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.
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.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_messag...