Assuming you're serious, I'm curious why you think Reddit's CEO shouldn't be chastised under that same category. Selling ads next to user-generated content, rent seeking with demands of extortionate API fees to serve that content, relying on unpaid volunteers to operate the site, proudly shipping terrible first-party UX, all while providing zero additional value sure doesn’t sound like a sustainable business. But maybe it’s the `hard hitting memo` obstinacy of a CEO that seems the biggest feature here?
I don't know. When the employee publicly disparages the business, I feel like a swift and decisive rebuttal might be a good idea.
I'm not saying I definitely disagree with you, but I can't really see why what reddit's CEO did was bad. Risky, sure, but it strikes me as a justified and effective response.
I have no inside information on Reddit management, but as an outsider who's watched reddit grow over the years, I get the impression the core problem with Reddit right now is not Ellen Pao per se. Ellen Pao was brought in as a person to run Reddit as a business and make money and that's exactly what I presume she is trying to do, the issue here is the vision of the company as a whole, the people (investors, shareholders?) who thought Ellen Pao was a necessary and good candidate to be the CEO.
Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision stays that way.
Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.
It’s justified outrage. I’m assuming you think because reddit is a “silly” website that it’s okay for this kind of behavior. But it’s really not, because there’s a lot of serious discussion that takes place and the CEO doing something like calls into question the integrity of the content.
A lot of this conversation assumes we all know what the role of Reddit's CEO should be. But we probably don't: the title means radically different things in different organizations.
It seems from easily available evidence that Reddit's core business challenge was taking a runaway successful online community and reliably monetizing it. If the CEO role at Reddit was primarily responsible for dealing with that problem, it's not surprising that the kind of person who filled it might not be congenial to message board nerds. The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.
The knee-jerk response to this obvious point is that someone brought in to monetize a community could easily damage it by being tone-deaf or compromising it in pursuit of profit. But most of the things Reddit Inc did to damage its community predate Pao, often by many years.
This is the stuff I think about when people point out that Pao was a terrible CEO for Reddit Inc because she didn't know how to send a private message.
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.
So who is actually running Reddit these days? Because a CEO involved in very high-profile personal litigation likely doesn't have the time to be a very effective CEO.
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.
Steve has always been the leader reddit deserves, not the leader it needs. The position Reddit is in is of his own creation. Even the most uninspired out of touch corporate leader would have avoided this entire clown show. Steve believes that his relationship with Reddit makes him the best leader but alas, it makes him the worst.
Steve has finally said in his AMA today, that Reddit has to be a sustainable business to survive! Very true, and that alone is justification for making radical change that people may hate. Yet, he has been so resistant to saying it that it seems like he didn’t want to admit it to himself either… and so the decisions he’s made haven’t been founded in an embrace of that idea but rather in a desperate attempt to avoid it.
Any competent business leader in charge of Reddit would understand that the reason Reddit only spends 100m/year on salaries is because they receive hundreds of millions in free labor from the small minority of Reddit power users who are fundamental to its success… any competent business leader would squeeze the 99% of users who have never delivered a single contribution to Reddit… and yet, Steve decided to target the smallest minority who actually matter to reddit’s future.
Putting YouTube style unskippable video ads into the official Reddit app would have pissed off zero power users and 10xed revenue.
I'm a big believer in Reddit, but NOT its current CEO, Steve Huffman, who has shown some horrible leadership. (See: how he handled third party apps.) He has to go.
Reddit's true corporate philosophy looks simple. These appear to be the 2 immutable laws of Reddit, and everything else follows naturally from them:
1. Anything goes
2. Unless it causes immediate and obvious harm to Reddit
I think the mission statements from Reddit's CEO are a torturous attempt to construct a grand community vision that embodies these laws. He might say it's the other way around, and the laws grew out of the vision, but I think these laws are shaped mainly by the economic and business realities of managing a huge community on an understaffed shoestring.
All the weirdness from Reddit seems to come from historically mixing the CEO role with the Community Manager role. There should be an entire department only dealing with on-site issues and that department should have absolute authority. Reddit grew from a 2 person company where everybody did everything, but did it actually grow up once it got bigger? Reddit has had a valley golden child touch since the beginning, so normal company growth patterns haven't always happened where would you expect in the lifecycle of a company because "lol reddit—we're differunt!"
Having the CEO be at the mercy of users in a multi-million-user fractured community is like having Tim Cook be the top level escalation for Apple tech support. Sure, the users may love it, but it's not sustainable for a company. Give the users an outlet for their rage and moderation problems, but don't touch the toxic waste personally.
i think you are comparing the reddit CEO to some bluechip company like Apple or IBM. It isnt anything like them, they produce no goods, their users are their product and more so their moderators. They are a social media company, if you cant deal qwith social media on your own site how are you supposed to be trusted with a social media site?
If the CEO was some boring old white man and he had done the same thing then yes his head would be called for. You are trying to make this an issue of her gender and her race when it is nothing to do with that.
FUnnily enough one of the reasons that she inspires such dislike is because she played the victim of sexism card and then after a trial she was found to have no case. And actually what came out of the trial was the truth about her self-serving behaviour. The trial documents make it very clear that she was no angel, she was sexist toward other females, she hads an affair whilst married, with a married man, and then blamed that on the other person all the while there were text messages and emails showing she was as much to blame as he was.
Coupled with all of this her partner is currently facing a lawsuit on a case of fraud. Stuff like that pisses people off and with reddit there are a lot of users that care a lot about the site, they care about how it is perceived and they see her as detrimental to the site in part becuase of her behaviour as CEO but also due to her behaviour prior to becoming CEO which has been well reported regardless of her reddit position.
There's criticism, and there's not knowing what you're talking about. Unless one has run an online community like Reddit before, it's more than likely that that individual is playing armchair CEO.
A friend proposed another theory, inappropriate as it may seem. That it's a way to draw attention to Reddit needing to make money, and Steve, being the CEO, has to find a way to do it and take blame for it.
If so, he deserves to be applauded. There are things a founder/CEO has to do you can't say.
Most cases you're probably thinking about are of CEOs of big companies issuing CYA-statements that minimize legal attack surface. Here, the guy just exposed himself completely. Also Reddit is not Goldman Sachs; it's value is directly proportional to how much people like the company, and Reddit finds itself in the middle of another funding round.
I do see a great potential for bad consequences here.
This response seems knee jerk to me - the actions of Reddit's CEO were made public and the backlash was considerable. As long as we're not running on fully distributed communication services the idea of fully impartial site owners remain hypothetical. I mean: the complaint itself had to be posted/linked on a Google service, another company that I guess should be shunned for being embroiled in various unrighteous actions. Not feasible or reasonable in my opinion.
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.
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