That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there was more to it, and the image that she has on Reddit was certainly not helpful, but she wasn't fired because of the backlash from last week and previous, because if that was the case she would have been fired much sooner, but instead she stepped down, by force or not, because she wasn't able to guarantee good revenue for Reddit by past actions and admission of the above.
This ignores that advertisement is a good amount of revenue for Reddit (it took is over $8M last year from advertising)[1]. In any case, there definitely needs to exist a balance, and the announcement on Reddit makes no pretense that they'll allow any community like FPH to come back or exist going forward. Even if they didn't need to rely on advertisement, it's better for the community overall to have communities that are hurtful go somewhere else. In my opinion, if FPH etc. are fine at Voat, stay there.
Looking past the vitriol towards Ellen Pao, this seems to be primarily due to a history of miscommunication between moderators, who feel they should have more power and better ways to handle the communities they support, and the admins of Reddit. While I think that there are definite issues on both sides -- I'm not a moderator, especially not of a big subreddit, so I don't know how disrespectful or how much the admins ignored the moderators requests, so my perspective is of an outsider -- I really feel like this is all just a temper tantrum that the moderators handled poorly, potentially purposefully. The users by and large did not need to know that Victoria was fired, and it's a shame that the moderators 1) let that information out, and 2) by letting it out, effectively let it be used as a base for a parade against Ellen Pao. It can't be argued that the moderators didn't/couldn't know this would happen because this kind of shit happens on Reddit all the time, and the more vocal parts of the community will cling to their dislike of Pao with this.
I think that the admins should have handled it better, for sure -- they could have at least given the moderators that relied on Victoria's help the heads up of, "hey, we are going to transition to a new community manager, for the time being X, Y, and Z are going to occur," but the backlash from the community and that the moderators are effectively using the community for their own gains instead of trying to handle it internally is a pretty bad reflection on how the community is structured as a whole. All I can think of is that this is basically 4chan and social media combined.
She did, in fact, attempt to reply to early discussions on Reddit but she was downvoted into oblivion (e.g. -5500+ down votes) and she wasn't ever going to be heard, no matter how relevant or important her discussion was. So she probably thought it was smarter (and would get better exposure while the community cools down a little bit) to communicate with Buzzfeed et. al.
Yeah, I've heard that, and that's crazy too. The community actually has a veto on communications from the CEO? Absolutely nuts. They couldn't just hack the backend to give her a billion upvotes?
Much of this controversy is driven by the community's loss of trust in the site's administration. Do you think the tactic you suggest would be constructive toward rebuilding that trust?
Faking upvotes, no. But that wouldn't be necessary if they had an actual communication channel in place ahead of time. Which they would if they really understood the value of the community and what it takes to manage it.
The thing that is kind of strange, but not surprising, to me is that the thing that they're using as justification for this is the firing of one of the admins, but these people don't know why that admin was fired, and also don't know who did the firing. Is Reddit the company primarily controlled by Ellen Pao or does she have managers that help her and therefore responsible for this kind of stuff?
I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't like is that Reddit is not what it used to be in that it's a "free for all" because it's now more business oriented, meaning that Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community. They don't see past the fact that someone that supported them was fired and see the reality that these things happen, and it sucks, but it's a reality of a business. As an aside, if the moderators had such a problem with what was going on, they should have been much more vocal about it and raised flags before instead of acting like children and throwing tantrums by making subreddits private (I call it a tantrum because they made it private for like 12-24 hours, most of that time during the US night where there's not as much traffic).
I'm not saying Ellen Pao is the best person for this job, and while I don't have super high opinions of her, I don't believe all the stuff Reddit says about her either, and she's being vilified for something that could have been completely out of her control. If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of. But given they've raised a lot of money recently I'd guess she doesn't seem to be doing poorly to the shareholders/investors, or at least isn't doing a piss poor job.
> Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community.
The unfortunate fact for Ellen Pao and the shareholders is that the value of Reddit - its intellectual property - is entirely supplied and moderated, for free, by volunteers.
That is the struggle here: between the people who want to corporatise and monetise Reddit and the people who actually supply the content. Unless lead by someone who is visionary, charismatic and genuinely interested in advancing the notions of community and free for all that attract the moderators in the first place (which Ellen Pao is demonstrably not), the moderators will rightly ask why they are doing all this work to greatly enrich other people.
In addition to this, as CEO, it is her job to get in front of the preexisting issues with important stakeholders of the site. She hasn't done so. In fact, relations have degraded to this low state under her watch. And where does the buck stop, if not the CEO?
If I had to guess, I'd say that's spun a little bit more to make it look like Reddit management is the bad guy. Having been fired from multiple jobs in the past, unless Reddit management is complete shit, she wouldn't have been fired so abruptly and would have had some inkling that she was going to be terminated. If I had to guess (and this is without knowing any more intricate details than the fact she's fired and that Quora screen capture), she probably didn't communicate well that she didn't feel comfortable doing what she was asked, so it looked like insubordination because to her boss, it might have seemed that she wasn't doing her job rather than she didn't feel comfortable doing what she was being asked.
There are some shit managers, but usually managers attempt to communicate when there's issues and give good warning before terminating except in cases where the company is downsizing or you pissed off the CEO since that happens from higher up. But even then, you'll hear it from fellow employees that the company is removing the dept. or the CEO hates you. I am hard pressed to believe that she was abruptly fired, no matter how well she treated the Reddit community.
> If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of.
To be fair the reasons you stated have been discussed endlessly on reddit.
I agree that petition could have been written better though. I didn't even think to read the description until you mentioned it. I doubt many others have either, they just read the headline (as usual...)
To be frank, I'd argue that this isn't really a petition and more of someone throwing a temper tantrum. I mean, when I read, "After Pao lost her gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins she was appointed CEO of Reddit Inc and Reddit entered into a new age of censorship. A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top", has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground. Alternative sites to Reddit.com have sprung up and have received vast amounts of traffic within the recent months," I wouldn't ever take it seriously, especially as Ellen Pao and the board.
Like, I understand that these people are upset, and I've said stupid shit when I've been angry, but really, this is a petition to try to change something. Use a little bit more eloquence, and back up your arguments with data. Like, if they're talking about voat.co, are they really trying to insinuate that Voat gets nearly as many views as Reddit? And, wasn't Ellen Pao already interim CEO before the trial concluded?
I think this petition was written by one person and is simply the one that got momentum behind a general idea. If it'd been better written it probably would've gotten more signatures.
100,000 + signatures should still count for something, and I imagine anyone with a vested interest could do a little investigative work to understand what's really going on.
Yeah I think that there's a lot of people pissed at the situation, but I think it would be better if they had at least proof read or had multiple less invested people read over it to make sure it didn't sound so childish. If it wasn't such a direct attack I'd consider signing it.
Given that this is Reddit we're talking about, and given the behavior of a lot of the people who are vocal about this on Reddit, it's probably fair to assume that a very significant chunk of those signatures are fake.
So what? No online voting system is perfect, and double-voting isn't unique to reddit.
The sheer amount of natural language written about the topic on reddit and elsewhere should tell you how many people are interested in the subject of reddit's management.
The petition was started some three weeks ago, but the number of signees hovered around 10,000 until the last few days. Also, over the last few days the number has risen at a consistent pace.
I assume change.org has some filter in place to attempt to achieve uniqueness. Regardless, the problem you're describing is a function of voting on the internet, not any particular community. Given interest and opportunity, there are individuals in any community that would try to rig the system. For example, competitions shared on Facebook, or even whole countries.
That's true, but my general point was that the very communities within Reddit that are most vocal about this and most critical of Pao are likely to have a lot of overlap with the subset of subredditors who are both willing and capable to try and rig something like this. Yes, internet voting in general is problematic, but there are a lot of groups on Reddit that explicitly set out to figure out how to rig stuff like this and encourage each other to do so (as opposed to isolated individuals, who are unlikely to have a big impact).
Like I said, there's enough natural language around this issue to convince me a lot of those signatures are real, mine included. It sounds like you don't trust some of the heaviest users of reddit. If that is your sentiment then I would not recommend investing in it. I personally would, given a leader who understood technology and the value of free speech, and who could communicate effectively. But I doubt they will IPO under Pao. The balance sheet may be looking better, but they are tanking hard on relations and she needs help. Perhaps she need not be the figure head and could instead fall back to other roles.
That's reddit for you. Over the past five years, the zeitgeist of the site has become increasingly petulant and entitled. A lot of people on the site seem to genuinely believe the entire internet gets their content from reddit and only reddit.
Remember when the genius sleuths of reddit wrongly accused an innocent man of the Boston Marathon bombing? Or all the ridiculously borderline illegal subreddits (jailbait, creepshots) Hell, there's an entire wikipedia article devoted to redditor drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
I haven't read his other blog posts, but in this one he seems to come off as arrogant and a child, in a sense, by arguing for some kind of feature addition without actually explaining how it would benefit any users other than him and (more importantly) how it would actually benefit Slack. Slack might not listen regardless, but it's a turn off to read the first paragraph and to try to not think of some whiny 16 year old.
> without actually explaining how it would benefit any users other than him
He seems to make it pretty clear: "You give me a place to send them, and when my students join they punch in the required credit card and then they’re done." This sounds like a more streamlined signup process than what his users currently go through, which involves signing up somewhere else, paying, and then receiving an email with a link enabling them to sign up (again) at slack.
> how it would actually benefit Slack
Again, fairly well spelled out: "I promote it, I do the hard work of being in there, and you get to skim your $6.67 or however much the plan costs off the top of the signups." So free promotion, somebody else drives user signups to your product.
Third, by my reading, the author is implying that this setup would be useful for many others who want to offer a good chat service for online learning, paid support, or a multitude of other reasons I can't think up. It sounds like a great idea to me.
Finally: you'll probably get more out of the internet by being more concerned about content than tone.
I guess, yes, there is a benefit to Slack in the sense that they would have more signups overall. But what I was really going for was that it wouldn't benefit them on a large scale, meaning that people that do stuff like what he does would have to move to Slack, which is most likely not going to happen without large incentive. I doubt that he has enough "clout" to drive a noticeable number of people to Slack over a long period of time. The only way that this would change is if Slack marketed itself differently.
> Third, by my reading, the author is implying that this setup would be useful for many others who want to offer a good chat service for online learning, paid support, or a multitude of other reasons I can't think up. It sounds like a great idea to me.
Yes, but Slack isn't really built for some of these purposes and it shows in the way that people see each other within the app. I.e. I see all of my coworkers within Slack, which is not what you want with tech support. I can see it being useful for a student-student interaction, but it would have to be augmented to allow specific student-teacher collabs because all people (at least in the way I understand) are on the same "level" and can see everyone and all the channels, which might be counter-productive to learning because it becomes like AIMing your classmates at that point.
> Finally: you'll probably get more out of the internet by being more concerned about content than tone.
Thanks dude! When I use the Internet next time I will be sure to think about this comment. :-)
Agree with angersock. It's really hard to know what you're looking at with such a vague description. It's hard to give any kind of good answer with solid recommendations without more information for a company of that size.
I'm kind of confused by the notion that Javascript execution times and CSS3 animations aren't part of the core functionality. I'm assuming they're not going to build their own JS JIT compiler and use v8 or spidermonkey. And while I don't see the necessity of animations, there's no reason to not put CSS3 as part of the core considering that every current major web browser basically supports its current form.
I do understand that the purpose of this browser is to be privacy-first, but what we don't need is a new browser that's just like IE6 in terms of bad web practices but with better privacy settings.
It would be cool to have an all JS implementation of NumPy or SciPy but the reality of the situation is that if this is going to be used in a research setting and speed is one of the most important factors, then this is secondary to actually porting over the lower level C++ and FORTRAN code.
The best way I've found to mimic an address bar is to use Command-Shift-G to open the "Go to this address" dialog. It gets the job done well enough when I do end up using Finder over Terminal.
