A petition to remove Ellen Pao as Reddit CEO: 100,000 signatures in 3 days(finance.yahoo.com) |
A petition to remove Ellen Pao as Reddit CEO: 100,000 signatures in 3 days(finance.yahoo.com) |
These days they're fine, I'm back, and it's almost the only thing I watch on my TV.
This actually feels a bit reminiscent of GamerGate, which for a while was able to have news outlets report on them as if their stated goal of ethics in game journalism was actually what it was about.
If that were the case nobody would care and protest about it. You could argue that the move was wrong and you could argue that the move was correct. However, it was clearly not unambiguously a great move. :)
Sadly, there's a very vocal set of reddittors who have the worst case of the GIFT I've ever seen. These are the same people who think that it's perfectly ok to wage sustained campaigns of harassment against other people, who think it's quite alright to post vile, incredibly hurtful things to r/fatpeoplehate and r/shitniggerssay (or whatever it was called) and many other subreddits devoted to hatred, and who think that an appropriate response to a few subreddits getting banned is to start publicly labelling Ellen Pao with every single gendered, misogynistic insult they can think of (while claiming that, no, they're not sexist or misogynist, no sir no way).
To claim that this is about hating Pao just because she is female is absurd, it has probably more to do with her obviously not understanding reddit at all.
Are you sure that there weren't any petitions to get rid of her before this weekends thing?
I'm not saying that these people will accomplish their goal. But they're definitely stirring up bad publicity for Reddit. That's not a great way to get a CEO fired, but bad publicity is a lot worse for Reddit than losing 100k users.
However, one persistent headline among 20 would not bother most people (aside from the powers that be who may want to quell unrest, of course). I missed earlier discussions and only came in during this one. I think the debate over how to create a successful social network, and how and where to limit free speech online while managing a large community, ought to be of interest to anyone with skin in the game. And that thread had plenty of upvotes and comments to survive beyond two hours.
Big drama always brings many copycat posts and follow-ups. Most need to be treated as duplicates or drama will fill the front page, which is not what HN is for. Where to draw the line? Our answer is, have a major thread on (hopefully) the most substantive version of a story, plus a new thread when there is significant new information [2]. That's the best way we know of to balance the different factors, though we're open to a better way if anyone suggests it.
It's true that it's common for a user to miss earlier discussions, as you mention, but that's a problem with HN in general. No one sees all the threads. We try to point to previous discussions when we notice them, and many HN users helpfully do so as well (greenyoda and ColinWright practically deserve medals for it).
It's relatively easy to either only remove illegal content or to have very strict moderation (ala Facebook). It's much harder to only remove certain kinds of "offensive material" without removing too much.