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!!!
Sad that the entitled children making up Reddit's user base scored an apology from their temper tantrum. Seriously, is Reddit not allowed to manage their employees as they see fit? They need to launch a /r/WeWantToFireThisPersonIsThatOkWithYou every time this comes up to prevent spoiled babies from holding message boards hostage?
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.
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Eh, who cares. Does anybody actually still look at that web site? Honestly I barely knew it was still around.
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.
I'm at slashdot waiting for Voat.co to escape the mediocrity that's this internet...
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!!
She calls for our death then apologizes half-heartedly when called on her BS. She hates us. Hates us. Hate is all her kind knows. Reddit is such a CONservative shithole that even the xian Republicans are uncomfortable goign there. That's why they're bleeding users in the same numbers that swelled-up to fight the banksters. We lost in the end, but damn it, we fought the banksters. They would have killed us if Occupy lasted another month, so it is good we allowed it to come to and end. They beat us, but only because they control armies with weapons. They hate us.
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.
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
1/4 of the time they are bonkers.
3/4 of the time just sad.
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*
What a piece of work.
http://www.vanityfair.com/styl...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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
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.
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
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."
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
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?
Ellen Pao admit a mistake?!??!?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Using something like reddit in the first place. Just another loser networking site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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)"
A man would never make a mistake like this.
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)
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."
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.'
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.
$
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Pao is once again in over her head, depending upon something other than competence to cling to position.
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 too love to find people guilty without any evidence whatsoever. We should hang out.
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.
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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?