It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you.
> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general
I couldn't agree more
[1] http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...
[2] http://www.redditblog.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-reporting-f...
Even /r/askscience supports this move [1]. It is one of the most heavily moderated subreddits on the site, with professional staff. These aren't rabblerousers, they are very hard-working volunteers who are fed up with the administration.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_messag...
It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the moment:
1. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.
2. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even if AskScience's mods are professional scientists, they're still volunteer AskScience mods.]
The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits. In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints. You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're doing an awful job on the other.
By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1 (including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits) may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.
I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a problem (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-intentioned.
(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)
You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]
kn0thing is, for all his original talents at communication with the reddit community, pretty bad at handling these flareups. Here's his initial response to todays goings on. [1] How tone deaf is that? How did the guy who talked about letting users take control at TED turn into the guy who says:
"We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after."
He went from a guy you thought was one of you to a guy who spews platitudes like he ate a dictionary in a country with bad water.
Something is rotten in the state of reddit. The common narrative of that site has become one of managerial incompetence. Whether or not you agree with their strategy, I think it's hard to deny that their tactics are in the bottom decile.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
It could be that he's not allowed to say anything about the matter. It reads to me more like an honest attempt at damage control while at the same time not divulging anything about the situation. So far his communication has been the most reasonable and levelheaded of all the reddit admins. I doubt he's lost his touch with the community, rather that he's been gagged and cannot say more than he does.
I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:
"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"
Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).
Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.
But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.
I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.
I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.
One last thing:
> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.
I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.
But that Alexis appears to have "matured" into a vanilla businessman, and that's fine. What isn't fine is the mass exodus of admins who were actually redditors, the bringing in of a CEO whose goals clearly align more with monetizing than nurturing, and a series of decisions that have shown the remaining braintrust at reddit to have grown further and further away from the community.
It's fine to monetize reddit. It's fine to run it like a real, live company. What's not fine is to do that to the exclusion of all else, and risk jeopardizing the very community that gives the site value in the first place.
What we've seen from the actions of the executive team at reddit in recent months suggests that they simply don't understand how their actions are being perceived. They've either lost or pushed out the people at the company who had a finger on the pulse of the community, and now they're flying blind. It seems that the only thing keeping reddit going right now as a community is the lack of a viable alternative, and that's a very dangerous place to be for a company like reddit.
I don't know whether the executive team at reddit sees this episode as just another fire to put out or as a portent of things to come. What I see, as an active participant on the site, is a restive user base that increasingly sees itself as neglected and taken for granted by a dismissive and aloof leadership. There are many things keeping the user base in reddit's orbit, but most of those things come down to inertia and lack of a better alternative. If the latter is solved, the former will take care of itself, and reddit will hit a tipping point whereby its most engaged users leave en masse.
It's not there yet, but it's an existential threat that it doesn't appear the reddit brain trust is taking seriously.
Raldi had a really good idea of creating an office of Public Advocate: someone in the company whose job it is to argue for the users in any meeting. That's a fantastic suggestion, and could go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of resentment among the user base.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/3c1m67/c...
I think she's singularly incapable of solving it, but that's fine. I don't think it's reasonable to expect her to be. She should be running a company and building a team that can solve it.
Yes, that's a bit of stupidity in her posting a link to her own inbox.
Pao may or may not be an idiot in the same league as Fiorina, Apotheker, and - arguably - Whitman and Ballmer.
But I think the Reddit flareup is part of a more general disgust with emotionally damaged management culture which is devoted to profits before people, but is so bad at people that profits tank too.
There's a point beyond which being rich and powerful doesn't protect you from shooting off your own head. Reddit management seems to have crossed that line, and the content farm idea stops working when contributors stop feeling like they're a part of a community and realise they're really just unpaid employees on a profit production line.
So it's not just about the AMA editor. It's about the fact that management is trying to control a community it doesn't pay and doesn't really own. The "Do what you like, but give us clicks" deal has been changed to "We run this farm, we tell you what you can and can't post, but give us clicks anyway, because $business$ - oh and by the way, fuck you."
The prospects for the future are not good, IMO.
Dude, what profit?
I have found the issue to be not so much a matter of the two factors that you've outlined, but more a consistent downward trend of the admin staff, towards a stronger disconnect with the community. There has been less communication, and the communication that has happened has been less clear and less consistent. Even in this entire drama, reddit's response has come through a single point of contact.
For a site like reddit to work, the administrators really need to be able to also participate in the community at large. They need to have firm, definite rules and guidelines of what they will and will not do, and how they will or will not help. They need to make themselves available to the volunteer staff that help run these numerous communities.
This I think is the root cause of both of these tensions. The community simply doesn't know what to expect from the admins anymore.
That's a contradiction, not many people (especially internet people) understand that freedom of speech and freedom of expression do not cover a conspiracy to be harmful.
However, Reddit certainly doesn't have [correctly defined] freedom of speech - which I have a problem with: Reddit has a certain sway over the way that people think and a world where unpopular or culturally immoral opinions are muzzled is not a world where ethical progress can be made.
They don't sound unrelated: both complaints seem to point towards a fundamental disconnect between reddit's management and its userbase.
So yes, they're disconnects. But one is a disconnect between a userbase / the moderators of subreddits that Reddit the company is not very invested in keeping, except to the extent that in general, they want to keep subreddits that don't break rules. The other is a disconnect between subreddits that Reddit relies on.
That's why when tension 1 flared up a few weeks ago, Reddit banned some subreddits and implicitly threatened others with banning, and when tension 2 flared up yesterday, some other subreddits threatened to shut down and successfully forced Reddit to care.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ju5cf/goodbye_iama_it...
>tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding
It has festered for years, we're watching it explode right now.
That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I think both sections of the site are vile, but I vastly prefer a uniform standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about ____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.
I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).
Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer-term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say, the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a huge surprise to a lot of people.
Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit, Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to put that, and I'm stealing it.
But it clearly was. Reddit should just release some of the brigading details - and that has always been something that can cause your sub to be closed and your account to be shaddow-banned.
I do not understand how you can use the existance of vile groups as evidence of Reddit squashing free speech - doesn't the fact that those vile groups didn't get closed (unless they brigaded) evidence that Reddit allows free speech as far as possible.
That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even solve that problem in general?
I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Reddit accounts. We've long observed 4chan/goon "Redditors" in YouTube comment threads. I'm with you on releasing how they got there, and I think it would provide a lot of clarity.
One last thing, I have to correct you: I never said Reddit was squashing free speech. I wish they'd pick a consistent value on it, that's all, and I pointed out specific things said in the press about free speech. I'm less concerned about FPH than I am about something like /r/jailbait, which got removed because it became the squeaky wheel due to CNN attention. There are worse subreddits regarding sexualization of children, and Reddit fails to uphold its own standard there, which negates the standard itself. That's my problem.
1) don't brigade.
2) don't dox
3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding
4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of rules.
Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of comments. In smaller subs this is very destructive. That is very clearly reddit activity that can be tied to FPH posts and FPH subscribers.
And if Reddit did apply their rules consistantly it would result in a lot more subs being closed - the pro-self harm subs, the pro eating disorder subs, and the pro suicide groups are clear contenders for banning. (To be fair the suicide groups do get banned. I think they've worked out an equilibrium of being as pro suicide as they can without getting banned).
(I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)
[0]https://www.reddit.com/rules/ [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta...
EDIT: Subs encourage use of non-participation links because for ages Reddit has banned subs that brigade.
Until now I assumed it was gathering lots of users to harass people IRL or on other web sites, but I guess I'm mistaken?
/r/ThisSubReddit exists. There's a post in /r/ThisSubReddit that someone doesn't like. They post a link to that post to /r/OtherSubReddit, sometimes with commentary (eg, "look at this idiot!")
That causes a bunch of people from /r/OtherSubReddit to visit /r/ThisSubReddit. That's okay, unless they start voting; or insulting; or harassing users.
The voting is not okay because often the brigading sub is much larger than the sub being brigaded. (FPH had 150,000 subscribed users) People generally agree that the heavily modded subs are better. Brigading makes it really hard for mods to do any modding. (If just 1% of FPH subs decide to vote that's 1,500 people. If your sub is only 800 subscribers you're going to get crushed by FPH.)
The harassment is not okay because, well, fuck those people who think it's okay to visit a self-harm support sub and tell people to kill themselves.
That kind of brigading has been risky for subs for a while now; plenty of subs got warned, temp banned, or permanently banned for this.
fatpeoplehate was warned multiple times about brigading. But the problem with FPH was not just on-Reddit brigading. They took it to facebook, youtube, a bunch of other websites. They also, if the admins are to be believed, took it AFK to people's IRL work / school / homes.
Even if the "position" in statements by the administrators were "consistent" (doubtful, but that's besides the point), the application of these rules is manifestly not.
It would have been a far, far more effective message if they said "We have banned FPH and the moderators due to their brigading and doxxing. Let this be a lesson to all subs: if you do these things, you will be disbanded." and then left alone all of the other subs that superficially looked like FPH but didn't engage in that specific behavior.
Instead they got a minor revolt, and the latest revolt seems like a manifestation of a lot of the hard feelings from that attempt.
Do you include TIL among those? I do. Best sub there is.
The only they they use 'extensive vigorous modding' for is verifying whether titles follow the rules. And ~100% of that is based on user reports, they just double-check.
Aside from that, there is 0 moderation, other than for sitewide rule violations. You can say anything_you_want in comments and they will take no action.
Thanks. I'm used to it, honestly, because it's become obvious over time that holding an opinion in contrast to what HN wants to hear is a nearly guaranteed ticket to comment illegibility. HN is the only forum on which I participate where disagreement is acceptably expressed as making someone's thoughts more difficult to read.
I'm merely presenting my (long earned) observations on Reddit. I absolutely think it's a shitshow, a terrible place full of terrible people, but I suspect I'm being punished for daring to suggest that there is something wrong with the site itself. In the smaller subreddits, there are absolutely small embers of really powerfully rewarding conversation. There is stuff worth saving on Reddit, and I think the loud stuff drowns it out. I've had extremely fulfilling conversations about network security, application security, game modification, and polyamory in the various communities of which I am a part, and I've learned a lot. My experience isn't representative because I subscribe to nearly zero default subs.
To your point, I think SRS serves as the complete counterexample to everything you're saying. The entire purpose of SRS is to brigade and single out individual Redditors, and I've seen the results firsthand. If FPH was doing it, there isn't a universe in existence where SRS gets off that hook and it makes sense. Transparency is important here, as you say.
Why was that a surprise to anyone?
The real problem is that the definition of "abusive" is hopelessly vague and the process for determining what constitutes "coordinating abusive action" is opaque and untrustworthy.
Not remotely fair to accuse people of trying to protect "coordinating abuse" without clarifying what that actually means.
As to ambiguous decision making -- you're right about that, but they have a problem. Reddit has a largeish group of teenagers, unemployed white men living in their mother's basement and techno-libertarians, that have turned the site into a cesspool of xenophobia, misogyny, wingnut conspiracies and most of all -- lots of eighth grade drama . Those people, of course, don't matter (advertisers don't care much about them), and nobody in the real-world (not most Reddit users) care or even notice the imaginary armageddon taking place in those kids' heads, but the problem with them is that 1) they're unreasonable, and 2) they have the time to make the lives of the site administrators miserable (it would make their day -- they've got nothing more exciting to do).
So the people running Reddit are scared. They've invited the devil -- worse, teenagers -- into their home for an endless party, and they know they'll trash the place even more if the party were to end. So they're sending mixed messages. They're talking about respect, but they allow CoonTown and "men"'s rights groups. It's time for Reddit to grow some balls, kick the misbehaving kids out, shutdown not a few, but all hate subreddits, all without issuing as much as a press release. The kids will talk about their judgement day (that nobody in the world would notice) for years, the grown men in their mom's basement will feel like they're actually being hunted, and everybody would get exactly what they want.
Pleasing special interest groups in a massively diverse community isn't possible, that's why democracy is typically favored over this bullypulpit nonsense.
Fallacy of relative privation, much?
but seriously, it was my snarky way of saying that:
1)Creating a system level heuristic to deal with types of problems is a more transparent, consistent and efficient way forward than simply tackling problems as they come up arbitrarily.
2)I am sick of this boys vs. girls/pc/whatever tropic bullshit, and the failure to enact a codified set of principals within reddit has allowed for groups with opposing views to discretely exert influence against one another. This murky climate lead to all sides entrenching and leveraging the influence they had acquired.
>content has been sliding >doxxing has gone up >several of the largest sections of the site are literally closed down >community is faltering >no side wants to compromise
tl;dr Flame wars are why this happened. Gaming is one of the stupid tropes that lead to this. I got #triggered.
I mean yeah, bigger fish to fry and all that, but it's still a problem for a lot of people - other problems existing doesn't change that. I'm sure "we" could fix the bigger issue at large but who's "we"? Who's working on that, and why does it invalidate incestuous and unpublished conflicts of interest?
It's like a sea lion colony in here.
But hey, kids need to feel important too, and nothing gives you a sense of belonging as a manufactured conspiracy and a sense of persecution.
This is a basic emotional need, why are you mocking it?
She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost:
Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
When you come in and right off the bat are condescending, haughty, and tone-deaf, as well as non-transparent, then don't be surprised if the internet is harsh.
This is not to say I condone in any way shape or form the hateful things being said about Pao or others. I do however understand the dynamic and see how they had a very active role in creating the reaction.
For example, consider if she had admitted her mistake and gasp! appeared human and asked for some patience while she learned the ropes. Imagine for a moment that instead, she didn't censor or remove the comments but relished the mistake, laughed at herself, posted a funny selfie and didn't try to hide it. Just a hypothetical scenario, that's all.
She would appear normal, human and worthy of empathy. But when she doubles down and erases it, censors and bans people and doesn't address it. Are you surprised that the worst elements see these qualities and judge her harshly as a non-symapthetic figure who holds massive power over them with opacity, arbitrariness and condescension?
Consider this analogy, if you don't know anything about bees and see a swarm on your tree branch, do you go apeshit and start screaming and swinging at the bees with a stick? and then go inside crying about how you are a 'victim' because the bees stung you hundreds of times?
Another approach would be to learn a bit about beekeeping or hire a beekeeper who would know what to do. They would come in, treat the bees with the due attention and care, give them a new nuc [1] as a home and then enjoy years of delicious honey.
An intelligent person would make their choice.
A person who is driven by a cocktail of incompetence, entitlement and playing the victim would also make their choice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuc
TL;DR reddit needs a 'bee whisperer'
In particular, Victoria had the job of making AMAs happen smoothly, and /r/IAmA is this very weird subreddit, operationally speaking (how many other subreddits have their own mobile app?), that clearly needs a paid staff member. Ellen has the job of being the final say on anything that happens, controversial or otherwise. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that an AMA needs to happen, Victoria does it. If the entire Reddit staff agrees that a subreddit needs to be banned, Ellen does it (or at least takes the blame for it).
If Victoria had done her job with condescension towards mods, if she had been haughty in her communications, arbitrary and non-transparent in her decision making, etc. then you can bet your bottom dollar that she would not have been so valued by the mods and the wider community.
This isn't about making 'difficult decisions' but about how they are made, communicated and implemented.
That is why I added the bee analogy in my previous comment.
I'm one of the "nicer" mods on my subreddit because I'm polite and very careful and careful in how I construct my responses to actions.
But at the end of the day I'm also liked because I'm not the most active mod. The very act of exerting power over another user, especially someone who has never stopped to think about the rules or the site history, results in resentment.
The better your mod team is at being able to implement the rules, the more friction there will be.
People will also come out to complain more than compliment.
This results in distancing from the community, just because of how painful it can be.
Good tools to moderate create more ways to censor people, track them, decide what words are ok and others which are not.
In short, Victoria is far removed from the kind of things which make people hate admins.
Why the past tense? Did people suddenly stop loving Raymond Chen for some reason?
Imagine being responsible for a platform where every time you post something people come out of the woodworks to call you a cunt and a stupid bitch.
Really, I don't know how she puts in an honest day's work and I really don't know what anyone expects of anyone in that situation. Were I in that situation I'd be thinking 'This house is infested, burn it down.'
She banned a few people? What, that's an abuse of her power? They used to decapitate people for saying less offensive things within someone else's domain.
I wonder how some people (not you) survive the cognitive dissonance of believing simultaneously that the right to free speech and the right to private property are the most important things ever of all time.
Who would have thought that the minds responsible for redpill, mensrights, and coontown might make a community less than enjoyable?
I was close to losing all hope just before they banned it. It would not have surprised me to see Conde Nast pull the plug on reddit before the end of 2015 had they not banned it.
FPH was somehow slowly taking over reddit. Probably because its members had more free time on their hands than average redditors. Also, there were 150.000 of them.
http://recode.net/2014/09/30/reddit-raises-50m-plans-to-shar...
Advance notes that they are affiliated with reddit, but that is aboot it:
>also, there were 150,000 of them.
Probably explains why you saw tagged users 'invading' subs you use.
That was a lot of the issue, it grew faster than it could be controlled and when it started having the population to push posts to /r/all, people got mad.
i wonder if non-reddit-users think of the entire reddit community as hateful...
Reddit is pretty much a byword for "steaming mound of vileness" around various chunks of the 'net. A couple of years ago I would have said it was no worse than old-school Usenet, but it seems to be increasingly suffering from the same problem Digg did before it died, of brigading, upvoting cartels, and so on. FPH is a high profile example, but there's a constant wash of racist brigading many of the defaults, even sweeping into dataisbeautiful after the Charleston church massacre.
They certainly do. My better half tried using reddit for a couple days 4 or 5 years ago, encountered some vile / bitter people, and decided that it just wasn't worth it. She won't go near it again.
I left a comment in that thread, but wasn't one of the hateful ones. While I don't think saying those hateful things are justified, I can see where they're coming from. This was right after the whole scandal with the banning, i think within 24hrs of the announcement, and a lot of them were passionate about the site, so they weren't really being friendy toward her
I checked out the reddit for the top level posts and it appears that many of them, even the ones that posted the most mean spirited comments in that thread, seem to be active. Most of them have plenty of recent comments with votes and replies.
Maybe the banned had their comments deleted? I don't think that's how it works though.
Not really... there is no consistent clear way to tell if a web page is meant for your account only or public. For example, if someone @tweets at you, you can share that URL just fine.
Given that reddit's notification system for public replies and private messages is identical (the orange envelope), it's really not that hard to confuse a private message with a public reply.
i think it's the same with different technologies, it all depends on the user :p
Given her recent gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins and potential appeal, it would have made strategic sense to block anything sexist. I don't know if that's what was in the content of the replies - just guessing.
Also guessing it was pretty racist, and <checks underpants - yep, white penis> I can only imagine that shit got old more than a century ago.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
Saying that the gamification of subscriptions is good for the streamer is the same as saying that games with micro-transactions, designed to be addictive, are good for the developers. Of course it is, but someone is paying for it...
Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever).
Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
Granted, that sort of thing apparently is uncommon because the people who did it were apparently almost immediately banned... but that's rather the point, isn't it? You don't see it because they ban it.
It's a capitalistic relationship, certainly. But it's very different. reddit volunteers provide their efforts to improve reddit's brand, for free, generally just for personal gratification (from people who will turn on you and drive you to suicide the moment you make the wrong move). Thos efforts are exploited by reddit, rather than rewarded.
Twitch has also many volunteers. Just look at this guide on how to become a Twitch admin: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2f77aw/how_to_becom...
"That means that being a Global Moderator is not something you get paid for."
Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.
This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).