It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now.
"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).
It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you.
> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general
The same goes for Yishan Wong, who personally hired Ellen Pao, supports the recent moderation actions[1], thought he wasn't qualified for the job[2], and censored creepshots, right? The whole thing's been going downhill since 2012, I guess?
I think you're trying to make a sarcastic point here (unless I'm mistaken,) but that's probably quite true as written.
Even /r/askscience supports this move [1]. It is one of the most heavily moderated subreddits on the site, with professional staff. These aren't rabblerousers, they are very hard-working volunteers who are fed up with the administration.
The comment I replied to was trying to say that this isn't about the firing, and is about the process of limiting free speech and restricting subs in a non-transparent manner. I see none of that in the /r/askscience post.
It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the moment:
1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
2. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even if AskScience's mods are professional scientists, they're still volunteer AskScience mods.]
The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits. In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints. You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're doing an awful job on the other.
By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1 (including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits) may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.
I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.
(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)
>Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making.
You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]
kn0thing is, for all his original talents at communication with the reddit community, pretty bad at handling these flareups. Here's his initial response to todays goings on. [1] How tone deaf is that? How did the guy who talked about letting users take control at TED turn into the guy who says:
"We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after."
He went from a guy you thought was one of you to a guy who spews platitudes like he ate a dictionary in a country with bad water.
Something is rotten in the state of reddit. The common narrative of that site has become one of managerial incompetence. Whether or not you agree with their strategy, I think it's hard to deny that their tactics are in the bottom decile.
It could be that he's not allowed to say anything about the matter. It reads to me more like an honest attempt at damage control while at the same time not divulging anything about the situation. So far his communication has been the most reasonable and levelheaded of all the reddit admins. I doubt he's lost his touch with the community, rather that he's been gagged and cannot say more than he does.
I don't think the bad taste has much to do with him not being able to divulge things about the situation. Everybody understands they don't need or can't comment on the reasons why Victoria was fired. That's just common sense. Of course everybody is curious, but unless the reason is something that directly affects the userbase and the IAMA-system, it's fine to not disclose any of it. It might likely be something that concerns Victoria's privacy as well.
I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:
"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"
Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).
Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.
But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.
I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.
I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.
One last thing:
> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.
I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.
This is the part that gets me. We're clearly getting PR-talk from Alexis. That would be fine if the expectation of Alexis was that he would simply be the Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. But that's not what was expected. Those of us who were around reddit when kn0thing and spez ran the place and it was held together with duct tape and good intentions remember someone who was an active member of the community and who truly had the community's interests at heart. We thought when he returned that we were getting that Alexis back, and we were happy.
But that Alexis appears to have "matured" into a vanilla businessman, and that's fine. What isn't fine is the mass exodus of admins who were actually redditors, the bringing in of a CEO whose goals clearly align more with monetizing than nurturing, and a series of decisions that have shown the remaining braintrust at reddit to have grown further and further away from the community.
It's fine to monetize reddit. It's fine to run it like a real, live company. What's not fine is to do that to the exclusion of all else, and risk jeopardizing the very community that gives the site value in the first place.
What we've seen from the actions of the executive team at reddit in recent months suggests that they simply don't understand how their actions are being perceived. They've either lost or pushed out the people at the company who had a finger on the pulse of the community, and now they're flying blind. It seems that the only thing keeping reddit going right now as a community is the lack of a viable alternative, and that's a very dangerous place to be for a company like reddit.
I don't know whether the executive team at reddit sees this episode as just another fire to put out or as a portent of things to come. What I see, as an active participant on the site, is a restive user base that increasingly sees itself as neglected and taken for granted by a dismissive and aloof leadership. There are many things keeping the user base in reddit's orbit, but most of those things come down to inertia and lack of a better alternative. If the latter is solved, the former will take care of itself, and reddit will hit a tipping point whereby its most engaged users leave en masse.
It's not there yet, but it's an existential threat that it doesn't appear the reddit brain trust is taking seriously.
Raldi had a really good idea of creating an office of Public Advocate: someone in the company whose job it is to argue for the users in any meeting. That's a fantastic suggestion, and could go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of resentment among the user base.
I have buried far too many internet communities to think this is fixable by creating an ombudsman (something I explicitly suggested for what was, in the past, the biggest free BBS on the internet). The idea will get a lot of lip service and then forgotten completely.
> You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]
I think she's singularly incapable of solving it, but that's fine. I don't think it's reasonable to expect her to be. She should be running a company and building a team that can solve it.
Yes, that's a bit of stupidity in her posting a link to her own inbox.
What was that about CEOs being responsible for building culture?
Pao may or may not be an idiot in the same league as Fiorina, Apotheker, and - arguably - Whitman and Ballmer.
But I think the Reddit flareup is part of a more general disgust with emotionally damaged management culture which is devoted to profits before people, but is so bad at people that profits tank too.
There's a point beyond which being rich and powerful doesn't protect you from shooting off your own head. Reddit management seems to have crossed that line, and the content farm idea stops working when contributors stop feeling like they're a part of a community and realise they're really just unpaid employees on a profit production line.
So it's not just about the AMA editor. It's about the fact that management is trying to control a community it doesn't pay and doesn't really own. The "Do what you like, but give us clicks" deal has been changed to "We run this farm, we tell you what you can and can't post, but give us clicks anyway, because $business$ - oh and by the way, fuck you."
> I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.
I have found the issue to be not so much a matter of the two factors that you've outlined, but more a consistent downward trend of the admin staff, towards a stronger disconnect with the community. There has been less communication, and the communication that has happened has been less clear and less consistent. Even in this entire drama, reddit's response has come through a single point of contact.
For a site like reddit to work, the administrators really need to be able to also participate in the community at large. They need to have firm, definite rules and guidelines of what they will and will not do, and how they will or will not help. They need to make themselves available to the volunteer staff that help run these numerous communities.
This I think is the root cause of both of these tensions. The community simply doesn't know what to expect from the admins anymore.
> Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions
That's a contradiction, not many people (especially internet people) understand that freedom of speech and freedom of expression do not cover a conspiracy to be harmful.
However, Reddit certainly doesn't have [correctly defined] freedom of speech - which I have a problem with: Reddit has a certain sway over the way that people think and a world where unpopular or culturally immoral opinions are muzzled is not a world where ethical progress can be made.
Kind of. Reddit cares a lot more about keeping the defaults around than keeping the smaller questionable subreddits around. I genuinely don't think they want to ban the distasteful but non-harassing subreddits (partly because they don't want to be known as a site that would ban those subreddits), but if one of those subreddits decided to one day get up and leave of their own accord, they wouldn't shed a tear. If, say, /r/IAmA decided to get up and leave, that would be a problem. This happened once [1], it was a problem, and (IIRC) Reddit management stepped in.
So yes, they're disconnects. But one is a disconnect between a userbase / the moderators of subreddits that Reddit the company is not very invested in keeping, except to the extent that in general, they want to keep subreddits that don't break rules. The other is a disconnect between subreddits that Reddit relies on.
That's why when tension 1 flared up a few weeks ago, Reddit banned some subreddits and implicitly threatened others with banning, and when tension 2 flared up yesterday, some other subreddits threatened to shut down and successfully forced Reddit to care.
> 1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I think both sections of the site are vile, but I vastly prefer a uniform standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about ____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.
I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).
Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer-term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say, the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a huge surprise to a lot of people.
Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit, Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to put that, and I'm stealing it.
People keep saying that FPH was not engaged in harassment and abuse that spread outside that group, and outside reddit.
But it clearly was. Reddit should just release some of the brigading details - and that has always been something that can cause your sub to be closed and your account to be shaddow-banned.
I do not understand how you can use the existance of vile groups as evidence of Reddit squashing free speech - doesn't the fact that those vile groups didn't get closed (unless they brigaded) evidence that Reddit allows free speech as far as possible.
That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even solve that problem in general?
I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Reddit accounts. We've long observed 4chan/goon "Redditors" in YouTube comment threads. I'm with you on releasing how they got there, and I think it would provide a lot of clarity.
One last thing, I have to correct you: I never said Reddit was squashing free speech. I wish they'd pick a consistent value on it, that's all, and I pointed out specific things said in the press about free speech. I'm less concerned about FPH than I am about something like /r/jailbait, which got removed because it became the squeaky wheel due to CNN attention. There are worse subreddits regarding sexualization of children, and Reddit fails to uphold its own standard there, which negates the standard itself. That's my problem.
3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding
4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of rules.
Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of comments. In smaller subs this is very destructive. That is very clearly reddit activity that can be tied to FPH posts and FPH subscribers.
And if Reddit did apply their rules consistantly it would result in a lot more subs being closed - the pro-self harm subs, the pro eating disorder subs, and the pro suicide groups are clear contenders for banning. (To be fair the suicide groups do get banned. I think they've worked out an equilibrium of being as pro suicide as they can without getting banned).
(I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)
Brigading is not against reddit's rules[0], despite semi-popular belief. Some big subs actually encourage it by not allowing np (non-participation) links to be posted on their sub[1].
/r/ThisSubReddit exists. There's a post in /r/ThisSubReddit that someone doesn't like. They post a link to that post to /r/OtherSubReddit, sometimes with commentary (eg, "look at this idiot!")
That causes a bunch of people from /r/OtherSubReddit to visit /r/ThisSubReddit. That's okay, unless they start voting; or insulting; or harassing users.
The voting is not okay because often the brigading sub is much larger than the sub being brigaded. (FPH had 150,000 subscribed users) People generally agree that the heavily modded subs are better. Brigading makes it really hard for mods to do any modding. (If just 1% of FPH subs decide to vote that's 1,500 people. If your sub is only 800 subscribers you're going to get crushed by FPH.)
The harassment is not okay because, well, fuck those people who think it's okay to visit a self-harm support sub and tell people to kill themselves.
That kind of brigading has been risky for subs for a while now; plenty of subs got warned, temp banned, or permanently banned for this.
fatpeoplehate was warned multiple times about brigading. But the problem with FPH was not just on-Reddit brigading. They took it to facebook, youtube, a bunch of other websites. They also, if the admins are to be believed, took it AFK to people's IRL work / school / homes.
Even if the "position" in statements by the administrators were "consistent" (doubtful, but that's besides the point), the application of these rules is manifestly not.
Reddit would have had my support if they enforced the rules as you say. Unfortunately Reddit chose instead to enforce the brand new harassment rule, ban the sub, ban the mods, and then ban any sub that even looked like FPH.
It would have been a far, far more effective message if they said "We have banned FPH and the moderators due to their brigading and doxxing. Let this be a lesson to all subs: if you do these things, you will be disbanded." and then left alone all of the other subs that superficially looked like FPH but didn't engage in that specific behavior.
Instead they got a minor revolt, and the latest revolt seems like a manifestation of a lot of the hard feelings from that attempt.
>the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding
Do you include TIL among those? I do. Best sub there is.
The only they they use 'extensive vigorous modding' for is verifying whether titles follow the rules. And ~100% of that is based on user reports, they just double-check.
Aside from that, there is 0 moderation, other than for sitewide rule violations. You can say anything_you_want in comments and they will take no action.
> (I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)
Thanks. I'm used to it, honestly, because it's become obvious over time that holding an opinion in contrast to what HN wants to hear is a nearly guaranteed ticket to comment illegibility. HN is the only forum on which I participate where disagreement is acceptably expressed as making someone's thoughts more difficult to read.
I'm merely presenting my (long earned) observations on Reddit. I absolutely think it's a shitshow, a terrible place full of terrible people, but I suspect I'm being punished for daring to suggest that there is something wrong with the site itself. In the smaller subreddits, there are absolutely small embers of really powerfully rewarding conversation. There is stuff worth saving on Reddit, and I think the loud stuff drowns it out. I've had extremely fulfilling conversations about network security, application security, game modification, and polyamory in the various communities of which I am a part, and I've learned a lot. My experience isn't representative because I subscribe to nearly zero default subs.
To your point, I think SRS serves as the complete counterexample to everything you're saying. The entire purpose of SRS is to brigade and single out individual Redditors, and I've seen the results firsthand. If FPH was doing it, there isn't a universe in existence where SRS gets off that hook and it makes sense. Transparency is important here, as you say.
> 1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
The real problem is that the definition of "abusive" is hopelessly vague and the process for determining what constitutes "coordinating abusive action" is opaque and untrustworthy.
Not remotely fair to accuse people of trying to protect "coordinating abuse" without clarifying what that actually means.
They're not "limiting free speech" in any way or form. They're moderating what gets published on their platform. That's a totally different thing. You got anything to say? Print out a pamphlet or host a blog on your own server. Nobody's stopping you.
As to ambiguous decision making -- you're right about that, but they have a problem. Reddit has a largeish group of teenagers, unemployed white men living in their mother's basement and techno-libertarians, that have turned the site into a cesspool of xenophobia, misogyny, wingnut conspiracies and most of all -- lots of eighth grade drama . Those people, of course, don't matter (advertisers don't care much about them), and nobody in the real-world (not most Reddit users) care or even notice the imaginary armageddon taking place in those kids' heads, but the problem with them is that 1) they're unreasonable, and 2) they have the time to make the lives of the site administrators miserable (it would make their day -- they've got nothing more exciting to do).
So the people running Reddit are scared. They've invited the devil -- worse, teenagers -- into their home for an endless party, and they know they'll trash the place even more if the party were to end. So they're sending mixed messages. They're talking about respect, but they allow CoonTown and "men"'s rights groups. It's time for Reddit to grow some balls, kick the misbehaving kids out, shutdown not a few, but all hate subreddits, all without issuing as much as a press release. The kids will talk about their judgement day (that nobody in the world would notice) for years, the grown men in their mom's basement will feel like they're actually being hunted, and everybody would get exactly what they want.
Are there really a lot of teenagers on there? When I was in high school almost nobody knew about Reddit, it took until college for most of my peers to find out what it was.
People caring to much about bullshit like ethics in game journalism are missing the forest for the trees.
Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that:
1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily.
2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired.
>content has been sliding
>doxxing has gone up
>several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down
>community is faltering
>no side wants to compromise
tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
Hey I think GG is pathetic, for a lot of reasons. But my previous job was at a games media company (and I'm still involved with them), and the stuff that goes on in games media is horribly incestuous.
I mean yeah, bigger fish to fry and all that, but it's still a problem for a lot of people - other problems existing doesn't change that. I'm sure "we" could fix the bigger issue at large but who's "we"? Who's working on that, and why does it invalidate incestuous and unpublished conflicts of interest?
reddit is one of the simplest and easiest sites for a new user to learn to use. Somehow, Ellen Pao doesn't know how to use reddit, nevermind what the culture and community that has built over a decade truly means.
She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost:
It is a 2 way street. The community can be nasty but they do not treat every admin this way. Consider Victoria who was just fired. The whole shenanigan today isn't really about her but about the way the mods are being treated. But my point is that the community really appreciated her work and her approach.
When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh.
This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction.
For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all.
She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension?
Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times?
Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey.
An intelligent person would make their choice.
A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice.
That's 'cause Victoria had a different job. People loved Raymond Chen back when Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft.
In particular, Victoria had the job of making AMAs happen smoothly, and /r/IAmA is this very weird subreddit, operationally speaking (how many other subreddits have their own mobile app?), that clearly needs a paid staff member. Ellen has the job of being the final say on anything that happens, controversial or otherwise. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that an AMA needs to happen, Victoria does it. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that a subreddit needs to be banned, Ellen does it (or at least takes the blame for it).
with respect, you are missing the whole point of this issue! It isn't about doing X but about how you do X.
If Victoria had done her job with condescension towards mods, if she had been haughty in her communications, arbitrary and non-transparent in her decision making, etc. then you can bet your bottom dollar that she would not have been so valued by the mods and the wider community.
This isn't about making 'difficult decisions' but about how they are made, communicated and implemented.
That is why I added the bee analogy in my previous comment.
I'm one of the "nicer" mods on my subreddit because I'm polite and very careful and careful in how I construct my responses to actions.
But at the end of the day I'm also liked because I'm not the most active mod. The very act of exerting power over another user, especially someone who has never stopped to think about the rules or the site history, results in resentment.
The better your mod team is at being able to implement the rules, the more friction there will be.
People will also come out to complain more than compliment.
This results in distancing from the community, just because of how painful it can be.
Good tools to moderate create more ways to censor people, track them, decide what words are ok and others which are not.
In short, Victoria is far removed from the kind of things which make people hate admins.
Yeah, that tense was unclear. How about "Even when Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft, people still loved Raymond Chen"? (I think few people hate Satya Nadella the way people hated Ballmer and hate Pao, that's all.)
Yeah, if she laughed at herself, and appeared human and submissive to the masses they'd stop calling her a cunt.
Imagine being responsible for a platform where every time you post something people come out of the woodworks to call you a cunt and a stupid bitch.
Really, I don't know how she puts in an honest day's work and I really don't know what anyone expects of anyone in that situation. Were I in that situation I'd be thinking 'This house is infested, burn it down.'
She banned a few people? What, that's an abuse of her power? They used to decapitate people for saying less offensive things within someone else's domain.
I wonder how some people (not you) survive the cognitive dissonance of believing simultaneously that the right to free speech and the right to private property are the most important things ever of all time.
Thing is, before they started hellbanning all of those subreddits (TrayvonMartin, fatpeoplehate, etc.) I had no idea they even existed. For 8 years I've been blissfully unaware of all the garbage subreddits popping up.
Well then consider yourself lucky that your favourite subreddits weren't targets. I spend way too much time on reddit and I have had to retreat from a few subreddits because of the FPH brigaders (using RES to tag them so I could see when a wave of them hit a sub).
I was close to losing all hope just before they banned it. It would not have surprised me to see Conde Nast pull the plug on reddit before the end of 2015 had they not banned it.
FPH was somehow slowly taking over reddit. Probably because its members had more free time on their hands than average redditors. Also, there were 150.000 of them.
Conde Nast is not part of the ownership structure of reddit. Conde Nast is owned by the major owner of reddit, Advance Publications, but reddit has not been part of Conde Nast for years. The ownership also got more diffuse last year:
FatPeopleHate was really recent. It exploded in popularity. It wasn't even a year old when it got banned.
That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
> i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
> i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
They certainly do. My better half tried using reddit for a couple days 4 or 5 years ago, encountered some vile / bitter people, and decided that it just wasn't worth it. She won't go near it again.
> That link also illustrates how utterly hateful some parts of the Reddit community is.
I left a comment in that thread, but wasn't one of the hateful ones. While I don't think saying those hateful things are justified, I can see where they're coming from. This was right after the whole scandal with the banning, i think within 24hrs of the announcement, and a lot of them were passionate about the site, so they weren't really being friendy toward her
Do you know if any users in that thread were actually banned?
I checked out the reddit for the top level posts and it appears that many of them, even the ones that posted the most mean spirited comments in that thread, seem to be active. Most of them have plenty of recent comments with votes and replies.
Maybe the banned had their comments deleted? I don't think that's how it works though.
> Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine.
Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to confuse a private message with a public reply.
If I want to see how a url will appear to someone before I send it, I open an incognito tab in chrome and paste it there. It doesn't have access to any of my currently open sessions, cookies, etc. so I see exactly what someone else will see when they click, and I send or don't send (or modify and send) accordingly.
I tried the link provided but was unable to display the page, though as a citizen of the internet I can take a stab at the flavor of the insults.
Given her recent gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins and potential appeal, it would have made strategic sense to block anything sexist. I don't know if that's what was in the content of the replies - just guessing.
Also guessing it was pretty racist, and <checks underpants - yep, white penis> I can only imagine that shit got old more than a century ago.
>the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
Twitch still uses flash because HLS wasn't widely supported until recently. Everyone knows Twitch takes half of the $5, there is no naivety there. And the gamification of subscriptions is a good thing for streamers. Anyone who has been a partner with both Twitch and YouTube will tell you Twitch is miles ahead when it comes to actually caring about its partners.
I'm not arguing against the choices of Twitch per se, I'm commenting on the bunch of free passes they get because the viewers see themselves as part of the 'twitch community'.
Saying that the gamification of subscriptions is good for the streamer is the same as saying that games with micro-transactions, designed to be addictive, are good for the developers. Of course it is, but someone is paying for it...
The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard.
Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever).
Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
> Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
I've seen softcore pornographic material from twitch. Women flashing their breasts or ass at the webcam.
Granted, that sort of thing apparently is uncommon because the people who did it were apparently almost immediately banned... but that's rather the point, isn't it? You don't see it because they ban it.
How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
I'm not sure this is an "exploitative relationship", unless you also define your relationship with a supermarket chain or netflix to be "exploitative". You give money for a service. Said service tries to extract money as efficiently as possible.
It's a capitalistic relationship, certainly. But it's very different. reddit volunteers provide their efforts to improve reddit's brand, for free, generally just for personal gratification (from people who will turn on you and drive you to suicide the moment you make the wrong move). Thos efforts are exploited by reddit, rather than rewarded.
What's really funny though, is that this was prompted by someone who seems to have been excellent at marketing, given her stellar reputation among the reddit userbase and universal praise from all of her AMA collaborators. I can't help but think all this will end up in her netting some really swank job. I've seen some post that claimed insider knowledge that Taylor was fired because she resisted further monetization of the AMA series. Given some of the decisions over there I don't find that implausible in the least.
Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.
> Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand
This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
Reddit has gone from someone who understood 'The Internet' :
“We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.”
To the current CEO, Ellen Pao:
It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.
As someone who loves reddit, this dichotomy is the clearest sign that it has no future. Anyone who values freedom of expression and knows how to program can help build a decentralized reddit that no one controls on top of platforms like IPFS and Ethereum's Swarm. Every attempt at building a reddit clone fails because reddit enjoys tremendous network effects. But decentralization yields its own network effects—you don't have to start your own site to see your changes in the wild, you just fork the codebase and tell people about it. The useful changes thrive, the useless ones are forgotten, and everyone's still contributing to the core stream of submissions, comments, and votes that make the system work regardless of which fork they're using.
reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.
I wouldn't say I love Reddit, but I'm certainly an active user. But I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread. There are lots of little communities that work well, with their own things they value. (There was a particular thread over on /r/OrthodoxChristianity, now removed, that would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad: a member of the community tried to convince everyone else to move to Voat. The usual talking points for that move didn't really go over well there.)
I suspect one of the network effects is simply that people have Reddit accounts and know how the site works; it's not yet another site to sign up for, for a small-ish community of people interested in a thing. I think that's the sole reason, for instance, /r/rust works as well as it does; philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole. I suspect that it's not users of any particular other subreddit (not even /r/programming) who are there, but people already using Reddit for many many other things. It's become one of the bigger discussion forums for the language, especially since the closure of the rust-dev mailing list.
If you can build a decentralized Reddit-like system with no per-community account system and also with no spam problem, you may stand a decent chance at replacing it.
>>philosophically, the community doesn't align well with Reddit as a whole
It's true. I for example was off-put by what I perceive as forced niceness. While it shouldn't matter on a subreddit dedicated to a programming language it's, at least for me, an illustration of culture conflict on Reddit.
Very small example: there was a poster claiming that we shouldn't use a word "guys" when referring to mixed groups and the moderators were willing to grant that request/encourage different ways of addressing mixed groups for some completely bs (in my view) reasons like the equivalent word in German being used only to address male groups.
Well, my preferred way of dealing with such requests is:
"We don't mean to offend anyone but this is English so deal with it, using a word guys to address mixes groups is completely standard"
I find the culture of forced niceness and political correctness off-putting and it is reason enough for me not to engage in certain communities (/r/chess is another one I stopped posting in because of it).
I think a difference in views on this matter is also why some Reddit communities are perceived as hateful while I not only don't see any hate there but I often see the critics as hateful authoritarians (one example: r/mensrights)
I would be happy just with HN clones more focused on specific topics. The per-community thing I don't care about too much; it doesn't even have to be the same host (it's 2015 we have bookmarks and speedials and password managers). What I care about is moderation done right. But I suspect it's an open issue for very large scale communities.
> I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread
While that might have been true when you posted this comment, I have trouble believing that it could be true for anybody right now. At least a half dozen defaults have gone private an the majority of posts on the signed-out home page are about this story.
Is it so hard to believe that active users wouldn't be subbed to any of the defaults?
Looking at all of my subscriptions, it looks like exactly one of them, /r/linux, is currently private. /r/bayarea previously was. Places like /r/debian or /r/AskNYC or /r/SandersForPresident or /r/osdev just don't care -- or at least, they care less than they care about keeping their community open. There's a post each on /r/Christianity and /r/Catholicism saying thanks to the mods. There's a post vaguely about the subject on /r/networking, but it veered into discussion about the community.
As I mentioned elsewhere in these comments, yesterday's issue was specifically about the tensions between large, default sub volunteer moderation and Reddit the company. Most of the subreddits I read are small communities without these problems. (And they don't see themselves at risk for being banned for harassment / political incorrectness / what-have-you, so they're not concerned about that, either.)
I'd suggest directed acyclic graph comments, too, so that a comment can reply to more than one other comment. Potentially super nice, but I haven't seen anyone implement them yet.
There were techniques we were working on prior to the ISPs neglecting them.
One such technique was a crypto method, similar to what has been recommended in reducing spam in emails. The client has to do some lengthy crypto transform for the message(and NG) they send. On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message. Small amounts of messages would get through, but spammers would be unable to bulk-send without some sort of supercomputer.
The appropriate algo could be agreed up and updated to increase the amount of time for the message. Even in worst cases, you're utilizing a slow computer for a second or 2. Solves the spam issue.
On average, it would take .5 sec to generate per message
So if I want to post from a mobile device, I have to wait considerably longer? And if I hijack a lot of computers for a spam farm, I can send as much as I like?
Spam is not only defined by bulk. You still need moderators, and that means a process for establishing and maintaining who moderates a particular group. You need people to delete the child porn and the death threats, and that means a process for deletion. (Signed cancels were a pretty good solution in the end). You probably want some means for identifying persistently troublesome users and their sockpuppets from legitimate new users.
You need hosting so that people can effectively access it despite firewalls and on mobile devices. You need a means of paying for that hosting.
As someone who hung around a few usenet discussion groups well into the 21st century, the problem was less "spam" and more "trolls and kooks". It only takes a very small number of people to completely disrupt a group, and no, "plonking" was not a solution that worked. A new usenet would need some sort of moderation system.
That's a good point. I was thinking along the lines of something that's essentially like reddit or HN, but had a field where you could add additional parent comment ids, so that the parent poster was notified of the reply.
We want to be a profitable platform and some of you have to go for that to happen.
The timing of the iAMA admin's removal coincides all to well with the recent Jesse Jackson AMA that went exactly as AMAs do and not how politicians want things.
Most celebrities can handle abuse and such, but there are certain one's and definitely more politicians who will not tolerate it from the rabble. To them they are royalty and damn if they will suffer humiliation, rudeness, or the like, from anyone. So likely we will soon have amusement park reddit, where there is a hint of roughness but everything is policed, scripted, and shadowbans go out like candy on halloween. AMA will likely come back as service to "the important people" Ellen and her like want to associate with to the point all posts will be so filtered it should be renamed "Ask Me Approved Questions"
Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all. Reddit is OK already, but the new management seems to want to change it more and more. These new CEO's want to always push their "vision" for what reddit should be despite what the userbase wants and the backlash for that is already showing.
The thing is, the power doesn't rest on the CEO or the company, it rests on the user base. Redditors can migrate to any other website they choose to, just like Digg users migrated to reddit some years ago. The people have the power in the end.
Reddit is a pretty terrible business. Discussion boards in general are a terrible business. Redditors can migrate anywhere they want, but the question is where are they welcome, particularly in volume? voat is begging for money, fighting with paypal, and being forced to kill wannabe kiddy porn / jailbait.
I'm sure reddit would be super tore up if the fat haters, racists, and jailbait traders left :rolleyes:
This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind.
The company wants to grow and become more profitable, the community wants to preserve what it has.
I don't know if a site like this can really be run as a for profit company, at least not a growth oriented one. The obvious monetization schemes will be met with resistance. Even though its attracted a lot of users, can it really ever make money?
> This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind.
And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?
By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.
How is this going to help increasing their profit?
If they're exactly where they were some years ago but now with a demographic that's less likely to block ads, that's a win. How might they have "capitalized on" their "homogeneous group of nerds" that wouldn't have caused them to just leave?
> How might they have "capitalized on" their "homogeneous group of nerds" that wouldn't have caused them to just leave?
The possibilities should be endless. One thing I could have imagined would be cooperations with companies that have products which reddit user value and use heavily. Take Valve's Steam, for instance. Reddit could have offered those companies a service to buy a sub that is especially tailored for the company's needs so that they could turn their sub into a tailor-made r&d lab (with special features as required...). Those who love their products would be thrilled to develop ideas and share their user knowledge with their favorite company.
As long as they would've selected companies carefully and resist from interfering with other parts of reddit no one would run away. If anything, those "special sub" could be a gateway drug for new users.
The community would be in an uproar if such a sale happened. Reddit's only monetization schemes right now are 1) reddit gold 2) ads and 3) the gift shop. These are things that the community can completely boycott. Any sane person would know not to buy out something like reddit.
Reddit is really poorly managed. If Google bought it and gave it an overhaul I'm sure it would be welcome over the current administration. Plus, the "non-vocal users" simply don't care.
I would start with rewarding administrators with payment (akin to youtube, somewhat proportionally to views -- this creates a strong incentive towards fidelity), revamp post priority algorithms, and add some basic functionality that you need to install an add on (!), RES, to get (what other top 100 website needs this?).
A few hundred million for what -- a largely unmonetizable high traffic website full of tantrum throwing racists, bigots, and pornographers? They don't make much money from ads (they were unprofitable through at least 2012 afaik) and probably can't monetize that way -- even past the brand safety issues, it's still a forum that would feel lucky to get perhaps 50 cent cpm advertising on US traffic. I'd be shocked if they could clear 50 million, and that would be from someone who was going to fire the majority of employees and just run the site out. Particularly with digg's example of how fickle internet users can be.
I'm aware it was invested in at a 1/2 billion valuation, and good luck to them, but I stand by my analysis.
The thing is, 'reddit-likes' have definitively a place in the Internet, and I mean for the next couple decades. This format has been iterated over and over, starting with slashdot, 4chan, digg et al, and it's obviously one of the best ways we ever found to manage large discussions/news/etc. HN is an example.
Reddit is growing and would continue to grow really quickly. There's no competition in sight. Owning the discussion backbone of the internet is massively valuable, comparable at least to WhatsApp I'd say.
Can it die out due to massive exodus? Sure, but something similar will replace it. And for each iteration (slashdot,digg,etc), those websites have become larger and more consolidated. It's fair to assume at some point it will reach long term stability (particularly if it's properly managed).
More likely investors are getting restless and want to see some return. In these cases management feels it needs to have things under its control and starts removing power bases from lower down the org chart so that everything stays on message. AMA is Reddit's only viable asset so having it under control of someone who isn't part of the management clique is unthinkable.
Usually these attempts fail and the company is dead within 24 months having burned the village in an attempt to save the village.
However a counter-point is that its quite possible that they are trying to pivot reddit into a mainstream site, and thus are more than willing to burn most of the current user base.
They don't need/want hard-hitting questions during AMA's, nor do they want freaky fetish subreddits, nor long winded post describing the intricacies of the Federal Reserve.
They want cat pictures, pictures of freshly baked cakes, celebrity soundbites, and lots of comments that go "that cake looks delish!" and "Love you Miley!"
In short, an internet version of "The View".
Regardless, I think it will fail, if thats even the case. However, ideas such as these are the exact type that tone-deaf MBA types think up lots of times.
The sense I get among most of my friends "in real life" is that they read reddit but would never post to reddit. A driving force behind that is the fear of being seen as a "redditor," which is an image generally associated with neckbeards (ironically a term popularized by themselves).
It could certainly follow an 80/20 rule, i.e. 20% of users post 80% of content, but 20% of users also cause 80% of the disruption. I mean ultimately, normal people are outside living their lives, not fussing over reddit drama. Much of the controversy is definitely stirred up by a "vocal minority." But are they necessary? That's the question. If the upvote economy is zero sum, why would you want to waste so much of it on loud muckrakers?
You might very well be right. Perhaps the reddit leadership realized they have an aggressive vocal minority that is actively damaging their reputation, so they don't mind culling it from their ranks. That would explain Alexis' overt willingness to sit and watch. He literally doesn't care, because why would he? It's all part of the plan to get more cats on the front page, and money in his pocket. (I don't blame him in the slightest.)
Reddit is already mainstream by any sense of the words. The reason it's full of hateful, annoying etc. people is because that's how anonymous human behave. Reddit is not a super secret group that only hateful bad apple knows about. You can try to clamp down the bad content, but alienate the user base will end up badly because there will be no one left to join.
Are websites that are known for being more anonymous than reddit known for being more or less abrasiveness than reddit?
In my personal opinion, they are less abrasive. But I think I am definitely in the minority there. I think that anonymous sites are popularly known as more abrasive.
I've been saying that the Scarlet Letter Administration of Pao are "paper tigers swimming in a barrel of incompetence"
But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left.
They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever.
Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipulate.
Is there anyone left NOT mad at reddit now? Maybe SubredditDrama....
In the spirit of Reddit and /r/conspiracy, maybe Pao wants to be the only successful woman there, so she can make her narrative more believable that the tech world hates women by pointing out how there aren't women at Reddit.
Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not.
So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao.
Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that powerful/authority figures, regardless of gender, always get the most grief? I think there's a misattribution error occurring here: the amount of grief one receives is not a function of gender, it is a function of 'power'.
That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger numbers of people. Meaning that there's a higher probability of receiving a hateful email from the 1 crank in a group affected by a decision you made.
There are a number of studies testing this, and the consensus that emerges from meta-analysis is that women tend to be liked, or respected, but rarely both. Cuddy (2005) is the citation I've memorized for this.
In contrast, men have no problem being liked and respected in positions of power. Women managers tend to be viewed as nurturing pushovers or bitches.
It would indeed be simpler if liking decreased as social distance increased, but the world is not always so simple, and a thousand years of gender stereotypes and oppression don't end in a century.
On the contrary, compare her reception to that of powerful men who behave badly, and she seems to be benefiting from favorable treatment. Powerful men who have attracted the internet's ire by abusing the legal system with frivolous lawsuits, such as Darl McBride, Jack Thompson, or Charles Carreon, have attracted a lot more hate than Pao, and that's just for their legal hijinks, not to mention that they didn't do anything approaching what's happening to Reddit.
Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing why the powerful deserve special sympathy, especially when compared to the non-powerful.
Pao gets hate because she's incompetent, vain, and an ass. Ballmer got hate, too. You know why? Because he's incompetent, vain, and an ass. There are two intersecting patterns here: first, that vain, incompetent asses get hate; second, that most of the people in positions of power are vain, incompetent asses. Maybe people tend to notice more often when they're women, but the men aren't any different and they get plenty of well-deserved hate too.
On reddit, an admin has more power than the overwhelming majority of users. There are seriously only a handful of people on reddit that had more power than Victoria had.
Well, Sam Altman wants Reddit to have a billion users. To me, that means preserving Reddit's culture isn't a top priority. I mean they'll nod at it and say they're trying to keep the culture yada yada, but push come to shove, they really aren't going to defer to it.
Reddit is actively driving away their core users. This is a disaster for any product, regardless of where the potential lies. Until they are no longer your core users, you still need them.
On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media.
Could you elaborate on what you mean?. The core users are the ones that vote and comment, If they don't vote and comment then posters dont get karma, If they don't get karma they don't post and if they don't post then Reddit really isn't going to have a user base of any kind. So it's in everyone's best interest to preserve the culture.
Actually a significant group of people are upset with kn0thing about this whole thing, because he commented about this whole mess [0] and gave what many called a "non-answer".
According to kn0thing, it's a shame, "but so it goes". And then there's the implication that they're all sitting back and enjoying popcorn while Reddit consumes itself.
What's really sad is that reddit and Alexis were, arguably, the most successful Y-Combinator startup, and now they've fallen by the wayside as cronyism and personal agendas take over. Alexis let this happen, though. Not that I blame him, I'd have taken the money too.
By far and away, Airbnb is the most successful Y-Combinator startup. It's not a close race between Reddit and Airbnb. After that is Dropbox and Stripe perhaps. I don't think Reddit ever quite stacked up to these types of companies in terms of potential. Reddit is a link-aggregator, the very definition of a poor business opportunity (they don't own anything, and hardly control anything on their own site).
Airbnb is carrying a $25 billion valuation, and has a legitimate shot at justifying it in the coming years. They own their segment like an eBay or Uber, their network effect has won.
Was Reddit once the top start-up out of Y-Combinator, years ago? I'm skeptical of that having ever been true as well.
Reddit was part of the first batch of YC and was sold for a large amount for Conde Nast, so it makes sense that at that point in time they were the most successful.
Although they're really really really not by today's standards, as you point out.
reddit was the first to release anything online[0]. It's probably fair to say at that point, they were the most successful. I think it's arguable that reddit is still the most successful of those, though Loopt may have been acquired for more money. Here's what happened to the rest:
* Memamp - desktop search: failed to launch, remaining founder hired by reddit
* Infogami - something between a blog and a wiki: merged with reddit, became reddit wiki
* Firecrawl - security software: pivoted and became TextPayMe - mobile payments: acquihired by Amazon, merged in to Amazon Payments
* Loopt - mobile location sharing: acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million
* Kiko - online calendar: launched shortly before Google Calendar, sold to Tucows for about $250k
* Clickfacts - advertising fraud detection: operated independently for years; now appears defunct
* Simmery - can't find anything on what this company was making: defunct
I'm not sure by which objective measure that would be true besides potentially being the most visited by consumers and having the most cultural-currency. From a business perspective, they are far from being the most successful and I'm guessing the last round of funding came with quite a bit of goals that needed to be met including getting the community under control and sanitizing it for mainstream America.
Seems another business model for the internet is : Create authentic community, sell out community to corporate highest bidder who can then eliminate unwanted controversial discussion. Reddit could have monetized like craigslist and made tons of money. Idiots.
I think it's more like a "haters gonna hate" type of comment. Whatever kn0thing says, it won't be good enough to placate the masses with their pitchforks so the best thing to do is sit back and wait till it all blows over. Generally, reddit has very short term institutional memory, by next week new users and admins will be like "Victoria who?!"
This is probably the clearest explanation I've seen. The reddit community has always been a very proudly geeky bunch that enthusiastically embraced internet culture.
It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for whom it isn't endogenous - at its best, it combines a commitment to free expression, a geeky pride in understanding how things work, a strong appreciation for authenticity, a pushback against attention seeking, and an embrace of a multitude of interests.
At its worse, well, it's really bad - you get the opinions of minorities dismissed, and you can have people doing all sorts of heinous stuff (revenge porn, etc) under the guise of free speech.
However, to horribly paraphrase Whitman.. it contains multitudes. Watching what used to be a beloved site being run by people who don't seem to even understand the ideals of their users is very grating.
As an analogy, imagine if the editor of the NYRB somehow ended up as the director of the organization that runs Nascar. Personally, I've never watched a Nascar race in my life and I doubt I ever will - but there are people that are fanatical about that culture, who would resent having a complete outsider who looks upon their hobby with contempt running the show.
Honestly, though... isn't this just a total overreaction? I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA (which once WASN'T a celebrity PR stop) but how does setting the whole damn subreddit to private help anyone? Like, I'm seriously asking. How?
The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all.
Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough?
It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.
Victoria being fired is basically the last straw in what has been close to a year of friction between the people who volunteer to provide and manage reddit's content (the moderators) and the people who profit off of their work (reddit the corporation).
This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.
Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
It's always struck me as weird that Reddit moderators are volunteers. While this may or may not have been justifiable, I'm not sure it was ever tenable that IAmA had a dedicated, paid staff member to make the subreddit run, answerable to Reddit the corporation and not to the subreddit moderators. (To what extent are the subreddit moderators answerable to Reddit the corporation, or vice versa? Remember that time that one of the IAmA mods went "It's been a good run, I'm shutting it down?")
So in retrospect, maybe all the other straws should have been obvious from the start.
Volunteer moderators are an extremely common feature of forums all over the internet. The only forums I know of that have paid moderators are forums for specific companies and their products.
> I get that Victoria getting fired was bad for /r/IAMA
And a number of other subreddits, all fairly large, and all now without a way to fulfill promises made because of this. You don't get it, because if you did, you'd realize why it was more than just /r/IAMA.
So, you should do some reading until you do understand it, because right now, everything you just said screams ignorance.
>The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.
Eh, I have trouble extending the concept of "censorship" of the internet to private websites deciding what can go on their own sites. HN flags and kills threads too. That's not censorship, because HN is Y Combinator's website, so they can pick and choose what kind of content they do and don't want discussed on their site. I could imagine saying, "[HN | Reddit | Slashdot | whatever] is running their site in a way I disagree with", but it's hard for me to imagine complaining that they are censoring me, and getting on some kind of high horse about "free speech", as a bunch of people on this subject seem to be doing.
If something really becomes a central medium of communication such that it's hard to avoid it, like the telephone system, internet infrastructure (backbones, DNS, etc.), and so on, then it starts to be a different issue imo. Then regulation as some kind of content-neutral common carrier might be in order. But does Reddit really play such a role? Twitter or Facebook seem closer to filling such a role, if we were going to pick one of those platforms.
It probably would have been better to frame it as: you can have open communities (old Reddit), or controlled communities (new Reddit) - but you can't have a controlled community that pretends to be an open community (not for very long, the contradiction destroys itself).
Reddit it's founders/community/company have been against PIPA/CISPA/TPP and pro EFF . Freedom on the site and an anti-censorship policy is "that one thing you need to get right", and will allow you to survive through getting a lot of other things wrong.
The thing is that as a user I want some control over what I see. I do not want NSFW content in my feed, or to accidentally see things that are illegal/NSFL. I want to avoid the worse of the troll and hatey people. Reddit does not have freedom of speech, it has admin controlled thiefdoms. This works well, but if a particular community jepardises the whole it should go elsewhere.
> "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
Some portions of the Internet have culture in much the same way that food you forget at the back of your fridge grows culture. And they should be treated much the same way.
Its really crazy actually. Large scale communities seemed doomed to experience a period of mass exidous, or rebellion. Though the subreddit feature I think played a big part in delaying it, it would seem to be coming more likely an inevitability. I think the only saving grace for Reddit right now is there's not a very clear exit point. Voat as a Reddit clone populated by the skurge of reddit, and fleeted with technical problems doesn't seem likely to take the flag next.
>We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin
What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.
These realms all started off as great communities with people who were mostly in it to participate and contribute to the discussion. But over time the zeitgeist became cool, and as soon as that happens, the bean-counters arrive.
And once that happens, it is pretty much game over for the community, no matter what technology is being used to sustain it.
Fundamentally there isn't much difference between your reddits and slashdots and USENETS .. and HN's .. in the end, the community is only as valuable as it perceives itself to have value. And then when the value becomes something that is co-opted by others who desire to exploit that value, a self-awareness of that value by the collective becomes its own worst fault. Reddit is clearly being invalidated by people who don't want the value they create to be valued differently by people who have what they consider to be differing values.
So it goes. I hope the next forum where people can creatively contribute to the dialog is not centralized. But that's hard - you have to have somewhere to meet, after all ..
Usenet died because the ISPs no longer offer newsgroup access. Back in the dialup days, services like this were standard, and they made the internet truly awesome.
Once high speed (DSL, cable) took over they axed all Usenet servers. Unless you had Hampster continuously scouring for insecure and open servers, you had to pay for a SuperNews account.
Spare us, Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there. Just look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments[0]. Not to mention the celeb nudes debacle, which was allowed then disallowed and announced by a sysadmin [1]. And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee [2]. Then we can go way back to /r/jailbait and the Violentacrez affair, the only mod to be awarded a golden trophy [3]. I could keep going but I think we're good.
The tide changed with Pao. All of those were roadblocks, but never had the community turned so swiftly against the admins until Pao arrived. There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Pao. kn0thing has had missteps but generally has had the respect of the community. The community largely does not respect Pao.
There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Yishan Wong as well. Name some of the concrete things Ellen Pao has done at Reddit to be the cause of all of this, or any of this.
Any criticism I've read seems to be based around how she's a woman and she used her womanness to get ahead.
Nothing she has done as the CEO of Reddit is evidence of the need for the awful insults and copypasta I've seen lobbed at her. And these aren't hidden in the recesses of MRA subreddits, they're the top comments on any thread with any mention of Pao.
Nothing to do with her being a woman and it sucks to even bring that up - it makes no difference. I'm speculating here, but I think the problem is largely that Pao is an ex-lawyer, wealthy investor that is married to a hedge fund manager. Reddit being a largely liberal/young/mass appeal/quirky internet subculture collective (at least at it's core) would see any ex-lawyer, wealthy investor married to a hedge fund manager as an outsider. She comes off as an "out of touch 1%'er" that is there to make the site more corporate and "safe" for advertisers, ruining its culture to make herself even richer. It doesn't help that she apparently doesn't even know how to use the site.
It's like being a software engineer and getting a new manager that previously worked at Goldman Sachs, wears expensive suits to the office, asks you for help using Microsoft Word, but then tells you to switch from IntelliJ to Borland JBuilder because he owns some shares in Borland. He doesn't get the culture, he's an outside and is making decisions to actively ruin your environment. That's how it feels.
> And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee
This was awesome. The employee started the trash talk, fully expecting Reddit not to defend itself (as expected of bullshit corporate america). It was perfect /r/justiceporn when Wong came out swinging in response. Glorious to see.
Would you work for Reddit right now, or even then?
I got the impression then, and I definitely get it now, that the management has little respect for their employees. In the case of Yishan's spat, it was definitely relatable, but it definitely had the smell of the company that view employees as assets to be managed and controlled rather than people with emotions and opinions.
whether it was political or performance based, he did raise a rather rational point. If your company is unprofitable/showing weak earnings, it might not make sense to give away 10% of all of the money you take in over the fiscal year.
Yishan has other problems, but yes I really dislike anti-discrimination laws for example. A better idea is to impose anti-discrimination restrictions on specific companies.
I wrote out a well thought out response to this, but decided to simply ask you to re-read your own post.
> Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there.
This is true, and all the more worrying. It has a track record of being unsuccessful both at the managerial level and a financial one.
> look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments
"popcorn tastes good" -670 karma
With submissions frozen on top subreddits, massive community backlash against the CEO, and a huge schism forming among communities he decides to antagonize a bit and keep his head down.
> the celeb nudes debacle
reddit is 4chan with a better layout. It is frankly absurd they didn't have a contingency for this, and that they didn't communicate it well. This is hallmark of the company ethos of a lack of preparedness, lack of consistency and above all, a failure to communicate.
> CEO Yishan Wong
Unprofessional for a CEO to go into a thread and blast an employee publicly. At least it felt that way as he never seemed to post visibly but did this simply to settle a score. Also said employee claimed his questioning of allocating 10% of all revenue for the year to charity. Whatever the reason he was fired, if your company is struggling an not posting acceptable profits it is irrational to give $0.10 of every dollar away and operate close to a loss.
>jailbait
This was sort of the beginning of when free speech really came to a head against morality. They have made no progress on this front. Also, jailbait was probably a little closer to black and white than things like gamergate and this adolescent namecalling.
Conclusion
So those massive problems, which are mostly unreseolved, or are symptoms of unresolved issues, have culminated in hiring of techs most hated person of 2014-2015, who has no credible qualifications to run this company. Compounding those issues, she really failed to connect with the community and I would suspect (guessing here) that the transition has been tough in the office as well. The only thing that has kept reddit working this whole time were moderators and the community which have now totally turned on it.
tl;dr arguing a company has a track record of being run poorly but still managing to survive, doesn't seem like a great argument for its success.
im not sure if it matters what happened in the past per se... its the amount, the type, etc.:
once something start to be massively as "bad" and the content is generated by those users seeing it as "bad" it just stops being what it was. It's like saying Firefox or IE aren't good browser. IE is a pretty good browser nowaday, but that's an unpopular opinion.
It feels like reddit is going to reach this point now...
For years all it would've taken is a solid competitor with good technology and management and Reddit is gone. Right now Reddit's really the only game in town. If someone were to come along with technology that wouldn't regularly crash and tools to help the moderators moderate and allow the community managers to quickly and effectively respond to problems; and a solid management team to be proactive and keep improving the site (not to mention make a few bucks) then Reddit would be in real trouble.
No. It was thanks to the ISPs dumping NNTP servers.
Back in the dialup days, they had NNTP servers available, pulling nearly all the NGs. As time went by, alt.binaries took over 99% of the bandwidth, along with a nice cornucopia of pirated content. It was rather awesome.
When DSL/Cable took over, those companies axed their news servers, if they had any at all. And your server choice was to use a non-binaries carrying, post limited free server or paid server.
I think it's a bit of a "google" mindset, which has become pervasive in the industry really. The idea of concentrating on managing a product, a platform, a system, etc. and giving short shrift to the community and interfacing with your user base. This is aggravated by the preponderance of free services, such as reddit, which make it all the easier to write off such interactions as non-productive. Instead there's an attempt to interact with the "community" and the "user base" as a conglomerate whole, but ultimately that's a weak method of interacting, at some point the rubber has to meet the road and that means person to person interactions and relationships. This is why sales people are so damned valuable, because that sort of interaction is hugely important.
P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.
The Problem is that, as reddit grows as a company it has been starting to put more of it's corporate influence onto the community it is so famous for. Reddit has always been a play of internet culture and freedom and though some of these changes have been, arguably, good a lot of it has been bad with communication errors between the company and the community leading to the problems we are seeing now. Reddit Corporate is learning a lesson in not biting the hand that feeds it. For so long they thought that they were the hand but it seems that it was the other way around.
Reddit management is somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They have a very free-for-all culture now, with the norms of the site driven largely by the community. As expected, these norms do not drive a lot of monetization -- the community is not constantly pushing for ways to make Reddit profitable. So management is trying to wrest control over the huge community in order to take it towards some more profitable territory, but at least to date they don't seem to be able to do so in a way that doesn't trigger a strong immune response.
I think no one really knows why the community is getting pissed off constantly. Right now it's just acting as an angry mob with no brain. And if you follow all this drama, you will see that they bring a lot of golds (so a lot of money to reddit) and that they die out in a day or two.
Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.
"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.