The thing that is kind of strange, but not surprising, to me is that the thing that they're using as justification for this is the firing of one of the admins, but these people don't know why that admin was fired, and also don't know who did the firing. Is Reddit the company primarily controlled by Ellen Pao or does she have managers that help her and therefore responsible for this kind of stuff?
I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't like is that Reddit is not what it used to be in that it's a "free for all" because it's now more business oriented, meaning that Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community. They don't see past the fact that someone that supported them was fired and see the reality that these things happen, and it sucks, but it's a reality of a business. As an aside, if the moderators had such a problem with what was going on, they should have been much more vocal about it and raised flags before instead of acting like children and throwing tantrums by making subreddits private (I call it a tantrum because they made it private for like 12-24 hours, most of that time during the US night where there's not as much traffic).
I'm not saying Ellen Pao is the best person for this job, and while I don't have super high opinions of her, I don't believe all the stuff Reddit says about her either, and she's being vilified for something that could have been completely out of her control. If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of. But given they've raised a lot of money recently I'd guess she doesn't seem to be doing poorly to the shareholders/investors, or at least isn't doing a piss poor job.
> If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of.
To be fair the reasons you stated have been discussed endlessly on reddit.
I agree that petition could have been written better though. I didn't even think to read the description until you mentioned it. I doubt many others have either, they just read the headline (as usual...)
To be frank, I'd argue that this isn't really a petition and more of someone throwing a temper tantrum. I mean, when I read, "After Pao lost her gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins she was appointed CEO of Reddit Inc and Reddit entered into a new age of censorship. A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top", has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground. Alternative sites to Reddit.com have sprung up and have received vast amounts of traffic within the recent months," I wouldn't ever take it seriously, especially as Ellen Pao and the board.
Like, I understand that these people are upset, and I've said stupid shit when I've been angry, but really, this is a petition to try to change something. Use a little bit more eloquence, and back up your arguments with data. Like, if they're talking about voat.co, are they really trying to insinuate that Voat gets nearly as many views as Reddit? And, wasn't Ellen Pao already interim CEO before the trial concluded?
I think this petition was written by one person and is simply the one that got momentum behind a general idea. If it'd been better written it probably would've gotten more signatures.
100,000 + signatures should still count for something, and I imagine anyone with a vested interest could do a little investigative work to understand what's really going on.
Yeah I think that there's a lot of people pissed at the situation, but I think it would be better if they had at least proof read or had multiple less invested people read over it to make sure it didn't sound so childish. If it wasn't such a direct attack I'd consider signing it.
Given that this is Reddit we're talking about, and given the behavior of a lot of the people who are vocal about this on Reddit, it's probably fair to assume that a very significant chunk of those signatures are fake.
So what? No online voting system is perfect, and double-voting isn't unique to reddit.
The sheer amount of natural language written about the topic on reddit and elsewhere should tell you how many people are interested in the subject of reddit's management.
The petition was started some three weeks ago, but the number of signees hovered around 10,000 until the last few days. Also, over the last few days the number has risen at a consistent pace.
I assume change.org has some filter in place to attempt to achieve uniqueness. Regardless, the problem you're describing is a function of voting on the internet, not any particular community. Given interest and opportunity, there are individuals in any community that would try to rig the system. For example, competitions shared on Facebook, or even whole countries.
That's true, but my general point was that the very communities within Reddit that are most vocal about this and most critical of Pao are likely to have a lot of overlap with the subset of subredditors who are both willing and capable to try and rig something like this. Yes, internet voting in general is problematic, but there are a lot of groups on Reddit that explicitly set out to figure out how to rig stuff like this and encourage each other to do so (as opposed to isolated individuals, who are unlikely to have a big impact).
Like I said, there's enough natural language around this issue to convince me a lot of those signatures are real, mine included. It sounds like you don't trust some of the heaviest users of reddit. If that is your sentiment then I would not recommend investing in it. I personally would, given a leader who understood technology and the value of free speech, and who could communicate effectively. But I doubt they will IPO under Pao. The balance sheet may be looking better, but they are tanking hard on relations and she needs help. Perhaps she need not be the figure head and could instead fall back to other roles.
That's reddit for you. Over the past five years, the zeitgeist of the site has become increasingly petulant and entitled. A lot of people on the site seem to genuinely believe the entire internet gets their content from reddit and only reddit.
Remember when the genius sleuths of reddit wrongly accused an innocent man of the Boston Marathon bombing? Or all the ridiculously borderline illegal subreddits (jailbait, creepshots) Hell, there's an entire wikipedia article devoted to redditor drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
If I had to guess, I'd say that's spun a little bit more to make it look like Reddit management is the bad guy. Having been fired from multiple jobs in the past, unless Reddit management is complete shit, she wouldn't have been fired so abruptly and would have had some inkling that she was going to be terminated. If I had to guess (and this is without knowing any more intricate details than the fact she's fired and that Quora screen capture), she probably didn't communicate well that she didn't feel comfortable doing what she was asked, so it looked like insubordination because to her boss, it might have seemed that she wasn't doing her job rather than she didn't feel comfortable doing what she was being asked.
There are some shit managers, but usually managers attempt to communicate when there's issues and give good warning before terminating except in cases where the company is downsizing or you pissed off the CEO since that happens from higher up. But even then, you'll hear it from fellow employees that the company is removing the dept. or the CEO hates you. I am hard pressed to believe that she was abruptly fired, no matter how well she treated the Reddit community.
> Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community.
The unfortunate fact for Ellen Pao and the shareholders is that the value of Reddit - its intellectual property - is entirely supplied and moderated, for free, by volunteers.
That is the struggle here: between the people who want to corporatise and monetise Reddit and the people who actually supply the content. Unless lead by someone who is visionary, charismatic and genuinely interested in advancing the notions of community and free for all that attract the moderators in the first place (which Ellen Pao is demonstrably not), the moderators will rightly ask why they are doing all this work to greatly enrich other people.
In addition to this, as CEO, it is her job to get in front of the preexisting issues with important stakeholders of the site. She hasn't done so. In fact, relations have degraded to this low state under her watch. And where does the buck stop, if not the CEO?
I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't like is that Reddit is not what it used to be in that it's a "free for all" because it's now more business oriented, meaning that Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community. They don't see past the fact that someone that supported them was fired and see the reality that these things happen, and it sucks, but it's a reality of a business. As an aside, if the moderators had such a problem with what was going on, they should have been much more vocal about it and raised flags before instead of acting like children and throwing tantrums by making subreddits private (I call it a tantrum because they made it private for like 12-24 hours, most of that time during the US night where there's not as much traffic).
I'm not saying Ellen Pao is the best person for this job, and while I don't have super high opinions of her, I don't believe all the stuff Reddit says about her either, and she's being vilified for something that could have been completely out of her control. If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of. But given they've raised a lot of money recently I'd guess she doesn't seem to be doing poorly to the shareholders/investors, or at least isn't doing a piss poor job.
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