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.
SHOCKING that a website like reddit, mostly a scummy place is run by a scum-monster.
I know! Let’s start a “movement” via a hashtag that literally ANYONE can use! We’ll call it #redditgate and I SWEAR for SUPER SERIAL REALZ, it’ll be all about ethics in reddit journalism! 🙂
I love this new subreddit, which is completely randomly generated, including comment threads. It makes about as much sense as human-generated content on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/
Even if it was Pao’s call to fire the AMA lady she would need approval of the board and every other unpopular call she made needed board approval. I would also venture to bet that some of those unpopular actions came down directly from the board. CEO’s are not the autocrats with total control over the companies they manage that people think they are, especially interim CEOs. Yet all the blame was heaped on Pao. Half of it is common ignorance of how businesses function and the other half is good old fashion Reddit toxicity.
Firing a single employee shouldn’t involve the board of a company. I do wonder why Victoria has never come out and said who fired her. If it was Pao, just say so, who cares, you’re fired and she probably could tell Pao was on her way out. If not Pao, why let Pao take the hit?
and now the new CEO is a friend’s SIL:
Reddit’s last hope is a new CEO, same as the old CEO
It’s not new. I believe Yishan once rudely (and publicly) commented on the circumstances of an employee’s dismissal when said ex-employee posted a comment discussing something related to that dismissal (IIRC; I haven’t looked up the specific comment thread).
Some friend of mine just posted this on facebook and it made my eyes twitch. I have to get it out somewhere!
http://thoughtcatalog.com/tara-kennedy-kline/2014/11/i-am-a-mother-of-two-children-and-i-cannot-and-will-not-support-feminism/
@Alice Sanguinaria
@Alpha von Carousel
Hey there! It seems like you two haven’t posted in a while and it’s super cool to see you back here.
Note: I don’t check this blog as often these days, so forgive me if you haven’t been absent for a while. I often don’t exactly know what’s happening around me.
@Leela
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/is.gif
Oh man, I was just about to post that. Where to start?
I don’t think that comment was a defence of True Redditors, but rather a description of how two protest movements within Reddit interacted in the recent drama.
The first movement is the Freeze Peach assholes, who have long been campaigning for the ability to say awful shit anywhere they want on Reddit. They include outright racists, MRAs, GamerGaters, hardcore libertarians, conspiracy theorists, creepshotters, jailbaiters etc. They have a range of targets and for a while had been building a narrative around Ellen Pao that she was an awful person, a fraud, an SJW, a censor etc. As with GamerGate, the ringleaders knew a lot of their criticisms were invented, but they served the purpose of riling up the masses and so they were endlessly repeated until they became received wisdom. When Pao made some comments that Reddit was not a ‘pure free speech zone’ and fatpeoplehate was banned a month ago, those well-polished attacks were wheeled out again and the anti-Pao movement began to go mainstream.
Meanwhile, the second movement is dissatisfaction among the volunteer moderators of subreddits. They are all over the map politically, from Fempire moderators who would fit right in here to Freeze Peach assholes, but a lot of them are mildly liberal, brogressive or relatively politically neutral and only interested in gardening or cats or obscure programmings languages or a cult cartoon from the 90s. What brings this group together is that they all want their subreddit to be a productive place to discuss whatever it’s for. The biggest part of their job is removing things that are banned across the whole of reddit e.g. spam, dox, illegal porn and things that are banned on their subreddit e.g. off-topic conversation, content against the sub rules.
Although they don’t have a lot in common, a large proportion of the moderators have long been unhappy at how Reddit employees (admins) treated them, given that the mods put in a huge amount of unpaid time to keep Reddit running. The main problems have been lack of communication and a failure to provide adequate tools for dealing with disruptive users and other moderation tasks, despite many promises. I don’t mean to suggest that moderators are blameless for the state of much of Reddit, but the technology makes it a lot easier to have a light-touch moderation policy than to push back hard against assholism. Of course, that means that the sort of person who is happy to be a moderator is often the sort of person who isn’t that bothered about slurs and you end up with a vicious circle.
So there were two background conflicts against the staff/admins of Reddit. When Victoria was fired without warning or any communication about how she would be replaced, the moderators erupted and started blacking out their subreddits, starting with IAMA and including some of the biggest subs on the site. The stated reason at the time was Victoria’s firing and how it was handled and the wider issues of communication with mods.
http://i.imgur.com/f4dU8F3.png https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/
Notice how there is basically no mention of Ellen Pao at this point.
What happened then was that the first group (Freeze Peach assholes) co-opted the blackout protest and used it as a kick-off to ramp up their anti-Pao campaign. This comment is already too long, but the drama increased along with the viciousness of the attacks on Pao and 3 days ago she resigned. As David points out, it now turns out that it wasn’t her who fired Victoria and even though her replacement has the same laissez-faire attitude towards racist subreddits as she did, everyone is acting like he’s a new broom.
What’s interesting is that although a lot of moderators have things in common with the Freeze Peach assholes (they both distrust Reddit staff/admins, they both espouse ideals of free speech), the two groups are often at loggerheads, because the Freeze Peach assholes tend to get their comments deleted a lot by moderators, because… well, because they’re assholes. And what happens when the moderators are Freeze Peach assholes? Well, it’s quite amusing to watch them endlessly splinter into smaller and smaller groups as whenever they form a group, someone is bound to piss in the punch-bowl, get banned and denounce their erstwhile comrades for having been closet censors all along. https://archive.is/NGDQr https://archive.is/SkY3P
So… the original blackout really wasn’t about Pao as can be seen from what participants said at the time. However, Reddit’s culture of tolerating assholes and distrusting anyone who isn’t male and white meant that it was very easy for an existing group to turn it into the tirade of abuse that it became.
Remember that Pao’s policy on racist subreddits was the same as her successor – so long as they weren’t harassing anyone, it was just fine for them to be on Reddit. She did a few good things – I’m not saying she’s the villain of this piece, but she shouldn’t be turned into a hero either. The point is that she is the victim of a sexist, racist campaign which is entirely par for the course at Reddit.
I know this great restaurant. Well, everything on the menu is made out of human shit, but if you ignore the main menu and ask the waiter for the special menu, there are some excellent dishes so long as you order the right ones and don’t accidentally end up with shit on your plate. I don’t understand why you keep obsessing over the shit, the good food is really great,
@Leela
I’m going to ignore how everyone can be helpful with doors and carrying things without making a show of it or how I agree with the no expectations but also believe in splitting checks or alternating who pays. That’s because I’m wondering if she believes men are the sole practitioners of gift giving and spontaneous affectionate gestures or if it just means a lot more when men do it.
I’m in no way recommending people read this drivel but if you want a quick hate read and don’t want to give this clickbait more support, here’s a donotlink link for you.
http://www.donotlink.com/cksa
Reddit: Where bigotry isn’t a bug, it’s Featured Content!
@Brooked: She appears to think it’s viable for her boys to pretend that it’s 1955.
Wow. That was a thing that was written.
I mean Jesus. This is just good-old conservative shaming of girls and women who don’t fit her standards.
One thing I noticed pretty clearly is that her entire piece treats only boys as agents. Girls are the wives, the targets of her sons’ affections, the temptations. They are elements of the environment that the boys are agents within. It’s like… essence of misogyny.
@kby: I wonder what happens if one of her sons turns out to be gay. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near when her head explodes.
Unfortunately, men who insist on this–not offer, with a willingness to negotiate, but INSIST–are more often than not controlling, manipulative assholes, who ARE expecting something in return.
Then there’s the other side, where she’s setting her boys up to be exploited by a high maintenance, bitchy users.
This woman clearly has no idea what relationship or negotiation skills are, or how to teach them, if all she can do is fall back on “traditional” sex roles, or can’t see the obvious drawbacks of a relationship dynamic that’s more parent/child than between equals.
Calling all gold-diggers….
Because teaching boys that girls are not objects, no matter how they’re dressed, is SOOOOOO HAAAAARD.
This woman isn’t fit to be a parent.
@Bina:
Which is great because earlier she writes about how she wants to teach her sons that beauty is about who a person is rather than what they wear. I guess it’s less about “treating everyone fairly no matter how they look” and more “be judgemental as hell no matter how much the succubi may tempt you.”
So observing any attractive girl is a result of “flaunting”?
As for “easy girls”–(when they exist, as opposed to a label applied by bullies and spread maliciously), overly promiscuous behaviour is often a result of childhood sexual abuse.
So way to go “lady” at failing to understand, well, anything.
It’s the only way to be sure Reddit is gone.
Interesting background on Alexis Ohanian. Sounds like an opportunist. Make of it what you will:
http://gawker.com/wikileaks-reveals-reddit-co-founder-tried-to-work-for-s-1202234100
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/13/1318801_re-fwd-reddit-cofounder-alexis-ohanian-visit-.html
So basically what we’ve learned is that Alexis Ohanian is Justin Timberlake.
I know, but every time they do it, I’m just surprised that they’ve gotten so much money from VCs over the years. It just seems like the kind of thing that would be a glaring red flag, warning that one day they’re going to be provoked into something that ends up destroying the business.