http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato... http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420...

"We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..."

This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.

A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.

As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.

Children are emotional.

- Earlier that week, reddit modified the search function which (though I don't know the details as I am not a mod and really don't care) apparently affected or limited the moderators' abilities is some negative manner.

- The banning of harassing subreddits, though none of the lurkers cared at all and the majority of active users did not care, left a sour taste in many users' mouths.

- The firing of that employee apparently greatly affected the ability to facilitate the most popular subreddit on the website, as well as a few others.

When the mods of IAMA closed shop for a while due to the third issue, the powder keg exploded, leading others who disliked the treatment of mods and those who irrationally hate the reddit CEO to make a hullabaloo for eight hours.

Frankly, I deleted my reddit account due to this. Not for any dislike the CEO or a desire to stand up for mods' rights, but rather because I genuinely do not care about the drama anymore and would rather focus my attention on more important things[1] and more interesting topics[2].

[1] Such as commenting on Hacker News.

[2] Such as discussions about Reddit.

:-)

I've cut Pao a lot of slack in the past, but this makes her look like she has no idea what she's doing. No communication for days? Speaking to outside reporters before speaking to her community? It makes no sense to me.

> Prove it -Reddit Community

There is no point in analyzing the apology, only the actions that occur over the next month.

Yeah it came late. But better late than never.

Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her interactions with the reddit community.

I think mainly this underscores the need for the internet to evolve. Sites like reddit and twitter are too important to be controlled by a single for-profit entity.

We need distributed systems that respect anonymity and privacy that prevent censorship. We also need the ability for groups to form where content can be curated.

I think there are a number of projects in development that have potential. It will be interesting to see where things go.

also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies are a serious mistake.

on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all popcorn-munching entertainment to me.

The success of Reddit is directly attributable to high profile subs (/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/AMA, /r/ListenToThis, etc.) and less visible but still well run subs that cater to more niche interests/topics (/r/MakeupAddiction, /r/PersonalFinance, etc.). Those subreddits would not exist without the thousands of man hours put in by moderators who are volunteers (modulo a few exceptions, such as Victoria). Anyone who has moderated an internet community knows how much sweat, effort, time, and pain go into maintaining a high quality community, and how crucial it is to keep your moderators happy and make them feel like their effort is valued.

The fact that the people running Reddit do not seem to realize that is a perfectly valid reason for the user base to be angry. A lot of Silicon Valley executives like to think of their company+product as some neat little money making machine that sits in a vacuum and that they can tweak and modify as they like. But the reality is that building a community platform like Reddit is very different from running a sausage factory. You can run your sausage factory in to the ground, and the sausages won't complain (the workers might, but the US does a pretty good job at avoiding that through strict control on labor unions). But when you start shitting on Reddit, the users will complain and protest - after all, you might control the code and the servers, but the community as a whole has contributed much more than you have to the end product.

You can't separate "reddit" and "the community" like some commenters here are doing. This dualism makes no sense - reddit and its community are the same thing. You can't have the thoughtful, well run threads on /r/AskScience without the dumb jokes on /r/funny.

Ellen Pao and friends do not seem to grasp those subtleties (this apology is just damage control), and it lead to the complete disaster we are seeing right now. This isn't rocket science - in fact the Reddit community is quite predictable. Any Reddit user would have been able to tell you how the community was going to react to these actions. The fact that Ellen Pao has some shady connections (her husband not being in jail because he has enough money is a good first example) is just more fuel on top of the fire. This was extremely easy to predict, and the fact that the Reddit leadership seems to be completely clueless about it is a very bad sign for things to come. The reddit community didn't have a problem with kn0thing, yishan, and others because they were first and foremost reddit users and know how to interact with the community. It's not the case for the current people in charge.

The community has every right to be up in arms. And if you think that the Reddit community is shit and don't spend time there, like some commenters here state, then what makes you feel like your input has any sort of relevance?

This isn't a technology or management fiasco - it's a political debacle. At a community interaction level, it's not very different from taking someone with arbitrary credentials and putting them in charge of a country they're completely unfamiliar with in the hope that they're going to make that country a peaceful democracy. It just doesn't work - you need the leadership to come from the community for it to have any lasting chance.

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.

For all we know, it may not have been Ellen's fault...a lot of people jumping the gun

Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that drama around and within reddit is ruining this - all I want to do is learn and engage - it's impossible now to avoid it. Any alternative that keeps the quality high and the format similar without all the ugly dramatics?

MY 2 cents, seen from far away.

"fuck you, pay me"

I don't think Reddit management (or anyone who's familiar with online communities in general) is worried about the mod 'chair' sitting empty. However, I think they are worried about the kind of person they have running large sections of their website. They've had moderators get caught favoring racist ideologies, sell access to large subs, general icky stuff that Reddit doesn't want happening. Then there's the ability of mods to simply "turn off" huge sections of the site to blackmail the owners. I think the incentive for the management to avoid that is obvious.

The current 'set' of mods are, as far as I can tell, saying: "We're pretty good at this, we're doing our best, but we're gonna get fed up eventually - the next set may not be so cooperative." I think that's a reasonable position to take in their situation, and is a position Reddit management would do well to pay attention to. It's a lot easier to create a environment where good mods stay and eject the ones you dislike than to conjure up smart, dedicated, hard-working people who don't demand a paycheck.

Reddit is not the first site that struggles to keep the paid employees and volunteer moderators happy. There are countless other examples which have had various outcomes.

Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people would feel great about.

But they still are part of the backbone. No single mod is, but the ever changing group of mods as a whole are very important. Cease all moderation and what will eventually happen? Some self moderation by means of the voting system will keep everything from going completely crazy, but smaller communities could be crushed. Consider how making twox default would've worked if there were no mods.

The moderators of Reddit actually have very legitimate issues and are bringing points that need to be addressed. Moderators of websites as big as reddit should be managed correctly and supervised. They should also have a line on communication with the administrators of the website for issues such as this one.

They should also receive proper tools needed to ensure that their work is done correctly and in a timely fashion.

Reddit's moderators have even greater responsibilities than moderators of more normals websites have. Their efforts on this point should be rewarded or at the very least recognized. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that attracts celebrities to the websites. It isn't the administrator of Reddit that create the quality content that is in subreddits like /r/askhistorians, and /r/science and all the other serious subreddits. It is the users and superusers, all self-managed by the moderators.

Some subreddit are ecosystems that are bigger, better staffed and more organized that a lot of websites out there.

To say openly that moderators and content creators are simply creating a ruckus out of nothing and should be ignored is biting the hand that feeds you. Those people are people of passions, and people of passions will hate quickly and move on to a better suited ecosystem even faster.

The firing of that employee was only the bottlecap blowing out from all the pressure. She also ended up a martyr to push the strike into the mind of regular users. Otherwise, she is barely related to what happened on reddit recently.

>I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset. >they're >they

Reddit is 160 million people because it is a huge online community. Calling them children and referring to them as a contiguous unit of alike individuals is laughable. So there isn't a straight answer why some subset of 160 million people are angry but a lot of them are for various reasons.

>I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman being fired

Brendan Eich was way more qualified to run Mozilla than Pao is to run reddit. He was really fucking good at his job and is one of the smartest engineers in tech. He couldn't effectively do his job and had to resign. It doesn't matter if the backlash was fair, it was impacting the company negatively. Pao is not the right person to run reddit, hasn't made great decisions, is followed by personal scandal and is generally detested by the community(which is reddits product). She has to step down whether you feel slighted about it or not.

It's like firing the person who wrote a language your company uses internally with little to no documentation: absolutely everything is going to go to hell until someone comes in, learns what and how things were done, and can replace that person.

With no word as to why she left or was fired - it screams something political or a massive disconnect with the userbase. AMA's on Reddit are a pretty huge deal. It's a large part of Reddit's popularity - such that even the POTUS has had an "AMA" on Reddit. So when you disrupt how they work and give absolutely no word as to why the person who played such a large part in many AMA's being scheduled, planned, and hosted: you're going to step on a lot of toes.

I read one story of a person flying to New York for an AMA. He had to change his plans and work with the person planning the AMA to schedule different interviews or sightseeing on his time because the AMA was cancelled due to Victoria being let off. That's a loss of a person's time and money with no explanation being given for why someone who was performing their job suddenly wasn't tasked with the job. I'd be pretty peeved myself. Luckily the man was very understanding it was outside of the moderator's control with Victoria being let off, but I imagine some mods aren't as lucky with their scheduled AMA's.

And the person fired was by most accounts a well-liked, very visible, performing employee. Dismissing someone like that with very little care was horrific management.

Edit: I don't know why I included Alexis since he also comes off pretty smug and user-hostile (e.g. "popcorn time").

I dont think that is true. I have used reddit for quite some time, probably since 2006. I have no personal animosity toward her however I dont think she is the right leader for reddit. And I say that as a user, not an owner, shareholder, employee etc. My reasons are because I like they way the old reddit operated. The reason that I say that is because when I started using reddit the free speech ethic was proudly trumpeted. This was around the time of the DeCSS key event that started the downfall of Digg.

Even up to as recently as 2012 Yishan Wong was reaffirming reddits commitment as a free speech platform. This was around the time of the r/jailbait takedown. But really that was the beginning of the end, r/jailbait was shut down because of illegal content being posted. I never saw definitive proof of that and I dont think any was offered. This was about the time that there was media interest in reddit (and to be fair r/jailabit was one of the more embarassing links that could and did show up on a google search for reddit). So it went and with it the start of a slippery slope of censorship began.

After r/jailabit (which the majority of users agreed with) there was the fappening, again a lot of users agreed, but all these agreeable users were relatively new, they were here for cat pictures and memes. They didnt care about reddit as a free speech platform because their interests were not affected. Then we arrive at r/fatpeoplehate being banned. This went because of 'harassment'.

Now we are at a stage where reddit is going to be kept clean and media friendly. It is not a free speech site (and I dont need to hear about free speech does not have to be protected by a businesss, i know that) even though it started off like that and it attracted a lot of users like that and those users built the communities that make reddit thrive.

I dont post that often anymore, i very rarely submit content anymore, I am not as attached to my accounts as I used to be. I am looking for alternatives because the site has changed so much (and so has the userbase) that the content it now has is no longer as relevant as it once was and this is only going to continue under the current leadership, and once a certain point is passed there is no getting it back. If she went now it may be retrieveable, if she lasts another 6-12 months in her position then it may not be.

The worst thing you can do is let that behavior poison the well for you. There is always going to be someone who shares your opinions but you don't like their reasoning or the way they choose to share their reasoning. You don't want other people to write your ideas off because some people that agree with you are assholes, so extend the same courtesy to people you don't agree with.

I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're upset.

Yes, you can. There is more than one answer, and 10x more people that are just into bandwagon shouting than thoroughly articulating their positions, but that doesn't mean you can't find it. It means you don't want to try.

Supposedly she helped with setting up a lot of IAMAs as well as fighting to keep their integrity up (i.e. identifying when an actor's agent was posing as that actor as part of a marketing ploy). Even if you really liked IAMAs and what I've heard is completely true, these are benefits you wouldn't directly notice. It is like the average computer user feeling slighted by the Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or the average voter feeling slighted by the TPP. These have nasty effects, but they are not at all direct in the harm they cause, and as such people do not feel slighted even when they have been.

Reddit has harbored toxic subreddits for long enough that they've nurtured a huge user base of racists and misogynists. It's a demographic crisis and it apparently doesn't take much to incite these mobs. These vocal and active users hated Pao before she became reddit CEO and these events were entirely predictable.

[1] https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-red...

Why is a supposedly community-based website run by someone the community hates?

You don't have to love reddit's community to smell a rat here. It's a complete shitshow.

Communities that suffer schisms like the one reddit is working itself into don't fare well. You can't build a healthy community out of a mindset like "well, we aren't THEM". This has happened time after time, and I've been on both sides of the problem, sometimes as a user, sometimes as the admin.

The reddit community just gets cherry picked depending on the view you want to put across. 'Bad Guys' - find an appropriate reddit, e.g. r/picsofdeadkids, or r/hangniggers or just go to r/SRS and choose a topic, sexism, racism etc, choose a particualarly vile comment from a single user and then say look this is representative of reddit, what a hive of scum and villainy.

'Good Guys' - go to r/randomactsofkindness or r/randomactsofpizza, or any local subreddit like r/oregon and find a heart warming story of a user sending another user a new laptop when theirs was stolen right before finals, or turning up with money for a hotel when a guy and his kid get stuck in a new city at night after a football game, or any of a hundred other amazing things that people do for one another just because they are a user of the same site.

Generalising like you have and saying you cant even get an answer about why they are upset is evidently trolling or laziness on your behalf as anyone with 10 minutes could find out the reasons behind the dislike of Pao just by reading the r/announcements and the user comments that go along with them.

The Ellen Pao stuff is complicated, she does have some fault for being the one who made unpopular decisions and the way she managed the process (particularly extremely poor communication) but in general I agree that she gets way too much criticism from the community. She's very unpopular for a bunch of things that are not actually her fault (like people who incorrectly think she censors reddit).

Imagine you're a freshman in college. You join a club and make friends with the people there. Quickly, the club becomes the center of your social life as you make friends with other people there and most of your time, formally or informally, revolves around the club.

As you get older, the club changes as old members leave and new members come. In two years, you feel like things are "going downhill", but just try to do your part a little better, and while you don't feel like you can have any effect on the larger portions (like the big introductory events) you have a little social circle that enjoys what you do, and you focus on making that the best place it can be.

However, when you're a junior, the leadership of the club starts changing rapidly. In six months there are two club presidents, each less liked than the last. Because of the way the university is structured, it would be very difficult to start a new club, or to get members of the previous club to come to the new club, and you've built up a lot of credential within the organization that will evaporate if you leave.

You're in a difficult situation now. You've invested a lot in this community. But top-down changes, possibly combined with normal drift over time, make it look like this community is going downhill. Suddenly, you feel like your little social circle will become an island in a hostile place rather than a part of a bigger organism.

>As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen

A casual X of any Y has no real reason to feel strongly about changes in Y. If I casually played golf, I wouldn't care if the rules changed. If I casually wrote iOS apps, I wouldn't care if Apple took a bigger or smaller cut. If I casually participated in politics, I would be unconcerned about changes that people who are above the level of casual are quite concerned with.

Deciding that because you do not feel personal investment with communities on reddit you are somehow above the "children" who do is misinformed. If you are a casual user you have no reason to be invested and no reason to care.

But to someone who feels close to a community that happens to live on reddit, these changes are scary. All of a sudden the administration team of reddit isn't the friendly, startup-vibe-having, tight-knight team of nerds that do cool april fools pranks and sometimes leave witty comments in pun threads. The Reddit admins have become depersonalized, and lately, they have been making changes that are very intrusive into the site. Whether you agree with those changes is immaterial. The fact is Reddit has moved from a mostly hands-off admin stance to a more hands-on one.

It's impossible to summarize this in a straight answer, because the fundamental reason why people are so upset over this (you are right that they are minor events -- only in the context of the larger reddit/community relationship do they become significant) is mere fear of change, and of the unknown. I think Redditors are very aware of the precarity of their communities. They don't want to lose them, but they think they might now, more so than they used to.

I hope this gives you a better idea of why Redditors might be upset. It's important to remember that every time we can't think of a likely true motivation for someone's actions, that is our own ignorance of human psychology, not a signifier of irrationality on the part of the person we observe. It's easy to write this off with bigotry or ageism, but that doesn't bring us closer to the truth.

In all fairness, a lot of their users are probably kids. Who are upset.

I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.

Get off your moral high-horse.

He's produced greatness, but not only that, he's done so consistently. He's made some missteps along the way but if you really dig deep and watch his interviews over the years you'll start to understand the person he is.

People are very interesting, and it's so easy to characterize public figures in these black and white ways and dismiss their work, but it's far more difficult to truly understand the person, their motivations, and their frustrations.

I've watched hours and hours of Kanye interviews, listened to days and days of his music, and watched him grow as a person as he progressed through his legendary career. It's truly incredible.

I think there's something be learned from Justin Bieber as well, whose music I don't like and whose fanbase I dislike even more.

People are fascinating, you just have to dig deeper to find those parts, and put forth effort to learn something from other people. Even those people you don't like.

But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen (people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).

This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something" statements and guessing.

Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-leaf-interpreting.

The firing by it self would have had some people grumbling a bit, but it wouldn't have become the newsworthy shitstorm it became.

The problem was that the moderators weren't warned and were left without any other means of dealing with the needs of the many events planned and happening.

They were already asking for years to have better tools and better ways to communicate with the admins.

So in the end, the firing was only the straw that broke the camel's back, not because of a beloved and dedicated employee, but because of a lack of respect and concern that became more than insulting.

Redditors may be the product, but a farm doesn't last long if you don't care for the cows.

The /r/iama mods only found out because one of the people who had an AMA scheduled that day sent them modmail saying something to the effect of "Victoria told me they let her go, so what's gonna happen to my AMA?".

That's a shitty way for the mod team to find out that the main person who handled their scheduling and coördination was let go.

As far as you know. Last time a reddit employee was fired and there was a public discussion around it, it didn't go so well for the employee.

Basically reddit was a cesspool of villainy for a while, and now she's turning it into a cesspool of SJW/"Mod-approved language". I'll take the former any day of the week. When you're afraid to speak your mind because you might get shadowbanned or a mod of a subreddit you never visit might be offended at your comment and complain to the admins, it's just a way to stifle speech.

It's basically GamerGate expanding into social media.

There are limits to how much time you want to dedicate to any one constituency. But yes, when you've got a problem with your mods and users on a mod-and-user-centric company, you talk to the mods and users.

No, it isn't.

Ellen Pao being at fault for everything is a meme spawned by the Gamergate/MRW/anti-SJW crowd. The recent mishandling of the fatpeoplehate ban and then the lack of communication about letting Victoria go have just fanned those existing flames.

If the CEO was some boring old white man, nobody would be calling for his head like this, nor would they be the best person to be publishing apologies.