Slashdot Mirror
"We Screwed Up," Says Reddit CEO In Formal Apology
An anonymous reader writes: After moderators locked up some of Reddit's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, and an online petition asking the company to fire CEO Ellen Pao reached more than 175,000 signatures over the weekend, Pao has issued an apology. The statement reads in part: "We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven't communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven't delivered on them. When you've had feedback or requests, we haven't always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit. Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me."
Hiring Ellen Pao.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Unless that's followed by her resignation, it's a whole lot of horse crap.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
How about I screwed up? Or does the buck not stop at the top at reddit?
Basically unless they rehire Taylor or Pao steps down, this is just a bunch of community knob-slobbery with no actual value behind it whatsoever.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, Ellen. You fucked up. Don't pass that blame onto your minions--I mean, employees. You are a rude, manipulative, bigoted, hypocritical, psychopathic cunt. The least you can do is own up to the fact that those things that all went wrong were your decisions to enforce.
She was all over other media outlets over the weekend, and only just now makes vague promises about "tools". Hopefully those won't go the way of the "transparency!" promises they made earlier. People are apparently rather unhappy. But the good news is that Ellen Pao thinks that her users don't care, and the ones who are raising a fuss are insignificant. That's the way to make the moderators (which are basically unpaid employees) happy, Ellen!
Her management style reeks of VC meddling. It's all sanitize and monetize now. Weird shadowbanning, giving some offensive subreddits the boot but not others, etc.
I predict a gradual exodus. The cool kids tend to move on anyway once their parents have arrived.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
This latest issue with firing a beloved director (Victoria) was only the catalyst for the rage against Ellen Pao. She comes in as an interim CEO, brings a ton of baggage in the form of her life-long scam artist husband and her own false claims of gender discrimination, proceeds to enforce selective and personally-driven censorship, and then finally fires one of the most community involved employees of reddit. It doesn't help that the rumors over the cause of Victoria's firing was due to her refusing to delete legitimate questions during Jesse Jackson's AMA.
Just like that time she filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner-Perkins but no gave a $uck 'cause they were circle-jerking off each other and the story and case appeared to jury was they were throwing cash at each other until Pao got a little $issy and sued... Pao has screwed yet again at least she doesn't appear as spoilt or bratty this time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was a user driven site. The users provided much of the value. The users were pissed off. The users struck back. Now the business is scared. What's the problem?
Eh, who cares. Does anybody actually still look at that web site? Honestly I barely knew it was still around.
Found Pao's Slashdot account....
Considering the massive screw-ups that have happened here at slashdot, it appears someone did not learn anything from this at all. Party on, guys.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Mod parent down. Seriously? Reddit is ONLY the community and the infrastructure, and the community is a lot more fragile. The way a lot of us see it, it's the reddit management who are entitled.
I'm at slashdot waiting for Voat.co to escape the mediocrity that's this internet...
Reddit is absolutely allowed to manage their employees as they see fit. The mods of Reddit, in turn, are allowed to exercise the powers that Reddit has given them, and to express their discontent.
Reddit is free to dispense with the services of mods and pay people to monitor and moderate all the conversations that go on, so that the corporation can maintain complete control. If they want to take advantage of the time and effort of volunteers (how many? thousands?), then they have to work cooperatively with those volunteers.
last time I saw it , it reminded me of a poor mans digg. both of them now seem like vaporware
seems like they have quite a few rabid fanboys though with that many signatures. mystifying.
Among other things, sounds like Slashdot's current owners are on a similar path...
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOO! Mooooo cows MOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU COWS!!
Reddit may eventually have to decide if they're an actual business that's supposed to make money or a hip BBS. The two identities are sorta in tension and I'm not sure it's resolvable.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
When your community is what generates the revenue and the articles and the commentary, you have to be careful to not go too far too fast. Was Victoria fired with cause? I don't know and I don't care - but you need to have contingency plans in place. It's clear there wasn't.
Reddit is a constantly money-losing business. Only 1 million in ad revenue, and several million in expenses, it never adds up! The only thing keeping it going is cash infusions from the large media company that owns it. But the owners can pull the plug anytime they feel like it. There's no point in keeping it running.
I guess if reddit is making $$$ from these mods and users, I guess they should think twice before alienating them... It's just like someone complaining about what shows up here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7491417&cid=49822833 fucking entitled children.
By the same token users are allowed to be upset when the site they are using changes and they don't like it. /. has gone through similar issues, the whole beta fiasco comes to mind and fortunately ./ decided to back off from those changes.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The problem is that is unAmerican. You see Reddit is a business & when a business wrongs us we are supposed to take it & give them more money or information that used to wrongfully be considered private information.
It's more accurate to replace "users" with "mods" in your post. The users were just along for the ride in the current/latest shitstorm. Most of them don't care.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
You used "reddit" and "value" in the same sentence, but forgot the /sarcasm
Anyone? I know someone people all over it but I noticed most of them are a few generations after me. I looked at it and it looked like a threaded forum site.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Clearly you don't understand how the site works. The moderators, the ones with the legitimate complaints, are not employees - they are users who "donate" their time to help run the site. The issue that caused all this was the firing of a Reddit employee who was a vital part of many of the subreddits. The main subreddit affected was AMA (Ask Me Anything). Victoria, the employee that was fired, was the key part in making sure that if an AMA thread is set up for person X, that person X can figure out how to use the site, that it is actually person X answering and not a proxy, and that everything goes smooth. Firing Victoria led to many of these prescheduled AMAs to have no way of happening. The Reddit admin should have either had someone already in place to take over her work and provide a seamless transition, or to at least finish the existing AMAs and only have her leave after the queue was cleared (or enough prior notice to cancel the ones scheduled later in the future). The moderators (again, not employees) revolted because it made their (volunteer) job difficult, and left them in a shitty position. They realized the best way to get things to change is to do something substantial. As a result, they shut down the subreddits they moderate (which already wouldn't be running without them), and got the attention of the CEO by rallying their users. If all they did was file a private complaint, then from the perspective of an outside, this story would look different. Instead, the moderators would be getting blamed for the failure to run the subreddits, and nothing would change.
What a piece of work.
http://www.vanityfair.com/styl...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
since you're stupid i'll explain, the problem is it was just words, no action. if i steal your shit then say "sorry" yet don't return your shit, WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
Cry babies my ass. I suppose people complaining about slashdot beta where cry babies too? How about Digg?
Whatever happened to keeping the customer happy? Reddit is a social media site, the users are the customers, and they are not happy. The entire premise of reddit is bring in the users to generate ad revenue. Along comes Pao who and pisses off a massive segment of the userbase. I doesn't matter if you like them or agree with them, if that is your audience your job is to keep them happy.
Pao's problem isn't that she made a mistake. The problem is she doesn't know how to use the site (for real she doesn't) and doesn't get the concept of user generated content. I mean reddit bills itself as the front page of the internet, so where do you go to get the news about her apology? Time. She apologized on national media before doing it on the very site she is supposed to be promoting, that's just clueless.
She is a terrible CEO and if reddits board had any brains they would fire her immediately.
Reddit may eventually have to decide if they're an actual business that's supposed to make money or a hip BBS. The two identities are sorta in tension and I'm not sure it's resolvable.
Well, you're not going to make money if you continue to arbitrarily ban things that you find offensive or someone else might find offensive. There are things on the internet I don't like. I just don't go to those sites. I don't demand that they take those sites down. Aside from that, I don't know how a BBS makes money these days with ad block, etc, unless they're selling user info, which would probably go over huge with the reddit crowd.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It is very easy to make words, it is very difficult to back those words up with anything of meaning. These are just platitudes unless they actually follow up with something, and they're probably not going to do that.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
All these reddit stories make we want Chinese food
Short answer, no.
Longer answer, MS Taylor was fired and no one providing an explanation about why. In one rumor, MS Taylor indicated she doesn't know. Another rumor, maybe because she refused to leave New York. By all accounts, MS Taylor had a high profile position and was well liked by the volunteer moderators. Key word is "volunteers". Whatever you may think of a companies rights to do whatever they like with their employees, a company that relies volunteers to help their bottom line gives those individuals a say.
So yes, Reddit can fire their employees but volunteers aren't employees. Volunteers instead of employees was a business decision and alienating the volunteers a very dumb business decision.
It's not about wether or not everyone's within their rights, nobody contests that the mods don't have the right to do what they did, I think. The question, more for Ellen Pao and the mods than us, is wether it's actually appropriate or good community conduct to shut down the whole website because she decides to let someone go.
Nobody's going to work for Reddit if they're told at the door: "We'll keep you around as long as some splinter cell of mods doesn't start a flashmob against you. And we try to fire bad people but if they have loyal mods they're impossible to get rid of." So exactly what do the redditors want reddit to be, assuming we call them constituents or stakeholders, and not mere content sharecroppers? Do they really want to be involved in Reddit's internal business process? Why?
In California at least, there are strict legal protections for people who are fired, their boss cannot necessarily talk about why or how someone is fired in public, not without courting significant legal liability. So I'm not sure what "transparency" or "involving the community" can practically accomplish, without getting everyone tied up in torts.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Unless the apology comes with a resignation, it means nothing. "Ok, we screwed up, but we're not going to do a damn thing about it" doesn't cut it.
I don't think in Reddit's case that it really is. The elements of the site that allowed them to expand it to its current size are not conducive to building it any larger, and there's not enough other mainstream usage to offset the loss of those elements when they can continue to disrupt the rest of site for an extended period of time.
This is sort of Slashdot's problem too; there's an upper bound on how much traffic geek news can drive, and rather than being content to have the best geek-news site such that it draws the most traffic from this niche, they keep trying to introduce non-geek elements, which causes userbase angst, drives away newcomers, and drives away existing users who feel that the site is diluted.
Until sites stop trying to be most or all things to most or all people this will continue to be a problem for them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does that mean Der Feminist Fuhrer is gone?!? I hate that lady.
That's from a COMPETING company (who owns shitholes like arstechnica - now THAT place is irrelevant & chock full of no-minds & weasels, that is certain) for Pete's sake!
* Consider the source...
APK
P.S.=> See subject man - I always considered you SMARTER than that, per my statements above - regardless of the damn TROLLS around here? It's STILL one of the best forums & news aggregators online (though I feel it's TOO "POLITICAL" LATELY & places like "El Reg" do better PURE technical articles for, oh, ever since DICE got ahold of THIS site)... apk
I hope you do not get buried because this is an important sentiment.
Reddit is revolving (hah) because Reddit, the closed-source, privately owned message board you've (royal You) decided to create an identity out of, is deciding to manage their staff the way they see fit.
It's almost as if the internet is coming to a small epiphany, and unfortunately it's being wasted on entitled folks who believe they are part of some progressive discussion because they use http.
The mods are pissed at Ellen for treating them the way the mods treat normal users. I think they miss the irony.
"We screwed up" seems contradictory to "the buck stops with me".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You're not going to make money if your site is full of horrible inhuman shit that scares away advertisers. You also can't make any room for advertising revenue when your community lights the beacons and storms the bastille any time an attempt is made to monetize.
Is the rumor that the firing was forced on Reddit by Jesse Jackson credible?
That's pretty much everyone's procedure, so Reddit's job is to make sure reddit.com doesn't become "one of those sites" for a sufficiently large group of people.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
She is a terrible CEO and if reddits board had any brains they would fire her immediately.
Yeah, but could they afford the lawsuit? The smartest move would have been to never hire her in the first place. It seems clear that she's trying to drive it into the ground.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The problem is that these people are trying to run a business while outsourcing some parts of it to "the community" for free.
Well guess what. The community doesn't give two shits about your legal obligations.
They've been working with this person for several years and suddenly she's gone. The community doesn't respond well to that.
The alternative is to not have a community, but to have employees, or to firewall the employees from the community.
Or just do what everyone else does. Post some BS about Karen finding new opportunities or whatever and post it a couple of days before hand so people have time to deal with it.
Maybe they just came from the same school of business
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
I spend entirely too much time on reddit, and it doesn't seem like they can even put together a clear message about what they are mad about. It's turned from a few people that had really good reasons at the beginning to a "Pao must go!!!" Circlejerk.
X
AND, not or
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So the 175.000 people that signed the "get rid of pao" petition are all mods? Wrong.
Not only that, real apologies wouldn't be talking about screwing up for years, since she hasn't even been there for years.
It's not a bad apology I guess, but it still seems to ignore the main reason for all the trouble-- the firing of Victoria. I'm not sure whose anger she thinks she's answering.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
its not because she was let go, but the way it was done
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So exactly what do the redditors want reddit to be, assuming we call them constituents or stakeholders, and not mere content sharecroppers? Do they really want to be involved in Reddit's internal business process? Why?.
You just answered your own question. Users and mods consider themselves stakeholders. And as far wanting to be involved Reddit's personnel decisions, no one gives a shit unless they feel that such decisions affect the site/subreddit adversely. But, as Pao explains in her apology, the tension between Reddit corporate and the subreddit mods has long been growing so it not about a single firing of a well-liked and excellent employee.
In California at least, there are strict legal protections for people who are fired, their boss cannot necessarily talk about why or how someone is fired in public, not without courting significant legal liability. So I'm not sure what "transparency" or "involving the community" can practically accomplish, without getting everyone tied up in torts.
Then the business needs to either spend the money in-advance to be able to mitigate the problems associated with staff turnover, or needs to be ready to absorb the damage incurred when that staff change occurs.
Reddit is finding out how much damage can be incurred when a popular employee is let-go. I expect that this is far, FAR more damage than they expected, but that just goes to demonstrate the disconnect between those that own/manage the business that is Reddit and those that moderate and use Reddit the website.
Trouble is, owners/management wants to economize. They have been penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This. I could care less about Pao, but please stop censoring the site and distorting the voting system.
X
That's pretty much everyone's procedure, so Reddit's job is to make sure reddit.com doesn't become "one of those sites" for a sufficiently large group of people.
You can easily avoid a lot of the offensive stuff on Reddit by not visiting those subreddits Maybe a more sane alternative would be to allow people to filter out subreddits they don't like. Maybe this is in place already, but I don't know. Reddit has too high of a noise to signal ratio for my taste, so when I do check it out, I don't even bother signing in any more.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Haven't you heard the recent narrative, AC? Those sigs are all from #gamergate . All 50 members. Plus, all those thousands of upvotes for Victoria stories on Reddit's frontpage were also given by gamergate as well.
Ellen Pao admit a mistake?!??!?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I hope you get the help you so desperately need, and soon.
Actually, they didn't use "reddit" in a sentence at all..
You're not going to make money if your site is full of horrible inhuman shit that scares away advertisers.
Ikr Been trying to tell the Admins to dump /r/SRS for ages, but they just won't listen.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Ellen Pao is, by many accounts, an abysmal manager and a CEO who appears to lack vision and/or a plan -- which are two things a CEO absolutely must have. Her handling of Victoria's dismissal is pretty clear evidence of that. A 20-something night manager of a McDonalds on the interstate could have handled letting an employee go better than she did.
We're talking about someone who doesn't even know how to use her own product (she once posted a submission that linked to one of her private PMs) and can't even apologize on her own site before going to the media to try to put out fires. She's apparently got dodgy ideas about race and sexism (her failed lawsuit against KP, banning certain subreddits). So an influential black leader gets pissy over a PR stunt that went bad and demands some action? Sure, I could see Pao reacting by firing the most high-profile and well-liked employee at the company without having a contingency plan in place.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
> is leddit not allowed
I realize all anyone cares about is formally-legal obligation, but I doubt the point of the dissent is forcing legal compulsion.
Yet feedback is relevant so long as user disregard is a bad move for a user-dependent business.
Which is a great segue into whatever all these retarded "Share" buttons are supposed to be; the hieroglyphs appear to have something to do with bird fucking.
it became Rape Culture.
and the buck stops with me.
Speaking of which, "Now get back to work you lazy freeloaders! Your time is my money!"
JonKatz sez "hi", n00b.
You see, all this sounds sensible until you guys start veering into all the anti-SJW stuff. You really need to make sure that the gamergaters don't hijack your rather valid concerns with all their BS.
Lest you forget, facebook underwent several major changes, including interface and privacy policy. People riled up. Yet, they maintain a stronghold in social media at ~70% in 2014 (Pew Research Center, US Census Bureau report on internet & media).
You can change and grow, but you have to do it strategically and sometimes, only one thing at a time. Ebay once had a big facelift in UX design (not including the logo), and people were very upset. They changed to the older design almost immediately. Over the course of a year, they slowly implemented those "features" into the interface. In the end, they were right where they started, minus upset and confused users.
People don't like to learn new things once they have a system in place - a system they developed for maximum efficiency and payout. If you integrate it slowly, they won't even notice it. Like slowly boiling a frog.
From what I know, it probably had nothing to do with it (I won't eliminate the possibility). Apparently, Reddit was trying to consolidate its offices in San Francisco and closed its New York office. Victoria was the only admin or other important person there, so they fired her in the course of this closing. They somehow did this without giving any warning that they were shutting down these offices. Or even the possibility of allowing her to work from home.
There have been other accusations that Victoria prevented Reddit form monetizing the AMAs. She basically forced the subjects to post themselves (no PR firms or go-betweens) and answer some tough questions.
So, it comes down to either incompetence or greed. Probably both.
Dan's completely accurate here. It makes me wonder if this (avoiding 'I' and using 'we') isn't the type of product that comes from Crisis Management PR firms who are brought in by CEO's in similar situations. As a consultant, their #1 goal is to please the person who signs their paychecks. When they craft apologies like this, the priorities might not be so much to soothe the audience as it is to present the boss with a response that's palatable to the boss. It would be unnatural for them to go into a meeting and kick Ellen Pao in the butt and say, "You need to grovel and beg the internet to take you back!"
Instead, the PR Crisis Consultants wrote an apology that didn't at all make nice with the Reddit community, but it certainly tricked Ellen Pao into thinking it would. Her inability to anticipate these backlash responses to her decisions are exactly why she is not a good fit to lead a community-based organization like Reddit.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
It's sad, tons of subforums banned after the sjws took over.
Sjw took over 4chan forcing Moot out, now Reddit. The last safe havens are encyclopedia dramatica, something awful, the reformed Totse, ogrishforum.com and theync are about it.
So the 175.000 people that signed the "get rid of pao" petition are all mods? Wrong.
Hard to say, I don't know how many mods Reddit has and there are sure to be some users that signed. I don't think it's a very significant number, though, considering Reddit gets 2M unique visitors per day (20M per month) and it takes almost no effort to sign an internet petition.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskRe...
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
She did say she was ultimately responsible, but I highly doubt she was the only party involved. The mistakes likely were a "we" situation, but now we've reached critical mass so anything that's said or done will be criticized as wrong.
It's sad that this was modded troll. And also sad how quickly I was modded +5. I don't usually say popular things so my my +5 mods are few and far between, but the one below was modded 5 almost instantly. So the one I disagreed with was modded Troll and and I was modded +5 and almost instantly. I can see how mod systems encourage self-congratulatory group think.
Bit got cut off the end:
"The buck stops with me. Therefore I totally confess that I am an ugly, slitty-eyed little bitch and I resign immediately and nominate Victoria Taylor as my replacement."
They should fire the dumb chinese cunt, right?
It seems the only thing Pao is good at is collecting degrees.
Basically unless they rehire Taylor or Pao steps down, this is just a bunch of community knob-slobbery with no actual value behind it whatsoever.
I keep hearing this statement, but we've no idea why she was fired. She could have came to work high on cocaine, started doing shots in the break room and then admitted embezzling millions for the company. Reddit can't legal comment on it, which makes sense.
The real problem here is that they had such an "indispensable" employee in the first place. Even worse, they seemed to have no idea how important she was. They should have know what she did, why she did it, and what to do in the event something happened to her. This is Business management 101
1. Establish their ownship of all reddits.
2. Remove the ability to have private reddits.
3. Establish a code of conduct for reddits, moderators, and members.
4. They should enforce said code of conduct.
Their members think they have reddit by the short hairs, but they don't. Reddit is the source of their traffic and reddit can take it away from them at any time. Yes some members may go elsewhere but they will be back.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
who cares if she is Chinese? plenty of dumb cunts in every ethnicity / nationality.
A man would never make a mistake like this.
But the point is volunteer moderators can easily be replaced.
While I don't run a site the size of reddit, I do have 18,000 members, 250k unique visitors per month, 100+ volunteer moderators, and 7.5 million page views a month. I know what I am talking about.
I don't have any of the problems reddit does, because I wouldn't put up with them.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Nobody's going to work for Reddit if they're told at the door: "We'll keep you around as long as some splinter cell of mods doesn't start a flashmob against you. And we try to fire bad people but if they have loyal mods they're impossible to get rid of."
Ok, so the 401k matching is 3% and vests over two years, I'll be working with sociopaths, and the health insurance kicks in on the first of the month. And sorry, where do I turn in my W-4 again?
The words "No shit, Sherlock." come to mind.
Maybe Dice Holdings should consider that when changing things about sites that have held up well for many years (Sourceforge, and yes, Slashdot)
^ give this person moderation points!
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
I don't disagree with you but there's another conflict at play.
Reddit is also eventually going to have to decide if they're a flatly organized, libertarian free-speech site, or a hierarchically organized, social media site enticing the lowest common denominator.
I see this issue as distinct from the issue you're mentioning. I don't see libertarian and free speech-focused as incompatible with making money (would the porn industry or Howard Stern be as big as they are if that were true?) They could have hired a CEO who actually understood what made Reddit tick, and made use of the libertarian, free-speech mentality that actually made it so popular. Pao is trying to pound a round peg into a square hole, because that's all she knows how to do.
Without getting into personal issues with her, she needs to go--she's quickly made it clear that she doesn't truly understand Reddit at all. It's like telling Stern that he needs to stop swearing and keep his program PG because doing otherwise is bad for business.
She's going to make a great (read: terrible) politician someday.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Instead, the PR Crisis Consultants wrote an apology that didn't at all make nice with the Reddit community
How hard would that have been? s/We/I/g , and a couple other specifics about taking responsibility for screwing up, and that they were going to come up with a 'comprehensive plan' in three weeks. At that point, they could hope something else enters the news cycle in the interim, and if not, they could stall a little longer.
Are you crazy??? Now she's going to sue you for sexual harassment!
Knowing how to suck up to people who are throwing other people's money around hoping something sticks is a very different skill set from running a business. Ellen Pao was never qualified to run a taco stand, much less a high-traffic web site.
The best thing Reddit could do is can her incompetent ass TODAY, and hire someone qualified to lead them to profitability.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Its not even the way it was done. Its more about demonstrating that management has no clue as to how reddit "delivers" its product, and not even giving thought about how to manage the transition. "We're the ones who hire and fire. You're just minions. You're only supposed to approve of what we do, or else storm out the door."
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
This is why he can't get jobs requiring managerial or supervisory acumen.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
It's even easier to use 'we' in those words, rather than 'I' and taking some ownership.
I know I wouldn't feel so great about it if it were me...'Bitch, what do you mean "we"?! "we" were doing what you told us to do.'
It was a user driven site. The users provided much of the value. The users were pissed off. The users struck back. Now the business is scared. What's the problem?
How is there value if the owners of the site aren't making any money? If I had someone who came into my store every day and did nothing but talk with his buddies without buying anything, then I sure as hell would kick him out to the curb. That's what's happening, and everyone is surprised? Web site lets people run amok for years, then decides to rebuild into something that makes money for the VC's. Big deal. Go find another playground to loiter around in.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The moderators were users too weren't they, not actual employees?
I dunno, I looked at reddit once but it was way too bizarre and confusing.
It was both. She made sure AMAs were legit.
No PR firms, no middle men, and sometimes their "guests" did more harm than good to their image.
Look into the last AMA she did, the one that was cancel midway with Jesse Jackson...
Because inhuman shits never buy anything am I right?
When a service grows popular and the admins believe they are rock stars, the moderators start to fight for control the user base. And the users of the service suffer the consequences (bans, removing of photos/posts). Remember kids that this was seen first on Wikipedia. ;)
1. Hire that Taylor back or
2. Explain why she was fired
They've done nothing at all. And the only thing to apologize for other than firing a well liked person for no apparent reason is the fact that Pao laughed at her users to their faces. And no one is going to believe that she means an apology for that.
the SJW took over 4chan? Oh God. What a massacre that must have been.
No, you're wrong about 'I' (though right that this wasn't a real apology) though everybody loves your snark. Here's some copypasta I keep around for the occasional moment when people really want to learn about apologies.
There are up to four parts to an effective apology, though not every apology requires all four parts. They are as follows.
1. A valid acknowledgment of the offense that makes clear who the offender is and who is the offended. The offender must clearly and completely acknowledge the offense.
2. An effective explanation, which shows an offense was neither intentional nor personal, and is unlikely to recur.
3. Expressions of remorse, shame, and humility, which show that the offender recognizes the suffering of the offended.
4. A reparation of some kind, in the form of a real or symbolic compensation for the offender’s transgression.
An effective apology must also satisfy at least one of seven psychological needs of an offended person.
1. The restoration of dignity in the offended person.
2. The affirmation that both parties have shared values and agree that the harm committed was wrong.
3. Validation that the victim was not responsible for the offense.
4. The assurance that the offended party is safe from a repeat offense.
5. Reparative justice, which occurs when the offended sees the offending party suffer through some type of punishment.
6. Reparation, when the victim receives some form of compensation for his pain.
7. A dialogue that allows the offended parties to express their feelings toward the offenders and even grieve over their losses.
Aaron Lazare: On Apology
True, and I'd love to know the reasoning behind firing Taylor and hiring Pao in the first place. Why Pao when there are literally millions of more qualified people who would love the job and do it better? Why ditch Taylor, a class act and the brains behind AMA? Something tells me there's another bigger idiot not too far up the chain of command and we should be trying to get rid of that fucker too.
$
Hoping for it not to be buried was a lost cause. Criticize entitled, petulant manbabies and 90% of /.'s remaining readership gets mighty defensive.
I don't know much about Reddit, but was under the impression that the mods were long time users, the users most committed to Reddit, and that they are those who create their respective sub-reddits or are close to those who did, and that they were those who would field and vet the AMA participants. My impression from the article I read was that AMA depends on them. So value in the sense of contributing to what might bring a user to the site. Value to the user, which naively means value to the proprietor. But to be sure, the only time I've been to Reddit was when a thread there showed up prominently in the results for some google query I'd made.
In any case I don't think Reddit owes anyone anything. Just don't think any of this is surprising or immoral The mods aren't exercising powers not accorded them by Reddit itself, are they?
I'm at Slashdot waiting for Voat to get some capacity in place. Right now it's behind a CloudFlare DDOS mitigation tool that blocks NoScript users.
Whatever happened to keeping the customer happy? Reddit is a social media site, the users are the customers, and they are not happy.
No, the users are the product being sold. The advertisers are the customers. reddit does skim a little money from some of its users in the form of reddit gold (sort of like a Slashdot subscription), but it's apparently a drop in the bucket compared to ad revenue. That said, if part of the product evaporates, the price that the customers can be charged goes down; pissing off the users isn't good for anyone.
Reddit, the closed-source, privately owned message board
The reddit platform is open source. Just as Soylent News runs on modified Slashcode, there are already other sites out there using reddit's codebase or forks thereof.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
If you could care less, then why don't you? What about Pao makes you care one little bit?
No, they should fire a weapon at your racist ass.
Is it something like facebook or twitter? Don't us them either.
8chan is doing well, it seems everyone has moved over from 4chan now.
Remove all the country specific web page which exists only due to the cheer number of people which are in this country (like baidu.com or any chinese web site) and you can see what the rest of the world do and then reddit jump much higher in place. Otherwise you will always have chinese specific stuff rising to the top which nobodies else in the world look at.
The fact that you see this shutdown as a result of one person's departure is EXACTLY the issue at hand here. I'm not a member of the reddit community (I'm actually not a fan of that culture in general) but even I can understand that the people are upset about the PATTERN of behavior by the staff, the firing of Victoria was just a catalyst for change. As far as I understand, this sort of pattern of fucking shit up and then apologizing, saying it will never happen again, is a common theme with reddit. Promises made but never kept, meanwhile the administration staff act like the moderators are barely contributing anything of value, that the site's fame and success is a direct result of their staff and not mainly due to the hard work of the volunteer force. Those volunteers feel betrayed and angered by the dismissive treatment offered by the reddit staff, and they are even more tired of the hollow apologies that bring no change. Shutting down the subreddits was seen as the only way to get serious change to happen, since it will affect Reddit monetarily (what CEO would ignore monetary damage? None, that's who!).
That's my take after doing a bit of research on this over the last couple days. Maybe some actual reddit users can comment as well but I think you are seriously missing the point of this protest.
Why didn't Reddit employees revoke moderator privileges from those mods who locked down certain parts of the site?
The "apology" is a shitty, half-assed apology. One that ignores the actual complaints and props up straw-men to knock down, instead. Pao a reddit's staff are still continuing to push this retarded bullshit narrative that the only people causing all of this hoopla are sexist mysoginyst racist GamerGaters who are just angry that she's a Chinese wiff boobies, because of course all of the censorship and mishandling of the site and steering it away from what it initially was founded on would be TOTALLY okay with everyone if it was done by a cis-het white male, right?
Fuck these disingenuous shitfucks. Burn reddit to the ground.
nobody contests that the mods don't have the right to do what they did
The first sub shut down since it depended on victoria for its operation, without her the mods needed time to reorganize.
The other subs shut down since they are run by volunteers and these volunteers got rather unhappy with the state of the sites management, tooling and utter disregard from the admin staff. They also have the right ( encoded in the reddit provided moderator interface ) to make a sub private when they no longer feel like moderating it. After all they are volunteers and cannot be forced to provide value without being paid ( apparently AOL tried something like that years ago, overshot it and was ordered to pay its rule plagued "volunteers" by a court ) .
Reddit wants more celebrities. To achieve this, they need to allow celebrity agents to do AMAs on behalf of their clients. Victoria Taylor stood in the way of this.
Move on to a better platform like slashdot beta
The users (mods included) aren't the customers, they are the product. A customer is a person who buys goods or services from a shop or business. The advertisers buys ads placement from Reddit, that money pays for the infrastructure and the salaries. One could agree that the mods pay with the free time they spend maintaining their subreddit working, but in the grand scheme of things they're mostly there to attract more users.
Also, based on the fund raising last October, expect more attempts to increase revenue by any means. Reddit was valued at $500M (60 years of their latest annual advertisement revenue) and raised $50M from investors based on that valuation. At the current level of revenue, 10 years on, Reddit is still operating at a loss and can't survive without investors.
I think there is a bit more to it.
I think that it was either Pao's idea or JJ's and he went to Pao. She then suggests it. Victoria says "bad idea". Which it is. JJ can't stop running his mouth. A controversial person who can't stop running his mouth on the internet is going to wind up getting results like the "LemonLyman" website episode of the West Wing.
From what I hear that is exactly what happened. JJ wound up shooting himself in the testicles. now Pao needs someone to blame. So goodbye Victoria. The rest is history.
Pao doesn't even know how to send a private message on the site. She can barely use a computer at that. Of course she has no idea how reddit 'delivers' its product... or even what the product really is.
actions:
1) Commit to reversing your actions
2) Fire Yourself, bitch
3) Goodbye and good ridence..
I am so sick of people apologizing and then going on with as if nothing wrong happened and it just happens agains.
the old "better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission" which is just crap.
I don't see how anything was even related to anti-SJWs stuff in that post... let alone GamerGate.
The real question would be if they won the lawsuit and got judgment for Pao to pay for lawyer fees, would she even be able to pay?
Pao is once again in over her head, depending upon something other than competence to cling to position.
Keep in mind that ads aren't reddit's only source of revenue. They also have reddit gold, which is a pretty bizarre thing: It functions basically as a subscription to the site with some of the typical perks.
The strange thing is that in general people don't buy it for themselves, they buy it for other people in recognition of good comments. Basically, if UserX makes a comment I really like I might click on the "give gold" button at the bottom of the comment. I pay money to reddit, reddit gives UserX some perks for a month. It's very bizarre when you think about it, but it gives reddit real incentives to make it a place where users post good comments.
Problematic? You want problematic? I'll give you problematic.
www.reddit.com/r/SRS
Much like any community, once the millennials and their new brand of postmodernist identity politics turn up, everything goes to shit within a few months.
Same thing everywhere. A diverse, close knit community exists happily and then along come the outrage mob, with their identity politics, call out culture, privilege theory, et al accusing everyone of *not* being diverse and happily co-existing, and generally through being the loudest, most obnoxious and utterly toxic cunts online, the community is killed and they can congratulate, upvote, like and retweet each other before moving on to the next community. Sci-fi, games, comics, tech, MtG etc if its a white male interest they are going to "clean it up", whether it needs to or not.
Even at slashdot it seems, although thankfully they seem to be a minority.
I wish this aditude weren't so prevelant. You can run a user-centric service and still make money.
Instead of seeking vendor or ad revenue, just allow your users to support the site. Give them the opportunity to be a "site supporter" and throw them a bone. A different colored username can be enough, or maybe toss in one or two more "nicities" (not defacto requirements) like a larger inbox, or some other such thing.
This is how I run the forum I'm an administor of. We accept ad revenue and vendor revenue, but the main source of revenue is from the users and that will always be true. Paid vendors have been run off by the users for being bad players, and we like it that way.
Block the ads, we don't care.
I can only imagine the revenue Reddit could garner if they'd just give their users the chance to support the site for pennies a day.
No, the users aren't the customers, the advertisers are the customers (and the few who buy reddit gold I suppose).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
As limited as Pao is, I don't even really blame her. I think Ohanian made some mega-mistakes which reflects poorly on upper management. He's the guy who helped create reddit, but he doesn't understand basic concepts in business operations or how to "properly" manage volunteers.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I'm not sure why you care. As for me, I couldn't care less.
I too love to find people guilty without any evidence whatsoever. We should hang out.
Well, Pao doesn't seem like a font of great ideas or vision, so I could certainly see it going down that way.
I'm not really sure who has what connection to whom, but I'm sure if Jackson approached reddit out of the blue, they would be thinking about the eyeballs.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
After all, no child is harmed, and the images are definitely a core aspect of speech.
But when it comes to backing up your words, you're suddenly in a different county and live at the police station.
Hmmm.
Meanwhile, here you are karma whoring to juice up your mod points...
Yea, Moot got "cucked" and outed. Moot formally stepped down as owner of 4chan.
The new ownership is strong SJW supporter and bans misogynistic posts, any pro white culture/heritage posts, etc.
4chan is now complete and utter shit. And heavily censored.
The spam bombs still occur, and some things get past or subtle jabs but 4chan is a shell of it's former self.
most moved to 8chan or the new totse forums or encyclopediadramatica forums, somethingaweful, etc.
Reddit banned a bunch of subforums like the fatpeoplehate parody subforum, hell I'm fat and it was hilarious. But SJW, political correctness and censorship has gone too far.
That's why on reddit I usually end my post with a reference to the movie "ExistenZ" but I replace the name "Death to the Demoness Zoe Quinn - ExistenZ" :P
yea, I loved Encyclopedia Dramatica's hilarious "fuck poltical correctness" satire report on the end of 4chan.
https://encyclopediadramatica.... :P
Reddit can't legal comment on it, which makes sense.
They can't legally comment on it? Are you sure? Or is it a situation where it is typically not legally smart to comment on it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reddit is revolting!
Which practically no one in any type of management position seems to have ever taken.
--
posting as AC since login does not appear to be working on my system today
She said, "We screwed up." Not, "I made a HUGE mistake."
Ellen Pow! Hit and destroy.
Is there a difference?