>constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.
There are multiple posts on multiple reddits, each with thousands of points and comments that were not deleted. Some posts were deleted by sub moderators(not the same as Reddit staff or Pao) on some subs because they were offtopic and were being vote brigaded and had comments full of hate speech.
E.g of posts:
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/30j9mn/ellen_pao_loses...
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/38qkmx/after_losing_he...
It doesn't make any sense why she would leave those posts up if she really was deleting stuff. It's interesting how the folks against her have made it look like she was. It's just sad how easily so many people are manipulated by false information.
Examples of comments that were being made and upvoted by the brigades on unrelated big subs:
>Somebody needs to fire this whore right fucking now. What a tampon smear...
>She's a lying cunt who is using her pussy pass because she didn't get what she wanted; a big pay-out for being a whore.
Why would subreddit mods want to deal with hundreds of such comments when the story is offtopic to their sub?
She may not have been removing anything, nor any of the other admins, but lnanek2 does bring up a strong point, albeit indirectly: She is hated by a majority of users on reddit. And she's hated because of her bogus lawsuit she now appears to be dragging out, and how her husband is in serious debt due to running a ponzi scheme.
Her and her husband are not nice people. She even says as much in her interview with Katie Couric, she says "I'm not likable". I sort of have to agree there. The CEO of a website that cannot function without its community needs to be a pillar of that community. This isn't some hedge fund company or a company making widgets where a sociopathic and ruthless CEO flourishes, this is a very intimate community-driven company and the CEO needs to reflect that. The CEO needs to be the epitome of that.
By all accounts, she's straight up out of touch with what reddit even is. She even screwed up sending a PM earlier yesterday and instead posted it as a submission to a subreddit, and was getting made fun of for it. She literally doesn't know how her own website works.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy those hate subreddits are banned. But completely unreleated to the current drama, and these are my thoughts even before this whole thing started: Ellen Pao needs to leave reddit, like yesterday. She's quite literally the worst CEO for a site like reddit.
There's no denying this is the biggest (and frankly hilarious to watch unfold) shitstorm in Reddit's history, but it is a vocal minority. There were only 5k subscribers to /r/fatpeoplehate. It was a silly move to ban it, because its clearly pissed off more than 5k people, but make no mistake, most of Reddit doesn't care.
You're off by about 160 million. Reddit had 172 million unique visitors last month. Source: http://www.reddit.com/about/
> There's no denying this is the biggest (and frankly hilarious to watch unfold) shitstorm in Reddit's history, but it is a vocal minority.
Here's the thing. I'm a power user over there. And a power mod. I have access to many of the backroom subreddits for the default mods and a few of the other "in group" communities. That said, I have never, not once, stumbled across anyone who truly likes her. Even the prominent mods of reddit are keeping their mouths shut because they're afraid of being targeted by her or the admins. But the general sentiment among most mods is that she's toxic.
Regular users either hate her or are largely indifferent. But those that are indifferent are either not really into the reddit metasphere, or they're ignorant of Ellen. Once they find out about Ellen's life (lawsuit, ponzi scheme) they usually bristle at the thought of her.
> but make no mistake, most of Reddit doesn't care.
If we were to scale reddit's public opinion of her, the people who don't care or are indifferent would get a zero. People who like her would move the scale to the right, into the positives, while the people who dislike her tip the scale to the left.
You're right in that many people are indifferent. They'd be a zero on this hypothetical scale. But the problem is, the rest of the people who do have an opinion tip the scale significantly to the left, into the negatives. There's virtually zero people who like her (even the people into SJW stuff don't particularly care for her) and there are many, many people who hate her. It's telling that more people liked Yishan Wong, reddit's previous CEO and that guy was a loon.
It's never very logical, someone shadowbans the first person to make a comment about Pao's husband but leaves the rest alone. My pet theory is another admin is making it look like Pao is doing it to build a case against her for her dismissal because it only creates a bigger shitstorm.
It's complete fiction that she is censoring anything. Every time it is sub moderators removing stuff that violates the rules of their sub. And there are massively upvoted threads bashing her everywhere with huge comment threads full of vicious attacks on her and nobody is deleting those.
If she is trying to censor criticism of herself on reddit, she is fucking awful at it.
Tons of people got shadowbanned and shadowbanning can only be done by the admins.
So stop spreading misinformation please.
Let's see your proof that people are getting showdowbanned for criticizing Pao. You have no proof. Because shadowbans are about as transparent as mud.
So stop spreading conspiracy theories as fact, please.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_...
"If you don't believe in freedom of speech for those you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech." (1600 points and gone from http://reddit.com/r/bestof)
>This is a curated space. >The moderators reserve the right to remove posts, users, and comments at their own discretion.
If I create a subreddit where I ban all posts start with A, is that censorship, or is that freedom for me to run and build my online space as I wish?
It's very much both. Where did you get the impression they're mutually exclusive? The "censorship" word is often only vocalized such when popular opinion objects to it, doesn't make it not censorship.
It's like how Bruce Schneier says that facebook's business model is surveillance. It's a descriptor advertisers and their platforms work hard not to be associated with, that doesn't make it not-surveillance.
Some subs leave a flair or a moderator message on removed submission, if not you can modmail them and ask.
The only new rule is no harassment.
If they were abusing that, we'd know about it. There would be a shitstorm just like this. There has not been.
I reported a user harassing me all over reddit, stalking me everywhere I went for weeks. They did not even ban him. Anecdotal but the bar seems to be pretty high.
Was in /r/TIFU recently, too lazy to get the link.
Interestingly, one of them submits awful content. It's not spam but he is absolutely terrible. I wonder if they shadowban because the algo's figured out you suck.
So, many of the deleted posts could have been deleted by the admins, in theory.
Though not entirely consistent with their statement that "we do protect the right of people to express their views".
Would remaining true to their statement for one day really have killed them on the hill?
Editorial cartoons are a pretty fundamental part of journalism. What if Tony Blair could delete news of the world editorial cartoons?
Seems to cross a line and, all due respect, until I saw proof that a delete happened, I'd be more likely to believe it was a histrionic "just-so-story"
I mean, Pao deleting this stuff personally? Even admins doing it?
It doesn't seem reasonable to me.
These people somehow seem to miss the dozens of huge threads that aren't removed that she could delete with a couple clicks. She could search her name every night and delete everything in a few minutes. Yet instead she randomly deletes a thread here and there? Makes no logical sense.
Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit.
It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.