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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.