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Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return
Deathspawner writes: To say that it's been a tumultuous month for reddit is an understatement. While multiple events have occurred in recent months that have caused an uproar, such as the banning of popular "hate" subreddits, nothing impacted the site quite like the out-of-nowhere firing of "Ask Me Anything" admin Victoria Taylor last week. Following that, other minor revelations surfaced, and finally, this past Monday, reddit CEO Ellen Pao came out from hiding to issue an apology. While her message instilled a bit more confidence in the future of the site, it wasn't enough. Today, it's been announced that Ellen Pao has left the company she joined last fall, and will be superseded by someone who knows what he's getting into: founder Steve Huffman.
It's pretty clear Pao was just a scapegoat to take care of unpleasant business. It could be she turned out worse than the board expected, but make no mistake: she wasn't alone in driving the New Reddit policies they want, and had the board's full support. Her resigning will change nothing.
In other news: There's voat.co that's turning into a pretty nice community to replace Reddit. It's more like the original and the userbase is pretty big now.
Ellen is a person who brazenly attempted to abuse the gender inequality debate in a high profile court case to make millions of dollars when she was fired for being abrasive, lazy and generally incompetent. Her husband is just as scummy a person, who participates in ponzi schemes and other less than above board activities. I'm frankly happy she's gone from Reddit. She is a horrible person.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Censoring people undermine's reddit though.
Its like removing all the porn links from google. You only think you're doing something that won't horribly backfire if you don't understand the business you're in.
As the man said "The internet intepretes censorship as DAMAGE and routes around it." You can't censor people on the internet.
And if you turn your site into a corporate friendly disneyland then many of the content creators will leave, you'll give a niche for competitors to exploit, and the viewers that like that content will leave with them.
Think of Reddit like a bee hive. The content creators like bees. And the 99 percent of users that don't actually contribute anything as the Honey.
The problem with bees is that they sting. So somewhere along the way they said "wouldn't it be cool if we could get rid of the bees and just keep the hive and the honey!"... well... sure. But then you'd just have a box of honey. It doesn't work that way though.
The bees make the honey. And the hive is only as good as it makes the bees happy and productive. Fuck with the bees and you get no honey.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Ellen made all the hard changes, like clamping down on offensive speech.
"Offense is never given, it's only ever taken."
-Unknown
"He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool."
Brigham Young
WTF happened to the basic American principle of dying for the right of the offensive to be offensive... not just when we don't agree but especially when we don't agree??
It's not about principle. It's about power. For an SJW, to take offense is to give yourself the power to close down the speech of others. That's why they take offense at everything.
She didn't though, the clampdown was about using Reddit to organize harassment, not the viewpoints of the people concerned. And this wasn't even the first time a forum had been closed for significant off-Reddit behavior, from TheFappening to SonyGOP - the latter of which I'd be inclined to think should be more controversial than a sub dedicated to shaming people - specific people, in real life - with a particular medical condition.
I know it's unpopular to point it out, but honestly, if this were about views, don't you think rather a lot more subs would have been closed? Reddit's not exactly known for being dominated by left wing "politically correct" (urgh) subreddits, quite the opposite in fact...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Nope, SRS and SRD are still there and engaging in harassement as they usually do. So she didn't even manage to clamp down on harassing subreddits.
Don't mistake what the FPH ban was : a political move to gain mainstream political correctness point in the eyes of the HAES and FA movements. Remember : 70% of americans are now overweight (source : http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/Pages/overweight-obesity-statistics.aspx). It pays to cater to the majority.
If the goal was banning harassment, FPH was not the subreddit to ban. For the most part, they were simply keeping to their own dark corner and doing their thing amongst themselves. You had to go out of your way to "get harassed", by visiting the subreddit while fat and looking for pictures of yourself. Or worse: submitting your pictures in an attempt to get attention.
You just bought the media narrative hook, line and sinker.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
It's OK. Everyone knows he's just making up a random cause-effect scenario to support his argument. He thinks the number of black women with illegitimate children or alcohol/drug addiction in 1950s was so high that we had to "wait" for someone with a clean record. I know this offends the average Slashdot reader, but it's amazing how racial stereotypes cloud this guy's judgement. Drug addiction among black women in Alabama in the 1950s was practically nonexistent, while alcoholism was extremely rare for black women. And if you doubt this, you might at least agree that drug addiction/alcoholism/unwed children are much more common today than decades ago. The guy is projecting 1980s racial stereotypes decades into the past.
The notion of having a 'perfect plaintiff' is entirely well established in legal theory. Part of the reason is precedent - if you lose a case, especially the sort of case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, getting a resounding judgment against your side is a pretty big blow, because it means future attempts will have a much harder time getting past the established doctrine.
So, you want a client who's squeaky clean, that doesn't have any character flaws or potentially shady past that the opposition can point to. You want someone that is more likely to evoke sympathy, because even though it shouldn't matter in the eyes of the law, judges (and juries) are human, and prone to human inclination of liking or disliking someone.
Republican presidential candidates: George Bush, George W. Bush, and now likely Jeb Bush.
Nope, no nepotism here, I am sure that they were each the best man for the job out of a population of 200+ million.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Personally I just hope she gets what her positive contribution to society warrants.
Positive contributions? If anything, this woman provides fuel to businesses and corporations that are hesitant to have women climb the corporate ladder.
First she sues her former employer, and loses on all counts.
Then she implements the most stupid HR policy I have ever seen: "we don't negotiate with job candidates because men negotiate better than women".
And the final straw was her not-so-brilliant PR move in upsetting her user base.
Not exactly the strong female CEO that Reddit needs. In fact, Ellen Pao is exactly the opposite of Marissa Mayer. Marissa is, so far, pretty successful in leading Yahoo. I don't work for Yahoo or ever have, but I'm a fan of Marissa Mayer. Silicon Valley needs more women like Marissa, and less like Ellen.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
By your definition, insults are hate speech.
Hate speech is like pornography/obscenity: No one can define it, and it's usually strangely close to "Stuff I don't like."
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Agreed, she had a lot of contacts within the civil rights movement, both political and ecclesiastical. What's also true is that she was a light skinned, chaste (at least apparently so) sober, respectable middle class black woman. Has she been the same person, but darker skinned, poorer, or with an illegitimate child or other non-ideal domestic situation, she might not have been able to make the impact she did.
100% bullshit.
The very idea that others have to tiptoe around your personal sensitivities is anathema to the very concept of free speech (and, frankly, being an adult).
In particular, the idea that certain groups can assert that other groups are entitled to social protection because of some historical or perceived grievance is not only particularist (and in that sense astonishingly narcissistic) but patronizing as well.
It's really nothing more than oversensitivity, displaced so one doesn't even have to take ownership: "it's not that I'm being hypersensitive, because I'm feeling this way on BEHALF of that person over there."
A very later-20th-century form of nonsense.
-Styopa