Pick a topic with many shades of gray. Paint it black and white - preferably around a modern controversial issue (this day and age it's sexism/racism).
Frame the narrative to fit the controversy ("50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again!") Ignore the 199,950 shades of gray and all other motivation behind the users and everything else. Zoom in to these 50 people. Cast them in the worst light. Cast Pao as a saint and Reddit as being "in the right" for "standing up to these 50 white male racist misogynist neck beards".
Fan the flames and stir the pot to generate traffic (and ad revenue).
Keep the fire alive as long as possible. You look good and get money. Reddit looks good and gets money. You both win.
Alternatively throw Reddit under the bus as well and find past controversies surrounding Pao. Cover those as well. You'll get more money for this.
As for all the users who aren't the 50 being covered? Fuck'em. You're too busy lining your checkbooks.
You think "the media" is intentionally causing confrontation as part of some collusion with Reddit to make money? Neither Reddit nor journalism generally is particularly profitable.
And isn't painting all of the media in the same cynical light for the actions of, at most, a small minority pretty much exactly what you claim they did to you?
I saw racist and sexist posts personally, so I know that's not a complete fabrication even if not every Redditor holds those beliefs. I found the posts of e.g. Pao as Hitler pretty jarring. If I were writing an article about Reddit and its CEO I probably would have mentioned them, not through any desire to stir trouble and certainly not as part of some money-making conspiracy.
And what does any of this have to do with Sam Altman or Ellen Pao?
> You think "the media" is intentionally causing confrontation as part of some collusion with Reddit to make money?
GP isn't implying any collusion. The media is intentionally causing confrontation just fine on its own.
> I saw racist and sexist posts personally
Nobody is claiming the hateful stuff didn't exist. But painting "Reddit" as sexist while conveniently ignoring the 90-9-1 rule and focusing on Pao's gender instead of atrocious track record is... in bad taste, to say the least.
It's jarring -- that is, newsworthy -- to see overt sexist or racist remarks with hundreds of upvotes, suggesting at least widespread if not majority support. So, yeah, that fact is going to find its way into many articles.
What is the argument against Pao anyway? It seems like the only non-personal complaints I've heard are that FatPeopleHate was banned and a well-liked moderator was fired on her watch. Is there more to it?
There's lots more to it. While I agree with the banning of FPH, the underlying policy that justified it was deeply flawed. The harassment policy was woefully vague to the point of absurdity.
There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago, and as we found out today, only last week dedicated employees to work on it; after the defaults revolted.
This is a small subset of all of the complaints of reddit's direction under Pao's leadership.
Honestly, I think she's a lovely person. I don't think she deserves a percent of the shit that's been thrown her way, but she definitely hasn't been an efficient CEO for reddit.
and by lots you mean...that's about it. Honestly if "There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago" was a good criteria for booting a CEO, Reddit would have had ~20 CEOs by now.
That was the actual problem, that mods have never had the tools they need, but that's not why she's resigning/being fired.
No, there's more to it. Because I don't want to drag her personal life into it (which does play a role), there were the huge problems with the AMA app, the new privacy policy (which while I agreed with, many didnt), Reddit Notes (the reddit cryptocurrency; perhaps the most jaw-droppingly stupid move in her tenure), and really, many more things.
You must be detached from reality and what a CEO does if you think those deserve being fired for. And seriously even insinuating that her personal life has anything to do with this is frankly disgusting behaviour.
Let me ask you about Brendan Eich, previously CEO of Mozilla. He contributed money to anti-prop 8 causes in California. He was fired from Mozilla because he supported anti-gay marriage causes. Was it wrong of mozilla to fire him because of his support?
If you say it was wrong, I will respect that we have different views on this issue.
If you think it's OK to fire Eich but not even bring up Pao's personal life, I will call you a hypocrite.
What you're describing are basically non-events in the history of bad decisions made at reddit (and like half of them come from Yishan's tenure, anyways). And reddit survived just fine every time, mind you.
There really wasn't anything overly egregious here except an angry internet mob. If it weren't for the subreddit blackout (which, again, was from an issue boiling over for years) timed so soon after the FPH shutdown I would give good odds it would have dissipated and we wouldn't be seeing this resignation today.
She was the CEO, she ultimately bore responsibility for every single decision made in her tenure. Regardless if initiatives were started under a previous CEO, she allowed bad decisions to be made public in her tenure where she had the power to stop them.
Like it or not, the CEO is ultimately responsible for every single thing a company does. That's pretty much their job.
Edit: Also, I have been on reddit for nearly 10 years. I've followed every stupid decision made since comments were implemented. I have never seen a period of bad decisions like this before Pao.
Edit 2: I also think it's sort of shitty for you to move the goalposts. You basically said "there's nothing else major" about Pao to criticize. As soon as I brought up three more things to criticize - well, they weren't important and everyone else is responsible.
Victoria's firing was the final straw. The general complaint is that moderators are in an abusive unpaid relationship with reddit and are treated like crap, that she is/was completely out of touch with the reddit userbase (going so far as posting a link to her own inbox in /r/self in a grandma-emailing-c:\\paths.jpg fashion; something she later explained as an administrative mishap), that she got rid of well-liked programs such as redditgifts and was behind other much less popular programs and very unpopular decisions on the site. And the whole lawsuit thing didn't help, either.
She doesn't deserve the blame for all of it, but things easily snowball on reddit. Once the mob finds its pitchforks, there's no stopping it. That's not unique to reddit in any way.
>It's jarring -- that is, newsworthy -- to see overt sexist or racist remarks with hundreds of upvotes, suggesting at least widespread if not majority support. So, yeah, that fact is going to find its way into many articles.
There is a polarising effect which occurs in these kinds of threads (or communities discussions as a whole): once the vitriol has met a critical mass the more moderate people tend to just avoid the whole thing (not participating, likely not even observing). So all that's left are the extremists who keep perpetuating it.
> Like what? That she shut down a forum called "Fat people hate", where posters singled out the obese for online harrassment?
You don't know me. You have no idea what my feelings are regarding FPH. Yet, you make assumptions.
So now we got that out of the way, hi, I'm Jerry, and I hated FPH and didn't give a rat's arse about its shutdown. Had Pao made only that one decision in her two years as CEO, reddit would have bigger problems on its hands.
Thankfully, I just wrote a reply to someone else's comment right below yours - a much nicer comment which asks a question without making aggressive assumptions - addressing your actual question. Take a look.
> Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste? Seriously?
The thing with rephrasing what someone else said and appending "Seriously?" is it always goes your way, because you get to decide how you rephrase it. Good thing again that I didn't say "Criticising Reddit or its community is in bad taste". I said:
> painting "Reddit" as sexist while conveniently ignoring the 90-9-1 rule and focusing on Pao's gender instead of atrocious track record [is in bad taste].
In other words, trying to turn millions of people into sexist pigs by ignoring how such communities function is in bad taste. Do you disagree?
> And isn't painting all of the media in the same cynical light for the actions of, at most, a small minority pretty much exactly what you claim they did to you?
Of course. No one's evil, everything's broken. The reason offensive and controversial discussions are so common throughout the interent is that they self-perpetuate; something makes you angry and you make a post 'debunking' it, that makes someone else angry and they reply; the more efficient posts at making people angry get more replies, and so are brought into prominence.
did you happen to miss how sites like the NYTimes and such were disappointed with how her case played out? How that and and another played out? They have their playbook and cannot see outside of it to the point they are no longer able to see the world for what it is.
Social Justice has infected the media to the point that anything contrary to the desired story is either ignored, recast, or dismissed. You can go google the Confederate flag issue and find far too many stories trying to link Republicans with it when it was Democrat politicians who put it up fifty years ago and kept it there; apparently it was just too good an opportunity to slander the Republicans for something the Democrats didn't fix for the fifty plus years they controlled most of those states.
So yeah, the media intentionally causes confrontation and likely because the same focus groups they use/rely on are merely political machines created to drive people one way or another. Politicians and the media both need a divided population and they both damn well do their best to get it.
Honestly Reddit in general could be taken as "racist and sexist" by an outsider. By an outsider. The humor tends to be sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, and in-group. For example any references to /r/pyongyang can be written off, 99% of the time it's part of a dedicated running joke that's not intentionally malicious. Pao as Hitler is jarring? You seem naively unfamiliar with Reddit.
Basically, the nature of the internet and how it enables individuals to have much louder voices, has significant implications for the integrity and expectations of what we used to consider "news". The point being that the old idea of 'news' as many of us are used to, as being something that's even semi reliable, needs some serious rethinking, because 'news' undergoes significantly less curation now that outlets are competing against the lightning pace of social media.
The author gives his own various experiences as examples of how this new style of information flow in the media industry is easily exploitable, and frankly, it's quite scary. Not just because of what he could do, but because how natural and subtle it all the 'propaganda' seemed.
You do realize you're commenting on a HN thread for a New York Times piece, right?
A piece that casually included terms such as "racist" and "misogynistic" as if they were describing the weather. If those terms do sound natural enough to use in something as casual as describing the weather, then congratulations, you've discovered the dangers that this book tried to highlight.
You lost me. What is the linked article supposed to be an example of? Would we be having a different conversation if the thread linked to the Reddit announcement instead?
And I don't think racism or sexism is something to be taken lightly. I don't think the New York Times does either, which is probably why the fact that there were racist and misogynistic posts about Ellen Pao was noteworthy enough to include in 8th graf of the article.
> What is the linked article supposed to be an example of?
It's an example of exactly what the book talks about: subtle, lightly filtered "news".
> Would we be having a different conversation if the thread linked to the Reddit announcement instead?
No, because if you read my previous summary of the book, you would realize that the mechanisms in these two outlets is exactly the same. A single highly emphasized voice/view, with little curation/filtering, being projected loudly through network effects.
If you're still unsure about what I'm talking about, or how it fits in, I can only recommend that you pick up the book. It's really quite an interesting and quick read. And interestingly, the issue you're having of having difficulty seeing what I'm talking about, is basically exactly what the book talks about.
Are those "racist" and "misogynistic" claims false? Judging by the top post(s), here https://www.reddit.com/r/Ellenpaoinaction/top/?sort=top&t=al... I would say no. That's pretty "racist" and "misogynistic". There was another sub reddit that was worse, but I can't seem to find it on my phone.
If you think the NYT article made those claims lightly (I don't) then I think that says more about the state of the Internet and its communities in general (or perhaps just you) rather than "The Media"
The point isn't whether it's "true" or "false", because that will vary depending on who you ask. Yes, even people you find disgusting are legitimate human beings with opinions too. Who are any of us to decide what is "right" or "wrong"? Good journalism is supposed to let you make those decisions on your own, not give them to you.
So in order to be good journalism, it must be objective, and to not describe things in terms of loaded phrases that convey any opinions. The opinions may be right, or they may be wrong, but that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is the one highlighted in the book, which is that our news isn't getting properly filtered, and as a result, we're being shown rather restricted points of view in our media.
If current media organizations were run with proper journalistic merit, almost 99% of what gets published out there as 'news', would be filed in the editorials section.
It seems you missed what I tried to convey. I explicitly stated that the issue is objectiveness, and subjective terms, by definition cannot be objective. You can gather all the data in the world about reddit users and their mannerisms, but that does not change the way the logic behind 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' work.
I think the overwhelming majority of our society will agree that the mentioned behaviour was misogynistic. That makes it a fairly objective statement. You can still disagree with it (in the same way people disagree with other objective statements, like vaccines and autism), but that doesn't make it subjective.
It's really not as obvious as you're making it sound. According to google, the most concrete definition of "misogyny" is: "an ingrained prejudice against women."
So immediately there are 2 problems here:
1.) Ellen Pao does not represent all women, nor would all women agree for her to represent them most likely. So dislike of Pao does not conclusively imply a dislike of women in general. Especially when we keep in mind the context of people being upset about a female employee being fired.
2.) Even if we assume that yes, Ellen Pao did represent all women, that still does not imply that the public's sentiments against her were somehow "ingrained" or unjustified. She did decide to ban several subreddits before the latest incident with Victoria (which may or may not have involved Pao). The anger may have been unjustly directed towards her specifically when it should've been directed towards Reddit management in general, but being a lightning rod for bad press has always been an unspoken the function of CEOs. It may not conclusively prove that the anger directed at her was purely due to management issues, but it does cast doubt about it being because she was a woman.
So the issue here is not that something can't be pseudo-objective if enough people agree, it's that the claim is not specific enough to be meaningful, and these kinds of terms are usually just used as social trump cards that discourage questioning, which again, is the opposite of what journalism is supposed to be about.
It has democratized the distribution of information or opinion. In the old days, as A.J. Liebling said, "The freedom of the press applies mainly to the man who owns one." (Quoted from memory, so probably a bit wrong.) Those men, and the occasional woman, were a very mixed lot.
I'd also appreciate it. Just note many of our minds won't be blown by the idea that the media is used to manipulate, and maybe focus on explaining what this has to do with nhf's points that this is a good move on reddit's part and that they were glad that Sam explicitly called out recent trends in Reddit discourse.
