It's standard practice for a company to not disclose why someone was fired, and this is often to the benefit of the former employee. Why do you think you're entitled to know the private details of Victoria's employment?
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_...
Also, Ellen Pao was not Reddit's CEO at that time and it seems unfair to hold her to the behavior of the CEO she replaced.
It's a good thing that Reddit does not reveal details of why people were fired.
The fact that Reddit refuses to take that path is a strong indication that the reasons would reflect badly on the company.
"In return, the polite expectation is that the employee will not go shooting their mouth off about the company especially (as in your case) through irresponsibly unfounded speculation. (...) Unfortunately, you have just forfeited this arrangement."
That is none of your business. That is none of -our- business. Anybody who thinks they deserve to know why Victoria / u/chooters was fired has either never worked a real job before, or has a vastly over-large opinion of themselves.
Is it really in anyones best interest to know? Firing of staff is a personal matter between two private entities.
I think it's obvious that there is a forced changing of the guard happening at reddit and given the people who were fired were some of the most popular with the users and moderators I can't imagine those changes will be well received by the users.
However, firing of staff is a personal matter and neither the company nor Ms. Taylor are going to say anything about it. So now we just have to wait for the other shoe to drop to find out what is really going on.
It will also make the site even more toxic as everybody takes sides and starts the same fights over and over again.
That _is_ Pao's responsibility, and she failed in having a plan, and the community called her on it.
Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
I bet most folks who don't frequent the site, and haven't used it over the holiday weekend will come back and not even know anything had transpired and don't feel any decline. I've used the site daily for a long time and it is fine by me. Maybe I just don't get upset that I can't say and do anything I want on the site because I know that is silly.
Shutting down creep subreddits like fatpeoplehate and others is totally fine and isn't stifling anyones free speech. No one has a right to be able to post whatever they want on a 3rd party website, fortunately to many and unfortunately to some the Internet is no longer the Wild Wild West.
I'm personally fine with those subreddits existing, free speech and all that, but I agreed with the decision to ban it. You step over the line when you start actively harassing people.
And I go on Reddit, like, every day.
> Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
I've also been around since nearly the beginning (coming up on tenth cakeday) and I feel very similarly.
I expressed as much in Alexis' modtalk thread, and I was glad to see many others doing the same. Site usability issues aside, frankly I couldn't care less about the admin-moderator and moderator-user dynamic of the default subs. The large-scale reddit community lost my interest years ago in typical Eternal September fashion.
But I feel, on the whole, betrayed by the new direction of the site. Not only does it not reflect the early days of reddit that drew me in -- it doesn't even seem to reflect a natural growth-driven evolution of the platform.
I find myself losing all remaining interest in reddit and suspect I'll delete my account in the coming weeks if there aren't major changes to
(a) the horrendous attitude of the [user-facing] admins,
(b) communication channels between reddit engineers and users who try to contribute to site development,
(c) the ancient moderation tools that can't handle subreddits over 50 thousand users.
It's been a great run. Really, what an amazing decade. But, at least for me, these recent events are just the final blow. They represent a turning point in reddit and a turning point in my own life. These discussion silos of the early 2000s all feel bloated and fairly useless now.
This sort of whiny bullshit has been on reddit forever, the truth is the mods went for a power play because they didn't like what the admin's did, and the users got thrown under the bus.
As a redditor of many years I just don't give 2 shits about it and I blame the mods more for the bullshit than reddit itself.
If each subreddit with 30,000 or more subscribers (all 1,000 of them) required just 5 hours of moderation per day, and that cost $8/hr, that's over $10 million/yr.
This is ignoring many mods are industry specialists who could charge $50-200/hr for the time they're donating to reddit.
Saying they would like their tools updated and to be taken seriously is a small "power play" considering the massive amount of labor they donate to the site each year.
There seems to be this disingenuous need for those who are anti-reddit in this case to try and inflate what these people actually do.
By and large, these mods are not content creators, they're mods. The people who post links on reddit are also not content creators, they're simply people who found something and posted a link on a site meant for linking stuff.
Moderating takes work, but this idea that these moderators are people who have specialized knowledge and work day and night on this is horseshit. You do yourself and your cause a disservice when you talk like that.
You seem to think you have a pretty strong grip on things so you tell me: ballpark, how many hours of work do you estimate have been donated to reddit by its moderators and what's the dollar value of that work?
Consider this - what do people who feel their work is undervalued do? They negotiate for higher pay, they look for a better job, they leave. In this particular tantrum, how many moderators of popular subredits can you point to that resigned in protest? I'm guessing that number is also zero.
There's no reason to get sidetracked with a debate about how value is defined, it's a simple question.
Additionally, these people don't want to go. They like whatever intangible benefits moderating brings them. If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
If you're dying of thirst and somebody offers you a glass of water some will argue the market value of that glass of water was zero. I get that. There's also the value of what that glass of water was worth to you and there are many ways to approximate that value. There's what you were willing and able to pay at the time, there's whatever water prices were at the time if you walked into a store, the size of a loan you would have taken out for it, etc. If for whatever reason this person gave you many life-saving glasses of water over the years, and you showed little appreciation, there may come a point where the two of you will debate the difference betwee market value and utility value.
I'm not trying to debate market vs utility value. I'm just saying if the mods have donated $100 of time over the years it's different from if they've donated $100 million of time over the years. It's an attempt to have a rational discussion about whether or not they're "throwing a temper tantrum." You're getting sidetracked because I'm using dollars to measure utility value instead of market value. If you'd like you can think of it this way: what would the cost of reddit's mods be if this was happening in a "perfect" market where other companies were competing for moderators.
> If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
This should be covered in the first semester of college economics: if a company has no close competitors you can not assert that its employees must be happy because they haven't left. People have been screaming for months for a similar place to leave to, it doesn't exist yet.
This is a very straightforward exchange - moderators spend time moderating in return for the endorphins and jollies this activity brings them. By 'leave' I mean 'stop moderating'. At any time, any moderator can stop moderating at the loss of nothing more than the endorphins and the gain of extra free time to devote to some other hobby. There is a glut of people who would take up their spot. For nothing. That's where the heavy competition is - lots and lots of people enjoy doing this sort of thing, for whatever reasons. It's not like there is a shortage of internet message boards and in most of them, calls for volunteer mod positions are flooded with applicants.
Reddit is not benefiting from the inexplicable altruism of some sort of rare and highly valuable specialists. And for all their talk, the mods know this too because they did not even threaten with a walk-out, let alone attempt one. Their only leverage was to force their users into this spat with the admins.
As you said, mods are being paid in intangibles. If you log in to a website several days a week to fulfill the responsibilites that come with your position, in exchange for compensation, for years at a time, that's called a job. you may not be an employee but at some point you are working.
I'm not saying we can assign a dollar value to this work, I'm saying we can ballpark an amount of value and we might as well communicate that in dollars. If you'd like we can measure it in millions of hours donated. The magnitude of these numbers alone should make this interesting.
Because reddit has no close competitors there is no market for mods, reddit has a monopoly. Since there is no market to tell us what the value of moddding is we have to guess. If there were a hundred reddits competing with each other for mods we could trust the level of compensation they receive. Glut of supply and only one buyer means compensation will be far under what it would be in a "fair market".
Very few people are going to buy that moderators are employee's of reddit, and therefore, the dynamic is completely different.
I never once said the mods are employees. I pointed out how much what they do would cost if you had to pay people to do what they do. The "debate" is over how value is measured. If you have something new to add please do.
The flaw has already been pointed out to you.
Nailed it.
As for your question, I reject it on the grounds that the assumption is faulty and therefore not worth discussing.
Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.
I hope they realized how much power the community holds. Reddit is fickle with a long memory, and if the winds of favor start blowing the other way, there will ALWAYS be someone dredging up the past any time you try to do anything in the future.
Pao and any others involved in these decisions have done irreparable damage to their community and its trust in Reddit's leadership. Reddit's success is built on a notion of trust that few, if any social networks could ever achieve because Reddit has consistently made choices in favor of the community, not despite them. When that starts changing, so does the trust and the rest of the relationship.
But maybe that's the goal and they are trying to drive out the people who care about that while retaining the users who just want cat pictures and celeb AMA's who don't give a crap about the drama or increasingly intrusive advertising (I'm looking at you Alienblue feed ads that I can't downvote enough). I'd be shocked if they didn't start selling audience data to brokers like Axciom or Neustar at some point as well.
> "He said the team were also looking into ways to "improve being a moderator"."
Given how things went down, I wouldn't be surprised if that implied restricting the ability for mods to make certain subs dark in the future. If you are a content portal, you can't be letting your pesky users turn off the tap whenever they want...bad for business.
I always wondered why Reddit never introduced paid subscription-based subs. Let the community monetize and promote the platform, give them recurring revenue and take a cut. Suddenly you are helping your users and helping Reddit. Sure free alternative subs might be more popular for easily duplicated content, but certain content areas could do quite well.
Oh well, it was great while it lasted.
--EDIT--
Please don't interpret my statement about them not providing details of the firing as a presumption that they should have or that I expected them to expose themselves to liability--I'm not ignorant when it comes to how these things go down. My (perhaps not clear enough) point is that there is no real acknowledgement that she was good at executing on her job (from the standpoint of the community and our perception) and the entire way this has been handled has been in a cold corporate manner.
I get they are a business, but when you run a community like Reddit, the Reddit employees who actively engage are part of that community, so it becomes an inherently personal matter, like when you have to explain to a child why you are divorcing your spouse. Sure you could just not explain it, but you increase the likely hood of deep emotional scars that never heal if you handle it poorly. As much as they would like this to be an internal situation, the community is intrinsically intertwined in this so some deeper explanation that satisfies this curiosity is more or less necessary to bring them around. Not saying that is fair to Reddit or Victoria, just stating how the mob works from my experience after 8+ years.