Congratulations, assholes of Reddit! You’ve driven another woman away from your internet clubhouse.
This time the woman in question was the site’s now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, who resigned today after a week of “Reddit Revolt” that included racist and misogynistic abuse aimed at “Chairman Pao” as well as the occasional death threat.
Indeed, the abuse was so bad that Pao felt the need to address it in her resignation note:
I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity.
Reddit board member Sam Altman, in his announcement of Pao’s replacement, described the attacks on Pao as “sickening,” and declared that “[i]f the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community.”
This latest “Reddit Revolt” was triggered by the firing of a popular admin who worked with the site’s’ often beleaguered and ignored subreddit moderators.
But what really drove the revolt was the resentment many Redditors feel every time the site admins make any efforts at all to rein in the worst tendencies of Reddit’s regulars — the most recent “outrage” being Reddit’s banning of the FatPeopleHate subreddit and an assortment of others because they were encouraging real world harassment.
It certainly didn’t help, as far as Redditors were concerned, that she was a woman. The very thought of being bossed around by a woman is anathema to a shockingly large number of Redditors. Naturally, she’s being replaced by a dude, Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, who promises to continue many of the same policies as Pao, but who will presumably be more palatable to the site’s fragile male userbase.
The abuse against Pao continued even after her resignation. In the thread announcing her replacement, this obnoxious comment at one point sported more than 1500 upvotes:
Only after someone pointed out that the commenter, who named himself after the racist Charleston church shooter, was in fact an unironically racist moderator of Reddit’s outrageously racist CoonTown subreddit did the comment end up with more downvotes than upvotes.
Stay classy, Reddit!
EDIT: Added links and a bit about her replacement.
@anon
It’s a nice dream but it’ll never happen because there are literally thousands of shitheads they’d have to deal with.
I do wish they’d shut down coontown and KiA (GamerGate) but I think their only concern is the same as it’s always been: bucks trump morals. I’d love it if it came out that Dylann Roof spent time on Reddit. The bad publicity would shake these greedy assholes up.
I’m glad I never subscribed and I never will.
Aaaand once again, I am reminded of why I’m not on Reddit. Shitty people aren’t a bug there, they’re a feature. And the sad part is, they’re what keeps the place going.
Fuck, I hate this planet sometimes.
@Auntie Alias
Oh, please, as if he didn’t. You type anything into a search bar and a subreddit will pop in one the first few pages. Reddit is 105% concentrated nazi so anything he looked up related to white supremacy would have Reddit come up again and again and again.
@Pandapool
Oh he probably did but I’d like to hear the FBI confirm they found evidence of it on Roof’s computer to rub it in Reddit’s face. Even then the freeze peach defenders will find a way to dismiss it as evidence that Reddit contains a cesspool of hate.
This is sad news, as someone who uses reddit ( it really is a website that has two very different sides to it) I’m disappointed. Both that she was forced to resign by horrible people and that the latest protest really started to try to get more mod tools and mod/admin communication and was Co-opted into this.
And the people who run reddit need to understand, while a lot of traffic may be going to the darker parts, most isn’t, (and I mean evil by darker) and by letting the evil side win again and again your going to drive away all of your traffic. So it’s both bad business and a sad case of evil wining.
“[i]f the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community.”
Is that really all he had to say?
“What’s with the “she ripped off firefighters and they can’t retire now” comments I’m seeing over there?”
Ellen Pao’s husband is Buddy Fletcher…
http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against-former-ny-hedgie-buddy-fletcher/
@Panda Nice fix.
“Only after someone pointed out that the commenter, who named himself after the racist Charleston church shooter, was in fact an unironically racist moderator of Reddit’s outrageously racist CoonTown subreddit did the comment end up with more downvotes than upvotes.”
And this here is the problem. No website that pretends to an ounce of credibility and relevance should have any forum titled “CoonTown”. And any website that does should be treated like Stormfront.
I can’t decide if the problem is Reddit’s platform model or the administration. It has defenders that are not MRAs/GG/racists/etc. Most of Reddit is not “Hate on the Hoof”. But the bit that is is very loud.
I can’t think of any sane reason to host threads supporting racists and encouraging hate crimes. The potential liability alone should scare sense into someone. My guess is someone in the ownership tree is attached to a ridiculous interpretation of “freeze peach”.
It’s really hard not to victim blame here. Between Pao’s and Altman’s comments… Are they that unaware that this is the site they helped build? The attacks on Pao are sickening? Of course they are! Sooooo much of your cesspit of a site is sickening! What little you’ve been doing lately is little, and it’s late!
If you run a website, you really should pay attention to the content on it. Reddit shook my faith in humanity long, long ago.
If the board members think its sickening why don’t they do the obvious thing and NUKE THE RACIST/SEXIST subs?
Instead they let the problem metastasize.
Yeah, I had a friend who participated in a contest on Reddit (I’m pretty sure that’s where it was), wherein you write something clever and Samuel L. Jackson would read and record it. When it looked like his entry had a strong chance of winning, some redditors got together, hacked into and doxxed his personal info, resulting in people coming to his house and unwanted pizzas being delivered. It was ridiculous. So yeah, I don’t care how many fun AMAs my favorite celebrity puts out, it is NOT FUCKING WORTH IT. When the poor thing has rabies, this is one of those cases where you DO throw the baby out with the bath water.
You mixed some metaphors there.
“If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will tumble like a house of cards. Checkmate.”
Mixing can be fun. 🙂
Reddit is like this big shining, glowing, neon example of a thing I’m always saying about any online gathering space (or offline space for that matter). Taking a hands-off approach to moderation is NOT a neutral act. People who are assholes, be they rabid bigots or just generally obnoxious, will overrun the place if you let them. That’s just the definition of “asshole”. They want what they want and they don’t care whose toes they have to step on to get it. When you don’t moderate, you end up with a community composed solely of assholes because all the decent people will have fucked off elsewhere.
There’s plenty of documentation. Thread after thread of people saying racist and misogynistic things about her and going on and on about “SJWs.”
Why are you even trying to sell this?
Your basic trolling may work elsewhere, but none of us here were born yesterday. You’re going to have to do way better than this.
No one deserves the harassment and abuse Pao received. However, I can’t help but note that as Reddit CEO she was complicit in fostering Reddit’s culture of bigotry, harassment, fascism, rape apologia, and general degeneracy. Reddit is basically 8chan in a cheap tuxedo, and Pao actively profited from this during her tenure as CEO. Can she truly be surprised when the virulent racists and misogynists she fostered finally turned on her?
I don’t think it’s accurate to discuss the the racist and sexist abuse Pao received and only mention the direction she tried to take Reddit and her gender/race as causes. Her legal history with previous employers is a huge part of the reason many redditors had such visceral hatred for her.
Wait, so Redditors were sexist and racist towards Pao because of her legal history? ….Uh, okay. Why not just insult her ethical character, then? Why bring race and/or gender into it at all?
Its a sad day when the Fark comments section is the more rational end of the internet.
There’s no reason she can’t have been ousted because of racist/sexist abuse AND because she’s a scumbag. Assholes can be victims, too, and while we may feel in some visceral was that some Karmic justice has been done, especially when the victim literally created the conditions of her own downfall, it doesn’t make the perpetrators of the abuse any less culpable as racist/sexist abusers.
i hate reddit
@John – please re-read my comment. I wrote it was wrong to *only* mention sexism, racism and her actions as CEO, not that those factors were irrelevant. Of course she is hated in part because she is a female POC. But her legal history is a huge part of it too. I don’t think I’ve seen a single anti-Pao thread on Reddit where it wasn’t brought up. And given the nature of the lawsuit, it’s self-evident that Reddit sexists would hate her for it.
Her legal history is moot. Whether she’s an asshole is moot. If she were a white male asshole with a sketchy legal history, they wouldn’t be harassing her, and everyone knows it.
The claim that attacks on Pao for her moderation policy or legal history are valid, is inherently a dishonest one.
There are many websites in the world. Most are run by people who did something before start the site. Of those, many have pasts which are less than glorious. However, we don’t see constant reminders of David Wong’s work history being held against him on Cracked, or of Stephen Totilo’s on Kotaku, or even of Moot’s personal situation on 4chan. These are treated as largely irrelevant and their harsh moderation is treated as a reasonable thing.
Likewise, many sites have shitty relations between community moderators and the owners. Steam is an excellent example of this. I’m told that the old Blizzard forums had the same issue. However, on these forums nobody is constantly calling for Gabe Newell to resign over the matter.
On the other hand, people on Reddit consider it acceptable and on-topic to dredge up Pao’s family dirty laundry and her difficulties in her past, accuse her of being a scumbag, and demand that she be personally blamed for the site’s woes. It is not a coincidence that this doesn’t happen on websites managed by white men. This is simply bigotry, albeit of a more subtle form; and while I’m sure bigots will deny it and claim that everything they said was true, this only underscores the point.
A man who runs a site can be a scumbag who gets on terribly with the mods and nobody cares. A woman is expected to be perfect or she’ll be hounded into unemployment, as happened here. A man can be an asshole and that’s not considered germane to whether he can run a website. If a woman is an asshole it’s held to be a major character flaw and a form of incompetence.