The tide changed with Pao. All of those were roadblocks, but never had the community turned so swiftly against the admins until Pao arrived. There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Pao. kn0thing has had missteps but generally has had the respect of the community. The community largely does not respect Pao.

There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Yishan Wong as well. Name some of the concrete things Ellen Pao has done at Reddit to be the cause of all of this, or any of this.

> The community largely does not respect Pao

Any criticism I've read seems to be based around how she's a woman and she used her womanness to get ahead.

Nothing she has done as the CEO of Reddit is evidence of the need for the awful insults and copypasta I've seen lobbed at her. And these aren't hidden in the recesses of MRA subreddits, they're the top comments on any thread with any mention of Pao.

Nothing to do with her being a woman and it sucks to even bring that up - it makes no difference. I'm speculating here, but I think the problem is largely that Pao is an ex-lawyer, wealthy investor that is married to a hedge fund manager. Reddit being a largely liberal/young/mass appeal/quirky internet subculture collective (at least at it's core) would see any ex-lawyer, wealthy investor married to a hedge fund manager as an outsider. She comes off as an "out of touch 1%'er" that is there to make the site more corporate and "safe" for advertisers, ruining its culture to make herself even richer. It doesn't help that she apparently doesn't even know how to use the site.

It's like being a software engineer and getting a new manager that previously worked at Goldman Sachs, wears expensive suits to the office, asks you for help using Microsoft Word, but then tells you to switch from IntelliJ to Borland JBuilder because he owns some shares in Borland. He doesn't get the culture, he's an outside and is making decisions to actively ruin your environment. That's how it feels.

Let me guess, they they hate Victoria as well is because she is also woman.

Oh wait, they don't hate Victoria. Huh...

> And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee

This was awesome. The employee started the trash talk, fully expecting Reddit not to defend itself (as expected of bullshit corporate america). It was perfect /r/justiceporn when Wong came out swinging in response. Glorious to see.

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.

Agreed. I recall people went from not knowing who was the CEO to cheering for him.

whether it was political or performance based, he did raise a rather rational point. If your company is unprofitable/showing weak earnings, it might not make sense to give away 10% of all of the money you take in over the fiscal year.

To me it was low-class and unprofessional to see a CEO do that.

Yishan has other problems, but yes I really dislike anti-discrimination laws for example. A better idea is to impose anti-discrimination restrictions on specific companies.

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.

im not sure if it matters what happened in the past per se... its the amount, the type, etc.:

once something start to be massively as "bad" and the content is generated by those users seeing it as "bad" it just stops being what it was. It's like saying Firefox or IE aren't good browser. IE is a pretty good browser nowaday, but that's an unpopular opinion.

It feels like reddit is going to reach this point now...

For years all it would've taken is a solid competitor with good technology and management and Reddit is gone. Right now Reddit's really the only game in town. If someone were to come along with technology that wouldn't regularly crash and tools to help the moderators moderate and allow the community managers to quickly and effectively respond to problems; and a solid management team to be proactive and keep improving the site (not to mention make a few bucks) then Reddit would be in real trouble.

Who wants to tackle this with me? Contact info in profile.

Yeah, because those are all the things that keep IRC alive... not.

You really don't think it's an architecture problem?

Do you really think "all" we need is "good tech" and "good people"? Everyone thinks that, and thinks they have that when they start something.

What we need, I think, is a forum/thread/whatchamacallit protocol, like IRC is that protocol for chat.

Am I crazy?

It's called NNTP and predates HTTP.

And it was glorious. And then it died.

.. partly due to lack of effective moderation tools.

No. It was thanks to the ISPs dumping NNTP servers.

Back in the dialup days, they had NNTP servers available, pulling nearly all the NGs. As time went by, alt.binaries took over 99% of the bandwidth, along with a nice cornucopia of pirated content. It was rather awesome.

When DSL/Cable took over, those companies axed their news servers, if they had any at all. And your server choice was to use a non-binaries carrying, post limited free server or paid server.

That's how it was killed.

Just a note for accuracy, Ellen was hired by reddit well before (months) the celebgate scandal broke