I think only a small percent amount of reddit and a smaller percent of the world will know the way Ohanian stepped down or this guy stepped in.
For most people it will be "I'm on the board of reddit." "Oh, cool."
For people who think it was because of skin color, they may think less of him or of reddit, but presumably he made that choice going in and is okay with the costs and benefits. I have a rare (and not at all serious) medical condition. If reddit said they were selecting board members only with this condition I would happily apply and take the position even if everyone would say I only got it because of my condition and even if that were true. The cost is people would think I benefited from luck or circumstance and the reward is being able to meaningfully influence a major website and money. Hardly seems like a terrible trade to me.
That's what Alex ohanian did at Reddit. Stepped down on the condition it be a minority candidate taking his place. This is after he replaced two Asian fall-people though, Ellen pao and yishan Wong. Arguably fed Ellen to the wolves.
"Downside" depends on which side you're on. From the perspective of an ordinary Redditor, Yishan forthrightness and transparency has probably been quite refreshing. From the perspective of the board, I bet they very much appreciate Ellen Pao's professionalism and silence.
Reddit is basically a society of 36M people now, roughly the size of Iraq. If it were a country, it'd be the 36th largest, bigger than Canada, Venezuela, and Taiwan. r/IAmA alone has 8.6M subscribers, r/AskReddit has 9M.
The biggest challenge of a leader is aligning interests. Many of those "citizens" are not aligned with the board, and are not even aligned with each other. It's no wonder that they keep burning through CEOs. Yishan may have been more aligned with the Reddit userbase (although even then, a good portion of the site hated him) and clashed with the board, while Ellen tried to please the board and ended up pissing off the whole userbase.
I'm surprised anyone agrees to be CEO of Reddit these days. No matter who holds the position, they always end up being vilified by both Reddit's users and its detractors.
Why would Reddit have had a hard time simply installing Ohanian or Huffman as the CEO? Why would they need covert machinations to put the founders back at the helm?
How about an older white male, from a business background, who was openly trying to institute censorship and monetization and was unabashedly ignorant of Reddit culture? I'm fairly confident that a CEO like that would have been significantly more hated by Redditors. The issue wasn't race or gender, it was culture.
There was a reddit announcement the other day that stated /u/kn0thing was stepping down from the board and requested that a black person fill his place.
Yishan Wong (ex Reddit CEO, and thus someone who would be in a position to know) said Ohanian did it as part of an attempt to change how Reddit handled AMAs, and criticized Ohanian harshly for his actions and failure to defend Pao.
Ohanian, for his part, has never denied it, and in fact has apologised for the "decision to change how we work with AMAs" as "his failure".
What are you talking about? Alexis Ohanian left Reddit, and Michael Seibel took his place on Reddit's board. How would this lead to Alexis Ohanian having an influence on HN?
I'm sure this happens a lot. But I'd have expected more of an effort to gain the trust of the users, which would seem to me to be an important element in all this.
Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense.
> The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO.
I have a hard time attributing recent events directly to Pao, though with her being CEO I guess ultimately the buck does stop with her.
> I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.
That could well be the case (though I fail to see the connection), but that still does not explain why she was initially picked and that's what my question is about. I can't imagine it was just a roll of the dice.
Not that I disagree, but it's worth mentioning (for anyone who doesn't frequent reddit) that firing Victoria was apparently Alexis Ohanian's decision, and not Pao's[1][2], which suggests that the pressure is coming from the board and not an endeavor specific to Pao.
Why did Reddit's board appoint Ellen Pao as CEO when it was already known she had a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins to deal with?
Many capable people could lead Reddit so why choose someone with highly visible distractions? For example, Ellen's husband has been accused of running a $140 million Ponzi scheme!
> "Users lash out at Reddit boss for ‘deleting’ posts on hubby’s lawsuit"
"Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher ran a hedge fund, Fletcher International, that is now bankrupt. He owes millions in unpaid legal bills and tax liens and the bankruptcy trustee described it as a Ponzi scheme.
Fletcher still owns several apartments in the storied Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while his defunct fund owes more than $140 million in court judgments."
Apparently Reddit has exactly 2 board members: Alexis and Sam Altman [1]. Why would Sam Altman, and by extension YC, have thought that Ellen Pao would make a good ("interim") CEO for Reddit?
This scenario should really be causing shareholders/board members to think about how dependent Reddit really is on moderator goodwill [2]. There needs to be a CEO and leadership team that can at least create a credible perception, if not the reality, that Reddit values moderators who donate their time to make the business viable.
For this purpose, it would seem you want a CEO who is going to be non-inflammatory (i.e., not Pao) and perceived as a relatively neutral arbitrator between the needs of shareholders for monetization and the needs of moderators for adequate support (i.e., probably not someone from a VC background). Considering how little it should actually cost the company to provide a reliable support network for mods, including honest, non-HR-speak communication, this hardly seems like a demanding task, but somehow they continue to manage it very poorly.
Does anyone know if there have been public comments by YC about any of these issues?
"In early 2012, he was supposed to move to San Francisco when he was diagnosed with Leukemia."
"Fortunately, reddit’s then-CEO, Yishan Wong, allowed him to keep his job and continued paying him until he was ready to work again"
So he worked for the company from 2012-2015..3 years. It sounds like at least a year of this was spent in and out of the hospital and he continued to get paid. It's not like he was fired on the spot.
Reddit gave him plenty of recovery time..and it just didn't work out in the end. I see no problem with what they did.
"Victoria (aka /u/chooter) was, without question, one of the nicest, most passionate, most efficient workers at reddit, and I honestly can’t fathom why she would have been terminated. It was such an honor to work with her, and as many mods have already stated, she truly took her work to heart and tried to provide a service to the community. She was one of the most well-known admins and was just incredible at her job. Without her, there would be hundreds of incredible AMAs that would have never happened."
We only see one-side of the story. Why was she let go? We still don't know.
> Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator)
> There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things.
I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Ellen Pao leading reddit in the long term.
Also from today's reddit blog post[0] by Alexis
> Instead, I joined the board and have done everything I can to not be a helicopter parent, but rather support reddit and all the amazing people who make it work as best I can. But reddit is and will always be my baby
For most people it will be "I'm on the board of reddit." "Oh, cool."
For people who think it was because of skin color, they may think less of him or of reddit, but presumably he made that choice going in and is okay with the costs and benefits. I have a rare (and not at all serious) medical condition. If reddit said they were selecting board members only with this condition I would happily apply and take the position even if everyone would say I only got it because of my condition and even if that were true. The cost is people would think I benefited from luck or circumstance and the reward is being able to meaningfully influence a major website and money. Hardly seems like a terrible trade to me.
reply