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.
@bvh
I doubt you meant anything by it, but I’m kind of fed up with sentences like this that imply certain ideas or reasonings must be the product of insanity.
I’m never going to bother with Reddit. No matter how important free speech is, social media platforms will always be dominated/derailed/ruined by their lowest common denominator.
This is also why I deleted my Twitter profile a while ago.
If social media sites can’t moderate adequately, they’ll eventually scare off all moderate individuals.
@Katz Are her actions as CEO moot too? Because David seemed to think they were as important as (if not more so) her gender and race in the post you’re commenting on. If he can discuss multiple factors behind hate towards Pao, I’m not sure why it can’t happen in the comments too.
@EJ I certainly don’t think attacks on Pao for her legal history are valid. Nor do I think attacks on her for her attempts to curb the worst of Reddit are valid, but I can’t see what is to be gained by describing how sexism works while leaving out the details. The rest of your comment is, of course, entirely accurate.
@Jo.
Redditors hate moderation, it’s true. They hate the sense of injustice that comes with having their shitty behaviour curbed, however slightly. The banning of harrassing subreddits was a cause of much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and Pao was seen to be the one weilding the banhammer.
However, I think that a lot of Redditors would have been more willing to accept moderation if it had the face of a white man. They might have been hurtful, but they certainly wouldn’t have hounded after him for his race or gender.
There’s a certain kind of fragile ego that can’t stand feeling challenged by a woman of colour. The racist, misogynist shit-head kind. Of which Reddit is a fucking hive.
I think Pao could have introduced almost any kind of change to Reddit, and they still would have leaped on her like a pack of rabid dogs. Because being a WoC in any position of power is intolerable to shit-heads.
I don’t think any actions by a CEO warrant the kind of threats and harassment that Pao has received. There are ways to express a legitimate grievance without resorting to racial slurs.
“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.”
Sam Altman is lamenting the sexism, racism, bigotry and harassment, when he and the rest of the board allow this kind of behavior. It’s not as if they’re unaware of it, they just don’t care. Are we really supposed to believe that Mr. Altman is angry, when he and the other board members profit from the twisted behavior of Reddit’s members? His statement is bullshit.
I’m sorry for the way Ellen Pao was treated. No one deserves to be harassed. But if she has even an ounce of decency, she’s better off being as far from that twisted site as possible.
^^^ QFT.
I’ve had a few different stints of moderating small to medium-ish web communities, and shutting down toxic douchecanoes was so very important to keeping them usable. It only takes one or two to ruin a forum, and the early warning signs are almost always obvious. And without fail, the people who would throw big snits about freeze peaches and draconian mods and “let the people decide” and blah blah blah–they were exactly the handful of people who were making the discussions miserable for everyone else.
Community self-policing does not work, because decent, productive, reasonable people have limits set by their conscience, schedule, and self-worth about how much energy they are willing to invest in fixing an online environment (especially one that is mostly, or entirely, recreational). It’s the soul-sucking trolls who have no sense of proportionality or life priorities, who truly don’t think they have anything better to do than to torment strangers on the internet, and who will treat their precious online turf as if it is the most righteous of causes to ever go to war over.
No matter their numerical disadvantage, without moderation, the poopheads will always win. And it only takes a little bit of moderation—it doesn’t even have to be anything particularly sophisticated—to hold the worst of it at bay.
She was only the CEO for seven months. Reddit’s been around for ten years.
And she tried to clean house – the FatPeopleHate shutdowns, for example – but every time she “Stepped out of line,” well, “[racist slur] [misogynistic slur] [Hitler comparison] [rape threat] [death threat] [misogynistic slur] [doxx].”
Would you blame a first-day store manager for their company messing up the order you placed before they were hired?
And as a side note, I really need to learn how to emdash in WordPress.
Also, this thread has quite a few first-time posters with generic usernames and blank avatars posting anti-Pao nonsense.
Hello, Redditors. Fuck off, Redditors.
Hello Redditors. Please don’t gertrude here, Redditors.
If my understanding is correct, it is supposed to be some kind of alternative, geeky community. There is nothing more mainstream and indicative of lazy thinking than plain old sexism and racism.
[blockquote]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?[/blockquote]
She had only recently been made CEO, if I understand correctly – I don’t think she’s actually held the position for a full year yet. And one of the main reasons they hate her was for shutting down a large subreddit, FatPeopleHate, dedicated to stalking and harassing people.
I don’t think that I’d have taken the job if I were her, given Reddit’s reputation, but I don’t think she can rightfully be blamed for the toxic culture that permeates the place – that developed long before she arrived, and she was driven off once she started doing the bare minimum to try and correct the problem.
—
Incidentally, this is a pretty darned big reason that I don’t tend to go to Reddit. Even in the “normal” parts of Reddit, it seems when topics related to race or gender comes up, you’re likely to see some pretty bizarre and offense comments come up and find agreement – and arguing against that tends to just end in an afternoon of frustration and wasted time.
Then again, I never really spent much time outside of Ghazi and SRD (neither of which suffer this problem, mostly; Ghazi bans people like that, while SRD heavily downvotes/mocks them these days), so I guess my perspective is probably pretty skewed. I wouldn’t really hear about it when Reddit is being decent, while instances of Reddit living down to its reputation tend to be talked about and linked to elsewhere.
But, well… I don’t [I]have[/I] to go to Reddit, and I know for a fact that significant portions of the website have some pretty messed up beliefs. Why should I waste time and energy finding communities on Reddit that are decent, instead of finding places elsewhere that are less likely to be associated with Reddit’s toxic elements? I mean, if I [I]expect[/I], erroneously or otherwise, Reddit members to be the sort of people I don’t wish to be around… Well, it doesn’t really make much sense for me to use Reddit as a starting point for my interests, no? And with the internet being as big as it is, there’s probably other places that I could look for my community needs.
All of which is a convoluted way of saying… It doesn’t really matter if Reddit’s reputation is justified or not – if I have other options that aren’t associated with that reputation, I (and others like me) will look elsewhere first. Which also serves to reinforce that reputation, because people more in line with Reddit’s reputation will not be similarly dissuaded.
I’d quibble with this very slightly. If you take care to ban the shitheads, a lot of communities will, in fact, police themselves, even quite large ones. I’m a mod in a Twitch TV channel which can get upwards of 20K viewers depending on the game being played and only rarely do I have to ban anyone because those rare, well-placed bans are that effective.
Which just goes to illustrate the point that hands-off moderation drives away astronomically more people than heavy-handed but judicious moderation. You can even watch it in real time. When you get one douchebag in the chat, for the time they’re allowed to shit up the place, the number of people chatting will drop noticeably and then return to normal levels when they’re gone. You may even get some new voices in the chat who’ve been encouraged by the sight of the shithead being dealt with.
I guess my overall point is that the hands-off approach is a self-fulfilling prophesy. By being unwilling to ban except under the most egregious circumstances, you actually create an environment which ultimately will require more moderation than if you just stepped in at the first hint of a problem.
@sevenofmine – re: your first paragraph in reply to me, I agree completely. Sorry for not being clearer!
A couple of Reddit defenders show up in every thread that I’ve seen about this claiming that it was Pao’s actions that lead to their disdain of her. But then they never specify what they’re talking about. And in this thread, someone mentions “legal history.” So far as I know, the primary “legal history” that the sexists are pointing to is that she filed a lawsuit against a previous employer for discrimination. And her actions at Reddit that were so “terrible” were simply shutting down some of vilest, harassing and hateful subreddits. So, is that it? That’s what we’re supposed to believe is justification for all of the vitriol that JUST HAPPENS to feature a lot of racist and sexist undertones? Seriously?
A more accurate metaphor would be a new manager of a store that sold confederate flags, Klan robes, and copies of Roosh pickup manuals, then claiming blamelessness because 1) the store was selling said items since before they were hired 2) they made some token effort to remove a portion of the more visible Nazi paraphernalia.
If you run the site that hosts r/CoonTown , r/PicsOfDeadKids , r/PhilosophyOfRape etc…
If you run a website that has entire communities dedicated to facilitating harassment, if you run a website that contains literal guides on how to commit and get away with rape you can’t claim innocence just because you’re new-ish. Once again, I completely think what happened to Pao was disgusting, but would you be making the same arguments if the new manager of SlutHate or Stormfront was run offsite with racist and sexist harassment?
rationalleft: That is nowhere near an accurate metaphor. There are also gifs of kittens, amongst all the other items. I want to go in and replace all the merchandise with kitten gifs. It’s not happening over night.
rationalleft: if she’d been run off the site because she was permitting the site to host the racist and sexist shit, that would be an entirely different situation to the one where she was driven off by racist, sexist shit.
Do you really want to argue that if you have an ethical disagreement with someone, that permits you to use any weapons you like, including those you claim to be disagreeing with? Racism and sexism are bad, therefore, it is okay to use racism and sexism to attack people who permit them?
Your hypothetical is sufficiently far from the actual as to provide no useful insights into the real situation. I suggest you try again.
Yes. We would be making the same arguments. Because racism and sexism are objectively wrong, regardless of who the target is.
Also: stop using words like they’re magical incantations. It doesn’t matter how often you insist that you’re disgusted by what’s happening to Pao if you consistently follow that up by making excuses for the people doing it. We’re under no obligation to give you credit for being a decent human being just because you insist you are.
I don’t think that’s the argument that as being made. The analogy was more that, if you ran a shop that facilitated hate, you should perhaps not complain when the clientele turns out to be unpleasant. It’s a species of ‘if you lie down with dogs then you’re going to catch fleas’.
Of course the abuse she’s now getting is to be condemned, but the fact is, she was quite willing to stand by, facilitate and profit whilst the people now targeting her hurled the same sort of abuse at others.
Alan Robertshaw:
You have a reasonable argument to provide for the bold phrasing, don’t you? Because, as I understand it, CEOs also answer to shareholders, and are not the sole decision-makers when it comes to deliverables. Especially not interim CEOs. So please, enlighten me as to how you know she was “quite willing to stand by”?
From what I understand, she sued once, right? Redditors make it sound like she’s made false sexism claims at every job she’s ever had. They also – of course – take her losing the suit as proof she was lying about the sexism. Never mind that in the US, the standard of proof for a discrimination case is almost unmeetably high.
Losing a gender discrimination suit is not proof that she’s a scumbag. Meanwhile, a white libertarian guy could have been a proven liar, thief or rapist and would never in a million years get this kind of treatment.
There’s no but here. No racism and sexism is wrong but…
That doesn’t fly. Period.
If Hilary Clinton wins the presidency, is it going to be her fault when people inevitably make misogynistic attacks on her because the US has an imperialist in every way but the name foreign policy and has shitty labor rights policies and a history of slavery? Are the racist attacks against President Obama to be hand waved away for the same reason?
@TAYTV
Yes they do; but if the organisation you *choose* to work for is predicated on hate then saying ‘ah well, I answer to the shareholders’ is not an excuse. Would you allow that justification for, say, the CEO of Halliburton?
@sevenofmine
I don’t read rationalleft as making excuses. I think they’re saying that Pao, as part of the administration of Reddit, is partly responsible for the conditions under which racism and sexism has been allowed to flourish at Reddit–the very same conditions which gave licence to the harassers of Pao, victim of racism and sexism. In other words, hoist with her own petard. I don’t think one has to excuse the harassment to make that observation. Tabby Lavalamp said much the same thing also.