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 Today, it's been announced that Ellen Pao has left the company she joined last fall, and will be superseded by someone who knows what he's getting into: founder Steve Huffman.

Comments

Well, she was an interim.

[gcnaddict]

Ellen made all the hard changes, like clamping down on offensive speech. She was then canned as a scapegoat, the desired person was brought in for the long term role, and all of Ellen's changes stick.

All the while, Reddit looks like it acquiesced to the masses. Brilliantly played.

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[msauve]

"Ellen made all the hard changes, like clamping down on politically incorrect speech."

FTFY.

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[kuzb]

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.

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I recommend reading the Wikipedia articles on both of them. Quite a pair:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They are Harvard educated elite grievance energizer bunnies, they just keep going!

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[Snufu]

I find your comment insectist and demand a full retraction and apology.

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[RedK]

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.

Re:Well, she was an interim.

[onthemightofprinces]

You mean something able to withstand enormous amounts of exterior and interior trauma and worshipped by 50% of the population?

Meet new boss, same as old boss

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Reddit

[ichthus]

What's Reddit? Is it like Digg?

Re:What a good day today is!

[amicusNYCL]

the racist conservative battle flag

You mean the one that Fritz Hollings, the Democrat, fought to install, in the 1960s?
The one that the S.C Legislature, under the control of Democrats for most of the last 50 years, kept up?

Yes, fuckface, that's the one. Did you have another one in mind? The Democratic party is the oldest political party in the world still in existence, and for much of its history it has had conservative factions. Even up until the 1980s Southern populists were Democrats until moving to the Republican party. If you think "conservative" is a synonym for "Republican" then you're an idiot. Conservative Democrats created that flag, and were instrumental in keeping it there (I'll ignore the fact that conservative Republicans in the SC legislature are the only ones against the flag's removal, because if it was another time they might have been conservative Democrats; either way they would still be conservative).

SJW

[Kunedog]

By using the term "SJW", you have outed yourself as someone who has had to deal with annoying, dishonest, power hungry, attention-seeking, hypocritical SJWs.

As usual, Iowahawk nails it

[PapayaSF]

Thanks to Ellen Pao, Asian-Americans will no longer be saddled with the insidious stereotype of being bright, hardworking and competent.

Anybody know of $500k+ tech industry job openings for a lawsuit-happy SJW with no technical experience? Asking for a friend.

"Hate Speech" has no definition

[Chibi Merrow]

Hate speech is when you *know* how hurtful your words are **and that's the entire point of why you say them.**

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."

Re:"Hate Speech" has no definition

[ultranova]

By your definition, insults are hate speech.

Which, of course, they are. People tell insults to work themselves up. They're psychological preparation to overcome the inhibitions against harming others. Since humans are pack animals, this preparation needs to take such highly visible form so either the victim or other members of the pack have a chance to interfere.

Look at every genocide in history. They all have a campaign of escalating slander preceding them.

Hate speech is like pornography/obscenity: No one can define it, and it's usually strangely close to "Stuff I don't like."

Pornography is speech aimed at causing sexual excitement, and hate speech is speech aimed at establishing it as acceptable to harm someone. Don't confuse people making excuses for themselves either way for the actual concepts being vague.