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.
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:
https://archive.is/9RFIp
Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.