Ellen Pao Resigns as Reddit Interim CEO

Recommended Videos

BreakfastMan

Scandinavian Jawbreaker
Jul 22, 2010
4,366
0
0
FirstNameLastName said:
BreakfastMan said:
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.
So why accept it and let the harassers get what they want, and suffer no consequences? Why don't we push to be better?
 

burnout02urza

New member
Nov 22, 2009
51
0
0
The Witch is dead! Ring the bells, the Wicked Witch is dead!

Wow, this was a long time coming. Ellen Pao was utterly awful, complete with a long and checkered history of...Well, what we'd call 'fraud' and 'bullshit'. I'm glad she's gone, and it is my sincerest prayer that she never gets an important post again.

Break out the champagne and dance in the streets! Let the cheers ring across the kingdom, for the tyrant has fled and the rightful King has returned! Now they just need to hire Victoria back, and the healing can begin.

More, this also proves what many people need to learn - you are not helpless. You, and others like you, can bring down even the mighty who think they're beyond your reach. Do not bend over for the liberals; Fight them, and they will fall before you or flee screaming into the place where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This is like the end of Starship Troopers, where they realized that the monster *was afraid*.

All-in-all, great work! My congratulations to Reddit's community. And, Ellen Pao - Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. I'd sent a letter of condolences, but she'd only want money instead.

BreakfastMan said:
So why accept it and let the harassers get what they want, and suffer no consequences? Why don't we push to be better?
Why? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. You've seen how SJWs have relentlessly hounded people out of the industry for speaking up against them. Turnabout is fair play. If you're fighting an enemy who has no honor, holding on to your principles when battling them isn't just stupid, it's actively self-defeating.

Harassers will always get their way. If you want to 'Push to be better', you'll accomplish nothing. No-one will care, and I'll offer you a lonely salute of solidarity for your doomed efforts, as well as the playing of the world's smallest violin.

edit: Ooh, the usual suspects are already trying to do spin-control. Dance for us, Gawker! Dance for us, Jezebel! Soon, the puppet strings will be wrapped around your necks!

But seriously, it's hilarious how quickly they're rising to her defense. Is this really the hill they want to die on?

Oh wait. They're rapidly running out of hills.
 

Ishal

New member
Oct 30, 2012
1,176
0
0
This was nothing more than blatant obvious incompetence.


That was from an ex-mod. All these actions were done with no transition plan, no intermediary solution going forward.

Pao wanted to make the company more profitable. I think that's easy to understand. It's a for profit website, but as others have pointed out. It's not easy to make money off sites like this. And Pao was supremely bad at it.
 

Padwolf

New member
Sep 2, 2010
2,060
0
0
Doesn't matter if you like her or not, seeing all the death threats, other threats and the misogyny, racism and just hatred thrown at her was sickening to see. I can believe human beings would act that way, but jesus h christ that was depressing to watch. I may not have agreed with some of her actions, but no one deserves the treatment she got. It's disgusting. I wonder what those harassers would do if they didn't have their computer screens to protect them?
 

Padwolf

New member
Sep 2, 2010
2,060
0
0
Marxie said:
Padwolf said:
I wonder what those harassers would do if they didn't have their computer screens to protect them?
I wonder what the harassed would do if they didn't have their computer screens to protect them. Being such poor fragile flowers getting paid my 10 years salary every month for fucking up - I just can't imagine them surviving an angry /b/tard's rageburst IRL. Much less try and use violence on people with such short temper.
I was talking in terms of the harassers of Ellen Pao. Seriously, she didn't deserve the shit she got from the users like that. It was just foul.
 

StreamerDarkly

Disciple of Trevor Philips
Jan 15, 2015
193
0
0
Marxie said:
Except that said forumites are literally her clientele. Not fucking up muh Reddit is her job. For all I know she could be Hitler Incarnate and I wouldn't give a flying fuck about it, as long as she's doing a halfway decent job. But as fucking everyone who use Reddit (i.e. - the people who's opinion actually matters) can say - she wasn't. Moderation of Reddit has been quite shit for awhile now, but with the Pao's coming it took a nosedive and embraced the Challenger Deep.
The concept of being good/bad at a job doesn't exist for the social justice crowd. Everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator of identity politics. Now the focus will repeatedly be diverted to reddit's toxic, misogynistic community while the legitimacy of the community's complaints (which is well established) will be casually waved away.

That's why it was perfectly fine to run Brendan Eich out of the Mozilla CEO position on a rail, but it's a gross miscarriage of justice that Ellen Pao was booted. It's blindingly obvious which of these two people was qualified for the job and earned it on merits. The difference is that one was a white guy whose politics were viewed as anti-progressive, the other was a minority woman with the "correct" political leanings. A vexatious lawsuit here or there isn't worth quibbling about.
 

Vanilla_Knight

New member
Jun 25, 2015
26
0
0
StreamerDarkly said:
Marxie said:
Except that said forumites are literally her clientele. Not fucking up muh Reddit is her job. For all I know she could be Hitler Incarnate and I wouldn't give a flying fuck about it, as long as she's doing a halfway decent job. But as fucking everyone who use Reddit (i.e. - the people who's opinion actually matters) can say - she wasn't. Moderation of Reddit has been quite shit for awhile now, but with the Pao's coming it took a nosedive and embraced the Challenger Deep.
The concept of being good/bad at a job doesn't exist for the social justice crowd. Everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator of identity politics. Now the focus will repeatedly be diverted to reddit's toxic, misogynistic community while the legitimacy of the community's complaints (which is well established) will be casually waved away.

That's why it was perfectly fine to run Brendan Eich out of the Mozilla CEO position on a rail, but it's a gross miscarriage of justice that Ellen Pao was booted. It's blindingly obvious which of these two people was qualified for the job and earned it on merits. The difference is that one was a white guy whose politics were viewed as anti-progressive, the other was a minority woman with the "correct" political leanings. A vexatious lawsuit here or there isn't worth quibbling about.
I don't know when someone drugged me and I woke up in this wacko-world where "progressive" values and sex were a shield against criticism for frivolous lawsuits. According to the mainstream media, she has been "pushed out by misogynistic harassers" instead of the reality that she was horrible at her job at both a technical and cultural level.
 

Random Gamer

New member
Sep 8, 2014
165
0
0
Can anyone tell me how this shit is possible, because it's quite amazing - specially considering the order in which the article had been revised. Had it occurred the other way around, it would make sense for a respected newspaper, but that way?

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
 

Hero in a half shell

It's not easy being green
Dec 30, 2009
4,285
0
0
Random Gamer said:
Can anyone tell me how this shit is possible, because it's quite amazing - specially considering the order in which the article had been revised. Had it occurred the other way around, it would make sense for a respected newspaper, but that way?

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
Wow.

I... wow.

I didn't think news could do that. I did note something very interesting though:

The article was first published by Mike Isaac at 5:23 pm. It was then 'updated' at 7:48pm - 2 hours and 20 minutes later, with virtually a complete rewrite.

The very first change made to the article is the addition to the "written by" section of "and David Streitfeld". So I don't need Sherlockian levels of deduction to conclude that he rewrote the entire thing, and he rewrote it bloody fast.

I looked the guy up.
He seems to actually be a really decorated and hard working investigative reporter; winning the "Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting" and has published several very high profile pieces outing corruption and stuff.

He even has his own website: http://www.davidstreitfeld.com/# Although it's very bare (His Twitter feed, personal blurb, and links to a book he wrote/helped write.) There are other sections, but hilariously they have only been populated with stock photos and Photoshop's filler text, so that was pretty funny.

I was most interested to see the opening sentence he wrote:
Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched sexist culture of Silicon Valley.
published 7:48pm, was edited at 10:42pm when the word "sexist" was changed to "male-dominated".

Then at 11:01pm it was changed back to "sexist"!

And then at 11:39pm it was changed back again to "male-dominated"!

What on earth was going on in the New York Times with this article? It was uploaded at half 5 by one reporter, then completely gutted and rewritten in merely 2 hours 20 minutes by another reporter, and judging by the myriad of small edits that were added to the article 1 hour and 20 minutes after that (at 9:07 - The third edit to the article) He was so desperate to get the original article changed that he published the revisions without properly having them edited or spell checked, and then there was some form of dispute over whether to call Silicon Valley sexist or male dominated, which resulted in 2 further edits over the next 2 hours.

That is bizarre.

That is really bizarre.

Also David Streitfeld lives in San Francisco. Because of course he does.
 

Vanilla_Knight

New member
Jun 25, 2015
26
0
0
Hero in a half shell said:
Random Gamer said:
Can anyone tell me how this shit is possible, because it's quite amazing - specially considering the order in which the article had been revised. Had it occurred the other way around, it would make sense for a respected newspaper, but that way?

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html

Also David Streitfeld lives in San Francisco. Because of course he does.
This made me laugh harder than I thought it would. They're spinning it hard. The original article was great, but it had to be butchered by propaganda and politics. What a shame.
 

Hero in a half shell

It's not easy being green
Dec 30, 2009
4,285
0
0
Bat Vader said:
Hero in a half shell said:
Also David Streitfeld lives in San Francisco. Because of course he does.
What's wrong with living in San Francisco?
There's nothing necessarily wrong with David Streitfeld living in San Francisco, but I found it interesting because a lot of people who have been all over the gaming forums in the past 12 months are all from San Francisco, and they would frequently use the same language, bias and storytelling technique in their recent... gaming culture media encounters.

To spell it out: San Francisco is basically the hometown and main hangout of many of the indie devs and journalists implicated in the recent Gamergate controversy who all conform to an extremist progressive liberal viewpoint that all social systems are run by the patriarchy and all women and minorities are being systemically downtrodden by all white males who are all believed to be unfairly gaining off the system that favours them, and therefore should all be denigrated and deposed.

As an extension of this they hold a radical zeal for reforming the system through influencing geek culture to be more open to women and minorities (not a bad thing) but they want this to come at the expense of white males and generally anyone who differs in their political viewpoints (as they are almost all confirmed Marxists - Which interestingly tends to be the ultimate end of their beliefs that they are less likely to explain in their seminars, although you can occasionally see it in come through in Tweets - tear down the capitalist patriarchy and replace it with a matriarchal driven Marxist utopia where everyone is equal.)

Basically San Francisco is kind of the headquarters of America for this belief, and many of their events and conferences are held there.

The Amish have Pennsylvania
The KKK have Mississippi
The Bankers have Wall Street
And the extremist feminists have San Francisco.
 

Bat Vader

Elite Member
Mar 11, 2009
4,997
2
43
LifeCharacter said:
MarsAtlas said:
I have no dog in this fight as I hardly use reddit, but from I gather she was more of a symbol of what site users disliked rather than actually directly responsible. Thats therefore a symbolic victory rather than a tangible victory. Don't make the mistake of celebrating early, as it wouldn't be the first time an organization mistook a single person as being the problem rather than policies. Or maybe I'm just too optimistic and they're right about how people will stop saying negative things just because she's no longer around rather than an actual policy shift. Given the amount of irrational hatred people threw her way, I wouldn't be surprised.
Funny thing about that, Alexis Ohanian [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/csz2p3i], the executive chairman and founder of reddit was the one who fired the popular employee and is responsible for that entire thing. So congrats people celebrating, you've gotten a woman fired for something she didn't actually do.

Though, now that we know that it wasn't her doing, I'm sure we'll see lots of petitions about firing this guy. It's not like Pao being one of them evil leftist women-folk had anything to do with all the bitching and moaning after all, it was all about the policies she wasn't really responsible for.
Of course he doesn't actually come out and say this until Ellen Pao already resigned. Hopefully he violently goes through a windshield at some point in the near future. I can't stand corrupt people.
 

FirstNameLastName

Premium Fraud
Nov 6, 2014
1,080
0
0
BreakfastMan said:
FirstNameLastName said:
BreakfastMan said:
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.
So why accept it and let the harassers get what they want, and suffer no consequences? Why don't we push to be better?
I'm not saying anyone should or should not do anything about it, just that this is unlikely to solidify the tactics of harassment into the public consciousness when it has already been well solidified long ago.
 

FirstNameLastName

Premium Fraud
Nov 6, 2014
1,080
0
0
Random Gamer said:
Can anyone tell me how this shit is possible, because it's quite amazing - specially considering the order in which the article had been revised. Had it occurred the other way around, it would make sense for a respected newspaper, but that way?

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
Wow. It's cringe-worthy how hard they are trying to make her seem like a virtuous martyr.
 

Hoplon

Jabbering Fool
Mar 31, 2010
1,839
0
0
a slightly more enlightening read here

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-s-terrorists-have-won-ellen-pao-and-the-failure-to-rebrand-web-2-0.html

seems like Ellen Pao was slightly less to blame for the mess that is Reddit. if of course it's accurate. seems so.
 

Tsun Tzu

Feuer! Sperrfeuer! Los!
Legacy
Jul 19, 2010
1,620
83
33
Country
Free-Dom
FirstNameLastName said:
Random Gamer said:
Can anyone tell me how this shit is possible, because it's quite amazing - specially considering the order in which the article had been revised. Had it occurred the other way around, it would make sense for a respected newspaper, but that way?

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
Wow. It's cringe-worthy how hard they are trying to make her seem like a virtuous martyr.
I...wow.

This is just blatant. o_O I love this archiving thing. It's like witnessing birth-

The birth of propoganda, mind, but still, quite interesting just to see it in action.
 

Nirallus

New member
Sep 18, 2014
58
0
0
Hoplon said:
a slightly more enlightening read here

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-s-terrorists-have-won-ellen-pao-and-the-failure-to-rebrand-web-2-0.html

seems like Ellen Pao was slightly less to blame for the mess that is Reddit. if of course it's accurate. seems so.
Enlightening and Arthur Chu: Pick just one.

LostGryphon said:
FirstNameLastName said:
Random Gamer said:
Can anyone tell me how this shit is possible, because it's quite amazing - specially considering the order in which the article had been revised. Had it occurred the other way around, it would make sense for a respected newspaper, but that way?

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/934341/934454/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddit-chief-executive-resignation.html
Wow. It's cringe-worthy how hard they are trying to make her seem like a virtuous martyr.
I...wow.

This is just blatant. o_O I love this archiving thing. It's like witnessing birth-

The birth of propoganda, mind, but still, quite interesting just to see it in action.
"All The News That's Fit To Print"
 

Jack Action

Not a premium member.
Sep 6, 2014
296
0
0
Bat Vader said:
Of course he doesn't actually come out and say this until Ellen Pao already resigned. Hopefully he violently goes through a windshield at some point in the near future. I can't stand corrupt people.
Huh, so Pao really was bait. Quite brilliant, really; hire a controversial figure (even better, a controversial woman), fuck everything up, imply it was her fault, then suddenly fix whatever problem you had which made you need a temporary CEO.
 

Jack Action

Not a premium member.
Sep 6, 2014
296
0
0
Dynast Brass said:
It's cynical, and it might have worked, so maybe it isn't cynical after all. :(
It certainly seems to have. We'll find out in a few months, I guess.