Ellen Pao Resigns as Reddit Interim CEO

[Kopikatsu]

Ellen Pao resigned as interim chief executive officer of Reddit Inc. after a user revolt at the online forum, the company announced.
Steve Huffman, a Reddit co-founder, is taking over as CEO, the San Francisco-based company said Friday. Huffman, chief technology officer at the travel startup Hipmunk Inc., has had no official role for several years at Reddit.
...
?We had different views in the potential growth rate in users for Reddit this year,? she said in an interview. ?We couldn?t come to an agreement on that and I decided to step down.?

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-10/ellen-pao-resigns-as-reddit-interim-ceo-after-user-revolt

Just thought people might be interested in this because I remember it was a contested issue on this forum.

Though this is the first time in recent memory that someone has been canned for backlash against their progressive policies. Was this a good move? Where does Reddit go from here?

 

[Zontar]

Though this is the first time in recent memory that someone has been canned for backlash against their progressive policies.

The policies which received backlash where by no means progressive. In fact, I'd say they where antithetical to progressive though. Then again, American style progressivism is not connected by much (if anything) to the meaning of the word these days.

Was this a good move?

Yes

Where does Reddit go from here?

Can't go anywhere but up, because going down would require an active attempt to do so.

 

[kris40k]

Spoiler: Um...really?

Well, where to go from here, I would say start with hire Victoria back.

Otherwise, roll back the attitudes of killing offensive subreddits to create a "safespace". There are a ton of subreddits that I wouldn't cry if they[footnote]and their users[/footnote] fell off the face of the earth, but I wouldn't ever state that they need to be shut down by admins.

 

[spartenX]

allow me to express my feelings on this development in song:

Ding Dong! the witch is dead. which old witch? the wicked witch. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!

Where does Reddit go from here?

personally, I'm hope that they will start actually working to fix stuff such as the issues between the admins and mods, give better tools for the mods, increase transparency when it comes to mod behavior, and remove the shadow bans.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

Damn, Kopi, you're fast; one of these days I'm going to have to cut your internet connection so I can be the one to post breaking news for once.

OT: I'm glad to see her go, but I'm wondering if the board just used her as a butcher to clean out some stuff they didn't like about Reddit, then allowed her to go (she was, after all, only ever 'interim CEO') so that people will celebrate that victory and not realise the long-term damage and precedent-setting of hacking down all those subreddits.

All they need to do is restore Victoria and they have a PR coup that keeps users from fleeing to Voat (which could have really exploded with this, right place and right time, but they couldn't handle the influx on their servers). Changes like this are the kind of thing that killed previous websites such as Myspace and Digg, and it's about that time in technology's life-cycle that companies learn how to manipulate the public with it.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

"Um, Ellen, there's this petition going around..."

"I'll pack my things..."

Either they were going to buckle down and throw themselves behind her or they were going to sack her.

Not my site by any stretch of the imagination but from what I've read, people won't really be happy until that AMA admin gets her job back. I'll just keep watching from the sidelines.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Can't wait for her to get a job at Google and write a script that redirects searches on obesity to a blog on the evils of fat shaming.

 

[Auberon]

I gather it was actual harassment that broke both the mod-rules and site rules with the fat subreddits, in which case it was fine. If not, then I kinda wonder why Chairman Pao didn't god own on Red Pill or other equally extremes...

Regardless, new CEO might actually fix the communication issues.

 

[BreakfastMan]

Regardless of her actual job as CEO (don't really use reddit that much, so I have no opinions there), this kind of seems like it could be a really bad move. Why? Mainly because, from what I gather, there was a TON of harassment directed at her. And since she did what the harassers wanted (to some extent, at least), this is going to be seen by those as harassers as a sign that harassing people gets them what they want. Not to mention other groups will see that these tactics look like they are being effective, and will start employing them on their own (for a recent example, see anti-vaccers adopting the tactics of the worst of GamerGate to attack journalists and politicians). And that just makes the internet as worse place overall. :\

 

[Somekindofgold]

Good. Looks like the investors saw the flood of people moving to Voat recently and are trying to stop it.

Ironic, reddit created its biggest competition.

 

[Zontar]

Snip

Actually as it stands Reddit could, like most sites, continue to operate at a profit, problem is Pao wanted to make it MORE profitable by alienating the user base, turning the site into something antethetical to what it stood for and made it popular in the first place, and would ultimately lead to it either managing to continue through force of popularity after these changes (which, given its user interface, would be unlikely) as another bland, unremarkable website which has long past its peak in quality, or fail.

Either way the current user base would loose since it would either be pushed out, or the site would die.

 

[Compatriot Block]

I have no opinion or stake in who is the current CEO or if she was terrible or not, but the hatred and bile and death threats I saw thrown at her from reddit users were embarrassing and frightening.

 

[Somekindofgold]

Good. Looks like the investors saw the flood of people moving to Voat recently and are trying to stop it.

Ironic, reddit created its biggest competition.

Super ironic given that Digg did the same before them, which is why we have Reddit now.

Maybe Rust was right about that time thing..

I have no opinion or stake in who is the current CEO or if she was terrible or not, but the hatred and bile and death threats I saw thrown at her from reddit users were embarrassing and frightening.

To this day I still do not understand people who take online death threats seriously.

But the hatred wasnt surprising, hell its what got her out of her CEO position in the first place. So yay hate.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

Regardless of her actual job as CEO (don't really use reddit that much, so I have no opinions there), this kind of seems like it could be a really bad move. Why? Mainly because, from what I gather, there was a TON of harassment directed at her. And since she did what the harassers wanted (to some extent, at least), this is going to be seen by those as harassers as a sign that harassing people gets them what they want. Not to mention other groups will see that these tactics look like they are being effective, and will start employing them on their own (for a recent example, see anti-vaccers adopting the tactics of the worst of GamerGate to attack journalists and politicians). And that just makes the internet as worse place overall. :\

the saddest part about the Internet is that the best way to get what you want is not with reason but screaming like a five-year-old, it's one of the reasons why the Internet is one of the worst places to have a debate. not to say she didn't deserve to have people call her out on her bullcrap but it's nothing new

 

[BreakfastMan]

Regardless of her actual job as CEO (don't really use reddit that much, so I have no opinions there), this kind of seems like it could be a really bad move. Why? Mainly because, from what I gather, there was a TON of harassment directed at her. And since she did what the harassers wanted (to some extent, at least), this is going to be seen by those as harassers as a sign that harassing people gets them what they want. Not to mention other groups will see that these tactics look like they are being effective, and will start employing them on their own (for a recent example, see anti-vaccers adopting the tactics of the worst of GamerGate to attack journalists and politicians). And that just makes the internet as worse place overall. :\

the saddest part about the Internet is that the best way to get what you want is not with reason but screaming like a five-year-old, it's one of the reasons why the Internet is one of the worst places to have a debate. not to say she didn't deserve to have people call her out on her bullcrap but it's nothing new

True, but has it ever appeared to contribute to something this significant before? That is what concerns me. :\

 

[The Lunatic]

A good idea overall. I don't know if it'll steer the ship in the right direction, but, the disconnect between the will of Pao and the will of the users of the site was extremely clear and it wasn't a pairing that was going to continue to work.

 

[Fappy]

I'm always surprised how many people actually care about and use Reddit. I use it sometimes, but have never really been a fan.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Regardless of her actual job as CEO (don't really use reddit that much, so I have no opinions there), this kind of seems like it could be a really bad move. Why? Mainly because, from what I gather, there was a TON of harassment directed at her. And since she did what the harassers wanted (to some extent, at least), this is going to be seen by those as harassers as a sign that harassing people gets them what they want. Not to mention other groups will see that these tactics look like they are being effective, and will start employing them on their own (for a recent example, see anti-vaccers adopting the tactics of the worst of GamerGate to attack journalists and politicians). And that just makes the internet as worse place overall. :\

I think people have had several thousand years of human history to learn that threats, violence, intimidation and harassment will (unfortunately) get you what you want. I doubt this will change much; if people haven't learned it by now they're not going to.

 

[infohippie]

I rarely visit Reddit, but this strikes me as a good thing. If you want to create "safe spaces" online then go and CREATE them. Don't rip chunks out of existing sites in order to make them "safe".

 

[Zontar]

Hooray that wicked witch who enforced site rules and closed subreddits whose mods weren't doing their damn jobs and who is apparently 100% responsible when an employee is fired has resigned after lots and lots of pressure.

I think the issue stemmed from the fact that she brought in new rules that run counter to the core of what the site is in the first place, then went on to not enforce them outside of a very few cases where it almost seemed to be in line with what could be considered an insult to her (I say almost because I don't want to believe that she is openly racist. Never attribute malice to what could simply be incompetence after all). Plus, given how the company has less then 75 people working for it, any call on who is fired is going to go through her position, either as the one who made the decision or as the one approving one of the less then 5 people who would logically make that call under her in such a small company (though given the size of the company, the former is the more likely). Given her position, it is clear she would have either been the one to make the call, or at the least signed off on it, both of which are pretty infuriating for the users, and are yet another part of the long list of reasons why the site's users hate her.

I thought that was something we were supposed to be against, but fuck it, no bad tactics after all.

I think you're confusing "trying to get someone fired for something in absolutely no way related with their job" with "trying to get someone fired for utterly failing at their job".

People aren't against the removal of people from jobs which they are not capable of doing well (which in Pao's case is her latest 2 jobs at the very least), we're against having someone removed from their job for something in no way related to, or effecting their ability to do, said job. Like, say, having an uncontroversial political opinion which some radicals consider to be wrong-think.