It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now.
"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).
It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you.
> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general
The same goes for Yishan Wong, who personally hired Ellen Pao, supports the recent moderation actions[1], thought he wasn't qualified for the job[2], and censored creepshots, right? The whole thing's been going downhill since 2012, I guess?
I think you're trying to make a sarcastic point here (unless I'm mistaken,) but that's probably quite true as written.
Even /r/askscience supports this move [1]. It is one of the most heavily moderated subreddits on the site, with professional staff. These aren't rabblerousers, they are very hard-working volunteers who are fed up with the administration.
The comment I replied to was trying to say that this isn't about the firing, and is about the process of limiting free speech and restricting subs in a non-transparent manner. I see none of that in the /r/askscience post.
It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the moment:
1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
2. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even if AskScience's mods are professional scientists, they're still volunteer AskScience mods.]
The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits. In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints. You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're doing an awful job on the other.
By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1 (including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits) may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.
I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.
(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)
>Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making.
You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]
kn0thing is, for all his original talents at communication with the reddit community, pretty bad at handling these flareups. Here's his initial response to todays goings on. [1] How tone deaf is that? How did the guy who talked about letting users take control at TED turn into the guy who says:
"We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after."
He went from a guy you thought was one of you to a guy who spews platitudes like he ate a dictionary in a country with bad water.
Something is rotten in the state of reddit. The common narrative of that site has become one of managerial incompetence. Whether or not you agree with their strategy, I think it's hard to deny that their tactics are in the bottom decile.
It could be that he's not allowed to say anything about the matter. It reads to me more like an honest attempt at damage control while at the same time not divulging anything about the situation. So far his communication has been the most reasonable and levelheaded of all the reddit admins. I doubt he's lost his touch with the community, rather that he's been gagged and cannot say more than he does.
I don't think the bad taste has much to do with him not being able to divulge things about the situation. Everybody understands they don't need or can't comment on the reasons why Victoria was fired. That's just common sense. Of course everybody is curious, but unless the reason is something that directly affects the userbase and the IAMA-system, it's fine to not disclose any of it. It might likely be something that concerns Victoria's privacy as well.
I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:
"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"
Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).
Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.
But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.
I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.
I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.
One last thing:
> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.
I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.
This is the part that gets me. We're clearly getting PR-talk from Alexis. That would be fine if the expectation of Alexis was that he would simply be the Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. But that's not what was expected. Those of us who were around reddit when kn0thing and spez ran the place and it was held together with duct tape and good intentions remember someone who was an active member of the community and who truly had the community's interests at heart. We thought when he returned that we were getting that Alexis back, and we were happy.
But that Alexis appears to have "matured" into a vanilla businessman, and that's fine. What isn't fine is the mass exodus of admins who were actually redditors, the bringing in of a CEO whose goals clearly align more with monetizing than nurturing, and a series of decisions that have shown the remaining braintrust at reddit to have grown further and further away from the community.
It's fine to monetize reddit. It's fine to run it like a real, live company. What's not fine is to do that to the exclusion of all else, and risk jeopardizing the very community that gives the site value in the first place.
What we've seen from the actions of the executive team at reddit in recent months suggests that they simply don't understand how their actions are being perceived. They've either lost or pushed out the people at the company who had a finger on the pulse of the community, and now they're flying blind. It seems that the only thing keeping reddit going right now as a community is the lack of a viable alternative, and that's a very dangerous place to be for a company like reddit.
I don't know whether the executive team at reddit sees this episode as just another fire to put out or as a portent of things to come. What I see, as an active participant on the site, is a restive user base that increasingly sees itself as neglected and taken for granted by a dismissive and aloof leadership. There are many things keeping the user base in reddit's orbit, but most of those things come down to inertia and lack of a better alternative. If the latter is solved, the former will take care of itself, and reddit will hit a tipping point whereby its most engaged users leave en masse.
It's not there yet, but it's an existential threat that it doesn't appear the reddit brain trust is taking seriously.
Raldi had a really good idea of creating an office of Public Advocate: someone in the company whose job it is to argue for the users in any meeting. That's a fantastic suggestion, and could go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of resentment among the user base.
I have buried far too many internet communities to think this is fixable by creating an ombudsman (something I explicitly suggested for what was, in the past, the biggest free BBS on the internet). The idea will get a lot of lip service and then forgotten completely.
> You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]
I think she's singularly incapable of solving it, but that's fine. I don't think it's reasonable to expect her to be. She should be running a company and building a team that can solve it.
Yes, that's a bit of stupidity in her posting a link to her own inbox.
What was that about CEOs being responsible for building culture?
Pao may or may not be an idiot in the same league as Fiorina, Apotheker, and - arguably - Whitman and Ballmer.
But I think the Reddit flareup is part of a more general disgust with emotionally damaged management culture which is devoted to profits before people, but is so bad at people that profits tank too.
There's a point beyond which being rich and powerful doesn't protect you from shooting off your own head. Reddit management seems to have crossed that line, and the content farm idea stops working when contributors stop feeling like they're a part of a community and realise they're really just unpaid employees on a profit production line.
So it's not just about the AMA editor. It's about the fact that management is trying to control a community it doesn't pay and doesn't really own. The "Do what you like, but give us clicks" deal has been changed to "We run this farm, we tell you what you can and can't post, but give us clicks anyway, because $business$ - oh and by the way, fuck you."
> I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.
I have found the issue to be not so much a matter of the two factors that you've outlined, but more a consistent downward trend of the admin staff, towards a stronger disconnect with the community. There has been less communication, and the communication that has happened has been less clear and less consistent. Even in this entire drama, reddit's response has come through a single point of contact.
For a site like reddit to work, the administrators really need to be able to also participate in the community at large. They need to have firm, definite rules and guidelines of what they will and will not do, and how they will or will not help. They need to make themselves available to the volunteer staff that help run these numerous communities.
This I think is the root cause of both of these tensions. The community simply doesn't know what to expect from the admins anymore.
> Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions
That's a contradiction, not many people (especially internet people) understand that freedom of speech and freedom of expression do not cover a conspiracy to be harmful.
However, Reddit certainly doesn't have [correctly defined] freedom of speech - which I have a problem with: Reddit has a certain sway over the way that people think and a world where unpopular or culturally immoral opinions are muzzled is not a world where ethical progress can be made.
Kind of. Reddit cares a lot more about keeping the defaults around than keeping the smaller questionable subreddits around. I genuinely don't think they want to ban the distasteful but non-harassing subreddits (partly because they don't want to be known as a site that would ban those subreddits), but if one of those subreddits decided to one day get up and leave of their own accord, they wouldn't shed a tear. If, say, /r/IAmA decided to get up and leave, that would be a problem. This happened once [1], it was a problem, and (IIRC) Reddit management stepped in.
So yes, they're disconnects. But one is a disconnect between a userbase / the moderators of subreddits that Reddit the company is not very invested in keeping, except to the extent that in general, they want to keep subreddits that don't break rules. The other is a disconnect between subreddits that Reddit relies on.
That's why when tension 1 flared up a few weeks ago, Reddit banned some subreddits and implicitly threatened others with banning, and when tension 2 flared up yesterday, some other subreddits threatened to shut down and successfully forced Reddit to care.
> 1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I think both sections of the site are vile, but I vastly prefer a uniform standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about ____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.
I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).
Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer-term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say, the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a huge surprise to a lot of people.
Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit, Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to put that, and I'm stealing it.
People keep saying that FPH was not engaged in harassment and abuse that spread outside that group, and outside reddit.
But it clearly was. Reddit should just release some of the brigading details - and that has always been something that can cause your sub to be closed and your account to be shaddow-banned.
I do not understand how you can use the existance of vile groups as evidence of Reddit squashing free speech - doesn't the fact that those vile groups didn't get closed (unless they brigaded) evidence that Reddit allows free speech as far as possible.
That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even solve that problem in general?
I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Reddit accounts. We've long observed 4chan/goon "Redditors" in YouTube comment threads. I'm with you on releasing how they got there, and I think it would provide a lot of clarity.
One last thing, I have to correct you: I never said Reddit was squashing free speech. I wish they'd pick a consistent value on it, that's all, and I pointed out specific things said in the press about free speech. I'm less concerned about FPH than I am about something like /r/jailbait, which got removed because it became the squeaky wheel due to CNN attention. There are worse subreddits regarding sexualization of children, and Reddit fails to uphold its own standard there, which negates the standard itself. That's my problem.
3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding
4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of rules.
Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of comments. In smaller subs this is very destructive. That is very clearly reddit activity that can be tied to FPH posts and FPH subscribers.
And if Reddit did apply their rules consistantly it would result in a lot more subs being closed - the pro-self harm subs, the pro eating disorder subs, and the pro suicide groups are clear contenders for banning. (To be fair the suicide groups do get banned. I think they've worked out an equilibrium of being as pro suicide as they can without getting banned).
(I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)
Brigading is not against reddit's rules[0], despite semi-popular belief. Some big subs actually encourage it by not allowing np (non-participation) links to be posted on their sub[1].
/r/ThisSubReddit exists. There's a post in /r/ThisSubReddit that someone doesn't like. They post a link to that post to /r/OtherSubReddit, sometimes with commentary (eg, "look at this idiot!")
That causes a bunch of people from /r/OtherSubReddit to visit /r/ThisSubReddit. That's okay, unless they start voting; or insulting; or harassing users.
The voting is not okay because often the brigading sub is much larger than the sub being brigaded. (FPH had 150,000 subscribed users) People generally agree that the heavily modded subs are better. Brigading makes it really hard for mods to do any modding. (If just 1% of FPH subs decide to vote that's 1,500 people. If your sub is only 800 subscribers you're going to get crushed by FPH.)
The harassment is not okay because, well, fuck those people who think it's okay to visit a self-harm support sub and tell people to kill themselves.
That kind of brigading has been risky for subs for a while now; plenty of subs got warned, temp banned, or permanently banned for this.
fatpeoplehate was warned multiple times about brigading. But the problem with FPH was not just on-Reddit brigading. They took it to facebook, youtube, a bunch of other websites. They also, if the admins are to be believed, took it AFK to people's IRL work / school / homes.
Even if the "position" in statements by the administrators were "consistent" (doubtful, but that's besides the point), the application of these rules is manifestly not.
Reddit would have had my support if they enforced the rules as you say. Unfortunately Reddit chose instead to enforce the brand new harassment rule, ban the sub, ban the mods, and then ban any sub that even looked like FPH.
It would have been a far, far more effective message if they said "We have banned FPH and the moderators due to their brigading and doxxing. Let this be a lesson to all subs: if you do these things, you will be disbanded." and then left alone all of the other subs that superficially looked like FPH but didn't engage in that specific behavior.
Instead they got a minor revolt, and the latest revolt seems like a manifestation of a lot of the hard feelings from that attempt.
>the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding
Do you include TIL among those? I do. Best sub there is.
The only they they use 'extensive vigorous modding' for is verifying whether titles follow the rules. And ~100% of that is based on user reports, they just double-check.
Aside from that, there is 0 moderation, other than for sitewide rule violations. You can say anything_you_want in comments and they will take no action.
> (I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)
Thanks. I'm used to it, honestly, because it's become obvious over time that holding an opinion in contrast to what HN wants to hear is a nearly guaranteed ticket to comment illegibility. HN is the only forum on which I participate where disagreement is acceptably expressed as making someone's thoughts more difficult to read.
I'm merely presenting my (long earned) observations on Reddit. I absolutely think it's a shitshow, a terrible place full of terrible people, but I suspect I'm being punished for daring to suggest that there is something wrong with the site itself. In the smaller subreddits, there are absolutely small embers of really powerfully rewarding conversation. There is stuff worth saving on Reddit, and I think the loud stuff drowns it out. I've had extremely fulfilling conversations about network security, application security, game modification, and polyamory in the various communities of which I am a part, and I've learned a lot. My experience isn't representative because I subscribe to nearly zero default subs.
To your point, I think SRS serves as the complete counterexample to everything you're saying. The entire purpose of SRS is to brigade and single out individual Redditors, and I've seen the results firsthand. If FPH was doing it, there isn't a universe in existence where SRS gets off that hook and it makes sense. Transparency is important here, as you say.
> 1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
The real problem is that the definition of "abusive" is hopelessly vague and the process for determining what constitutes "coordinating abusive action" is opaque and untrustworthy.
Not remotely fair to accuse people of trying to protect "coordinating abuse" without clarifying what that actually means.
They're not "limiting free speech" in any way or form. They're moderating what gets published on their platform. That's a totally different thing. You got anything to say? Print out a pamphlet or host a blog on your own server. Nobody's stopping you.
As to ambiguous decision making -- you're right about that, but they have a problem. Reddit has a largeish group of teenagers, unemployed white men living in their mother's basement and techno-libertarians, that have turned the site into a cesspool of xenophobia, misogyny, wingnut conspiracies and most of all -- lots of eighth grade drama . Those people, of course, don't matter (advertisers don't care much about them), and nobody in the real-world (not most Reddit users) care or even notice the imaginary armageddon taking place in those kids' heads, but the problem with them is that 1) they're unreasonable, and 2) they have the time to make the lives of the site administrators miserable (it would make their day -- they've got nothing more exciting to do).
So the people running Reddit are scared. They've invited the devil -- worse, teenagers -- into their home for an endless party, and they know they'll trash the place even more if the party were to end. So they're sending mixed messages. They're talking about respect, but they allow CoonTown and "men"'s rights groups. It's time for Reddit to grow some balls, kick the misbehaving kids out, shutdown not a few, but all hate subreddits, all without issuing as much as a press release. The kids will talk about their judgement day (that nobody in the world would notice) for years, the grown men in their mom's basement will feel like they're actually being hunted, and everybody would get exactly what they want.
Are there really a lot of teenagers on there? When I was in high school almost nobody knew about Reddit, it took until college for most of my peers to find out what it was.
People caring to much about bullshit like ethics in game journalism are missing the forest for the trees.
Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that:
1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily.
2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired.
>content has been sliding
>doxxing has gone up
>several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down
>community is faltering
>no side wants to compromise
tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
Hey I think GG is pathetic, for a lot of reasons. But my previous job was at a games media company (and I'm still involved with them), and the stuff that goes on in games media is horribly incestuous.
I mean yeah, bigger fish to fry and all that, but it's still a problem for a lot of people - other problems existing doesn't change that. I'm sure "we" could fix the bigger issue at large but who's "we"? Who's working on that, and why does it invalidate incestuous and unpublished conflicts of interest?
reddit is one of the simplest and easiest sites for a new user to learn to use. Somehow, Ellen Pao doesn't know how to use reddit, nevermind what the culture and community that has built over a decade truly means.
She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost:
It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach.
When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh.
This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction.
For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all.
She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension?
Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times?
Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey.
An intelligent person would make their choice.
A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice.
That's 'cause Victoria had a different job. People loved Raymond Chen back when Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft.
In particular, Victoria had the job of making AMAs happen smoothly, and /r/IAmA is this very weird subreddit, operationally speaking (how many other subreddits have their own mobile app?), that clearly needs a paid staff member. Ellen has the job of being the final say on anything that happens, controversial or otherwise. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that an AMA needs to happen, Victoria does it. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that a subreddit needs to be banned, Ellen does it (or at least takes the blame for it).
with respect, you are missing the whole point of this issue! It isn't about doing X but about how you do X.
If Victoria had done her job with condescension towards mods, if she had been haughty in her communications, arbitrary and non-transparent in her decision making, etc. then you can bet your bottom dollar that she would not have been so valued by the mods and the wider community.
This isn't about making 'difficult decisions' but about how they are made, communicated and implemented.
That is why I added the bee analogy in my previous comment.
I'm one of the "nicer" mods on my subreddit because I'm polite and very careful and careful in how I construct my responses to actions.
But at the end of the day I'm also liked because I'm not the most active mod. The very act of exerting power over another user, especially someone who has never stopped to think about the rules or the site history, results in resentment.
The better your mod team is at being able to implement the rules, the more friction there will be.
People will also come out to complain more than compliment.
This results in distancing from the community, just because of how painful it can be.
Good tools to moderate create more ways to censor people, track them, decide what words are ok and others which are not.
In short, Victoria is far removed from the kind of things which make people hate admins.
Yeah, that tense was unclear. How about "Even when Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft, people still loved Raymond Chen"? (I think few people hate Satya Nadella the way people hated Ballmer and hate Pao, that's all.)
Yeah, if she laughed at herself, and appeared human and submissive to the masses they'd stop calling her a cunt.
Imagine being responsible for a platform where every time you post something people come out of the woodworks to call you a cunt and a stupid bitch.
Really, I don't know how she puts in an honest day's work and I really don't know what anyone expects of anyone in that situation. Were I in that situation I'd be thinking 'This house is infested, burn it down.'
She banned a few people? What, that's an abuse of her power? They used to decapitate people for saying less offensive things within someone else's domain.
I wonder how some people (not you) survive the cognitive dissonance of believing simultaneously that the right to free speech and the right to private property are the most important things ever of all time.
Thing is, before they started hellbanning all of those subreddits (TrayvonMartin, fatpeoplehate, etc.) I had no idea they even existed. For 8 years I've been blissfully unaware of all the garbage subreddits popping up.
Well then consider yourself lucky that your favourite subreddits weren't targets. I spend way too much time on reddit and I have had to retreat from a few subreddits because of the FPH brigaders (using RES to tag them so I could see when a wave of them hit a sub).
I was close to losing all hope just before they banned it. It would not have surprised me to see Conde Nast pull the plug on reddit before the end of 2015 had they not banned it.
FPH was somehow slowly taking over reddit. Probably because its members had more free time on their hands than average redditors. Also, there were 150.000 of them.
Conde Nast is not part of the ownership structure of reddit. Conde Nast is owned by the major owner of reddit, Advance Publications, but reddit has not been part of Conde Nast for years. The ownership also got more diffuse last year:
FatPeopleHate was really recent. It exploded in popularity. It wasn't even a year old when it got banned.
That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
> i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
> i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
They certainly do. My better half tried using reddit for a couple days 4 or 5 years ago, encountered some vile / bitter people, and decided that it just wasn't worth it. She won't go near it again.
> That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is.
I left a comment in that thread, but wasn't one of the hateful ones. While I don't think saying those hateful things are justified, I can see where they're coming from. This was right after the whole scandal with the banning, i think within 24hrs of the announcement, and a lot of them were passionate about the site, so they weren't really being friendy toward her
Do you know if any users in that thread were actually banned?
I checked out the reddit for the top level posts and it appears that many of them, even the ones that posted the most mean spirited comments in that thread, seem to be active. Most of them have plenty of recent comments with votes and replies.
Maybe the banned had their comments deleted? I don't think that's how it works though.
> Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine.
Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to confuse a private message with a public reply.
If I want to see how a url will appear to someone before I send it, I open an incognito tab in chrome and paste it there. It doesn't have access to any of my currently open sessions, cookies, etc. so I see exactly what someone else will see when they click, and I send or don't send (or modify and send) accordingly.
I tried the link provided but was unable to display the page, though as a citizen of the internet I can take a stab at the flavor of the insults.
Given her recent gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins and potential appeal, it would have made strategic sense to block anything sexist. I don't know if that's what was in the content of the replies - just guessing.
Also guessing it was pretty racist, and <checks underpants - yep, white penis> I can only imagine that shit got old more than a century ago.
>the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
Twitch still uses flash because HLS wasn't widely supported until recently. Everyone knows Twitch takes half of the $5, there is no naivety there. And the gamification of subscriptions is a good thing for streamers. Anyone who has been a partner with both Twitch and YouTube will tell you Twitch is miles ahead when it comes to actually caring about its partners.
I'm not arguing against the choices of Twitch per se, I'm commenting on the bunch of free passes they get because the viewers see themselves as part of the 'twitch community'.
Saying that the gamification of subscriptions is good for the streamer is the same as saying that games with micro-transactions, designed to be addictive, are good for the developers. Of course it is, but someone is paying for it...
The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard.
Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever).
Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
> Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
I've seen softcore pornographic material from twitch. Women flashing their breasts or ass at the webcam.
Granted, that sort of thing apparently is uncommon because the people who did it were apparently almost immediately banned... but that's rather the point, isn't it? You don't see it because they ban it.
How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
I'm not sure this is an "exploitative relationship", unless you also define your relationship with a supermarket chain or netflix to be "exploitative". You give money for a service. Said service tries to extract money as efficiently as possible.
It's a capitalistic relationship, certainly. But it's very different. reddit volunteers provide their efforts to improve reddit's brand, for free, generally just for personal gratification (from people who will turn on you and drive you to suicide the moment you make the wrong move). Thos efforts are exploited by reddit, rather than rewarded.
What's really funny though, is that this was prompted by someone who seems to have been excellent at marketing, given her stellar reputation among the reddit userbase and universal praise from all of her AMA collaborators. I can't help but think all this will end up in her netting some really swank job. I've seen some post that claimed insider knowledge that Taylor was fired because she resisted further monetization of the AMA series. Given some of the decisions over there I don't find that implausible in the least.
Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.
> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand
This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' :
“We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.”
To the current CEO, Ellen Pao:
It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.
As someone who loves reddit, this dichotomy is the clearest sign that it has no future. Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls on top of platforms like IPFS and Ethereum's Swarm. Every attempt at building a reddit clone fails because reddit enjoys tremendous network effects. But decentralization yields its own network effects—you don't have to start your own site to see your changes in the wild, you just fork the codebase and tell people about it. The useful changes thrive, the useless ones are forgotten, and everyone's still contributing to the core stream of submissions, comments, and votes that make the system work regardless of which fork they're using.
reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.
I wouldn't say I love Reddit, but I'm certainly an active user. But I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread. There are lots of little communities that work well, with their own things they value. (There was a particular thread over on /r/OrthodoxChristianity, now removed, that would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad: a member of the community tried to convince everyone else to move to Voat. The usual talking points for that move didn't really go over well there.)
I suspect one of the network effects is simply that people have Reddit accounts and know how the site works; it's not yet another site to sign up for, for a small-ish community of people interested in a thing. I think that's the sole reason, for instance, /r/rust works as well as it does; philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole. I suspect that it's not users of any particular other subreddit (not even /r/programming) who are there, but people already using Reddit for many many other things. It's become one of the bigger discussion forums for the language, especially since the closure of the rust-dev mailing list.
If you can build a decentralized Reddit-like system with no per-community account system and also with no spam problem, you may stand a decent chance at replacing it.
>>philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole
It's true. I for example was off-put by what I perceive as forced niceness. While it shouldn't matter on a subreddit dedicated to a programming language it's, at least for me, an illustration of culture conflict on Reddit.
Very small example: there was a poster claiming that we shouldn't use a word "guys" when referring to mixed groups and the moderators were willing to grant that request/encourage different ways of addressing mixed groups for some completely bs (in my view) reasons like the equivalent word in German being used only to address male groups.
Well, my preferred way of dealing with such requests is:
"We don't mean to offend anyone but this is English so deal with it, using a word guys to address mixes groups is completely standard"
I find the culture of forced niceness and political correctness off-putting and it is reason enough for me not to engage in certain communities (/r/chess is another one I stopped posting in because of it).
I think a difference in views on this matter is also why some Reddit communities are perceived as hateful while I not only don't see any hate there but I often see the critics as hateful authoritarians (one example: r/mensrights)
I would be happy just with HN clones more focused on specific topics. The per-community thing I don't care about too much; it doesn't even have to be the same host (it's 2015 we have bookmarks and speedials and password managers). What I care about is moderation done right. But I suspect it's an open issue for very large scale communities.
> I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread
While that might have been true when you posted this comment, I have trouble believing that it could be true for anybody right now. At least a half dozen defaults have gone private an the majority of posts on the signed-out home page are about this story.
Is it so hard to believe that active users wouldn't be subbed to any of the defaults?
Looking at all of my subscriptions, it looks like exactly one of them, /r/linux, is currently private. /r/bayarea previously was. Places like /r/debian or /r/AskNYC or /r/SandersForPresident or /r/osdev just don't care -- or at least, they care less than they care about keeping their community open. There's a post each on /r/Christianity and /r/Catholicism saying thanks to the mods. There's a post vaguely about the subject on /r/networking, but it veered into discussion about the community.
As I mentioned elsewhere in these comments, yesterday's issue was specifically about the tensions between large, default sub volunteer moderation and Reddit the company. Most of the subreddits I read are small communities without these problems. (And they don't see themselves at risk for being banned for harassment / political incorrectness / what-have-you, so they're not concerned about that, either.)
I'd suggest directed acyclic graph comments, too, so that a comment can reply to more than one other comment. Potentially super nice, but I haven't seen anyone implement them yet.
There were techniques we were working on prior to the ISPs neglecting them.
One such technique was a crypto method, similar to what has been recommended in reducing spam in emails. The client has to do some lengthy crypto transform for the message(and NG) they send. On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message. Small amounts of messages would get through, but spammers would be unable to bulk-send without some sort of supercomputer.
The appropriate algo could be agreed up and updated to increase the amount of time for the message. Even in worst cases, you're utilizing a slow computer for a second or 2. Solves the spam issue.
On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message
So if I want to post from a mobile device, I have to wait considerably longer? And if I hijack a lot of computers for a spam farm, I can send as much as I like?
Spam is not only defined by bulk. You still need moderators, and that means a process for establishing and maintaining who moderates a particular group. You need people to delete the child porn and the death threats, and that means a process for deletion. (Signed cancels were a pretty good solution in the end). You probably want some means for identifying persistently troublesome users and their sockpuppets from legitimate new users.
You need hosting so that people can effectively access it despite firewalls and on mobile devices. You need a means of paying for that hosting.
As someone who hung around a few usenet discussion groups well into the 21st century, the problem was less "spam" and more "trolls and kooks". It only takes a very small number of people to completely disrupt a group, and no, "plonking" was not a solution that worked. A new usenet would need some sort of moderation system.
That's a good point. I was thinking along the lines of something that's essentially like reddit or HN, but had a field where you could add additional parent comment ids, so that the parent poster was notified of the reply.
We want to be a profitable platform and some of you have to go for that to happen.
The timing of the iAMA admin's removal coincides all to well with the recent Jesse Jackson AMA that went exactly as AMAs do and not how politicians want things.
Most celebrities can handle abuse and such, but there are certain one's and definitely more politicians who will not tolerate it from the rabble. To them they are royalty and damn if they will suffer humiliation, rudeness, or the like, from anyone. So likely we will soon have amusement park reddit, where there is a hint of roughness but everything is policed, scripted, and shadowbans go out like candy on halloween. AMA will likely come back as service to "the important people" Ellen and her like want to associate with to the point all posts will be so filtered it should be renamed "Ask Me Approved Questions"
Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all. Reddit is OK already, but the new management seems to want to change it more and more. These new CEO's want to always push their "vision" for what reddit should be despite what the userbase wants and the backlash for that is already showing.
The thing is, the power doesn't rest on the CEO or the company, it rests on the user base. Redditors can migrate to any other website they choose to, just like Digg users migrated to reddit some years ago. The people have the power in the end.
Reddit is a pretty terrible business. Discussion boards in general are a terrible business. Redditors can migrate anywhere they want, but the question is where are they welcome, particularly in volume? voat is begging for money, fighting with paypal, and being forced to kill wannabe kiddy porn / jailbait.
I'm sure reddit would be super tore up if the fat haters, racists, and jailbait traders left :rolleyes:
This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind.
The company wants to grow and become more profitable, the community wants to preserve what it has.
I don't know if a site like this can really be run as a for profit company, at least not a growth oriented one. The obvious monetization schemes will be met with resistance. Even though its attracted a lot of users, can it really ever make money?
> This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind.
And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?
By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.
How is this going to help increasing their profit?
If they're exactly where they were some years ago but now with a demographic that's less likely to block ads, that's a win. How might they have "capitalized on" their "homogeneous group of nerds" that wouldn't have caused them to just leave?
> How might they have "capitalized on" their "homogeneous group of nerds" that wouldn't have caused them to just leave?
The possibilities should be endless. One thing I could have imagined would be cooperations with companies that have products which reddit user value and use heavily. Take Valve's Steam, for instance. Reddit could have offered those companies a service to buy a sub that is especially tailored for the company's needs so that they could turn their sub into a tailor-made r&d lab (with special features as required...). Those who love their products would be thrilled to develop ideas and share their user knowledge with their favorite company.
As long as they would've selected companies carefully and resist from interfering with other parts of reddit no one would run away. If anything, those "special sub" could be a gateway drug for new users.
The community would be in an uproar if such a sale happened. Reddit's only monetization schemes right now are 1) reddit gold 2) ads and 3) the gift shop. These are things that the community can completely boycott. Any sane person would know not to buy out something like reddit.
Reddit is really poorly managed. If Google bought it and gave it an overhaul I'm sure it would be welcome over the current administration. Plus, the "non-vocal users" simply don't care.
I would start with rewarding administrators with payment (akin to youtube, somewhat proportionally to views -- this creates a strong incentive towards fidelity), revamp post priority algorithms, and add some basic functionality that you need to install an add on (!), RES, to get (what other top 100 website needs this?).
A few hundred million for what -- a largely unmonetizable high traffic website full of tantrum throwing racists, bigots, and pornographers? They don't make much money from ads (they were unprofitable through at least 2012 afaik) and probably can't monetize that way -- even past the brand safety issues, it's still a forum that would feel lucky to get perhaps 50 cent cpm advertising on US traffic. I'd be shocked if they could clear 50 million, and that would be from someone who was going to fire the majority of employees and just run the site out. Particularly with digg's example of how fickle internet users can be.
I'm aware it was invested in at a 1/2 billion valuation, and good luck to them, but I stand by my analysis.
The thing is, 'reddit-likes' have definitively a place in the Internet, and I mean for the next couple decades. This format has been iterated over and over, starting with slashdot, 4chan, digg et al, and it's obviously one of the best ways we ever found to manage large discussions/news/etc. HN is an example.
Reddit is growing and would continue to grow really quickly. There's no competition in sight. Owning the discussion backbone of the internet is massively valuable, comparable at least to WhatsApp I'd say.
Can it die out due to massive exodus? Sure, but something similar will replace it. And for each iteration (slashdot,digg,etc), those websites have become larger and more consolidated. It's fair to assume at some point it will reach long term stability (particularly if it's properly managed).
More likely investors are getting restless and want to see some return. In these cases management feels it needs to have things under its control and starts removing power bases from lower down the org chart so that everything stays on message. AMA is Reddit's only viable asset so having it under control of someone who isn't part of the management clique is unthinkable.
Usually these attempts fail and the company is dead within 24 months having burned the village in an attempt to save the village.
However a counter-point is that its quite possible that they are trying to pivot reddit into a mainstream site, and thus are more than willing to burn most of the current user base.
They don't need/want hard-hitting questions during AMA's, nor do they want freaky fetish subreddits, nor long winded post describing the intricacies of the Federal Reserve.
They want cat pictures, pictures of freshly baked cakes, celebrity soundbites, and lots of comments that go "that cake looks delish!" and "Love you Miley!"
In short, an internet version of "The View".
Regardless, I think it will fail, if thats even the case. However, ideas such as these are the exact type that tone-deaf MBA types think up lots of times.
The sense I get among most of my friends "in real life" is that they read reddit but would never post to reddit. A driving force behind that is the fear of being seen as a "redditor," which is an image generally associated with neckbeards (ironically a term popularized by themselves).
It could certainly follow an 80/20 rule, i.e. 20% of users post 80% of content, but 20% of users also cause 80% of the disruption. I mean ultimately, normal people are outside living their lives, not fussing over reddit drama. Much of the controversy is definitely stirred up by a "vocal minority." But are they necessary? That's the question. If the upvote economy is zero sum, why would you want to waste so much of it on loud muckrakers?
You might very well be right. Perhaps the reddit leadership realized they have an aggressive vocal minority that is actively damaging their reputation, so they don't mind culling it from their ranks. That would explain Alexis' overt willingness to sit and watch. He literally doesn't care, because why would he? It's all part of the plan to get more cats on the front page, and money in his pocket. (I don't blame him in the slightest.)
Reddit is already mainstream by any sense of the words. The reason it's full of hateful, annoying etc. people is because that's how anonymous human behave. Reddit is not a super secret group that only hateful bad apple knows about. You can try to clamp down the bad content, but alienate the user base will end up badly because there will be no one left to join.
Are websites that are known for being more anonymous than reddit known for being more or less abrasiveness than reddit?
In my personal opinion, they are less abrasive. But I think I am definitely in the minority there. I think that anonymous sites are popularly known as more abrasive.
I've been saying that the Scarlet Letter Administration of Pao are "paper tigers swimming in a barrel of incompetence"
But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left.
They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever.
Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipulate.
Is there anyone left NOT mad at reddit now? Maybe SubredditDrama....
In the spirit of Reddit and /r/conspiracy, maybe Pao wants to be the only successful woman there, so she can make her narrative more believable that the tech world hates women by pointing out how there aren't women at Reddit.
Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not.
So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao.
Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that powerful/authority figures, regardless of gender, always get the most grief? I think there's a misattribution error occurring here: the amount of grief one receives is not a function of gender, it is a function of 'power'.
That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger numbers of people. Meaning that there's a higher probability of receiving a hateful email from the 1 crank in a group affected by a decision you made.
There are a number of studies testing this, and the consensus that emerges from meta-analysis is that women tend to be liked, or respected, but rarely both. Cuddy (2005) is the citation I've memorized for this.
In contrast, men have no problem being liked and respected in positions of power. Women managers tend to be viewed as nurturing pushovers or bitches.
It would indeed be simpler if liking decreased as social distance increased, but the world is not always so simple, and a thousand years of gender stereotypes and oppression don't end in a century.
On the contrary, compare her reception to that of powerful men who behave badly, and she seems to be benefiting from favorable treatment. Powerful men who have attracted the internet's ire by abusing the legal system with frivolous lawsuits, such as Darl McBride, Jack Thompson, or Charles Carreon, have attracted a lot more hate than Pao, and that's just for their legal hijinks, not to mention that they didn't do anything approaching what's happening to Reddit.
Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing why the powerful deserve special sympathy, especially when compared to the non-powerful.
Pao gets hate because she's incompetent, vain, and an ass. Ballmer got hate, too. You know why? Because he's incompetent, vain, and an ass. There are two intersecting patterns here: first, that vain, incompetent asses get hate; second, that most of the people in positions of power are vain, incompetent asses. Maybe people tend to notice more often when they're women, but the men aren't any different and they get plenty of well-deserved hate too.
On reddit, an admin has more power than the overwhelming majority of users. There are seriously only a handful of people on reddit that had more power than Victoria had.
Well, Sam Altman wants Reddit to have a billion users. To me, that means preserving Reddit's culture isn't a top priority. I mean they'll nod at it and say they're trying to keep the culture yada yada, but push come to shove, they really aren't going to defer to it.
Reddit is actively driving away their core users. This is a disaster for any product, regardless of where the potential lies. Until they are no longer your core users, you still need them.
On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media.
Could you elaborate on what you mean?. The core users are the ones that vote and comment, If they don't vote and comment then posters dont get karma, If they don't get karma they don't post and if they don't post then Reddit really isn't going to have a user base of any kind. So it's in everyone's best interest to preserve the culture.
Actually a significant group of people are upset with kn0thing about this whole thing, because he commented about this whole mess [0] and gave what many called a "non-answer".
According to kn0thing, it's a shame, "but so it goes". And then there's the implication that they're all sitting back and enjoying popcorn while Reddit consumes itself.
What's really sad is that reddit and Alexis were, arguably, the most successful Y-Combinator startup, and now they've fallen by the wayside as cronyism and personal agendas take over. Alexis let this happen, though. Not that I blame him, I'd have taken the money too.
By far and away, Airbnb is the most successful Y-Combinator startup. It's not a close race between Reddit and Airbnb. After that is Dropbox and Stripe perhaps. I don't think Reddit ever quite stacked up to these types of companies in terms of potential. Reddit is a link-aggregator, the very definition of a poor business opportunity (they don't own anything, and hardly control anything on their own site).
Airbnb is carrying a $25 billion valuation, and has a legitimate shot at justifying it in the coming years. They own their segment like an eBay or Uber, their network effect has won.
Was Reddit once the top start-up out of Y-Combinator, years ago? I'm skeptical of that having ever been true as well.
Reddit was part of the first batch of YC and was sold for a large amount for Conde Nast, so it makes sense that at that point in time they were the most successful.
Although they're really really really not by today's standards, as you point out.
reddit was the first to release anything online[0]. It's probably fair to say at that point, they were the most successful. I think it's arguable that reddit is still the most successful of those, though Loopt may have been acquired for more money. Here's what happened to the rest:
* Memamp - desktop search: failed to launch, remaining founder hired by reddit
* Infogami - something between a blog and a wiki: merged with reddit, became reddit wiki
* Firecrawl - security software: pivoted and became TextPayMe - mobile payments: acquihired by Amazon, merged in to Amazon Payments
* Loopt - mobile location sharing: acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million
* Kiko - online calendar: launched shortly before Google Calendar, sold to Tucows for about $250k
* Clickfacts - advertising fraud detection: operated independently for years; now appears defunct
* Simmery - can't find anything on what this company was making: defunct
I'm not sure by which objective measure that would be true besides potentially being the most visited by consumers and having the most cultural-currency. From a business perspective, they are far from being the most successful and I'm guessing the last round of funding came with quite a bit of goals that needed to be met including getting the community under control and sanitizing it for mainstream America.
Seems another business model for the internet is : Create authentic community, sell out community to corporate highest bidder who can then eliminate unwanted controversial discussion. Reddit could have monetized like craigslist and made tons of money. Idiots.
I think it's more like a "haters gonna hate" type of comment. Whatever kn0thing says, it won't be good enough to placate the masses with their pitchforks so the best thing to do is sit back and wait till it all blows over. Generally, reddit has very short term institutional memory, by next week new users and admins will be like "Victoria who?!"
This is probably the clearest explanation I've seen. The reddit community has always been a very proudly geeky bunch that enthusiastically embraced internet culture.
It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for whom it isn't endogenous - at its best, it combines a commitment to free expression, a geeky pride in understanding how things work, a strong appreciation for authenticity, a pushback against attention seeking, and an embrace of a multitude of interests.
At its worse, well, it's really bad - you get the opinions of minorities dismissed, and you can have people doing all sorts of heinous stuff (revenge porn, etc) under the guise of free speech.
However, to horribly paraphrase Whitman.. it contains multitudes. Watching what used to be a beloved site being run by people who don't seem to even understand the ideals of their users is very grating.
As an analogy, imagine if the editor of the NYRB somehow ended up as the director of the organization that runs Nascar. Personally, I've never watched a Nascar race in my life and I doubt I ever will - but there are people that are fanatical about that culture, who would resent having a complete outsider who looks upon their hobby with contempt running the show.
Honestly, though... isn't this just a total overreaction? I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA (which once WASN'T a celebrity PR stop) but how does setting the whole damn subreddit to private help anyone? Like, I'm seriously asking. How?
The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all.
Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough?
It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.
Victoria being fired is basically the last straw in what has been close to a year of friction between the people who volunteer to provide and manage reddit's content (the moderators) and the people who profit off of their work (reddit the corporation).
This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.
Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that one of the IAmA mods went "It's been a good run, I'm shutting it down?")
So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.
Volunteer moderators are an extremely common feature of forums all over the internet. The only forums I know of that have paid moderators are forums for specific companies and their products.
> I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA
And a number of other subreddits, all fairly large, and all now without a way to fulfill promises made because of this. You don't get it, because if you did, you'd realize why it was more than just /r/IAMA.
So, you should do some reading until you do understand it, because right now, everything you just said screams ignorance.
>The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.
Eh, I have trouble extending the concept of "censorship" of the internet to private websites deciding what can go on their own sites. HN flags and kills threads too. That's not censorship, because HN is Y Combinator's website, so they can pick and choose what kind of content they do and don't want discussed on their site. I could imagine saying, "[HN | Reddit | Slashdot | whatever] is running their site in a way I disagree with", but it's hard for me to imagine complaining that they are censoring me, and getting on some kind of high horse about "free speech", as a bunch of people on this subject seem to be doing.
If something really becomes a central medium of communication such that it's hard to avoid it, like the telephone system, internet infrastructure (backbones, DNS, etc.), and so on, then it starts to be a different issue imo. Then regulation as some kind of content-neutral common carrier might be in order. But does Reddit really play such a role? Twitter or Facebook seem closer to filling such a role, if we were going to pick one of those platforms.
It probably would have been better to frame it as: you can have open communities (old Reddit), or controlled communities (new Reddit) - but you can't have a controlled community that pretends to be an open community (not for very long, the contradiction destroys itself).
Reddit it's founders/community/company have been against PIPA/CISPA/TPP and pro EFF . Freedom on the site and an anti-censorship policy is "that one thing you need to get right", and will allow you to survive through getting a lot of other things wrong.
The thing is that as a user I want some control over what I see. I do not want NSFW content in my feed, or to accidentally see things that are illegal/NSFL. I want to avoid the worse of the troll and hatey people. Reddit does not have freedom of speech, it has admin controlled thiefdoms. This works well, but if a particular community jepardises the whole it should go elsewhere.
> "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
Some portions of the Internet have culture in much the same way that food you forget at the back of your fridge grows culture. And they should be treated much the same way.
Its really crazy actually. Large scale communities seemed doomed to experience a period of mass exidous, or rebellion. Though the subreddit feature I think played a big part in delaying it, it would seem to be coming more likely an inevitability. I think the only saving grace for Reddit right now is there's not a very clear exit point. Voat as a Reddit clone populated by the skurge of reddit, and fleeted with technical problems doesn't seem likely to take the flag next.
>We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin
What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.
These realms all started off as great communities with people who were mostly in it to participate and contribute to the discussion. But over time the zeitgeist became cool, and as soon as that happens, the bean-counters arrive.
And once that happens, it is pretty much game over for the community, no matter what technology is being used to sustain it.
Fundamentally there isn't much difference between your reddits and slashdots and USENETS .. and HN's .. in the end, the community is only as valuable as it perceives itself to have value. And then when the value becomes something that is co-opted by others who desire to exploit that value, a self-awareness of that value by the collective becomes its own worst fault. Reddit is clearly being invalidated by people who don't want the value they create to be valued differently by people who have what they consider to be differing values.
So it goes. I hope the next forum where people can creatively contribute to the dialog is not centralized. But that's hard - you have to have somewhere to meet, after all ..
Usenet died because the ISPs no longer offer newsgroup access. Back in the dialup days, services like this were standard, and they made the internet truly awesome.
Once high speed (DSL, cable) took over they axed all Usenet servers. Unless you had Hampster continuously scouring for insecure and open servers, you had to pay for a SuperNews account.
Spare us, Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there. Just look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments[0]. Not to mention the celeb nudes debacle, which was allowed then disallowed and announced by a sysadmin [1]. And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee [2]. Then we can go way back to /r/jailbait and the Violentacrez affair, the only mod to be awarded a golden trophy [3]. I could keep going but I think we're good.
The tide changed with Pao. All of those were roadblocks, but never had the community turned so swiftly against the admins until Pao arrived. There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Pao. kn0thing has had missteps but generally has had the respect of the community. The community largely does not respect Pao.
There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Yishan Wong as well. Name some of the concrete things Ellen Pao has done at Reddit to be the cause of all of this, or any of this.
Any criticism I've read seems to be based around how she's a woman and she used her womanness to get ahead.
Nothing she has done as the CEO of Reddit is evidence of the need for the awful insults and copypasta I've seen lobbed at her. And these aren't hidden in the recesses of MRA subreddits, they're the top comments on any thread with any mention of Pao.
Nothing to do with her being a woman and it sucks to even bring that up - it makes no difference. I'm speculating here, but I think the problem is largely that Pao is an ex-lawyer, wealthy investor that is married to a hedge fund manager. Reddit being a largely liberal/young/mass appeal/quirky internet subculture collective (at least at it's core) would see any ex-lawyer, wealthy investor married to a hedge fund manager as an outsider. She comes off as an "out of touch 1%'er" that is there to make the site more corporate and "safe" for advertisers, ruining its culture to make herself even richer. It doesn't help that she apparently doesn't even know how to use the site.
It's like being a software engineer and getting a new manager that previously worked at Goldman Sachs, wears expensive suits to the office, asks you for help using Microsoft Word, but then tells you to switch from IntelliJ to Borland JBuilder because he owns some shares in Borland. He doesn't get the culture, he's an outside and is making decisions to actively ruin your environment. That's how it feels.
> And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee
This was awesome. The employee started the trash talk, fully expecting Reddit not to defend itself (as expected of bullshit corporate america). It was perfect /r/justiceporn when Wong came out swinging in response. Glorious to see.
Would you work for Reddit right now, or even then?
I got the impression then, and I definitely get it now, that the management has little respect for their employees. In the case of Yishan's spat, it was definitely relatable, but it definitely had the smell of the company that view employees as assets to be managed and controlled rather than people with emotions and opinions.
whether it was political or performance based, he did raise a rather rational point. If your company is unprofitable/showing weak earnings, it might not make sense to give away 10% of all of the money you take in over the fiscal year.
Yishan has other problems, but yes I really dislike anti-discrimination laws for example. A better idea is to impose anti-discrimination restrictions on specific companies.
I wrote out a well thought out response to this, but decided to simply ask you to re-read your own post.
> Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there.
This is true, and all the more worrying. It has a track record of being unsuccessful both at the managerial level and a financial one.
> look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments
"popcorn tastes good" -670 karma
With submissions frozen on top subreddits, massive community backlash against the CEO, and a huge schism forming among communities he decides to antagonize a bit and keep his head down.
> the celeb nudes debacle
reddit is 4chan with a better layout. It is frankly absurd they didn't have a contingency for this, and that they didn't communicate it well. This is hallmark of the company ethos of a lack of preparedness, lack of consistency and above all, a failure to communicate.
> CEO Yishan Wong
Unprofessional for a CEO to go into a thread and blast an employee publicly. At least it felt that way as he never seemed to post visibly but did this simply to settle a score. Also said employee claimed his questioning of allocating 10% of all revenue for the year to charity. Whatever the reason he was fired, if your company is struggling an not posting acceptable profits it is irrational to give $0.10 of every dollar away and operate close to a loss.
>jailbait
This was sort of the beginning of when free speech really came to a head against morality. They have made no progress on this front. Also, jailbait was probably a little closer to black and white than things like gamergate and this adolescent namecalling.
Conclusion
So those massive problems, which are mostly unreseolved, or are symptoms of unresolved issues, have culminated in hiring of techs most hated person of 2014-2015, who has no credible qualifications to run this company. Compounding those issues, she really failed to connect with the community and I would suspect (guessing here) that the transition has been tough in the office as well. The only thing that has kept reddit working this whole time were moderators and the community which have now totally turned on it.
tl;dr arguing a company has a track record of being run poorly but still managing to survive, doesn't seem like a great argument for its success.
im not sure if it matters what happened in the past per se... its the amount, the type, etc.:
once something start to be massively as "bad" and the content is generated by those users seeing it as "bad" it just stops being what it was. It's like saying Firefox or IE aren't good browser. IE is a pretty good browser nowaday, but that's an unpopular opinion.
It feels like reddit is going to reach this point now...
For years all it would've taken is a solid competitor with good technology and management and Reddit is gone. Right now Reddit's really the only game in town. If someone were to come along with technology that wouldn't regularly crash and tools to help the moderators moderate and allow the community managers to quickly and effectively respond to problems; and a solid management team to be proactive and keep improving the site (not to mention make a few bucks) then Reddit would be in real trouble.
No. It was thanks to the ISPs dumping NNTP servers.
Back in the dialup days, they had NNTP servers available, pulling nearly all the NGs. As time went by, alt.binaries took over 99% of the bandwidth, along with a nice cornucopia of pirated content. It was rather awesome.
When DSL/Cable took over, those companies axed their news servers, if they had any at all. And your server choice was to use a non-binaries carrying, post limited free server or paid server.
I think it's a bit of a "google" mindset, which has become pervasive in the industry really. The idea of concentrating on managing a product, a platform, a system, etc. and giving short shrift to the community and interfacing with your user base. This is aggravated by the preponderance of free services, such as reddit, which make it all the easier to write off such interactions as non-productive. Instead there's an attempt to interact with the "community" and the "user base" as a conglomerate whole, but ultimately that's a weak method of interacting, at some point the rubber has to meet the road and that means person to person interactions and relationships. This is why sales people are so damned valuable, because that sort of interaction is hugely important.
P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.
The Problem is that, as reddit grows as a company it has been starting to put more of it's corporate influence onto the community it is so famous for. Reddit has always been a play of internet culture and freedom and though some of these changes have been, arguably, good a lot of it has been bad with communication errors between the company and the community leading to the problems we are seeing now. Reddit Corporate is learning a lesson in not biting the hand that feeds it. For so long they thought that they were the hand but it seems that it was the other way around.
Reddit management is somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They have a very free-for-all culture now, with the norms of the site driven largely by the community. As expected, these norms do not drive a lot of monetization -- the community is not constantly pushing for ways to make Reddit profitable. So management is trying to wrest control over the huge community in order to take it towards some more profitable territory, but at least to date they don't seem to be able to do so in a way that doesn't trigger a strong immune response.
I think no one really knows why the community is getting pissed off constantly. Right now it's just acting as an angry mob with no brain. And if you follow all this drama, you will see that they bring a lot of golds (so a lot of money to reddit) and that they die out in a day or two.
Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.
One of the most telling points is from /u/imakuram, moderator for /r/books:
"This seems to be a seriously stupid decision. We have several AMAs upcoming in /r/books and have no idea how to contact the authors."[1]
They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support. Given that the key feature in ensuring the quality of Reddit is the moderation "donated" by the community, this is a deeply dangerous move, especially as many of the moderators are already irritated.
If Reddit forcibly take control of the subreddits, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a Reddit civil war.
> They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support.
Reddit's major liability (and yet, one of its strengths) is the devolvement of responsibility to moderators. Without their volunteer work, the site couldn't have grown as big as it has. But mods have the power to utterly trash the site through collective action.
The admins have spent years saying that moderators are responsible for the content and direction of a subreddit. I wonder whether they'll keep that line now that moderators of several key subreddits have effectively gone rogue.
This is actually a much bigger threat to Reddit than the recent revolt over the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits.
I feel like it was a situation where the few are in power because the huddled masses don't know that they can actually revolt. The admins have been neglecting tools and moderators for quite a while, and you can see a trend over the last ~3 months of more and more general unhappiness with the site. The admins didn't think the moderators would realize it, but they did. They found a peaceful protest that the reddit admins absolutely have to address, either by fixing things, or by abandoning all credibility and removing the mods from their subreddits.
Interesting fact w/r/t how pissed people are at him on Reddit: people have gone back and downvoted every single one of his comments now, to the point that several pages back his comments (typically which get upvoted like crazy) are in the negatives.
Still, it is only symbolic. Not that internet points are really that important anyway but seeing as his last posts are already 4 days old, all this reactionary downvoting will do nothing to his overall "karma". After 2 days, a downvote will not reduce your karma. So yeah, all this does is show the rest that apparently there are a lot of upset people out there.
> All this does is show the rest that apparently there are a lot of upset people out there.
Which is actually important; if you run the site and your comments have a -2000 karma your users are telling you a very clear message that something isn't right.
Kind of funny. On the one hand the angry mobs want their freeze peach. On the other hand they seem awfully touchy about people, well, exercising their free speech.
Alexis Ohanian is one of the cofounders of Reddit who had left and has since returned as Executive Chair, he's also a current partner at YC, and goes by the username kn0thing on Reddit & HN.
Peak Reddit was 2011-2014. The people running the 'business' just don't realize it yet. Three years from now, Reddit will be half as influential as it has been these past three years.
A community like Reddit is incredibly challenging to keep balanced long-term. Services like it just tend to blow-up eventually. The upside is, innovation will probably come out of its meltdown, new types of services will bloom, and wipe out what's left of Reddit's value proposition.
On the other hand, Reddit has tons of mostly-isolated subcommunities that will continue to thrive, because they aren't really dependent on the Reddit userbase; they're just the moral equivalent of hosted copies of the reddit codebase, like WordPress.com instances of WordPress.
I can imagine that people will stop thinking of "Reddit" as a website that everyone visits with "default subreddits" et al, but they will possibly continue to associate the name with the platform.
I agree, lots of communities that peak and decline, also continue forward perpetually - such as FARK, Digg or Metafilter - with smaller dedicated user bases. That's the most likely outcome for Reddit. It's so relatively inexpensive to operate, it's unlikely to fold. More likely it'll be swapped around in acquisitions, spin-offs, etc. as different parents try their hands at getting the mojo back (the MySpace / Digg scenario).
Yeah cause what you want to do, as an employer, is go out to a community of people you have no control over and say, 'Hey we are about to fire one of your favorite admins, one of your friends maybe. But don't freak out it'll be ok. We can't talk about why we want to fire her, but trust us. Oh and can you not mention it to her before we fire her tomorrow.'
I'm curious how this was communicated to the admins. Even in the case where, say, she punched kn0thing in the nose and was currently being carted off to jail, I imagine you could say "Hey mods, something came up, since it's a personnel matter there's unfortunate legal stuff involved, but we needed to terminate Victoria's employment a couple of minutes ago. For now, full responsibility for running AMAs is with so-and-so, who is not going to be as good at it but will try their best. This is what records we have, this is what we don't and we're working on getting them as soon as possible. This sucks and we're really sorry about the impact on AMAs, but so-and-so will try to make things as non-bad as possible, and they will be super easily reachable for you until we figure out what's happening long term."
It appears that there was no communication with the mods[0]. They only found out because someone who was supposed to do an AMA told them Victoria wasn't available to help them[1].
There was no transition or contingency plan announced to the mods[2]. At first, the admins responded dismissively[3][4], but afterwards they took the issue more receptively[5].
It sound like this started the same way it would if someone was hit by a bus. All owns sudden they were just GONE.
Unless the firing was REALLY fast this hasn't been handled well. It's obvious she was important and did a lot of work. If Reddit knew even one day in advance they should have had some sort of plan on how to handle her workload l. Basic business continuity for others.
Instead it sounds like everything got dropped on the floor and Reddit is rushing to pick up the pieces and it's clearly not working.
They could have, and should have, simply stated that she will be gone in a month and laid out at the same time what the handover process would be, given her a generous severance conditional on not stating publicly that she was actually fired until x months or years have passed (by which time nobody will give a shit anymore), and carried on. If they had done this, none of this backlash would have happened at all.
Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most upvoted questions were simply disrespectful. The Reverend's answers were mostly boilerplate and often unresponsive to the question. The AMA seems to have been part of some PR rollout -- Mother Jones had an article three days ago about Jackson taking on Silicon Valley. The event seems to have failed the rollout's objectives.
Not a great moment for anyone: The AMA didn't always feature the Reddit community at its best, but the Reverend didn't show at all well under the spotlight of Radical Transparency.
Given all that, the timing and speed of the admin's firing hardly seems coincidental. Reddit seems to have blown up a number of ongoing events, and upset an important chunk of its community, which hardly suggests that her firing relates to some long-term issue.
I can see why Reddit might feel the event wasn't handled well.
But it is also very plausible that Jackson and his camp were deeply embarrassed, and insisted that someone be punished for that. So plausible, in fact, that I think Reddit really should give some account that demonstrates that this is _not_ what happened -- or admit that it did.
It is very surprising that this whole thing hasn't gotten more coverage in the tech press.
If you are a public figure, it is your (really, your manager's or agent's) responsibility to manage your image. An important part of that is deciding which engagements are good opportunities for you and which are not. It is also your own responsibility to be prepared for an engagement to go poorly -- unexpected/negative questions, hecklers, etc -- and have a plan in place for how to respond to that. If you're not willing or able to do these things, you should decline invitations like this and live privately. Or at the very least, don't complain when you don't get the result you were hoping for when you accepted.
I think it's pretty forseeable that an AMA would likely result in a lot of uncomfortable questions for a highly controversial figure like Rev. Jackson. That can be an opportunity, or it can be a disaster. It does not seem that he was properly prepared for it either way. That's not Reddit's fault nor Chooter's; it's his.
All that said, it's clear that Reddit is not a well-managed company, and this appears to have gotten worse since they hired Ellen Pao. So it's certainly possible that the people calling the shots over there don't get it, or are trying to reimagine Reddit as something it is not. If that's so, then your theory is entirely plausible. But it still doesn't explain the lack of communication or any semblance of a backup plan. If you're employing someone who has no alternate, and you have no plan in place to transfer that person's duties, the only reason to fire that person on the spot is that they're committing felonies directly related to the company or its business. Anything else -- and I do mean anything else; I don't care if they took a giant shit right on your desk -- can wait 24 business hours while you get some kind of continuity plan in place. As a manager, if you can't control your own anger or impetuousness well enough to avoid torpedoing your own business out of spite, you don't belong in your role. Ellen Pao, we're looking at you.
Despite your own image / plans being your own responsibility, it's not like there aren't people with public profiles (celebs, politicians, etc) out there who are vindictive over failed PR events.
I think I have a plausible explanation (please beware, this is 100% conjecture).
Hypothesis 1: Jackson's AMA went badly, he/his team was specifically pissed at Victoria and demanded consequences, threatening a public campaign against reddit.
Hypothesis 2: Conde Nast is not happy about the public perception of reddit as the biggest blob of hate on the Internet. So they might have given them a "one more headline news scandal" ultimatum.
In that situation, there are no winners, only losers, there is nothing to gain and there isn't even a 100% guilty party.
>Jackson's AMA went badly, he/his team was specifically pissed at Victoria and demanded consequences, threatening a public campaign against reddit.
This is a very plausible conjecture, especially in view of admins' comments in wake of the fatpeoplehate ban explicitly permitting racist anti-black subreddits to continue to operate. This could have become an existential threat to reddit. In view of that, and their apparent weathering of past anti-user controversies, a user revolt would seem like the lesser evil from a short-sighted perspective.
I don't think the questions were overly disrespectful. It's an Ask Me Anything, not an Ask Me Respectful Things. And it's not the first time someone has called him a shakedown artist or mentioned his out-of-wedlock child.
>Mr. Jackson, You are an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain. You've personally set back race relations year after year and continue to do more harm than good. Extorting money from companies to line your pockets and threatening to bus in protestors and create a fake racial controversy if they don’t agree to pay you off is NOT civil rights activism. My question is simple; how is your relationship with the illegitimate child you fathered in 1998 while cheating on your wife? Bonus question: How much money have you extorted from various people and companies over the years of practicing your shakedown scheme? Do you think Al Capone would be jealous of your business model if he were still alive?
That is the "best" question according to Reddit's sorting algorithm. I think that easily qualifies as "overly disrespectful".
It one thing to ask tough questions. It is another to call a man an immoral race baiter, say he set back his cause years, call him an extortionist, chastise him for an affair, and then insinuate he is worse than one of the most notorious criminals in US history all within a single paragraph. That isn't a question, it is a personal attack.
I sadly don't think it is surprising that a comment like that is posted. But it is a black eye on the Reddit community that it was upvoted more than any other question in the AMA.
The question was on point though. It was a tough question and it hurt, but the guy isn't just "some guy" he goes on TV almost every night to push his political agenda. He was called out for being a hypocrite and people in his position deserve to be called out for being hypocritical, deceitful, and manipulative.
None of this is anything new though, it's widely accepted that Jackson is a demagogue.
It's equivalent to what happens to someone like E.L. James when she does a Twitter Q&A. Or when Anne Coulter does a Q&A on Reddit.
There was no scenario under which Jessie Jackson was going to get anything but slammed (in semi-respectful and completely disrespectful ways). His profile is very, very polarizing to say the least.
Ultimately you either have a completely open community, or a tightly controlled community. Given a bit of time, there can be no middle ground.
The phrasing is awful, agreed. But as GP pointed out, it is "ask me anything." further, each of the points raised are the kinds of thing I would expect to be addressed directly in a transparent interview format. Surely that user could have found a more respectful way to phrase it, but asking questions about someone's right to a morally superior attitude when that is central to their PR? Not that out of line.
While I agree it is disrespectful, clearly there are plenty of people who don't respect him. If that question causes you to melt down and get someone fired then you're not worthy of respect.
I'm pretty certain AMA disasters do not qualify as fireable. And firing the facilitator with a history of good AMAs for that reason is hardly an appropriate remedy even if that is so.
'Have you felt regretful for rushing to judgement after condemning the "perpetrators" of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal during 2006-07?'
'No, the pattern is consistent. And we never want injustice to occur. But the pattern is fairly obvious, and a very obvious pattern that must be ended.'
The Reverend isn't interested in fairness to individuals, he's interested in "patterns". If he feels himself subjected to a pattern he feels unfair, well, fairness to any individual is less important than ending that pattern.
The Reverend is not the guy you'd want arguing with Yahweh to spare Sodom and Gomorrah lest He unjustly punish the innocent with the guilty.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but I'm not sure I see how that relates to the departure of a Reddit employee facilitating that AMA. He answered the question, right? Whether the answer is terrible maybe impacts what you think of him, but not what you think of the person making the AMA happen (either as a person or as an employee), right?
Or did he not actually answer the question, and did someone else answer in his place? Or is there more going on, like he regretted that answer?
He probably refretted the answer, because it's like he didn't even read the question before answering with some boilerplate answer, which is probably why the question got rated so high after the answer.
I do. But I was jailed in 1960. For trying to use a public library. And that caused more good than harm. I marched to end segregation. The day Dr. King spoke on Washington, in 1963, I was there for that speech. That day, from Texas to Florida, you couldn't use a single public toilet. We could not buy ice cream at Howard Johnson's, or stay in Holiday Inns. We fought to bring those barriers down. And because those walls are down, all the new interstate construction across the South - the new bridges and ports, and seaports - that's progress. You couldn't have teams behind the Cotton Curtain. You couldn't have had Olympics in Atlanta behind the Cotton Curtain. You couldn't have Toyota, and Michelin, behind the Cotton Curtain, so we pulled those walls down.
So our work has been beneficial. And it seems to me that people who benefit from that work ascribe it to the wrong reasons.
When the laws change to make the South more civil, that brought in more investment. So we've made America better.
All these changes have come from our work. Our work has bene good for the South, and good for America.
My goal is to expand our consciousness, to create as big a tent as possible, as we fight for justice and world peace. I was able to bring Americans home from jail, from prison, and gaining those freedom of those Americans was the highest and best use of my talents and time.
Replying to myself to include a relevant point (reported by Digg, of all people): /u/kickme444, a Reddit employee and founder of RedditGifts, was also let go. RedditGifts was the other weird subreddit that had paid staff at corporate.
It is a demonstration that the Reverend doesn't much care about fairness to individuals, and so would not feel qualms about insisting someone be fired because he was embarrassed.
OK, and why would Reddit go along with that? IAmA was one of the most monetizable parts of Reddit, and it needed a full-time staff member to work. The site was already vaguely unhappy with the admins (though maybe those folks were leaving). Jesse Jackson's personal support doesn't mean much to Reddit, I'm pretty sure. Even if it made sense for him to want Victoria fired, which I'm not sure it does, and even if nobody at Reddit felt qualms about firing their coworker, it still makes no business sense why this was the right move for Reddit.
Quoting the International Business Times: "The AMA in question, which took place just two days before Taylor's firing was revealed, was widely regarded to be nothing short of a disaster. When the top question on the AMA calls the person answering questions 'an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain', you know you are in trouble. [...] However the suggestion that this was the reason for Taylor's firing does seem tenuous at best, and outright ridiculous in reality." There are some more plausible reasons in that story. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reddit-revolt-why-was-popular-direc...
"[T]he suggestion that this was the reason for Taylor's firing does seem tenuous at best, and outright ridiculous in reality." That is an assertion, and one without any argument or evidence. The other two theories mentioned by the article (anti-relocation, anti-commercialization) aren't consistent with such an abrupt and poorly handled firing.
Now why would Reddit fire Victoria over the AMA? There are many _possible_ reasons. Here are some speculations.
One, no company wants to be the target of Reverend Jackson or his supporters complaining that they treated him in a disrespectful or racist fashion. Look at how some of the various tech diversity controversies have played out, and how quickly. Reddit may well have worried that _not_ firing Victoria could have put them in a "Reddit is racist" cross-hairs that could quickly have spun out of control. Especially given how much of exactly that sort of material is floating around on various subreddits. Given how those controversies can roll, reasoning like this may even have been in some sense correct. Lose the whole company in a Twitter storm? Or fire a popular employee and irritate a bunch of mods?
Two, CEO Pao is on record talking about the importance of diversity at Reddit. It may very well be that she felt the AMA was cross-wise her own values, and those she wants to promote at Reddit.
Three, CEO Pao may also regard the Reverend and his supporters as important allies for purposes of her own, apart from her role as Reddit's CEO. She's certainly out there as interested in diversity issues, and admired by many for that. It isn't hard to imagine that she would be concerned about that image.
Four, others at Reddit may have felt the AMA didn't represent their values. Silicon Valley is notoriously progressive, and when dealing with political questions people often don't think straight. The conflict between "AMAs can be rough" and "Reverend Jackson deserves more respect than that" creates cognitive dissonance. That makes decision-making very hard. Add in some pressure from Jackson or his people -- whom many in Silicon Valley _want_ to perceive as reasonable and intelligent folks, and exposed to a lot of unreasonable criticism -- and good choices start to get difficult.
We don't _know_ anything, of course. The basic point is, the Jackson AMA created a _political_ situation for Reddit. Political decision-making is already hard, and the thinking about it easily confused. Reddit may have made a political choice driven by business concerns. Or it may have made political choices based on its employees personal agendas or outlooks.
Or, the timing of the firing and the AMA were completely coincidental.
Even if you grant one through four, the role of AMA facilitator is incredibly monetarily important for Reddit, and also incredibly politically important for Reddit as a platform. Victoria was their one paid control of AMA. The mods (as we saw) are volunteers and answer to nobody. Reddit's management isn't dumb, they know that.
(Speculation one also seems somewhat unlikely given that, for instance, /r/coontown is still around. They'd be an obvious scapegoat if you wanted to curry favor with Jackson or with the Twitter folks who were already saying that Reddit was racist. And they're far less valuable to Reddit than an employee was.)
What they could have done, if they really wanted, was to trump up some charges against the AMA mods (perhaps for not moderating that AMA well) and replace some or all of the mod team. That would have placated Jackson, or Twitter, or Pao's self-image, or whomever, while cementing control of AMA in the future. Reddit continued to have an employee involved in running AMAs, and she could have been pressured into keeping AMAs reflect the message Reddit wants to send.
So even if someone (Jackson, Pao, someone else at Reddit) felt like Something Needed To Be Done in response to that AMA, it's far from obvious that firing someone would have been a response that occurred to them. What we're assuming here is not just poor decision-making blinded by ideology / political exigency / whatever, but poor decision-making in the face of other, obvious, obviously better options. That's what makes it so hard to believe.
We know that Reddit already implemented a move-or-get-fired policy. We know that Reddit is bad at handling employee termination (and lots of companies are, to be fair). We know that, fairly recently, Reddit terminated an employee for not moving, and handled it very abruptly, too, without contacting the subreddit they were assigned to work with. "Management decided to fire the employee for standard company-politics reasons, and did a bad job of it" seems perfectly within reason.
Or, you've generated Scenario Five: Reddit wanted to remove a mod in connection with the Jackson AMA, Victoria refused to cooperate, they fired her instead.
But I would definitely agree that what looks like conspiracy generally turns out to be stupidity.
My heart goes out to the athletes ruined by the scandal. There is another point of view. Something us Internet commenters don't often realize. Do you have any black friends who was at Duke during that time? Ask them to describe it.
That's a good ask. I wasn't trying to be snarky. I really don't understand it that well and I don't think it means as much coming from an Asian person. And honestly I'm not comfortable arguing about it on a public forum.
Well, I didn't take it for being snarky. I also don't want to engage in any kind of argument, I just want to hear about the point you were trying to make. You even said it was "something us Internet commenters don't often realize", so this would be a great forum to share the viewpoint, since it is almost by definition filled with internetters
(Translation for the reddit-impaired: Woody Harrelson came to IAMA trying to do publicity for his movie Rampart. His cluelessness and apparent entitlement nearly blotted out the sun.)
> Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most upvoted questions were simply disrespectful.
I think anyone could have seen that coming. Anonymous accounts with community voting and an API to boot? This is only asking for trouble - especially if the AMA was done by an individual who wasn't familiar with the personality of the community or internet etiquette in general. Assuming every other AMA was respectful/successful - they were just playing a game of russian roulette.
I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit - don't get wrong I love the idea of an exchange of comments between the common person and famous people but I certainly wouldn't want to do it on an anonymous posting site.
Edit: To the downvoters - I should point out that assuming that reddit has automated systems in place to detect fraudulent voting - someone with a botnet could easily defeat it. It's easy to detect when the same guy is upvotting posts from the same IP or same block of IPs - how do you detect that when the voting are coming from all over the world? It doesn't even have to be a botnet - how do you know that the android/ios game you just downloaded isn't making web service calls in the background to a site like reddit? If I was a bad guy - I would definitely outsource development of some useful app or game and embed my upvoting code into that once it becomes popular.
> I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit
Some celebrities seem to be thriving on reddit. I've seen Arnold Schwarzneggar engage users on /r/fitness, and he has posted several videos (that tank one was one I saw recently) along with doing PR for his Terminator movie.
Whoever is helping him along seems to be doing a great job.
> I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit
Celebrity AMAs more often than not go really really well, even for controversial figures like Obama.
Reddit just has a tendency to lash out at a) people who are obviously just using the site for PR (the Rampart AMA) and b) terrible people (Jesse Jackson) tend to go bad because people simply don't like them in general.
Yeah, it's surprising there isn't any tools for vetting questions, and perhaps requiring accounts to have a certain age or karma... then again it kinda goes against the openness of reddit, which is nice and all but tends to break down when a site gets large enough
Questions get voted up or down. Either Reddit has a problem with being gamed and trolls can successfully get their questions upvoted, or that's what the audience wanted.
Reddit admin's recent decisions have painted an impression that they think that administrative actions are favors to hand out to their personal social group. Like, it's the explanation that makes sense both for this as well as the banning of /r/neofag.
I'd be surprised if it was about that (at least only) and not more about reddit wanting to bring AMA's back to a team at their SF office rather than NY... but your guess is as good as mine
The admin in question, Victoria (/u/chooter), is still posting, and gives every indication that it was not an expected nor voluntary departure: https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter
> We had a number of AMAs scheduled for today that Victoria was supposed to help with, and they are all left absolutely high and dry (hence taking IAMA private to figure out the situation) She was still willing to help them today (before the sub was shut down, of course) even without being paid or required to do so. Just a sign of how much she is committed to what she does.
> The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that [...] down immediately. We can't do that anymore. Part of it is also that Victoria is an essential lifeline of communication. When something goes wrong in an AMA, we can call and get it fixed immediately. Otherwise, we have to resort to desperately try messaging the person via Reddit (and they may not know to check their messages or even to look for these notifications).
If there's anything to be learned here for the larger technology crowd, it's this: There are human single-points-of-failure just like there are in hardware. And if you can't avoid having a SPOF, don't kick it in the face out of nowhere and expect the world to continue chugging along like nothing happened.
It's not even that: apparently the mods weren't notified of the organizational change because "we were busy handling the day's flow of AMAs and taking care of those AMA guests took priority."
> Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that [...] down immediately.
Righteous firing or not, a lot of this is a lesson in avoiding a SPOF.
From a systems dynamics point-of-view, single points of failure are problematic.
However, in human dynamics and the foundation of all leadership (and thus creating genuine followership), it requires a single point of accountability.
Leaders of any community are accountable to their followers.
Leaders have to realize that the community and the purpose are always more important than them.
I think the reason why u/chooter was considered a leader (or top-notch liason between admins and mods) was because of her commitment to the quality of the AMA.
I think the reason why u/chooter is adored by readers was for the same reason, though typically expressed by her inate ability to capture the AMA guests voices, mannerisms, etc. She was being 100% accountable to the community and the purpose that she was serving.
This is a thing to be admired, encouraged, and emulated. Not scorned or spoken of in terms of an acronym.
I'm not picking a thread fight, as I think your perspective is very important within hardware networks and/or very relevant in process management, it's quite inaccurate when describing the human dynamics involved with building a community.
Given the bizarre nature of Jackson's comments in that AMA, I somewhat suspect that Victoria fucked up by writing down what Jackson was saying over the phone verbatim.
Doing that is usually a good way to make somebody seem rather illiterate. For example, people are much looser with the way they structure sentences and organize thoughts when speaking in an unprepared manner.
When you listen to audio of them talking, everything seems normal because we have different expectations for written English and spoken English. When you don't get to listen to the audio but only read a transcript, then you start to get problems because then you have written English that only meets a spoken English standard.
The JJ angle has already been removed as the reason for dismissal. (Besides, Victoria is known, adored for actually being able to type down what the person doing the AMA sounds like --see Jeff Glodblum AMA).
I suspect that this had much more to do with the one thing that a management team is more interested in: money.
- AMAs are (or were?) probably one of the most visited subs on Reddit
- AMAs readers are often on pages for hours
- AMAs are on reddit-domained pages, so the "real estate" is valuable and "in-house"
If there was a management idea to "tweak" the AMAs to monetize it and Victoria thought it would not be true to the community, and spoke up, it would be easy to see why they would sack her.
This is much more likely to be the cause than capturing the typing down an AMA guest comments in the cadence they have been provided.
It's not impossible that she is lying, but I think it is quite plausible that Marc's contact is not as authoritative as Marc seems to think. He is probably just repeating that person's speculation.
I'd also like to point out that if they fired Victoria for embarrassing Jackson, admitting that this was the case would be counterproductive because it would make a mob of angry redditors [even more] angry at Jackson.
Reddit started going badly downhill (where it was a visible and public departure from what it was previously) from around the time that Sam Altman personally invested in the company nine months ago, an announcement that almost ruptured my cringe-pipes. I laughed internally at the notion that he thinks he's altruistic by giving 10% back to the users, whilst in the same announcement he mentions reddit reaching a billion users.
So, Sam was boasting that of his shares he owns 90%, whilst each of the "shareholders" (a reddit user) has 0.0000000001% – and that's exactly what I expect from investors.
Then Yishan Wong resigns, it felt more like a pushing, one month after Sam invests, and is replaced by Pao; who has a history of going after previous employers because she's angry that she's a woman. Nobody has the nerve to fire Pao because they're afraid of being called sexist.
It's like Reddit is this persistent YC nightmare that he feels he needs to "right the history" on it and somehow make it successful.
And they're just massively failing at every step. Out of touch, out of clue. Reddit the company is at this point completely removed from the actual site. They went back into startup mode but you would never know it looking at the site. No new features, same old shitty reliability, nothing.
Video AMAs are easier to sanitise. They ask for questions then give the 10 most upvoted to the guys to provide a video response. Of course the 10 most upvoted may not be easy softball questions so they can remove these and the guest never knows about them. Right now the guest knows the questions but can refuse to answer them but then it is apparent they are ignoring difficult questions. With a video AMA they get to distance themselves considerably from anything out of their comfort zone.
PLoS, the open-access science publication, was putting on an excellent series [1]. Given Victoria's role in that, her loss puts that significant scientific outreach in jeopardy. A sad casualty. It was fantastic to see the front-lines of cutting edge research getting asked, answering, and otherwise motivating a lot of really interesting public discussion. Even if they repost all that old discussion (all those links on the blog currently don't work), it won't be trivial to fill Victoria's role in the upcoming AMAs, if they hold them at all.
If you look at the backlash of the community on the subreddits coming back online, you can see how it was a mistake to involve the immature community of reddit into that moderator/admin tension.
> Due to an unexpected Reddit administrative personnel change /r/science is temporarily private so that we can resolve the situation, our apologizes for any disruption this may cause.
The doublespeak is weird. If it's a protest, say so. There's no direct relation between the employee getting fired and a subreddit that is not focused on celebrity PR going dark.
Did I? Can't /r/science keep on functioning without AMAs through an intermediary in New York that's supposed to read questions and type answers for the supposedly smart scientists doing those Q&A sessions?
Clearly that can't be true. That subreddit is still valuable without AMAs. The people in charge just can't bring themselves to be honest with their users. Look at the re-opening announcement and spot the blatant lies and half-truths:
> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing, we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the inconvenience to the community.
> The comments in this thread will be locked.
They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked the comments. Father knows best.
dealing with rescheduling all future AMAs can suck up a lot of volunteer moderator time. Time that would otherwise have to be spent moderating the sub.
So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a reason to shut down the sub temporarily
I think that a clearer answer for @stefantalpalaru would be that the making /r/science private is the moderators of /r/science sending a message to the Reddit admins. They probably don't feel like grandstanding to the public over the issue. People that care about Reddit drama already know what's going on via other avenues.
People don't give a shit about 'reddit' as a thing, what they care about is the content people submit and the subreddits that foster the communities.
They seem to be going through their own Digg v4 moment here, completely disregarding users because they think they're big enough to survive without them.
Felt I should share this. There are a number of really good established alternatives with great mods and admins for those who wish to branch out and check out something new:
www.snapzu.com - Excellent content and friendly community. Has a unique XP/Leveling system and ability to post content into multiple subs.
www.empeopled.com - Gives you more influence based on the amount of up-votes you've received. Use influence to steer future of the site.
www.theneeds.com - Good content but a lot of it looks automated, possibly using bots. No discussion so you lose a lot of that community feel.
www.hubski.com - Classic alternative, been kicking it around for 4-5 years, but still little activity. Community is small but nice.
www.spreadit.it - A dark themed reddit alternative that is similar to reddit and easy to use. Content and community is lacking however.
Note: I didn't mention the voat boat because I felt they have a little too much hate/racism on there.
Reddit still has those subs about beating women and lynching black people, right? Get over yourself, voat is better than every single example you listed.
I think stackexchange are still running on IIS so it's probably close to doable - although I imagine they have some seriously smart people and resources way beyond what Voat will in the near future.
That said, does Azure play nicely with IIS? I bet it's expensive but can you scale that way maybe?
I thought the super secret internet clubs era was over. How old are you? Most people on voat cross browse. There's even a plugin to put both aggregators in the same page. I don't get where this idea that voat is that "den of pedos and fat haters" is coming from.
Many HN readers should recognize that as the words a certain admin of fark.com.
For those that don't recognize it, the short version of the story was the admins had developed a new front-end to Fark, but they didn't make a general announcement an update was going to happen. The just deployed it one morning... and left for a convention. When the change was discovered a little while later... well... lets just say it was not a popular change[1]. More importantly, nobody know what was going on, making emotions run even higher due to the lack of communication from the admins.
So after being left to stew for 4+ hours - and over 10k posts from confused and angry users - an admin does the absolutly worst thing possible, and made a single post with those four words: "You'll get over it". There were three main reactions to this. Many of us closed the browser and went back to work or otherwise avoided the drama. Maybe 10-15% of users spent the next day flaming the admins at about 10k posts/hour. Finally, about 1/3 close their accounts and left, permanently.
I suspect reddit is in the middle of a similar situation right now.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that the Fark story doesn't really end there. Years later, Fark admin Joe Peacock gave one of the more important talks[3] (at NOTACON 8) I've ever seen, about what exactly went wrong, and the bad decisions that made a catastrophe inevitable. Joe discusses what may be the most important lesson for anyone managing a place where users choose to spend their free time: if you don't involve your user in the decisions and changes that affect them, they wil simply find another place to hang out.
This is a great talk for anyone managing communities. Reddit's current situation does bear many resemblances, especially with kn0thing's "Thank you for the feedback. I hope you change your mind about reddit, but if not, you're entitled to your opinion." response.
This is just amazingly tone-deaf on Reddit's part. I don't even read IAMA regularly and I knew Victoria was well-liked. What is Ellen Pao paying attention to if not their highest-profile subreddit? Did she have no transitional plan?
> This is just amazingly tone-deaf on Reddit's part.
They do not think like a business. They are a storage mechanism for other peoples content which their users generously provide for them to index. They don't make content, they don't generate revenue, they are stuck in a web2.0 model being valued on a per user basis. Reddit probably can't recover as community, but almost certainly not as a business.
> What is Ellen Pao paying attention to
Ideally the calls for her resignation, but it is to little to late probably.
I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as evaluators and filters for others' content. The thing is, almost anyone can evaluate content for basic human emotional or intellectual value. The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.
> I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as evaluators and filters for others' content.
my post was a bit unclear, i meant they literally provide it to the site by finding it and posting it. They act as the first tier of the filtering mechanism(votes being secondary).
> The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.
reddit itself, and many other companies/communities are caught in the trap of placating a vocal minority and exercising to broad of a control on the culture. The Y-Combinator ethos is basically this. Make something that enough people love, rather than a lot of people really like.
This revolt is backlash against changing a well-ingrained culture to try an please discrete sub-groups. Whether these sub-groups are "right" or "wrong" was largely a question of the communities sentiment expressed in posts and votes. When reddit altered the culture here they lost critical mass.
It is happening on 4chan right now as well with people moving to various cloned image boards. Reddit needs it's users a lot more than users need reddit, so we will see what will happen. I am short on reddit and bullish on community choice though.
I basically agree with everything you've said here, so when I pose this question, just consider it food for thought:
Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority? Indeed, they are the ones exercising a great deal of control over reddit and its community.
Critical mass is pretty ambiguous. Is it defined by people who run subreddits, people who visit them, people who vote on them, people who buy reddit gold?
I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators. It was possible because it was very hands off.
Even though reddit has a very open philosophy, moderators of subreddits are anything but hands off.
sort of, they def have power within their own space and can bargain collectively. People hate Pao for many reasons. She is changing the culture (not single handedly) but with special interests. There are social justice/politically correct views being handed down from the company thus removing certain subreddits and restricting topics. Various other interests like moderators and users oppose these changes. That is what I meant about special interest. Many communities within reddit are hostile to one another and have sort of been playing a proxy war. Although, gun to my head, i think many of the people that would happily trade insults with one another, have slowed for now to unite against Pao/Corporate Reddit.
> critical mass is pretty ambiguous.
yeah i was qouting another poster. I think it is just enough people to generate quality content and discussion and cycle through enough depth to not let everything go stale.
> I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators.
4chan had a coup d'état of sorts recently where many moderators and janitors were purged from the board. Moderation became much more strict and many were part of the social justice movement. They banned threads such as #gamegate briefly and some of the culture of the boards changed.
Also people are spreading to 8chan, wizchan, krautchan and irc further sharding out the culture that created many of the things that we regard as "internet culture"
Victoria is literally the only member of the Reddit team, besides the CEO, who I actually know the first name of. Out of all the terrible PR stuff that reddit has gone through lately, this is literally the worst. It's pretty hard to get that upset about banning fatpeoplehate but firing Victoria is pretty much like punching a kitten.
A lot of people said this was because Pao is a woman and reddit is sexist. But then explain this reaction to Victoria.
Here's a thought: the reddit community despises Pao because Pao is in no way part of the community. She's a bizdev-turned-investor corporate suit who seemingly came out of nowhere to now run the site.
She's posted very few times since becoming interim CEO. In fact, only 56 posts.
* 3 short messages when her interim-CEO position was announced.
* 9 when she posted the new privacy policy.
* 8 for Nepal earthquake relief.
* 9 posts for the reddit 10-year anniversary. This, to me, is lame. This is a classic senior executive move where they hide in their office all year round and no one has a clue what the fuck they do, if anything, but they emerge just during the victory celebrations.
Since becoming interim CEO, she has an average ONE post every five days. One posted message -- not even one submission every five days, which would be meatier. By contrast, Jack Dorsey has an average 5 tweets a day since twitter started. Is there any doubt Dorsey uses his own product? Well, we can see that Ellen does not use the product that she is running (unless she has some anonymous accounts). She made a gaffe recently where she posted a message publicly to a user that was meant to be private -- fair or not, that solidified the narrative that she is not a Reddit user.
I have no inside information on Reddit management, but as an outsider who's watched reddit grow over the years, I get the impression the core problem with Reddit right now is not Ellen Pao per se. Ellen Pao was brought in as a person to run Reddit as a business and make money and that's exactly what I presume she is trying to do, the issue here is the vision of the company as a whole, the people (investors, shareholders?) who thought Ellen Pao was a necessary and good candidate to be the CEO.
Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision stays that way.
Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.
It might be useful to distinguish between the vision, the plan to implement that vision, and the execution of that plan.
I think what you're saying is that you cannot conceive of a plan that will successfully implement the vision to make money.
I'd add that execution seems to be sorely lacking, whatever the vision or plan, assuming a real plan even exists (which I suppose it part of execution as well, "have a plan").
I get that reddit is trying to run a successful business, but I don't think the staff is well served by assuming that the users will be happy little community-created-content worker bees no matter what they do. Users DGAF about the business.
All of the admins that were any good at interacting with the community are on the "reddit alum" section of the admin list (read: former employes). And more often than not, the staff doing the high-quality and visible community management was strangely the sysadmins and programmers.
Edit: not strange at all, I just realized that they were probably the only admins that were legit users too. Which would explain why I'd lump pre-sale spez and kn0thing in with people who actually interacted, they posted with their real usernames while also running all the sockpuppets making the site look alive.
What a circus reddit has become. There's probably/hopefully more to this story but still. It will be interesting to see if reddit forces the hands of the biggest subreddits to open again.
Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like reddit to have "public facing" administrators
Many of the biggest subreddits are revolting against the "governing" and gone private in protest, for example:
I'm actually surprised that reddit allows default subreddits to go private or disable themselves in any way. Each community should absolutely be able to moderate themselves, but at the same time being a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.
> a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.
Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.
I'm blown away by what Reddit has been doing in the last few months. I thought it was just me being a get-off-my-lawn old user (since I've been on Reddit like 7-8 years or something) but then I had a young copyrighter (early twenties) talking to me about leaving Reddit for "other places" and that blew me away. I hadn't realized it was starting to trickle down for lack of better words.
>Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.
Let's think about the fact that this is possible for a company to do this to a full-time employee with several years experience next time an election comes up.
Unfortunately, not all of us get the luxury of advance notice on firings/layoffs
You're missing the part about how many things that said person was responsible for are floundering because the admins fired a person that was a single-point-of-failure without any backup plan.
It's like firing someone, then all of the sudden you realize that you need to hire a team of people to replace them, all while your site is down and your servers are on fire (and all of the MBAs are busy looking for someone else to blame so they don't get fired).
You seem to be making a statement about the law - I don't think anyone is suggesting that what Reddit has done here is against the law. Instead, what Reddit has done here strikes many people as rather stupid.
Even in countries where an employer has to give advance notice that just means they have to continue to pay the fired employee. That person can still be sent home if the employer prefers that over the employer continuing their job or training their replacements.
I am also surprised. I wonder what this is going to do for their SEO because there is a lot of content now missing once googles bot gets to some of these pages.
This is an edge case that probably nobody thought about until today. I imagine the ability to take a default sub private will not last through tomorrow.
> being a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.
Mostly filtering whichever collection of racists and woman-haters show up when they become defaults. So at least their moderators are getting a break from that.
Please don't lump this in with the anti-Pao brigade. Like her or not, the issue of admin-moderator relations goes back long before her tenure. I say this as a (currently inactive) moderator of a default subreddit.
Whichever side of the Pao debate you fall on, you have to admit that the CEO of a site that is of the size, scale, and simplicity of Reddit should understand the core functionality of the site.
Shouldn't this be a criticism towards Sam et al, not Ellen? She was offered a good job and took it. Good on her. The failure lies with how completely out of touch the ownership is.
They became good at money and bad at people, which usually happens. Unfortunately for them, reddit is little more than the people.
I work in the silicon valley and I got quite a few promotion offers denied because I'm a white male and that's not promoting diversity. Heck, I didn't even mind it so much as long as the other candidates are +- qualified.
But by that logic, I guess I should sue! ;-) Oh wait...
If you have evidence that people did not hire / promote you because you are white you should totally sue.
Perhaps your recent experience has opened your eyes to the difficulties black people have had for very many years. It is hard to get evidence of discrimination; that makes it hard to bring and win a case; lack of won cases is used as evidence of a lack of discrimination.
Adding the single word promote makes the post entirely an on-topic reply to what he said - white men are not discriminated against "because diversity"; and if they are the exact same legal recourse used by protected classes is open to them.
But since you think I didn't answer their post: what do you think they were talking about?
Do you think that "promotion" is somehow not part of "recruitment and selection"?
Of course it is. They are also known as career-advancement opportunities or whatever you want to call them. But they are most certainly part of recruitment, along with all the other possible benefits the company has to offer.
To be honest hiring or promoting is probably similar so I wouldn't bash him.
It's just unfortunate that the way we "fix things" is never fair. I'd rather we be transparent in the hiring, promoting, and salaries. I'd rather we attempt to fix the social pressure issues.
It kind of funny how people turn their heads away about this situation. Anyways, I just finished reading the Fortune article from 2012 and it has more color to the story.
Seems likely to me that the problem is now too big for the admins to fix even if they wanted too. They couldn't moderate that many large subs, they don't have the manpower. There's going to be an impressive amount of bad publicity hitting reddit tomorrow, I hope to hell they have a good explanation lined up cause they're going to need it.
Something related I saw posted today is the news that the guy in charge of community at Digg ( /u/LordVinyl ) when the fallout occurred was hired to be in charge of shadowbans, something that has seemingly increased a lot (maybe due to the Ellen Pao issue). The /r/videos post is down obviously, but a mirror is here:
The intense vitriol about Ellen Pao makes me very suspicious of most complaints from vocal redditors.
I'm not even really sure why the anti-fem crowd hates her so much. But man...wow.
If some of the things that I've read today are to be believed, the firing of this admin was a stupid act. Reddit and several other "web 2.0" companies made it big on "user generated content" which always seemed like it had the potential to turn into a gross corporate overlord milking their user-cow for all it's worth.
It seems like there are a lot of valley companies that just want to slap a sticker on your culture and hand it back to you. Or they want to say that the rules don't apply to them because they are so new and communicate with their employees through an app or some other horse shit.
In the end, it sounds like this young woman (the admin they fired) did her job well and it sucks when people aren't rewarded for that.
As a long time redditor I think I can help shine some light here. When Yishong Wang left abruptly there was a real pull from the community to bring Alexis back - or if not him then someone who was "from reddit." When Pao was announced the thought was "why is a lawyer taking over?" She reeks of 1%ers which redditors love to bash on when they see one bleeding (not Elon Musk of course).
Within just a few months Pao made some major moves that directly impacted reddit staff and could be attributed to her presence - namely eliminating salary negotiations, which caused a big stir. The banning of specific hate-speech subreddits at her direction pushed large segments of the community against her for a variety of reasons - some cause they were just mad they lost a platform and other stating that it was anti-democratic censorship.
Her massive public lawsuit, which was panned as frivolous across the web, basically killed any remaining credibility she did have with the community. When she lost the suit it was like fuel to the fire.
A large subset of vocal redditors hated Pao the moment she walked through the door. Now everything that happens on her watch is considered evidence of her awfulness.
Goes to show you just how powerful the MRA subreddits are. I used to be staunchly "free speech above all", but seeing how blind hatred can fester and spread has filled me with a lot of doubts about us, as a group of humans.
A couple of years ago a group of people that I was attracted to due to their professed reliance on reason and scientific method turned out to be virulently anti-female.
And then this fringe hatefulness just seems to have pervaded everything...even computing forums that are dedicated to what I thought were relatively dispassionate topics that are quite arcane have had death threats lobbed at people who just have a different opinion. It's fucking weird.
Top comment from that gizmodo article: "Reddit is legitimately full of the most self important toxic people ever. It’s also home to a huge variety of all manners of genius and hilarity."
I will miss it. As an Old Person™, reddit was the closest the modern Internet has come to replicating the heyday of Usenet in the 80s/90s. But because it's controlled by a single corporation instead of federating among all internet service providers, it succumbed to the corruption of the pursuit of captial. RIP.
Eternal september; lack of moderation combined with massive trolling / spam / sporge / hipcrime flooding, etc; ISPs stopped offering Usenet access as part of their packages; to most users it's baffling in comparison to something like Imgur or Reddit.
Well, I'm sure glad I don't have to work tomorrow. I don't know how Reddit is going to fix this. Unless they have photographic evidence that Victoria was literally eating puppies alive, I don't think they're going to win the community back to their side.
I understand that if you're going to fire someone, you can't very well go around telling a bunch of people that you're about to do that. They still should have had a better plan in place to pick up the slack first.
For those with PR, marketing and community management experience - if you we're in a position to try and solve this, what would you do to minimize the damage and move the community on as quickly as possible?
1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than just what relates to this specific situation.
2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit - there is nothing without them.
3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).
#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too late.
The third part of the parent's conditional: experience with running or dealing with online communities (from building and operating sites that have them, since the 1990s).
1. I would ignore most of the attacks. Don't "you'll get over it" or don't even try to moderate any of the posts/comments.
2. Most of the mods are realizing their mistakes right now, if you can see the subs who are coming back online they are just getting insulted and downvoted over and over for giving up on the black out
3. Use that + give them better tools to moderate their subs = you have the mods on your side
4. They need a martyr story, Ellen Pao is getting harassed all over the place, people trying to doxx her, people photoshoping her pictures over and over, people making bad jokes about her (racists, sexist, etc...). They need to make it look like this is a bad thing, like she's suffering, like the reaction of these people who are a minority of reddit are causing to the people administrating reddit. I think that would be good if it came from some mods of subreddits or from some rumors in random subreddits.
Seriously, I see Ellen Pao as the new Britney Spears. In a few years people will love her (if she hasn't killed herself from all of this harassment).
5.? They could fire Ellen Pao and hire someone from the community. But I doubt this would change something in the long run.
6.? They could make the whole management process of reddit more "open" like buffer does.
Eventually, things like that are doomed to happen. A company needs to fire people, needs to take decision that their users will not like so they can monetize their website, etc... It's also good to notice that things like that often goes away pretty quickly, the last drama lasted a day, I don't think this one will last more than a day or two either... Most people didn't even realize. This is an interesting topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bz9pm/how_...
So who's going to capitalize on this? Lots of users are pissed off and want to leave. People are pushing "voat.co" really hard, but it looks like a weak clone of reddit that will ultimately suffer from the same problems.
This would be a good time for someone to figure out a decentralized solution to the links+comments app. There is lots of research into decentralized reputation and recommendation algorithms. Combined with cryptocurrency there could be some real potential.
The people who have closed the subreddits are the moderators. These moderators should represent the desires of the users. In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors. Even the AMAs are cut off. I think this is wrong.
Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
While I don't know Victoria so I cannot sympathize, I can at least understand the moderators' cause. However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.
I would imagine that users by-and-large support the shut-downs (I do, as a user). Moreover, I don't think Reddit is the sort of site that fosters friendships. A sense of community, yes, but not individual friendships. And anyway, PMs and such are unaffected so you could contact an individual without issue anyway.
> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
Why is that a problem? If the mods are actually acting in the best interests of their communities (which, in your scenario, are able to re-form on another site) then that's a positive result for them (in an altruistic sense).
Moderators created those subreddits and gives them the power to close them, make them private, etc. IAMA was just somebody's idea at some point and it became popular. It even changed a lot over the years.
As I user, I fully support the shutdown. I wish every major sub would shutdown.
I think the moderators are doing a good job. Read what the IAMA mods have stated. 1) They couldn't do their job with Victoria fired and no liaison so took things down temporarily while they figure out a new way to work. 2) They communicated with the admins and offered to restore things if they were assured there was no plan to start limiting the IAMAs to money making purposes. 3) Admins refused and now IAMA mods are going to run the IAMAs on their own.
So Victora didn't want the quality hurt for monetization purposes and was fired. Now the mods stepped up and said they don't want it either. Immediately we got a really high quality IAMA from a Reddit employee fired by Pao for having cancer. Do you think we'd ever see real back and forth about topics like that if it was just pre-scripted money making IAMAs left?
Victoria and the mods seems to do the absolutely best things they could do for the quality. If I just wanted advertiser sponsored content I'd still be a digg user, which is what that site turned into.
> These moderators should represent the desires of the users.
You're thinking democracy. That's not how subreddits work. Some might respect the wishes of the community and try to work with it but they're not beholden at all.
> In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.
Your portrayal is not right. While it might be in some cases, there's pretty good arguments about why people are doing what they're doing and the subscribers for different subreddits have given an impressive amount of support to the movements so you can't claim it's some sort of ego power play without consent of other people.
> As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors
I find it slightly funny that you're talking as if this was some sort of humanitarian crisis or natural disaster. They can still message their friends and discuss in many subs that are not private if they're so inclined.
> Even the AMAs are cut off.
Well, one of the arguments is that the reddit administration didn't care about the AMAs when they made their decision of removing Victoria without consulting with any moderator (specially those that depended heavily on her).
> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
People can find alternate sites all the time. The "power loss" you claim is negligible and seems more like a scare tactic to force inaction. "Don't try protesting or showing anything is not in order because people might leave and you'll not be as important! Fall back in line!"
> However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.
The way they chose is absolutely effective with only the cost of a slight inconvenience. What the moderators represent to you is clearly not the popular opinion and the fact that many users seem to be overwhelmingly in support of this measures seems to leave you in a minority position.
At the risk of sounding harsh one could argue that your stance seems motivated by reasons of personal convenience that go against the best for reddit and the community as a whole.
You should read "Atlas Shrugged". These moderators built the community they wanted to thrive; they work for the community they desire. They are not slaves to the masses. If others want to create their own communities, then so be it. But the moderators that have closed their subreddits do so because they are their communities, even if Reddit controls the platform on which they live.
I hate to do what is an essentially a "me too" post of sorts, but as an old, old Reddit user, I'm really confused by the moves made in the last few months.
I can't think of another time I've been immediately like, "Why?!" in reaction to Reddit's actions. Usually when I see a new feature, direction, policy, etc, my thoughts are, "Huh. Makes sense"
My only why moment I can think of was removing the vote counts on comments, (?|?)gate. But that was a minor little blip on the radar and I wasn't super bothered by it.
This does feel a bit like "Internet" culture meets Sarbanes Oxley (which comes into play when you are publicly traded).
There was a story about how unprofitable Reddit is [1] and given that one would expect it to start running out of cash. And when that happens it has to either get more VC funding or go to the public for additional funding. But if you're going to file an S-1 you really have to get your SOX compliance in order, and generally that has things like executives swearing that there isn't any illegal stuff going on, with jail time penalties if there is. And lawyers tend to be really conservative when it comes to "illegal" (advising against anything even nominally bad).
I, of course, have no inside information, but I'm not the only one wondering about this. An inability to raise funds would kill Reddit, and this "strike" action would seem to just accelerate that (fewer page views, fewer ad clicks).
All of the conditions of SOX seem to be about financial disclosure, with the most general "crime-like" thing having to do with financial fraud. I don't SOX has much to do with e.g. online harrassment or pornography. It was enacted in response to financial and accounting scandals around 2000. [1]
One thing I find amusing about the whole history of social networks is that by far, 4chan has been the longest running consistent platform and with the least governance.
There is something to be learned there, not sure what it is though.
edit: Actually metafilter is older, but way less popular/influential.
metafilter is less popular by design, as a survival strategy. They throttle new account creation when it heats up. That's probably going to become more common.
It would seem that it has something to do with the ambiguity of ethics on the site. Things such as can we charge for posts, can we moderate content we disagree with etc.
My girlfriend is doing a master's degree in archival science on digital preservation. I hadn't heard so many "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0" thrown around in a while :(
I have a question that will sounds like a rhetorical just for the sake of mindless bashing, but actually I want to ask it honestly, and I don't pretend that I know the answer.
Have Pao done anything good for Reddit since she's been appointed CEO?
Hacker News is behaving weirdly with respect to this story:
It's been up for 9 hours and has 714 points but is lower on the front page than "What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?" which has been up for 18 hours and has less than half (307) the points.
Aaand this is how Reddit does. Because this is basically how Digg died and created Reddit.
Who out there has a reddit clone ready to take up the torch? Communities are fickle, and if you fuck with them they will abandon you quickly and en masse.
voat is a clone; but I don't think reddit as a platform is strong enough. I think it works for a lot of things (obviously) but other things it sucks terribly at.
Still, getting communities right is hard. Obviously. I have something in the works but, it's fairly different, and you know how these things can go south.
But i think this is good. it will spur innovation in the space, and thats good for everyone. Well, except reddit.
Generally its symptomatic of a business not understanding how it works any more.
In any business, employees will be fired, employees will leave.
The weakness here was that Reddit seems to have no business continuity plan for the one subreddit that gets the best publicity. Anything that attracts presidents, and A-list stars should have been able to lose an admin with minimal chaos.
Misunderstanding the role of a critical employee lead to this and now they have to struggle to catch up and figure out what the heck Victoria really did.
I'm going to offer a wild suggestion - What if reddit is being purposefully dismantled to break up the social hive it represents? Is it possible that current events are he fruition of a purposeful strategy?
The whole dust up over /r/fph and the few other little subs kinda horrified me. I think reddit has often veered too far into laxness (the LONG existence of /r/jailbait) and there is still an amazing ton of blatant rule violations going on.
The only problem I had with the /r/fph thing was how inconsistently enforced it was. It seemed like a ban against a relatively small group so they wouldn't have to deal with pissing off one of the bigger problem subs. It ended up looking like a fake token gesture.
If that is what is happening, is that what the owners want? Or is that what leadership wants? The leadership has very little money sunk into reedit, but the owners have a lot more.
I'm sure leadership is willing to gamble that they can disrupt the hive without killing it. But will the owners continue to go down that road?
With billions (and billions) of dollars being poured into this year's election cycle, it makes sense for the string-pullers to dismantle any vestige of true grassroots organizing. It seems like the "real" money would be invested in disrupting organic organization and favoring controlled and curated organization that favors their whim. I just can't get this damn tinfoil cap off my head.
A tangential point, but I really abhor this style of writing:
"/r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/science, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos, /r/gadgets, and /r/movies have all made themselves private in response to the removal of an administrator key to the AMA process (... lots of other text ...) Major subreddits, including /r/4chan, /r/circlejerk and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, have also expressed solidarity through going private."
So you read the fist part, building a mental model of what's going on ("ok, so these subs went private, which means others listed did something different"), only to have to update it because someone decided to split the list in two, probably going for style.
I see this happening particularly in news reports and it's really, really annoying. You may actually fail to connect those two separate parts together if you're skimming.
The first list references the title (although "default" subreddits would be the better term), the second one are additional ones that are not in the default list.
Reddit admins have consistently shown themselves to be clueless in the past. They're only ever reactive to some scandal or PR disaster. I've never seen them try to get out in front and actually lead their community.
To complete the blindness trifecta, now all they need is for an admin to "seize" control of a subreddit(maybe /r/iama, since they apparently have devoted an entire department to it)
I'd love to hear some people's opinions: what's the next reddit? Where will people go?
I've been looking at alternatives ever since all the stupid crap with mods came out (mods messing with submissions, resubmitting under their name, and deleting stuff they didn't agree with) and some of my favorite subreddits started to rot. And now, it feels like Reddit is really falling apart.
Within the next two weeks we're going to see just about every Reddit clone and/or variation that exists spring into action.
One of them will be lucky enough to gain enough traction to replace Reddit, though it will take a couple of years for the transition to complete.
I have next to no doubt that these are the death throes of Reddit. I'm not personally invested in these politics (though it is fascinating to watch unfold), but what I can say is that I'll gladly move away should the opportunity present itself. What I care about at this point is I would like to consume content and for some reason I can't. So now I'm sitting here writing a comment on Hacker News to publicly showcase my discontent when I could have been enjoying cat pictures.
Edit: Reminds me of HipChat. It went down on a workday for a long period of time and I knew about Slack, our engineering team was swapped over by end of day. I don't particularly care why your service is down, whether it's a service outage or a coup, I just care about how long it will be down for and whether or not I can expect this to be a pattern.
I'm sure there will be a hundred clones. I do hope someone will just try a brand new way of doing content and people will be like "Oh yeah! That works really well!"
I've been disillusioned with reddit when I saw that the niche subreddits no longer get updated :/ and the bigger subreddits are ruled by an iron fist of mods. The content doesn't refresh as often as I'd like either (in the 2nd tier subreddits, the ones that aren't default but are still really popular).
Anyways, all good points. I used HC and Slack both and have to say that they seem almost identical to me.
> I do hope someone will just try a brand new way of doing content
I am with mine, and I encourage others to follow suite and try different tactics. Reddit is hardly the gold standard; but it is not without it's merits either.
I wonder if Reddit is big enough to survive these kinds of recent outcries [1], or if it's destined to go the way of digg, etc.
[1] Only a week or so ago there was a huge outcry about censorship, which resulted in a lot of negative personal information being posted about the current Reddit CEO. Now we have this.
No one knows why Victoria was let go, right? Even respecting privacy of employment decisions, it was handled horribly. I honestly have no idea how/why reddit management makes any decisions anymore. Instead of transparency it's obfuscation. This is just the latest.
When she is involved in a AMA it seems to go well. Better than well, actually. When I see that she is helping out I pay more attention due to the fact there is someone helping guide the person in responses.
Won't matter. There's no real lock-in among text / link content communities. They're trivial to build, there will never be a lack of new variations. Reddit doesn't even have possession of the vast media (youtube, imgur) that gets posted to its service, making it that much easier to replace.
Imgur will probably see among the greatest benefit as Reddit erodes.
That's true about Imgur. It has already gained a sizable community not directly related to reddit before this fiasco, I wouldn't be surprised if it grew more quickly now. It has the infrastructure as well as the most popular form of content from reddit - unlike something like voat.
Right, the critical difference between Reddit and Imgur - Imgur contains the content. They're the host, rather than sending traffic off-platform. Just like eg YouTube. Those types of platforms end up being vastly more valuable; if you don't own or control anything on your own site, it'll always come back to bite you. Imagine Facebook hosting all of its photos on another site like Imgur.
With Reddit's approach, you end up creating lots of competitors; given the right context, or given enough time, those competitors will bleed you out. Twitter figured that out with TwitPic et al.
I really loved Usenet when I discovered it (I never posted though.) The moderation capabilities were not well developed, but it was way more client-centric and decentralized.
I wonder it there's a market for a modern reboot of usenet.
"As much as Victoria is loved, this reaction is not all a result of her departure: there is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits, which they feel is expressed by, among other things, the lack of communication between them and the admins, and their disregard of the thousands of mods who keep reddit's communities going. /u/nallen's response above is an example of one of the many responses to these issues."
Ultimately this is about large companies needing to make more money using internet communities. To do this they have to change the community to make it mass market.
We in Hacker News are a small percentage of the "Innovators" set. We are not who reddit is wanting to appeal to now.
Reddit started with Innovators like ourselves as a small site and grew to encompass "Early Adopters" from the other Internet communities, it has been growing out and nearly full of "Early Adopters" - it needs to get more people, and to do this it changes the demographic. It needs people like our relatives and co workers who just use Facebook. It needs to grow because more people equal more money. They can and do accept the loss of the original Innovators and some of the Early Adopters as part of the cost to draw in much more revenue.
Thus, removing hateful subreddits, cleaning up the place is part of that. Another is increasing mass market interests - adding celebs and politicians. Another is increasing revenue through sponsored posts, like what Twitter is doing.
Allegedly the reason why this admin was fired was because she was against increasing the amount of corporate sponsored/promoted AMAs, and she was more in favour of community friendly content.
The people claiming that Reddit needs to be more consistent keep saying that they only censor something when it bubbles up to the top. That's pretty much the only content moderation model that has EVER worked. No one likes it, and it seems hypocritical, but its what the entire internet does.
Look at Google. France complains about Nazi related material. They block Nazi material in France. They index massive amounts of porn, and take down individual images that offend people. It's sub-optimal, but it largely works.
Now, the thing that has changed is that normal people have started getting a dose of the kind of speech that they consider "hate speech" IRL from sites like Reddit. What they are demanding is that fringe positions remain fringe positions.
Something as mainstream as Reddit will not be allowed to serve up red pill/racist/homophobe/far-right content. They will keep doing this stuff until that content goes somewhere else. Maybe that's a good thing...I don't know, but at least having it in one place made it easy to see what crazy people are up to these days. Know your enemy, etc.
As for the corporate thing...that's always going to seem schizophrenic...corporations aren't rational people. They make snap decisions that seem reasonable in the moment because they lack functional memories. Fuck em.
Want something different? Find a way to spread the cost of running something like Reddit over a larger group of people in a decentralized model. And then get ready for the us vs them to move to "inner circle" vs "outer circle"...
From the outside view it looks like people of Reddit are unsatisfied with their government and so they destroy their own motherland in an attempt to overthrow said government. Looks very much alike any coup d'etat. Human nature is in play again. It will lead to civil war and huge damage to the community. In the end there will be no winner.
I have heard a lot of people here and in reddit say, "well we should just make something better and leave!" Maybe a lot of that talk is just anger or discontent coming out right now. The community is up in arms. The moderators are frustrated at both corporate reddit and the website/tools available to them. Users are mortified. But in all seriousness, I want to explore the question, why don't we? What is stopping us from replacing it?
-- Technical challenges? No that doesn't seem right. Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this. The tools and technology are there.
-- Building a community is hard? This seems more in line with reality. Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?
-- Sites like this aren't the solution any more? This could be it. But if this isn't the solution, what is?
I haven't thought of all possibilities. But really, why not just replace it?
I think the biggest issue is that any general discussion site which simply clones reddit's conversation model (e.g., voat) might do better at transparency and free speech and community relations and so on, but is still probably doomed to end up with the same middlebrow discourse and groupthink that exists on reddit.
Does there exist good, empirical research on how different discussion models (linear vs. trees of comments, up/down-voting systems, etc.) affect quality of discourse, for some definition of quality?
>Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this.
In general you do so with a huge corporate budget.
>Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?
That's the answer.
You only have a few ways to monetize the product. Direct advertising; banner ads. The ad market is going to crap though, everyone has them, large numbers of users block them, and payments are very low. Direct payments for features. Reddit has 'Gold' as a means to get premium features and help pay for the site. The other way that has been bandied about, but with no direct evidence that it occurs is indirect advertising. For example a movie star paying for an AMA to advertize for their new film.
Even then those things only work if you can get the people to come to your site in the first place. It's highly likely a large number of social sites have a good deal of vice in their founding. People come to the site looking for porn or other somewhat socially unacceptable topics, but end up staying for the other parts of the community. As the site grows you run in to the inevitable 'great purge' which can cause serious issues.
It costs money to run. Serious money if you're going to have employees. And, as voat have discovered, if you're going to become the favoured destination of the assorted gators, racists, pedo^h^h^h^hebeophiles, woman-haters, frozen peachers, and assorted bottom-of-the-barrel types that have been looking for reddit alternatives in the last few months, you may find it quite difficult to keep your hosting arrangements even if you can pay for them.
I'd probably call /r/IAMA reddit's strongest content asset in terms of publicity, I seriously can't believe there's such a disconnect there. When I found out about Victoria helping them out and all the work she was doing - and then the IAmA app, it seemed the admins got that, but I guess not.
A time like this is an excellent opportunity to create a reddit competitor.
Current alternatives(like voat.co) are focused on completely avoiding censorship and moderation, thus attracting the worst of reddit.
I am curious, what are your thoughts on how one could go about attracting the best of reddit?
I am working on a personal project that is very similar, but I wouldn't try to compete with reddit to attract all the haters and celebrity-gossip kind of people. Do you have some ideas about what kind of startup could attract the most intelligent and creative parts of the community?
(right now my project is focused on writers, "reddit meets fictionpress", but it would be very easy to pivot into something broader, if I can come up with a smart way to do that)
Pretty sad that the free speech is disappearing from the internet with the speed of light and it gets replaced with propaganda. Victoria was a well known character of the reddit community and she did a lot for them. Sad to see her gone.
819 points, 421 comments, 12 hours old and still this is close to the bottom of the front page. Clearly HN users are finding this interesting. I guess I don't understand the HN ranking methodology at all...
This is the exact reason why we started PushdUp. As a long time reddit user I was getting sick of the drama that was happening and decided to take it upon myself to create something different. We are still in VERY early alpha so there are bound to be some bugs. Come join the revolution. http://www.pushdup.com , feedback is welcome and encouraged.
Loading animation in the beginning, I'm bored already. After loading, it just looks like some clickbait buzzfeed or auto-generated "read these 5 articles more, please" because of the big pictures set in a grid.
Thanks for the feedback. We are playing around with different layouts to see what people like more, so far the big picture layout isn't exactly what we are looking for but we are still working on it. I'm wondering if you actually read the article titles or if you just closed it down before noticing any of them?
I did not read them, no. Just went back and did, nothing special. Same like every website (this is not criticism, although I don't like clickbaity titles in general, like "Xi Jinping has run into the one thing in China he can't control".
Grid layout is still shit, It makes it harder to skim and keep track of where you were.
Thanks, man. I want to keep it super simple, no distractions. I'm sure it's not for everyone, but I have a vision and I'm working towards it. Glad you stopped by.
Remove the "privacy" and "about" links in the top left. That's among your most valuable real-estate. 99.x% of your users will never read either page, not under any scenario. Move them somewhere else reasonable.
You might say: well, but it's important to explain our culture on the about page; to explain what we're all about. To that I say: no it's not, your users are not going to partake in, or come to understand, your site's culture via an about page. That happens on the site itself.
wow what's crazy to me is that I was on reddit today, but didn't know about this till I saw this thread.
And even after going back to reddit I couldn't see any information on this until I cilcked /r/all.. looks like reddit censorship scandal is going out of hand :/
Too bad most of the community there is made up of the worst of reddit. Maybe if enough normal users moved there it'd be worth it, and maybe that will actually happen if reddit doesn't figure out how to salvage this, but until then, there's nothing on voat worth wading through the sewage.
You may be forgetting that Reddit was built on the same 'shit'. A huge portion of the real content of Reddit was porn and other repugnant topics. The admins of the time faked a huge portion of their posts to form communities around them.
My experience, having actually used Voat, is that this is not the case. I've engaged people in the /v/gaming, /v/programming subverses and everyone's been friendly and polite to me thus far.
Agreed. People move from one site to another because the other site is better, not because the first site is worse. There's a difference between push and pull that makes a good or a bad community.
It's why reddit and digg and facebook and twitter grew - they were better than the other sites, they pulled users in.
I still don't know what to think of it, and I can't keep up with it either.. but I just hope it gets thoroughly archived and documented on sites other than reddit and imgur. Because while I won't condemn reddit on a whim and call it a bad actor, I also don't find any of this trustworthy at all. I'd even say, unless the /r/pics "takeover" was the "root mod" (or whatever it's called, I never made a subreddit) locking out all other mods, if this was actually admins protecting "their" assets, made by the community, that'd surely be crossing the line for me.
As would be paying lip service to mods as to how swell everything will be to get mods to get subs back up, while people with scheduled AMA still don't know how to get in touch with the people Victoria had the contact info for. I don't have a link for the last bit, and it was just a claim by someone anyway (didn't check if they actually were involved with AMA stuff), so don't take my word for it - but that mod mail really does read so fluffy while making no real commitments to anything, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Anyway, I would rather see blacked out subs in support of something I agree with, than active subs that are testament to a shameful episode and state of things. They have my support to black out all the things, for days, weeks and months. For how ever long is necessary. If reddit becomes a place putting effort into again, I'll enjoy it like nothing was ever gone. Otherwise, might as well go out with a bang and some pride. There is infinitely more where reddit came from, and maybe a better site will be born because of all this somewhere down the road. Maybe reddit can reform, but it clearly needs some boundaries, so this blackout has my full support. Enough already, users and communities are not dough to be shaped however one wishes, to be disrespected like helpless dependents. It's a bit like that Fight Club bathroom scene: "We cook your meals, we take care of you when you're sick, and we also make the sites that pay your salary worth visiting. Do not fuck with us."
Yeah I know I'm being a bit dramatic, please take this with a grain of salt. It makes me sad rather than angry or indignated. Still, I don't think this is cool, at all. It's just not on.
Why? The mods of several subreddits hosting AMAs have been left high and dry, and there were posts from PR agents saying that they'd flown clients around and made arrangements only to have them disappear.
I'd say that this is the beginning of the end of reddit but I just don't know what will replace it.
Same thing that goes on in every exec board room: stupidity, ignorance, self-delusion, ass-kissing, change for the sake of change, and various forms of backstabbing. Unless Reddit's user base is comprised entirely of kindergartners, they know that already.
They're not wondering what's going on; they're angry that what's going on is, at best, not what they want, or at worst, harmful and destructive. Probably nothing will come of it, but they figure they may as well try.
"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.