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!
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!!!
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.
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?
Found Pao's Slashdot account....
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.
Among other things, sounds like Slashdot's current owners are on a similar path...
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.
Eh, who cares. Does anybody actually still look at that web site? Honestly I barely knew it was still around.
Funny, that is what people are usually saying about this website. Hell, a while back slashdot's own Rob Malda made CNN's list of 10 people who don't matter.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
You say that like it's an unusual trait in a politician.
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.
No company "hates" its userbase.
The userbase is rather considered as some sort of nebulous thing which can be shaped however the company sees fit. Sometimes that boulder is soft and can be shaped however the company wants, either because it has huge inertia, (see Facebook) or because it's mesmerized by the company (see CIG), but sometimes it's so hard that the company breaks its teeth on it.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
How about I screwed up? Or does the buck not stop at the top at reddit?
We screwed up and some of us will be fired.
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.
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.
Stopped reading when I saw Linus Tovalds on that list.
You should have continued, because it gets better:
Mark Zuckerberg
[...] Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer, holding out instead for as much as $2 billion. Bad move. After selling itself to Rupert Murdoch's Fox for $580 million last year, MySpace is now the Web's second most popular website. Facebook is growing too - but given that MySpace has quickly grown into the industry's 80-million-user gorilla, it's hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran.
There's also that gem:
Reed Hastings
CEO, Netflix
[...] It's simply not clear that anything Hastings has built will give him much of a leg up as the industry shifts toward video-on-demand and other forms of digital distribution. Hastings has created an amazing system for shuffling around 120mm plastic discs, but online rivals such as iTunes and MovieLink seem to have the momentum as we head into the future.
What is MovieLink? "On December 16, 2008 the Movielink website was shut down." Oops!
Also mentions the PS3 failure...
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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!
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
Ninja please...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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."
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.
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.
Dice hates its userbase
This is the real problem, in both reddit's and /.'s case. These 'business-people' have no idea of how a community works, what free-speech actually is and they cannot understand any behavior that is not selfish. The very fact that people are ready to volunteer time and effort into a community they love is confusing to them. They think that people like this are idiots. They hate them. They just want to monetize the phenomenon as much as they can and get out of this crap.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
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.