Well.. I came here because of her, but I think i'm gonna stay on Hubski. I like you guys better.
None of the Reddit drama drew me here. I heard about this site one day and decided to join just to see what it is like. So far, I have really enjoyed my stay.
Same for me and agreed wholeheartedly. Reddit seems very... corporate right now.
I think this was definitely expected, though as forwardslash said, not this soon. In a lot of ways I think Pao was a scapegoat - Not just for the community, but also for those who run reddit. Basically, I see her job to have been:
1.) Do things that would make the investors happy, that they knew would make the community unhappy
2.) when the community inevitably hated those things, take the fall and the hatred.
3.) leave, golden parachute in tow.
After having Pao leave, they may "fix" a few things, but all of the changes will stay in place, but the community will be happier. Win-Win for the people who run Reddit. When I said that I was surprised she's leaving this soon, I'm mostly surprised that they didn't try to get a few more changes out of her - maybe they figured they'd gotten as much out of the situation as they could.
Every time this theory comes up I feel the need to ask "what changes"?
Surely you don't mean to say that they brought in a CEO just to ban one subreddit and fire one employee? I think it's more a case of bad timing.
What changes have there been that were really unpopular - and predictably so?
Well, the biggest change is one of perceived tone by the community. That is, Many redditors, correctly or incorrectly, were under the impression that reddit the website and the company were for Free Speech at a libertarian level - To paraphrase Voltaire "I disagree with what you're saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Since Pao has been on, it has been made clear that this is not the case (Nor was it ever, really, but that's dust in the wind), and that Reddit is being "cleaned up".
Of course, the clean up will now mostly be brushing the ugly subreddits under the rug until they cause a ruckus again and they get banned.
- Of course, the clean up will now mostly be brushing the ugly subreddits under the rug until they cause a ruckus again and they get banned.
And that's the way it has always been. But I guess perception is what matters, and people are only cottoning on to this now.
Was a daily user of reddit for four years. I saw a marked decline in quality and what was actually posted. Back in heydays, lot of talk on Occupy Movement, 99%, Snowden, Assange, privacy movements, heavy tech focus, gaming. Left of center.
The last two years, last year especially, I've noticed a radical shift. All the political stuff, anything that questioned corporate interests, has been dissapearing. Reddit has been actively policing the site and removing posts not because they're obscene, but because they believe in different theories of politics, economics. Been a lot more blatant advertisers, shills pretending to be users, trying to sneak in references to popular name brands. And with Ellen Pao, at the same time it became quite clear that the executive people who bought Reddit were wanting to monetize it, bring in advertisers, turn it into a money making machine. Which means dumbing down, taking away the politics, take away the dissenters, censor what's allowed to be discussed, flood the site with advertisement. More managing speak. More jargon from the admins. Increasingly out of touch. There's been shown a real clear push to stop focusing on the community, and focusing instead in monetizing and making a quick buck, no matter if it drags the site down, no matter if it kills it. And given we're living in a time when a lot of people are getting angry about how politics and laws are manipulated by people in power, people with money, widening economic divide between upper class and all the lower class, it's understandable why the Reddit issue became as inflamed as it did.
Important to keep in mind: a lot of the drastic changes, shifts in content... Imagine you live in North Korea. All information gets filtered, North Korea decides what info you hear. Unless you educate yourself, you accept this, and it doesn't occur to you what's happening. North Korea doctrine is all. When you're INSIDE it, it's hard to tell. You can only tell via statistics, causal analysis, research, long term analysis, data comparisons from year to year, etc. it's about the absence of once was. And many people are so easily distracted, they don't notice. And the people who DO notice are told they're imagining things, what's the hubbub about?
It's not the admins (read: reddit employees) making those changes, tho. The mods are the ones who're making those changes and decisions, and they are doing that in large part as a response to a shift in the userbase that has lead to a lot more bitter fights over anything related to social justice issues.
The actual changes coming from the admin team have been almost unnoticeable, and even the banning of FPH was reasonably in line with their banning of other subs like /gameoftrolls and /niggers.
Which highlights the whole problem of the land grab that subreddits are, and why hubski is just fundamentally a better way for a community.
Monetizing it is going to be much harder but honestly, there are ways that don't involve turning the community into a product.
It's a different way, and better isn't a useful term unless you define your metrics for what constitutes better/worse. Users here are far more responsible for managing their own curation, and topic-specific communities will be much more weakly defined and amorphous. Significant growth of this site will be a real stress test for how this style of social media will work at scale.
One of the great features of reddit is the ability to create small, closeknit, well-defined, single topic communities that can be joined with little hassle by new members.
Over the last year, off the top of my head?
Move all the employees to SF per the VCs.
End the outside vendors on Redditgifts and monetize that marketplace as a reddit Inc space.
Drive popular, yet "offensive," content off the visible parts of the site. This is why /r/cutefemalecorpses and /r/coontown still exist.
End salary negotiations. The conspiracy theory is that this is to lower payroll costs.
Then there are the mod's frustrations of a lack of support from Reddit Inc employees as to what is brigading, spamming, how to deal with trolls, etc.
That is off the top of my head. I bailed on Reddit last year and don't go there anymore, but I do note the drama when it leaks out to the normal spaces on the Internet. Example, Forbes, CNN, BBC, Guardian have all been running Reddit stories.
dawg, you are reddit's product to advertisers and investors. Your existence in the comment sections especially. All they care about is the time you spend ON reddit looking AT reddit. They don't care what content you "create" (Creation being kind of spurious on reddit considering most people don't make or create what they posted) so long as it isn't illegal and it makes people talk ON reddit.
Thinking that thought further, you are spend time staring AT reddit for the content, so it's all the same in the end, it's just a matter of what aspect you're trying to emphasize. No content, no ads.
I know that and so does Reddit - that's probably why they didn't make any more changes with Pao.
However,
1.) inferring that Reddit cares what the content is, so long as it attracts people and isn't illegal enough to get them put in jail is being way too generous, and to infer that they need to care about the "creators" of that content any more than their content is being altogether charitable.
2.) referring to the reddit "community" is more correct than "Content creators". Most posters on reddit aren't submitting their own work, or even primary derivatives of other people's work. I would even go so far as to say that the vast majority could not even be referred to as a "Transformative Work". that doesn't even go into the fact that Most of reddit doesn't post content, just comments. Calling the reddit community content creators is a similar level of generous to the kind that infers that reddit cares about you.
- I think Pao was a scapegoat
I don't agree. The complaints users have seem to be not what was changed while she was CEO but rather how it was done. Her failure wasn't making unpopular changes, it was failing to make unpopular changes palatable.
The dismissal of chooter/Victoria is a great example. The IAMA moderators shut down the sub not because they were protesting but because they didn't understand how to proceed. That was a massive failure by the reddit employees. They should have been ready immediately after Victoria was dismissed with a message to the moderators Victoria directly worked with to help them understand the change and give them an open line of communication. The failures of reddit under Ellen Pao weren't unpopular changes, they were failed communication of unexpected but generally benign changes.
- The failures of reddit under Ellen Pao weren't unpopular changes, they were failed communication of unexpected but generally benign changes.
Yet she took the heat for things that she wasn't responsible for. The firing of Victoria has been known since day one to be Alexis' doing, by his own words. Yet I can't recall a single piece of repurposed propaganda featuring his face rising to the front page.
I argue she was responsible for the poor interaction and communication with users and moderators. The criticism stems from how reddit, Inc interacted with users and moderators and not what Alexis or other did. For that I think the CEO of a small organization deserves much of the blame.
To steal from a reddit philosophy coined under her, the criticism was behavior, not ideas. She may not have been responsible for the ideas, but she was responsible for the behavior.
- I argue she was responsible for the poor interaction and communication with users and moderators.
She's responsible for an issue that's been around for years, long before she was a CEO and even before she ever joined reddit?
- The criticism stems from how reddit, Inc interacted with users and moderators and not what Alexis or other did. For that I think the CEO of a small organization deserves much of the blame.
In other words, Alexis isn't responsible for anything he chose to do because, even though he's one of the co-founders and ultimately has far more power and say-so than Pao ever did?
- To steal from a reddit philosophy coined under her, the criticism was behavior, not ideas. She may not have been responsible for the ideas, but she was responsible for the behavior.
Sounds to me like you're just stretching as far as you can to make sure she gets blamed for everything because of some vendetta you have against her.
And here I thought Hubski prided itself for being above the common redditisms. Maybe it's just a new skin on the same old hate.
Sounds to me like you're stretching to make it appear I have a vendetta against her when I do not. I, too, am disappointed by this interaction and had hoped for more.
I did not expect this, at least not this soon. Not that I think it'll change much in the long run. They have much the same board, and the previous people in charge (going back before Pao) did a lot of damage that we probably still haven't seen all the consequences from. As Alexis' initial response to the recent mod blackout has shown, just because you're a founder doesn't mean you necessarily know what the community needs.
Also, regardless of who is and is not CEO, they have to show significant earnings at some point. There is very little they can do about this without alienating their core community.
Rock and a hard place.
These are my thoughts too. Whoever hired this CEO is still at reddit, everyone has their boss. It's true that Pao did enough wrong to start an e-riot, but she did it because that's how she thought she would be able to finish her task. A task that will persist.
Steve Huffman is back and CEO. That's cool? You're probably right though. I don't know what Alexis said but there are more changes coming as they seek to sell and/or investors want returns. And the community backlash is sure to scare off a great many potential buyers who wouldn't want to bother trying to reign in the anarchy that is reddit.
I started looking for alternatives to reddit from the whole situation, and ended up coming here and joining a much better, more constructive community. I'm honestly glad reddit drove me here, because even if reddit goes back to what it was before, here is where I'll stay.
I had no idea that it would happen this fast. I'm still done with Reddit and have no plans to go back there, but wow. This made the front pages of CNN Money, Business week and Forbes. Looking at Reddit traffic, they went from the 23rd most visited website worldwide to the 33rd in the time she was there. I guess the people writing the checks stepped in to save their valuations.
She did that much damage? I had no idea.
Still, I can't feel a bit sorry for her, she wasn't a good CEO, but she didn't deserve the things that were said about her+ the thousands of death threats were also not called for.
It was clear from the beginning that Pao wasn't a cultural fit for Reddit. And I don't even know what to think about Pao's pre-reddit history.
But still, her sudden departure is a real bummer, and here's why: because this whole thing proves to the whole internet that bullying and rancor will win out over logic and conversation. If you act like a whiny kid, and you do it loud enough, you win.
The second someone mentioned a better place than reddit, I jumped ship. Now I feel unattached, and I like it. It almost feels as good as quitting Facebook.
I haven't had a big assignment in a few days. I tend to do stuff like this, when I'm tired of my homework.
While I did not agree with a lot of what she did but frankly I think the unspeakable hate that she got in the form of some frankly pretty disgusting sentiments and comments was really uncalled for. Anyway, hopefully Reddit moves forward from this, if nothing else.