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"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."
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.
And by doing so Reddit became "the front page of the Internet". It had, by its own account, 163,966,958 unique visitors, 7,086,828,967 pages viewed, 8,384 communities powered, with 3,080,084 users logged in last month. Much of the site run for FREE by dedicated mods.
Now, they're are their way to becoming yet another SJW site whose administrators hate their own userbase.
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."
Yep. Reddit isn't serious about anything until she's gone.
Anyone who ever subscribed to Star Wars Galaxies experienced this exact kind of management. SOE endlessly would apologize for their "lack of communication" then proceed to continue on their destructive changes no one liked not altering their course one degree.
Corporatism != Free Market
It's not just people in /r/theredpill. The entire site is unhappy with Ellen Pao.
Why not Forums?
VBulletin/phpBB style discussion boards are great, and there's usually one for basically-whatever you're into - cars, computers, pets, food, crafts, wedding planning. It's not uncommon for a given user to be a part of at least one such community. The problem is that it's a bit more difficult to 'channel surf' that way. If a user participates in a discussion thread in Alpha Forum, they'd have to log in separately to Bravo Forum to participate there. This limits the scope of topics that can be viewed at a given clip. Similarly, different forums have different rules or customs. Some are particularly strict about citing sources for claims, others are super strict in the profanity, others use a 'reputation' point system while others simply use 'thanks' or nothing at all; Reddit is at least a smidge more consistent site-wide with its rules.
Why not Usenet?
I'm still a fan, personally. comp.misc has some interesting discussions, and misc.legal.moderated is frequently some fascinating reading. There are a few groups related to video games and Doctor Who that have interesting discussions, the latter particularly after new episodes air. The fact that a user identify is basically universal is helpful to keep the playing field level. Usenet has its own list of problems though. First and foremost, usenet is something that itself needs to be sought after to a certain extent at this point; few ISPs offer access to it, and neither Windows nor OSX ship with a client. This is further complicated by the fact that a "binary client" and a "text client" are frequently different pieces of software, usually cost money on top of existing internet subscriptions, few real-life friends tend to be able to share the experience, and the search results for the term in Google are usually affiliated with warez, so getting people into it is its own challenge to begin with. Moreover, usenet is much more susceptible to spam, it's not possible to share in-line images or youtube clips (like it or not, responding with memes and animated GIFs is a common practice these days), and it's not possible to 'upvote' posts as to indicate the quality of a particular contribution. Put it all together, and Usenet is a wonderful niche that Reddit simply does better for the majority of internet users.
And by doing so Reddit became "the front page of the Internet".
Except it's actually not, and titles like that lend credence to the view that Reddit users are entitled self-absorbed people in general.
Top sites on the internet, according to Alexa:
1. Google.com (note, this is the actual "front page of the internet")
2. Facebook.com (this could also be easily considered the "front page of the internet")
3. Youtube.com (yet another "front page" contender)
4. Baidu.com (how many Reddit users have ever seen the fourth most-used web site?)
5. Yahoo.com (almost literally "the front page of the internet" as the default home page for many people, much more popular than reddit.com)
6. Amazon.com
7. Wikipedia.org
8. Qq.com (I've only ever heard of this site in passing a few times, and it's still way more popular than reddit.com)
9. Taobao.com (shopping for Chinese folk)
10. Twitter.com (this site is used by Reddit users who want to express their righteous indignation)
11. Google.co.in (the Indian version of Google is significantly more popular than Reddit)
12. Live.com (apparently this is still a thing; significantly more popular than Reddit)
13. Sina.com.cn (Chinese messaging, apparently)
14. Linkedin.com (this is where Reddit moderators can find employment)
15. Weibo.com (this site is so Chinese that the Alexa description is written in Chinese; significantly more popular than Reddit)
16. Yahoo.co.jp (the Japanese version of Yahoo is also more popular than Reddit)
17. Google.co.jp
18. Ebay.com
19. Yandex.ru
20. Vk.com (Russian social network; more popular than Reddit)
21. Blogspot.com
22. Tmall.com (more Chinese shopping)
23. Google.de (German Google is more popular than Reddit)
24. Hao123.com (the only thing I know about this site is that it is more popular than Reddit)
25. T.co (a shorter twitter.com URL domain is more popular than Reddit)
26. Msn.com (this is a site built for the purpose of making Internet Explorer painfully slow to start; more popular than Reddit)
27. Instagram.com
28. Google.co.uk (the Google portal for the United Kingdom [pop. ~64 million] is more popular than Reddit)
29. Bing.com (search engine primarily used by people who don't know how to change the default search engine for IE; more popular than Reddit)
30. Amazon.co.jp (the Japanese Amazon portal is more popular than...)
31. Reddit.com ( "The Front Page Of The Internet!!!" claims its frenzied, self-important user base)
32. Google.com.br
So, there you go. Your "front page of the internet" is right there between Japanese Amazon and Brazilian Google. Now please excuse me if I don't give a shit what your CEO or user base are doing with their time.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The majority of users most certainly don't care (or care enough to sign a meaningless petition). But a lot of moderators, who are essentially the unpaid employees who are driving most of the content on the site, like those popular AMAs, DO care. A lot of them are pretty upset. The lack of communication and planning makes their (volunteer) jobs harder, which makes them less eager to do those jobs.
Take the AMAs for example. When Victoria was there, the mods could do what they do: verify the person's ID, make sure it happens on time, set up the schedules, etc. When they fired Victoria, the link between the admins and moderators was gone. That left the mods with no good way to do their jobs and make all that content the company is so eager to monetize. The mgmt team shot themselves in the foot, in other words, and now all the mods are getting are platitudes and vague promises without any deliverables, timetables, etc.
More people will likely start caring when the overall quality of content goes down as mods get more and more burnt out.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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.
Same problem as facebook and social whatever. And unique snowflakes suddenly butthurt when they realize closed walled gardens are heavily policed since those are not operated under old internet creed of free access, they're corporations.
Old unmoderated media are still all out there - usenet, irc channels, or non-mainstream imageboards if people want it in hip setting. No moderation has also some pretty nasty drawbacks, and suddenly muh free speech types will be offended by what happens when there truly is unrestrained freespeech - trollfest, spam, cp, sheer retardness, anarchy. You can't satisfy a stereotypical average reddit user, all they do is just complain.