The misogyny of many of those who badgered Ellen Pao out of her CEO position at Reddit was about as subtle as an explosive fart at a dinner party. And it’s not exactly difficult to find evidence of widespread racism directed at her as well.
There was the whole “Chairman Pao” thing, for example, and the blatantly racist “humor” that it unleashed:
And, yes, it gets even worse than that (link very much NSFW).
But some of Pao’s more, well, imaginative detractors, it’s Pao’s defenders who are the real racists and misogynists.
A blogger by the name of Blixkrogg, a self-described “rational freak,” puts it this way:
Ellen Pao was ousted for incompetence. It didn’t matter whether she was Asian-American or had a vagina. Excusing incompetence and having a lower level of expectation just because someone’s Asian or a woman is condescending prejudice. Arguing that she should have stayed CEO despite her competence is the actual racism and misogyny.
Also, black is white and night is day and the car alarm going off outside my apartment is not annoying.
So the #RedditRevolt was about “incompetence?”
If you want to see the real incompetence at Reddit, look at the way in which the powers that be at Reddit allowed their site to be used to disseminate child porn and stolen celebrity nudes. Look at the toxic culture of hate and harassment that their tolerance of blatantly hateful subreddits has allowed to flourish — so much so that white supremacists have started using Reddit as a hunting ground for new members.
Pao’s detractors aren’t angry about the toxic wasteland that Reddit has become — and in some ways always has been. They’re angry at Pao because of the tiny steps she was taking to try to clean up the worst of that mess — by banning the FatPeopleHate subreddit and a few others that were actively harassing people.
The powers that be at Reddit have now made it abundantly clear that they can be bullied by the hate mob that their policies have essentially created. Setting that precedent seems like a pretty incompetent thing to do, if you ask me.
WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED OF THIS.
I hope the Yogscast and their affiliates go the same way, tbh.
I like them, and I want to get more involved in the community, but I don’t want to have to go to Reddit to do it. : / (And we all know the YouTube comments section is out.)
@SFHC Goddamnit, I could have gone all my life knowing that guy only as the fucking sandwich guy and never giving a damn about him, now I can’t.
@Pandapool Wooo! I just hope they don’t use any other AC/DC song for the movie, hell if back in black wasn’t in the movie I’d be happy; I loved the first’s movie soundtrack
Yeah, at least you know they read their subreddits, and are kind of active on them, it’s a weird thing to go I hate all of this site ( pr at least the people who comment on them) except this one little tiny bit of it.
Given that even on the subject of bras and bra fit, things can go defcon 2376.6 pretty quick within the applicable sub- community, not to mention the migration of what seems to be close to every angry and/or hateful group over to Reddit for establishing new colonies of like-minded people filled with hate as the heads-of-hate assholes work to figure out how to roll out new-ish ways of protecting them from the law or needing to relocate again…Reddit has never been much of a draw for me.
I’m not convinced it’s all that great of an idea for the neighborhood kids to be playing on the newest variety of social media on the internet even if it does keep them off of my damn lawn.
I admit that I sometimes have a kind of morbid curiousity to want to see what kind of terrible things get deleted/removed by moderators, like when I come by a thread on this blog that had a particularly odious troll’s comments removed and all I can see is the responses to them.
That said, there’s generally a damn good reason the comments got removed in the first place, and I’m better off not seeing that shit, really. What the new CEO seems to be proposing is closer to the youtube comment practice of downvoted/flagged comments be hidden behind a ‘click to read’ button. And we all know what a friendly, considerate, and intellectually stimulating place the youtube comments section is!
@M:
HOLY SHIT THAT THREAD.
The person who posted “Hi, Conde Nast lawyers from the future” was absolutely on the money. That’s the sort of thing one doesn’t joke about.
Was the hardcore porn link strictly necessary? I guess it’s important to document the abuse that Pao has received, but could you please at least put a little note in there that it’s a link to hardcore porn with Pao’s face crudely photoshopped into it?
I feel like by viewing it, I’ve in some way contributed to the erosion of Pao’s dignity.
I agree with Alto that I really don’t think the hardcore porn link was necessary.I was willing to take your word for it that the badly photoshopped revenge porn was rolling in, I didn’t need to see it.
Also, I was wondering if the “freedom gamer” account is a troll or a parody account. Looking at some of their other tweets, it seems a little too self-aware to be serious.
So the only non-gross reason I’ve seen anyone give about being dissatisfied with Pao as CEO—the firing of Victoria—as it turns out, that wasn’t even her call. It was made by a dude. Who has most definitely not been harassed out of his job.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-s-terrorists-have-won-ellen-pao-and-the-failure-to-rebrand-web-2-0.html
@sfhc
For what it’s worth, Jared has not been charged with anything yet or been detained and outlets are reporting he is cooperating with the investigation.
It could very well be where there’s smoke there’s fire kinda thing or because one of the higher ups in his foundation was definitely charged with definitely having child pornography.
But you could….I dunno…wait til something is actually happening before….
I can’t believe these miserable little trolls are still carping, they won.
That said, if, as many are pointing out, Reddit is being cleaned up to please the investors, they’ll soon be looking for another woman to blame. If they can’t focus on one specific woman, it’ll be a general hate fest against SJWs.
I don’t know… Putting Sam in charge doesn’t really bode well for any sort of standards. And if they really were able to get the majority of shares back under their control, then they don’t really need to answer to investors anymore, right?
That said, this just means that Reddit will eventually fade out in favor of something else, in my opinion. Most people aren’t going to keep going to Reddit if its users continue to decry even bare-minimum standards as some sort of terrible mod oppression – and those that will? Well, those are the sort of people that most people want to avoid anyway.
@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs I’m not defending anything, but maybe calling him a pedophile when *he* hasn’t been charged with anything and is reportedly cooperating with law enforcement? His business partner has been charged, not Fogle.
We predicted this even before the creation of SRS though – that by fostering an environment commonly known as a “cesspool” that that cesspool would become the undoing. This is the direct result of allowing toxicity to brew and ferment. Like all unfettered fermentations it exploded.
Reddit delenda est and all that.
So what can be done about the racist and misogyny at Reddit? Which companies support Reddit and can a boycott be organized against them similar to what happened to Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers after his slut shaming comments? One thing that should be done is that decent people boycott Reddit altogether so that their only users are the racists and misogynists. I perused Reddit once to check out a subreddit for Black women but would never click on it again.
“And if they really were able to get the majority of shares back under their control, then they don’t really need to answer to investors anymore, right?”
Where did you hear that? They raised 50 million in VC funding last October, and the company has always had a large group of investors. Any single party buying all the shares back would be a significant investment and pretty big news. It would also probably mean that someone has a major idealogical axe to grind.
Eryn E,
I was in wait and see mode when the news first broke too. Then I saw this.
http://www.mysuncoast.com/news/local/woman-alleges-subway-guy-jared-fogle-made-inapporpriate-comments-about/article_1a97e28c-2681-11e5-a358-6b3479782b41.html
….And in Redditors’ Wonderland, up is down and left is right.
Update on the situation regarding the Michigan judge that jailed the three kids: the kids have been released from Children’s Village and sent to a Jewish summer camp instead, but the judge has said that she will be working to give full custody to the dad. The mother has agreed to it and denied the accusations that she was trying to alienate the children from their father.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015/07/10/jailed-kids/29964437/
Poor kids. They’ll grow up with a HUGE resentment for legal authorities and I don’t blame them one bit. When you have a Disney villain overseeing your case of course you’ll have no faith in the courts.
P.S: Apologies if I’ve been ninja’d.
P.P.S:: If the children really do wind up with the dad, this whole case must be an MRA’s wet dream. ESPECIALLY if the accusations of violence against the dad are true.
I heard that here: https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled/cszjqg2
But I should have been a bite more clear that I considered the statements dubious; that was meant to be a pretty big “if” in my question, since I don’t know how much of their statements were intended to line up with fact (obviously, there was no conspiracy to get the old founders back in the job – but I don’t know if they really were able to get Conde Nast back to minority shareholder or not). I also seem to have read a bit more into than was intended, since it only seems to imply that they have the majority of shares between them.
I recently blocked Reddit, and made it redirect to ConceptArt.org. Not really regretting that decision!
@weirwoodtreehugger Oh, wow, yeah, that kind of changes things.
@delphi_ote
Fundamentally, the only reason there are dollars to be made from Reddit is through exploiting the fedora-wearing jackasses’ freely-given labor.
Wow, these people sure make Goebbels and Streicher proud! Such “effort”, such wit, I am simply speechless.
Yes, the internet is deeply flawed, at times downright depressing. The lack of “real” human interaction quickly makes communication a veritable nightmare. Things get emotionalised, animosities turn into all-out hatefests etc. and so on and so on. Rational, measured debate can be as rare the proverbial unicorn, while histrionics and name-calling to the point of demonisation and dehumanisation prevail. Much to my chagrin, certain self-declared intersectionalists can be as guilty of that as the reactionaries: just because you say you’re supporting social justice, it does not follow that all your words and actions are automatically decent or laudable (case in point: the whole sordid issue of transphobia among certain radical feminists).
Goodies and baddies, fighting each other to the virtual blood. It’s no exaggeration to say that the dark side of the web can exacerbate your misanthropy in the same way as a cursory look at 19th and 20th Century history. But: things can also work out in a differently, I dare say, civilized manner. How so? I do not have answers, and I can only think of two things (couple of paragraphs below).
Sometimes I don’t think that “free speech” (i.e. plain racist, sexist, etc. abuse* and sociopathic trolling à la 4chan et al., as well as propaganda for yer ISISes and KKKs) is not that great a thing after all… I have become much, much less sympathetic to the internet “civil libertarian” crowd in the last few months. Not that that means I have become a fan of such awful things like the Chinese Great Firewall..
But are some of these people really contributing to the betterment of society with this hurtful, damaging trash? Why don’t you keep your shitty memes (right off the pages of “der Stuermer” or “Dabiq”, it seems) and your vapid hate-mongering in your private scrapbook, and off the web- a public space, after all! Yes, a public space the internet may be, but it should not be lawless and generally unsafe for the vulnerable. Oh dear, where’s the NSA when it can actually do some good for a change? (OK, that one was a joke).
Here are two suggestions: 1) Anonymity is fine -indeed, a human right- for your beleaguered dissident and whistleblower (there definitely needs to be a niche for them), but maybe not for some quasi-psychopathic kid with too much time at their hands. It would be preposterous to assume that enablers and apologists for this garbage such as weev (a noted anti-semite, to boot), moot, hotwheels**etc. are in any way comparable with real, well, freedom fighters such as Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald or Daniel Ellsberg. If your identity is known, you might feel less inclined to do things such as hacking and doxxing***.
2) Maybe minimum standards of human decency have to be enforced at times through tough and comprehensive moderation (Hear that, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit? Oh I forgot, you cannot make a profit with that! Whoops!). I know this could be abused at times, but hey, nothing’s all black or white! Anyway, you don’t need to be too bright to “get” the difference between say, nuanced, constructive criticism towards certain aspects of the feminist movement and some inflammatory MRA masculinazi bullshit.
But lest we forget that under certain circumstances, words can just be as harmful as deeds, after all (e.g. incitement). More restrictive measures might not make certain people any less hateful, but at least they will have lost a couple of venues for spreading their filth. Also, maybe some of the parents of those hateful, entitled people (or whoever else was responsible) need a good look at themselves for utterly failing to raise them properly.
*There’s a beautiful word for all that in my native Germany (where racism and reactionary politics in general are having something of a renaissance at the moment, alas): Gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit (group-based hostility towards humans).
**It’s not ableist to point out that, yes, disabled people can be as responsible for morally reprehensible things like any other human being- another example is the dreadfully obstinate Wolfgang “Nemesis of the Hellenic People” Schaeuble. OK, this is insulting to Schaeuble: he might be one of the major actors responsible for the disastrous Troika-enforced austerity policy (and not only in Greece), because of his pig-headed belief in neo-ordoliberal ideology, and has as such contributed himself to the ongoing humanitarian disaster, but at least he’s not (to my knowledge) a Gamergater.
***Hypocrisy much? Yes, I know.