I've known a couple of people who previously worked at Reddit and I can't imagine they'd quit over something like this. I think most employees don't feel any personal responsibility or sense of control for the situation and are happy to get paid a comfortable salary.
Almost no company will say why they fire someone. reddit is not unique in that regard. Personnel retention is a private concern, regardless of how it makes the community feel.
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.
That's kind of bizarre to me. They act like they're firing employees, and replacing someone for that role, when they're just random volunteers to a community set up by a person unaffiliated with Reddit.
I think that's actually a question worth examining. I'm a little uncomfortable that the protests got him fired.
The initial problem wasn't that the employee was hired, it was Reddit's heavy-handed filtering, censoring, and autobanning. Firing the employee doesn't fix the actual issue.
Between Reddit and the employee, there's stuff we don't know and won't ever know. Did he hide info during the hiring process, and so on. Maybe the firing was justified, maybe it wasn't. He was never charged or convicted of a crime, and the idea of continuously punishing him just because of suspicions or associating isn't right. On the other hand, I think it would have been sensible to Reddit to have avoided hiring him in the first place.
We might have to see whether the opprobrium spreads to future employment, social media accounts, and so on. That would definitely be cancellation, and wrong.
There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.
We haven't heard much from Reddit employees on this situation. DHH has been the vocal one. Before we jump to any conclusions we should ask how Reddit's remote employees really feel.
You like many people seem to not realize something that the other side is saying: WE KNOW REDDIT HAS THE RIGHT TO FIRE THEIR STAFF, AND NO ONE IS COMPLAINING BECAUSE REDDIT CHOSE TO RESTAFF.
Now, go back and read the all caps like five times, because people keep trying to say that to you, and you keep shouting about how reddit has the right to fire people.
People are upset because reddit corporate did a shitty job of managing reddit corporate, and it caused reddit corporate to fall through on several plans they had made with the public and other parties.
This particular instance of shitty management and execution on the part of reddit corporate is just the latest in a long string of bad management, and people finally got sick of it.
Perhaps, but I'm surprised given the level of influence Reddit has these days. Reddit reaches about 500 million people per month, probably more. It's not "just a silly message board" anymore.
They have a comparatively tiny number of employees and those people have a very real power to control narratives. We're seeing just the tiniest glimpse of that here because the employee in question has done so in an incredibly egregious manner. The question this whole incident should raise is "what else is going on, that we haven't yet seen?". The specifics of this particular example are uninteresting.
That's the exception, not the rule. What's more likely?
1. Reddit did a shitty job hiring, reviewing, working with, and taking remedial actions with a large set of employees.
OR
2. Reddit is just another company pulling a chicken-shit move; trying to eek out profits while putting blame on then little guys.
There is absolutely no way in hell all these companies are weeding out poor performers this quickly or efficiently. It's actually paradoxical given the pretense of widespread incompetence.
At the same time this might be not be that different, i.e., customers of a company interfering with the internal decisions. If firing a certain employee is that bad for the company, investors would be a lot more upset than the customers. (and TBH, the likelihood that one single individual is that integral to the company is practically zero; not saying it was a good decision; I don't think enough details have been made public).
Even though I admit reddit is a strange place, somewhat halfway between a company and a governing body with democracy-like structure. Still, given the sheer amount of userbase, it's unlikely that the activism of the mods and a chuck of active users (who are upvoting the boycott related posts) would seriously affect it (i.e., bring the website down in the long term). Probably such internal decisions would change the flavor/nature of the website.
Just doesn't make sense. Sure, quickly eliminate someone's role, but why immediately fire the person? Why not even try to transition the person to a new role? Was she employed as an independent contractor?
Reddit clearly has both plenty of money, and plenty of work to be done. This explanation doesn't add up at all.
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.
There's a lot of people in this thread defending Reddit and they don't seem to have ever had the pleasure of dealing with an actual Reddit employee. They have a culture of unchecked cronyism. Reddit doesn't care about anyone, some people will eventually figure it out the hard way.
Reddit has a real and serious potential liability if they didn't take action on this (now, there is a very good argument that hiring the individual in question in the role in question showed epically poor judgement, but, while a part of the chain of events that got the situation to this point, that's a different issue.)
Redditors do not know anything about who works at Reddit, so they could not possibly be upset at the firing of "the most competent person". Most well liked public facing one to some people who read one of the subreddits, sure.
The article seems to clumsily imply that the firing/resignation of a handful of employees is evidence of some conspiracy at reddit, yet people resign and get fired for all kinds of different reasons.
The tone of the piece makes me feel like it wouldn't even have been written if the employees who left had been 'tech bros'
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