As you may recall, the recent week of hate and abuse directed at Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, which led to her becoming ex-Reddit-CEO Ellen Pao, was triggered by the firing of a popular admin Victoria Taylor, one of the few people on Reddit’s staff who actually seemed to respond to user concerns. The firing was said to be an example of Pao’s supposed “incompetence,” a sign that she didn’t really understand Reddit or Reddit culture — and that she needed to go.
One problem with this line of argument was that there was never ever any proof that Pao was responsible for firing Taylor.
And now it seems pretty clear that she wasn’t. Over the weekend, Reddit co-founder and Chairman of the Board Alexis Ohanian seemed to admit, albeit somewhat obliquely, that he was the person responsible for the firing, commenting on Reddit that
It was my decision to change how we work with AMAs and the transition was my failure and I hope we can keep moving forward from that lesson.
Yishan Wong, who was Reddit’s CEO before Pao took over, put things a bit more bluntly, accusing Ohanian of letting Pao pay the price for his bad decision. In a comment on Reddit, he wrote
Alexis wasn’t some employee reporting to Pao, he was the Executive Chairman of the Board, i.e. Pao’s boss. He had different ideas for AMAs, he didn’t like Victoria’s role, and decided to fire her. Pao wasn’t able to do anything about it. …
Then when the hate-train started up against Pao, Alexis should have been out front and center saying very clearly “Ellen Pao did not make this decision, I did.” Instead, he just sat back and let her take the heat. That’s a stunning lack of leadership and an incredibly shitty thing to do. …
I used to respect Alexis Ohanian. After this, not quite so much.
Ohanian responded with another oblique comment, insisting that he “did report to her.” Admitting that “we didn’t handle it well,” he apologized, but said he couldn’t be any more specific than this.
A real profile in courage.
Wong acknowledged to Ohanian that “in-one-capacity you weren’t her boss,” but added
It wasn’t “we didn’t handle it well” – Ellen actually handled things very well, and with quite a bit of grace given the prejudices arrayed against her and the situation she was put in – you didn’t handle it well. There was tremendous amounts of unnecessary damage done as a result, and we are only able to say that things might turn out ok because Huffman agreed to return and take up the mantle.
Both Ohanian’s seeming admission and Wong’s accusations have caused a little bit of a stir on Reddit.
But there are no subreddits going dark to protest the fact that the person seemingly responsible for Taylor’s firing is still Reddit’s chairman of the board — after letting Pao take the hit for what seems to have been his mistake.
There is no Change.org petition with hundreds of thousands of votes calling for Ohanian to step down. There are no nasty “Chairman Ohanian” graphics going viral on Twitter. There’s no mass movement forming to apologize to Pao for wrongly targeting her.
Could it be that perhaps Taylor’s firing wasn’t the real reason so many were angry at Pao?
Could it be that her haters actually hated her not because of the firing but because she was taking small steps to curb the worst excesses of Reddit’s poisonous culture? That she was a woman standing up to some of the angry boys of Reddit?
I’m not even sure why I bother to ask these questions, as the answer is so blindingly obvious.
I’m just SHOCKED I tell you, SHOCKED that there is no mass outcry on reddit over this, she spat sarcastically into the wind.
This is very much a issue of “why am I not surprised.” Guy does something shitty, sees a woman taking the fall, decides to let that fall happen. Truth comes out, guy gets off Scott Free because hey, everyone was just mad at that woman for standing up to the guys anyway, he just made them have a “legit” reason. What a scum sucker.
Oh, my. Gee, golly, gosh.
I’m soooooo surprised that Pao was hung out to dry by a colleague and just one single solitary person has said this was a bad thing.
Respect? Phooey. The only person gaining any respect from sensible people in all this is Pao herself.
What an asshole. I wonder: did he allow Pao to be thrown under the bus because he KNEW that the misogynists/racists would do it with glee, thus he would slip under the radar without a scratch? No way can you be chairman/co-founder and be oblivious to what your site users are like.
He’s a shitty leader indeed. No wonder his website is the way it is.
The more this unfolds, the more apparent it is that the toxic environment on reddit is a direct reflection of the shitty, unwiped assholes that run it.
Also, the more I believe the conspiracy theories that Pao was just thrown out there to draw the redditors’ fire, and they knew full well what they were doing.
Redditor dudebros are still spinning the firing as Pao’s fault. At least the ones who come over to Gawker to whine and rage anytime they write about reddit.
And a reddit engineer quit because she is saying pao was set up to fail. Just proving reddit is a clusterfuck run by literal children. Ellen seemed the most professional of the bunch.
http://gawker.com/top-reddit-engineer-quits-saying-ousted-ceo-ellen-pao-w-1717690102
The blackout started as a good thing – it brought to light Reddit’s mismanagement of mod tools and communication with the community. The original IAMA going dark had NOTHING to do with Ellen Pao, and they never even accused her of that. They were primarily mad at kn0thing the whole time, even before they suspected the firing was his decision. It was only later the dregs of Reddit leftover from FPH co-opted the movement and muddied the waters. Sad, because some genuine grievances needed to be addressed.
I love how they’re all saying it was never about Victoria even though just days ago they were complaining that the apology Pao put out didn’t address the real problem of firing a mod that everyone liked (yeah, someone actually argued that a company shouldn’t be able to fire an employee because they liked her). It’s almost like they’re angry about the harassers being shut down but don’t want to say that because then they’re siding with the harassers.
Well yeah, Ohanian’s a white dude. He’s unassailable to them. Pao, being neither white nor a dude, you could probably convince Reddit that she stole the TARDIS, travelled back to the ’30s, started WWII in the name of the Femborg Collective and falsely accused an innocent white man of masterminding the Holocaust with minimal (and misspelled) effort.
… Indeed, I’m half-expecting that post to end up on /r/MRA as “Proof” of it all.
“She didn’t snap and give us the right royal public reaming we so obviously deserve, tell us to go fuck ourselves, and then wipe the dust of our offices from her shoes.”
Pao is better off out of there, they don’t deserve to have their site cleaned up and made profitable, they deserve to see it sink into the mire of its lowest common denominator while advertisers are scared off in their droves.
I’ll bet she comes back even stronger when this is through, even critics have called her ‘an achievement machine’.
I kind of wish someone would get Victoria Taylor’s views about all this, given that it sounds like she wasn’t being scapegoated too.
Mr. Miracle resents your dragging him into this.
Barda isn’t exactly delighted herself.
Setting aside for a moment how gross the community of Reddit can be…
I’m just seriously surprised to see how absurdly unprofessional Reddit’s staff can be. A former CEO and a board member getting into a slap fight in public? For everyone to see? What the heck are they thinking? They couldn’t even take it to PMs? They just decided to wave around all of this dirty laundry for everyone to see?
I mean, I’m glad to hear that it was Alexis’s fault that Victoria was fired, but the thing is… I really shouldn’t know that sort of thing. Much less because high-level employees decided to yell at each other in public.
Although… If they’re going to be unprofessional anyway, would it really have hurt to have been so a week ago, when everyone wanted Pao’s head for something that she didn’t do? If there was ever a time to discuss who’s firing whom, doing so to calm an angry mob is a pretty good time for it.
@Nequam – lol I didn’t even think of that, oops. See, I always think of him as Mr. Miracle first and was generally always more interested in Barda. Who, like most DC heroines, didn’t deserve what they did to her at ALL.
To be fair, he was named for the term, which is ‘scot-free’. And yes, I seem to remember they fridged Barda in a most obnoxious way… then again, the Big Two comics have managed in the last decade or two to be some obnoxious combination of grimdark and continuity-snarled to the point where I’d rather consume ancillary media like animated TV shows or movies (though DC movies are getting ridiculously grimdark too).
Glass cliff
“Good news everyone! We have a new woman to hate!” remains the meme most accurately describing Reddit’s behaviour.
Reddit: By dirtbags, for dirtbags!
Jane:
This isn’t new. IIRC, one of the former CEOs (I think it was Yishan?) publicly said why a disgruntled ex-employee was fired. The users don’t even care; they just love drama.
Watching Reddit melt down in real time is VERY satisfying. Good riddance.
What, it turns out a white dude was responsible for this thing that everyone said they were mad about and harassed an Asian woman to step down over, and no one’s saying anything?
Color me surprised.
I see we already have someone upthread arguing that the blackout had nothing to do with Pao and it was only a fringe of No True Redditors who did the harassing.
My favorite is when the No True Redditor types tell me that there’s so much awesome on reddit, you just need to not read the default subs because they’re the cesspools. If the default, front page or whatever of the site is all bigoted crap and you have to go seeking out the good people on the fringes, there’s a problem.
That’s not to say that all redditors are bad people. I know people in the anti-anti-feminist subs are often the ones who tip off David.
I’m just saying that argument really doesn’t make me want to join. I have this place to talk about social justice issues. The atheist sub is apparently overridden with the Dawkins style atheist, so that’s a no go. The ASOIAF sub is supposed to be good, but I have other sites to talk about it on.
You are asking them because someone needs to. And no one at Reddit seems to be doing so. Such injustice needs to be called out. Thank you for doing so.
Reason #9287468936 why Reddit should be burned to the ground already.