One look at the completely irrelevant second sentence of the petition to remove her [1] should tell you everything to know about why users are actually angry at her. This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.
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.
It doesn't take a misogynist or a racist to be upset to see a well-liked person fired abruptly, especially with no apparent cause. There is a lot of stored-up discontent with the way Reddit is run, some of it even goes back to when Yishan was CEO. It's a fool's errand to try to please all of such a huge userbase, but Pao seems to have been able to unite some very unlikely factions against her.
You say there is no apparent cause, but you're not privy to the details and have no right to be unless you were a reddit employee working closely with her. It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing, regardless of the position and company.
The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice to people who depending on the fired person. That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.
Strictly speaking that's correct. Here in the real world, Reddit might weigh more carefully how their operational decisions have affected actual operations, as opposed to continuing to operate as if they have total control of every aspect of Reddit.
>It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing
Of course it is, but keeping silent won't stop the speculation. Something tells me that decorum isn't the reason for Reddit's silence. I suspect they are merely worried about exposing themselves to the possibility of a lawsuit. In that light, it may have been better to come up with a more creative way to move /u/chooter out of her role.
>The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice to people who depending on the fired person.
That is one of the legitimate complaints about /u/chooter's firing. Like it or not, it is perfectly legitimate for anyone, especially Reddit mods and users to have and express an opinion about Reddit and their operations. That's kind of what Reddit is, a place for people to express opinions; I am not sure how that aspect escaped the notice of management. And, yeah, Reddit also dropped the ball by not having a contingency plan for /u/chooter's departure and they probably don't have contingency plans for other employees in critical roles.
>That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.
That's because the firing of /u/chooter was just the catalyst that began the release of a lot of pent-up discontent.
What was the pent-up discontent about? Removing awful subreddits? I still can't come up with any good reasons why people are so angry. Some moderators should be mildly peeved, but that's about it.
Lack of moderation tools, unresponsive admins, accusations of shady conspiracy stuff (payola, censorship, etc), there is other stuff. I don't care to list it all but you should look into it if you want your arguments to be taken seriously.
>Removing awful subreddits?
As has been related to you many times, that is a recent issue.
She has no clue that the "vocal minority" is the one that creates the content that the majority consumes. She comes across as aloof, as if she's just playing out the role of the CEO without really understanding the soul of Reddit. Of course, the vitriol poured out by some of the users is misogynistic, but the larger backlash is really because of the way things were handled by the company.
In the comment thread of the OP, she clarifies the "vocal minority" as referring to the people obsessed with her.
> I assume you’re referring to the NYT quote. I want to clarify the quote's context. The reporter asked about the people who are posting and commenting really negatively about me, not about the mods and content creators. That's what I was referring to when I talked about them being a vocal minority. I do understand that the site is built on the content and voting, and I know that we and the community owe a lot to our mods and core users. —/u/ekjp, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
You could say the same about Twitter's hosting individuals who espouse toxic views. I believe that Reddit essentially wants to be a Twitter for communities (as opposed to individuals), in that they aren't interested in guiding the moral ethos of its userbase (beyond removing illegal or harassing content). So, honest question, would you apply your criticism to Twitter? (and if not, why not?)
I don't use Twitter, so I have no idea. But each company, despite their freewheeling public images, has a right to dictate how their services are used. If that means adopting a stronger stance on these toxic elements in order to improve their user experience (and attractiveness to advertisers), it's probably best to do it.
Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
You're right, but it doesn't matter whether they're "beholden" to it or not, they're the consumers and they're telling the market that they want a platform with transparency and where speech is protected. It's just supply and demand, so if there are signals that reddit isn't satisfying what its market demands, how exactly is reddit immune from your average market forces here? It's a popular site, sure, but so were digg and myspace. Just because users have certain expectations of a site, that the site itself may or may not have actually promised, does not make the site immune from competition.
So in reality, it's not so much about users feeling entitled to anything, it's that reddit seems to have been getting complacent about what it feels it needs to deliver to stay relevant to its content producers and power users (which are the main drivers of a site like that).
Companies can dictate how their services are used all they want, but that doesn't mean they have an automatic right to remain successful/profitable/relevant, especially if how they went about dictating their terms hurt their PR (whether reasonably or not).
We can imagine all we want, but that's up to the markets to decide, not you, advertisers, or anyone else. Advertisers just want to have an audience they can make money off of. If reddit scares away what it's trying to sell to advertisers because it's ideals aren't aligned with its product/userbase, then it deserves to be disrupted by competition.
It's not like we live in a dictatorship where we can easily designate what is/isn't appropriate for a site like reddit to be successful. If a competitor to reddit finds itself being more successful by hosting things like TheRedPill and CoonTown, then so be it, that's how the market works.
> Reddit is not beholden to to their users to the degree that those users probably believe. Nor are they beholden to some imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
And yet, when those non-"beholding" users revolted, Pao apologizes to them, instead of continuing to ignore them.
> imagined ethos about being a place where all speech is protected.
Exactly, they are merely "pretty open" and can change the rules as they see fit. Like I said, any belief that all speech should be protected on reddit is false.
Every company has a right to dictate how their services are used but they don't have a right to keep their "freewheeling public images" if they do a lot of dictating.
No, you're right- they don't care about that at all. They're mad that the administration are cracking down on abusive subreddits like "fat people hate" and all of the revenge porn subs that got shut down last year. They're pretending to care about the Victoria thing because it's more socially acceptable.
And you know this because you interviewed the hundreds of thousands of discontent reddit users I presume?
Generalizations are fun, but they don't make the greatest arguments.
Not all users that were upset at the /r/fatpeoplehate ban were subscribers to that sub, and not all subscribers to that sub were partaking in harassment I presume (which is a reasonable assessment based on the subscriber numbers and the usual ratios of participation in online communities).
So taking all that into account, even if this is in fact the main demographic of disgruntled users, that still has nothing to do with misogyny. If it were true misogyny, they likely wouldn't even be using a female employee as their martyr. I really don't understand what distorting contexts and stretching the truth to frame things in terms of sexism is supposed to accomplish, but it's certainly not proving any points.
Reddit screwed up, and it's CEO's decisions clearly affected an influential and vocal part of the community, to the point where it's now open to competition from sites like voat. There's enough business mishaps and silliness in all this to explain everything, I don't see how shoehorning misogyny into it adds anything of value.
> This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.
If the Reddit CEO were male AND their "failed lawsuit" were also about a dishonest attempt at smearing the name of innocent companies and people - like cowards and people without principles do - then I bet you the outcry would be the same.
Good people hate liars, and there's no coming back from playing the victim and seeking compensation unjustifiably.
I won't quote here but search for the points made by celticninja. It's incredible that we allow women to get away with so much that we even forget to acknowledge that liars and unprincipled narcissists come in all shapes and colors. Don't hate the gender, hate the (lack of) principles.
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...