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.
I read a comment from a user on reddit that the plan was to hire Pao in order to enact things redditors would hate so that the new/old guy Steve would seem like a hero, even though he’s doing the same things as Pao.
I also noticed that a lot of redditors seemed to miss the memo that fatpeoplehate was not being censored, it was being shut down because they were encouraging readers to actually go out and harass people (which in the online world is often no small thing). You note the real-world harassment in your post, but I remember thinking while reading the funny and advice animal threads that people felt censored for their hate and what they were saying, not their actions.
Thanks for sharing this!
@ WWTH
I don’t think anyone is justifying the attacks, more pointing out the irony that she was happy to cater for the people making such attacks when they weren’t directed at her.
Consider this scenario; it is inevitable that at some stage the MRA types will fall out with one or more of the more prominent MRA supporting women. When that happens they’ll resort to their usual litany of misogyny and hate. The fact that the woman previously encouraged that won’t make it right or provide any form of justification, but will that make it wrong to say to her “Now do you understand why you were wrong to support them in the first place?”?
The CEO of Halliburton doesn’t have a subreddit called /r/CEOofHalliburtonHate [TW: Racism, sexism, transphobia for some reason, Reddit].
Victim blaming. Victim blaming everywhere.
But a large part of the anger against her is because she banned a popular subreddit that was stalking and harassing people. Doesn’t that demonstrate that she was willing to begin changing things?
If she’d been CEO for ten years, I could understand being frustrated that she didn’t do more, but… She really didn’t have time to do much. And what little she did created a huge backlash.
I mean, I’d love to see TRP and the Nazi subs shut down, but… If she had, they’d probably just be reopened next week by the new CEO. She wasn’t really in a position to make any sweeping changes, especially since I recall some of the board members being those radical free speech types.
I’m a little confused as to why you believe that we would react any differently to a mod of “SlutHate” and “Stormfront” who was trying to reduce the incidence of harassment and bigotry and was chased out by the bigots.
@ SFHC
That’s my point. Shareholders or no, you can’t become the CEO of an organisation that is notorious for permitting, facilitating and, I would argue, promoting hate and then claim that you have no responsibility for that.
Misogyny can never be justified. It’s just the irony that she didn’t seem to see a problem when it wasn’t aimed at her.
She was a CEO for a very short time. During her tenure she attempted to shut down some of the worst of the site’s forums. The response to that was awful and distracting.
She took over a shitty situation and tried to improve it. For her efforts she is now heavily harassed.
@ Alan Robertshaw
You keep saying that. What makes you think she didn’t see a problem til it was aimed at her?
She didn’t take over a site with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever and stand idly by as you seem to be saying, Alan. And she certainly bears no responsibility for her own harrassment, even if she signed a waiver for it.
She went into a bad situation and tried to make it better. And now you want to say she has no right to complain about her harrassment? What the actual fuck though.
@Alan
But she’d been trying to wrestle back control, albeit necessarily slowly so as to not startle the witches. She was the only one trying to stop the hate. And you’re still blaming her for said hate.
Replace Pao with Anita and Reddit with gaming culture, and it’s the same song and dance you and I have both seen a thousand times.
Alan, we like you, but you really are being uncomfortably mansplainy. Take a step back and look at this from a woman’s point of view, not a man’s.
I’ve not said she has no right to complain, of course she does; just that there’s an irony that it *seems* she was less concerned about such things before they happened to her.
If it is the case that she came in to clean up the sewer and that’s why she’s been hounded out then she has my full sympathies. My understanding though, and I’m only aware of this issues from The Guardian piece, is that the fuss started when she sacked a popular staff member. The newspaper piece makes no mention of any other issues.
As CEO it was completely in her power to shut down whatever for a she chose. She is answerable to the shareholders *after* the event either at a regular or emergency AGM. My understanding is that she was there for quite a few months and took no steps in relation to a number of for a that exist only to promote hate and that she took a ‘free speech’ is paramount stance. My understanding is that she only took action against certain for a when they actually started targeting individuals.
To go back to my analogy of MRA supporting women; when they start getting all the abuse we will rightly condemn that. Will we though say that means that their responsibility for previously promoting misogyny will retrospectively be negated?
This is feeling a little like those times I’ve been told I shouldn’t be surprised I get catcalled for wearing a tank top in places where men are.
@ Alan Robertshaw
Dude. She fucking changed reddit’s policies to include rules against harassment and shut down r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits because they violated them. She signed a post on reddit’s blog which was prefaced with this:
This has been pointed out multiple times in this thread and has been discussed in previous blog posts. She has been working to stop this shit. She has not been sitting *apparently* idly by until this moment. If it *seems* to you she didn’t care as much about those things before now, you’re just not fucking paying attention.
@ SFHC
Thanks for that. Apologies for any mansplaining I may have slipped into. She does have my sympathies. I accept also now that it seems she was trying to clean up the for a and that’s a major reason she’s been targeted. That aspect wasn’t reported in the articles I’ve read.
I suppose this is an interesting example of the effects of privilege. Here’s a woman who b y all accounts is quite successful. Broke through the glass sealing, got a job in a STEM field and by all accounts was doing quite well. The MRA would no doubt point out that she easily has more privilege than a working stiff in a low paid job. But, unlike the guy, she only has to be perceived to have put a foot wrong and all of a sudden she’s a “c**t”. A male CEO in her position may have been called out on his actual performance but he wouldn’t have faced the same irrelevant ad hominem attacks, or if he did they’d be some gender based insult anyway (“What a p*ssy!”) etc. When a male CEO acts in a way people don’t like he’s dominant and forceful, when it’s a woman well, it’s probably just the wrong time of the month.
Sorry if I derailed things. Wasn’t trying to justify any of the abuse. Guess it was my distaste of Reddit generally, and that’s mainly because I didn’t realise it had any redeeming features; I thought it was *just* a hate site. So, once again, my apologies to the people on this board and vicariously to the woman concerned.
Ah, that’s a bit of a simplistic explanation from The Guardian, then; it is my understanding (which is quite limited; my only exposure to this is from listening to people who make a hobby of laughing at fights on Reddit) that things began last month, when she shut down the site’s sixth-largest subreddit, FatPeopleHate, for harassment (amongst a number of others, but few people cared about those). This started a large campaign against her, consisting of former members of FatPeopleHate, the usual Status Quo Warriors, and the “How dare you try and enforce standards!” types.
During this already-charged climate, the administrator in charge of the popular AMA subreddit was let go for reasons that are still unknown (a number of theories have been advanced, but none really substantiated). AMA announced that, without this administrator, they could no longer function and temporarily went private while they decided how to organize in the future.
This lead to a number of other subreddits going private in protest of… A number of things, really. Some wanted the admin rehired; others wanted better communication from the administrators in general (a longstanding complaint); some wanted Pao to resign; others wanted better mod-tools; some didn’t really have much of a point, and were just in support of the protests in general.
This rapidly went off the rails, however. Reddit has been in kind of a witch-hunt against “SJW”s for a while, now, you see – I’m not entirely clear on why, precisely, but a certain portion of the userbase has been convinced for months that there was some sort of impending takeover of the site (theories differ on whether the admins are going to crack down, or if the moderation teams are going to be infiltrated by “cancerous” moderators who will enforce strict “SJW’ ideology.). So, when FatPeopleHate was shut down, it confirmed people’s worst fears that they were finally going to be kicked off the site, and that Pao was going to be the harbinger of all of this – and when people had a legitimate complaint about what the admins had done, they saw this as an opportunity to deal with the threat.
The protests, scattered as they were, ended up co-opted almost immediately, with the loudest voices calling for Pao’s removal instead of, well, anything that any of the actual original protestors were actually asking for. The protests themselves burnt out pretty quickly, though, with most of the subs reopening within a couple of days – the big, loud, public hate for Pao, though? That continues to this day, to my understanding – but, well, I haven’t listened to any of it, truth be told, so I could be mistaken.
To further clarify, she was brought in as a temporary “interim” CEO, after the abrupt departure of their last CEO, and her initial time was spent cleaning up a number of pipedream projects the last guy had left behind as well as organizing the relocation to San Francisco.
It wasn’t really her place to make those kind major decisions, regardless of her personal philosophies – it was to keep things running in an administrative capacity until they found a long-term CEO. That she did as much as she did was a testament to how bad things had gotten.
@ Sevenofmine
My apologies to you too.
I wasn’t trying to justify the harassment but in any event I got the underlying facts wrong. My knowledge of this issue came from a news story that said this:
Interestingly, the sub editors (who have no connection with the journalists who write the articles) have now added a sub headline that clarifies the position
I completely retract anything I said about her ‘standing by’. Wish the original article had actually explained the real reason she was ousted..
@ Jane
I wish *you’d* written the original bloody article!
Ah, I should note that that’s not the reason she was ousted, either; that’s the reason why a large portion of Reddit is currently angry at her.
The actual reason she’s leaving (as stated by the announcement and supported by the speed in which they have secured her replacement) is that she doesn’t believe she can meet Reddit’s growth goals while preserving Reddit’s principles. Just standard business stuff, taking place a downright terrible time that makes it looks like they’re bowing to pressure from terrible people.
Of course, I could be mistaken in taking their stated reasons at face value, as they would have every reason to avoid looking like they were caving to pressure, but… The fervor of the current protests would burn out in, what, a week? A month? This is the sort of thing that fades back into an angry simmer as soon as something else catches their eye. Nobody was going to leave the site over it, no matter how often they say they’re going to switch to Voat.
The sad thing is, the MRA-types are being arrogant:
“So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.”
@ Jane
As someone who’s fond of pointing out that correlation does not equal causation I should have been more wary of that “following” in the original article.
So basically, it’s all just financial.
So they say, and so I believe, but… Well, if people are inclined to believe differently, there are good enough reasons to believe that her departure is related to recent troubles.
If nothing else, I’m not certain I’d be inclined to chase an unrealistic growth goal while having to deal with people calling me the spawn of Satan.
Quoting all of this for Truth.
@Jane – Concise explanation. You laid things out well enoufh that even this Reddit-averse person now has a pretty good grasp of the timeline.