hate in the AMA was hardly her fault; that’s what happens on a site that allows racism to flourish to such an extent that white supremacists have started using it as a primo hunting ground for new recruits.
Meanwhile, other Reddit observers are suggesting that the Jesse Jackson theory is bunk and that Taylor was in fact booted because she was resisting Reddit’s efforts to “overcommercialize” the site.
Whatever the reason, the Reddit overlords have a bit of a PR disaster on their hands.
For more details and updates, see this summary of events on Gawker and/or this highly useful thread on the Out of the Loop subreddit. And if you have any other useful links or info, feel free to post them below.
The Gawker link is to Reddit, FYI.
Hey, just so you know, you’ve linked to the r/OutoftheLoop twice, and left out the Gawker timeline link.
But still, good post. It seems a simple Reddit solution would’ve been to ban the racist questioners, instead of the person who made AMA’s possible in the first place. Now that they’re starting to ban racist subreddits anyways, why not?
Reddit delenda est.
skiriki, fixed the link, thanks!
I’m hoping this is the start of a downward spiral.
Gawker link: http://gawker.com/reddit-in-chaos-after-allegedly-firing-ama-coordinator-1715556970
People are already blaming it on Ellen Pao. I swear, someday the sun will fail to come up and redditors will blame it on Pao.
lol
Burn Reddit Down
Once more, Reddit eats its own ass. Racism and misogyny are okay, but a co-ordinator having independent (and sensible) ideas about bad management decisions? NOPE. Says it all, really.
Honestly, the fact that the IAMA had to shut down shows the the real reason she was sacked – she was silo-building (hoarding knowledge in a misguided effort to protect her employment.)
I’ve seen it before, and management made the right call – the longer you wait to get rid of them the more painful it becomes.
I had a dream, once. Shall I tell you about it? I dreamed that one day, little progressive subs and big bigoted subs could one day join hands together in solidarity. I dreamed that one day, subs would not be judged by the content of their… content… but by how much they hated the admins. I dreamed… and today that dream has become reality.
But seriously, this is one of those things where I have no real driving opinion. The staffer that was fire was actually pretty critical, so the anger makes perfect sense. It’s a bit sad to see a big company like Reddit drive itself into the ground in real time.
On the other hand, this is about the only situation in which the toxic subreddits are actually being ‘shut down’ (by the mods of those subs, but still). Big things are happening, and for good reasons, but the big things I wish were happening aren’t happening for the right good reasons.
Ah well, pass the popcorn, and let’s watch this train wreck.
“Silo building”, really, Karl? By running a subreddit expertly and professionally, she was “hoarding knowledge in a misguided effort to protect her employment”? And she was “hoarding” this knowledge through wide dissemination on one of Reddit’s most popular subreddits? That’s a pretty dastardly plan, hoarding knowledge by making it so very, very public.
I…legit feel bad for the Reddit moderators here. It’s awful to have *one* advocate/actual competent person “managing” you and then to lose them.
@Karl – I am not a Reddit expert (or even a Reddit user really) but from what I read she wasn’t “hoarding knowledge”. She was providing valuable assistance to the unpaid moderators who have little to no actual power, by doing things like 1) verifying potential AMAers were the people they claimed to be 2) being one of the only employees who would actually pay attention to and work out issues brought to her by mods.
In other words, the subs aren’t closing because other Reddit employees want to help but don’t have Victoria’s esoteric knowledge; they are closing because she appeared to be one of the only employees who was willing to *do her job*.
I’ve not heard the phrase “silo building” before, but I’m familiar with the concept. If an employee is so vital to the operation that they hold the power in any negotiation with management rather than vice versa, then a) management have screwed up immensely, but also b) the company cannot permit this situation to continue. Paradoxically, in this situation firing the person immediately is usually the only real option.
It’s important to note that this was a terrible and stupid action by any measure – r/IAmA is the ridiculously popular mainstream end of Reddit, the bit that lures in new users, and it seems nobody in power actually understood what Taylor actually did for a living. The execs’ tone-deaf posts since have only magnified this.
It’s not symmetrical to the decision to kick out the very worst people in the world, but this move has actually pissed off both the nice people and the horrible people.
At this time, I think the most likely explanation is one of the ones mentioned on the Gawker article – she wasn’t willing to relocate to San Francisco. I’ve been in that place before (a site was looking into hiring me but wanted me to relocate to California from Australia, which wasn’t possible at the time, so it fell through). It’s dumb, but common enough with large sites.
*Mentioned in, even.
The very fact that the term “silo building” exists demonstrates very neatly how fucked labor/management relationships are in this country. What, a valuable employee thinks its people?!? Somebody beat it back into its cage to protect the company.
Very important interlude.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/robots.jpg
@Cerebus It’s not that they are a valuable employee that is the issue. It’s the fact that they would be preventing other employees from improving their value and introducing risk to the company by hiding knowledge necessary to follow processes.
I’m an outsider to reddit, but in principle I have an issue with their choice to give a platform to the very worst people in the world. So for me, it’s all just
http://media.giphy.com/media/mmaMTz2eOsucw/giphy.gif
http://persephonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/colbert-popcorn.gif
http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Maurice-Moss-Eating-Popcorn-The-IT-Crowd.gif
What does it say about popular culture that when I Google image searched “popcorn gif” the vast majority of hits were of men eating popcorn. Women don’t eat! Unless they’re eating salad and laughing of course. Sigh.
“Honestly, the fact that the IAMA had to shut down shows the the real reason she was sacked – she was silo-building (hoarding knowledge in a misguided effort to protect her employment.)”
What the fuck? Are you seriously suggesting that she was fired for *being competent at her job*?
As the IAMA folk said themselves, running that subreddit was very hard, and really needed official support. They’ve suffered without it in the past, and they don’t want a repeat of that.
It isn’t like there’s anything arcane about being organised and working hard, and I fail to see how IAMA could have needed some kind of secret handshake or esoteric knowledge.
This is a real shame, as the AMAs were one of the few things reddit had going that they could point to to show that they weren’t just a collection of the detritus of humanity.