Also, reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.

Free speech is a principle and people should be free to say whatever they want no matter how disgusting or distasteful to the majority or mainstream. This is the ideal of a free society and people who can't make the distinction between supporting the principle and yet rejecting the advocates of idiocy are implicitly advocating some form of government censorship.

I'm often weirded by the freedom of speech argument in non critical contexts. These persons life aren't at risk because they can't express opinions, isn't that what is meant by FoS ? not just a free card to be able to let yourself loose in public.

I have no solution, but far too often FoS ends up a noisy non-discussions.

ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.

No

I personally respect freedom of speech, except hate. For example, HN strongly discourages attacking another member personally (eg. calling someone else idiot). I consider this a reasonable limit on freedom of speech, but concepts and opinions should be fully open for discussion (eg. pro/anti evolution etc). If the discussions are respectful, then anything should be allowed.

I believe Political Correctness has done more harm than it does good. It has created an unhealthy focus on skin colour, reproductive organs, etc to the point of lunacy. Many people struggle to look past superficial features and seem to lost the ability to make reasoned judgements. Any criticism of a woman gets you labelled a misogynist, regardless of how incapable she is. This continues to undermine the credibility of women that are truly capable in their own right. I'm currently managing a team of women. They all got there on their own merit. I would not hire a woman for the sake of political correctness or because I was bullied by a feminist journalist (as is quite common these days). The women in my team were not selected based on their gender - they were selected based on their talents and attitudes. They were available and capable.

This whole Ellen Pao incident made me think about the validity of comments on sexism and racism that are floating around the net. Compare the attitudes towards the criticisms of Steve Ballmer vs Ellen Pao. One of these individuals contributed to the significant growth of Microsoft, the other didn't manage to achieve much that stands out. Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not. The major difference (other than Ballmer's financial track record for Microsoft) is their genders. Political Correctness has driven the need to blindly defend women, no matter how incompetent they may be. The hope is that this behaviour will help "women's rights". I view it as doing the exact opposite ... "jobs for the girls".

It saddens me that we seem to be more sexist, less tolerant and more willing to defend incompetence an an attempt to promote rights for selected members of society.

On a side note, I dislike the term "women's rights". Is it so hard to represent "people's rights"? I believe one of these reflects a destructive, prejudiced mindset and creates a bad attitude of entitlement and encourages sexism. If society said we'd defend the rights of everyone equally based on merit, the world would be a much better place.

The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line, you need to appoint a censor to determine what qualifies as "hate". As Christopher Hitchens asked: "To whom would you want to delegate the task to decide for you what you could read? To relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear?"

Typically this job falls to the public prosecutors. Who will make mistakes, misapply and pervert the laws. Sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with malice.

It is not just an abstract argument, it has very real consequences. Here in Finland we had a case [1] where an MP (now MEP) was convicted of hate speech for making a point about freedom of speech by asking a question along the lines of: 'Why is it ok to write that Finns might be culturally and genetically predisposed to get drunk and kill people, but not ok to write that Somalis might be culturally and genetically predisposed to rob people and live on welfare?'

These types of laws have very real chilling effects on public discourse. People are unwilling to engage in certain topics, which should be discussed, due to the fear of being prosecuted. In democracies trying to suppress or censor an idea or argument will just end up elevating them. In this case, the party to which the convicted MP belongs ended up becoming the second largest party and are now in the government. They no longer have to argue their case, they can simply implement it (and their immigration program was written by the MP in question).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_Halla-aho#Criminal_charg...

I want more great censorship, not less. If it’s done by people and organisations, at least. Because that’s what we are talking about here, right? Reddit, not governments?

Censors are just editors and that job is not some inscrutable thing. It can be done and it can be done excellently.

I mean, to me this only gets tricky when we are talking about basic infrastructure, i.e. should a paper mill be allowed to refuse to sell their paper to Neo Nazis because of ideological reasons? Should a web hoster be allowed to refuse to sell to Neo Nazis?

But Reddit? That’s easy and I don’t really get what the fuss is about. Nothing would be lost at all if the admins were much, much, much more ban happy and much more pro-censorship. They should be, 100%.

Specifically, it seems to me that if you're shielded from seeing that they censored, then they could also be censoring "good" speech too. So the only way it seems you could ensure they weren't do this poorly or deliberately would be to allow everyone access to what they've censored. Which inversely seems to defeat the purpose of having a good censor. Now essentially nothing in censored.

Again, perhaps I'm missing something but if I'm not then I don't understand how you resolve this conundrum.

Edit: Unless you're referring to ex post facto censorship, where everyone sees the "bad" speech, and the speaker is banned for violating "community standards" To pre-emptively ban future speech. But this too still allows "bad" speech, and I suppose you also have the problem of deleting the bad speech. If it's gone, then what substantiates the ban/censorship? Because again, what if the action was either done in error, or maliciously to ban "good" but unpopular speech/speakers how would you know?

But I do have the ability to trust people and I know when I enjoy something.

So, this all might sound very abstract, but I do know that I like the censors (they call themselves editors) working for certain newspapers I like. I trust them to make good decisions, partly just because I don’t have time to make those decisions myself.

And that’s obviously not perfect – but this whole nerd dream of provable correctness and absolute, guaranteed access to the truth all the time … it’s all unachievable bullshit anyway. Sometime you just don’t know. Sometimes you just have to live with that. I live with it and I like it.

Honestly, this comes across as "He loved Big Brother"-level creepy.

Do you have some sort of trust issues? I mean, sometimes I’m willing to trust other people, that’s all. I don’t have to believe that everyone is evil and out to get me. So when I read a newspaper I like I have a general trust that the editors (censors) have done their job … because what else can I do? What else can you do?

I don’t have the time to sit around 24 hours by the newswire … and even then, the people writing that and reporting that … how do I know I can trust those absolutely? I can’t. That’s all.

We humans are forever doomed to not know the truth always all the time. And no one is an island and sometimes you just have to trust other people. And that’s healthy and that’s ok.

Well it's crucial that the censors are people who like you. If they didn't like you, you probably wouldn't be such a fan of censorship. That is to say, the only reason you're in favour of censorship on reddit is that you're reasonably that the censors will be people like you, which really is no more than sophisticated tribalism.

If I didn’t like the censors at Reddit I would do the same thing. I think that’s normal and healthy.

reddit does that actually, until you're a well known user, you cannot submit more than a few per minute, after that delays kick in, if it really was something you wanted to share, you'll come back. No censor involved.

That's just an idea, but you get the point.

   > The problem is that as soon as you draw such a line

At some point, hate speech most definitely infringes upon the reader's rights. The canonical example is yelling "FIRE! FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and causing a stampede; your right to free speech doesn't trump everybody else's right to be safe.

[A] United States Supreme Court decision concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense.

I want to pull this quote out and address it directly, because it's a valid concern with a real answer. The reason we don't represent "people's rights" is because all people do not need their rights defended. To use an analogy, think of our system for measuring the level of endangered for animals, from "Critically Endangered" to "Least Concern." Is it sensible to say, 'Well, aren't all species important to the ecosystem? Why do we seek to protect Garrulax courtoisi but not Megascops watsonii?' This is because the former is nearly extinct, while the latter is ubiquitous. The cause of "social justice" -- the oft-derided 'warriors' of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc -- is to correct years of disadvantage. It's not accurate to call, say, attempts to further women in technology as 'sexist'. In fact, that's co-opting the term to obfuscate the original issue.

Overall, your heart is in the right place -- it does seem like our attempts to further minorities comes off as patronizing (like affirmative action). But, in the end, the good that is done outweighs the bad so long as we adequately train the individuals we put forward through these initiatives such that no one believes they only 'got it because of their gender' (which to me is no different than 'got here through someone she knows' -- this is how most business seems to be done in the world!)

I have thought much on these as common person, neither in an academic setting nor who has to deal with these issue frequently.

Lot of time I would argue with myself why can't we have everybody have equal rights ? Why we need to specially fight for rights of women and be feminists or to project the issue to broader sense, where we talk or act about any group. Personally I believe that while the ideal case as it should be is equal rights for everybody, the problem is the inequality created by negative discrimination over the ages. It is more like we are trying to correct the wrong doing over the ages by believing that a positive discrimination for the groups would offset the historical prejudice.

These are personal thoughts. Please feel free to correct.

> Both developed a bad reputation as leaders. Yet, one of these people is being defended and the other is not.

You mean Ballmer?

We know nothing specific and substantial about internal Reddit politics, so the cause for seeing all this hateful scapegoating can only be some kind of mass stupidity.

How far are you willing to take that? You could potentially prohibit satire.

I'm sorry. You don't respect freedom of speech then. Drawing an arbitrary line on what you (or anyone else) considers acceptable isn't free speech.

Put it this way: Things that were unacceptable in the 1950s are completely banal and uninteresting now. Things that were considered in poor taste in the past are horribly offensive now (look at Andy Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's). Are you going to be some society guardian, constantly updating what is and isn't acceptable to say as our values shift with the times

Hah yeah because speaking up against these mobs can lead to getting DOXed. What an insane world we live in.

No. That's the exact opposite of free speech. Free speech is meant to protect the most disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, foolish speech.

That's the whole freaking point - nobody wants to silence unoffensive opinions.

>ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.

It is funny. Because it's the people who want silence others' free speech who repeat the "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" meme as justification for their horrible actions.

No it's not. It's meant to protect speech which the politically powerful find objectionable. It's not about protecting abuse, but protecting ideas. Rebellious and revolutionary ideas, for example.

This is all a canard anyway - Reddit is not the (US) government. They get to set the rules for communication in their playground. If you don't let them do that, then you are infringing on their freedom of expression. Reddit can only say 'no' on their own systems; they don't stop you spreading whatever disgusting, heinous, pointless, hateful, ignorant, or foolish speech in other forums.

If you want free speech the way you describe it, then you need to go to an unmoderated forum. Incidentally, on the front page of HN at the moment is a request for help in removing child porn from a web service, because the owner doesn't have enough resources to moderate it. If you ever wanted a clear example of where free speech is not meant to protect disgusting material, that's got to be it

Saying that people should be open to your arguments privileges those ideas you yourself hold. How do you tell which arguments get such treatment?

I didn't say at all people should be open to my particular arguments, but to arguments in general.

If it's arguments in general,

* you can't hang up on salesmen,

* you can't kick 911 conspirators off your unrelated forum,

* you can't remove most trolls,

* you can't ban homeopathy threads from /r/science,

* etc.

In general, you lose the ability to moderate conversations in spaces you own, or decide what you spend your time doing. This is, to be honest, a pretty extreme idea if taken literally.

Or you could deem salesmen, 911 conspirators, trolls and homeopathy proponents as "crazy and confused", but who decides that? How is that any more unwanted than posting critical meta commentary to /r/fatpeoplehate?

I imagine a concrete implementation of this idea as a meme that people themselves would recognize this as a good rule and that they would consider it as a decision aid whether or not to participate in a certain group.

The loophole, then, is to define ideas the politically powerful find objectionable as abuse.

While I agree that pointless, hateful etc. speech deserves protection one word I almost never see in the reddit free speech wars is *dissent. As in "free speech is meant to protect speech that opposes or challenges orthodox opinion and conventional wisdom."

It's almost like the most vocal part of reddit gets off on being offensive for its own sake and is more concerned about the right to call fat people names rather than defending free speech generally. It does seems like they are flying the free speech flag purely out of narrow self-interest.

How many of them actually give a crap about free speech outside of their "community"? How many of them regularly downvote opinions they don't agree with, I wonder?

Ugh. "horrible actions" as a description for calling people out who threaten, belittle, insult and harass other people and claim that is "protected speech".

By the way, even in a context, where the term "freedom of speech" is really adequate (so, when talking laws and government actions, for example), freedom stops where you infringe the rights of others. That's the whole point of states: To balance the natural freedoms of one person with the rights of other people, thus providing stability. Which is why you can't steal, for example. That's a freedom that had to be balanced against the rights of other people.

As long as you are free to create your own community where you can say whatever you want, there is no need for any other community to listen to you.

And it's certainly understandable that Reddit has no wish to be associated with certain speech, but that comes with troubling implications as well. For example, do they not then appear to support whatever they do not ban if we know that whatever sufficiently offends them gets the ban hammer?

For another example, take Google removing Confederate flags. I personally hate that damned flag and would be perfectly happy to join others in burning one to express my feelings about it, but I'm loathe to go around removing them. Please understand that I'm perfectly happy if a few get taken down where they appear that some governmental branch was endorsing it.

But at the same time, that's not quite the same as when Google goes about removing them. Sure, they are free to do as they wish, I have to wonder why Google doesn't do the same for Nazi symbols? Surely they don't support Nazis, but it's hard to make a case for not giving the Nazis the same treatment. They're at least as evil, right? So what explanations are left to us for the disparity? That Nazis don't offend googlers as much? That doesn't seem like a likely reason, but just what's left?

And in the end, where does that leave us? The problem is, I don't think that train of thought has an end, and that's what makes me uneasy. After we remove everything offensive, what's left? It's not like we'll have things that don't offend anybody, so at some point it becomes a matter of choosing which people are okay to offend and which people are not okay to offend.

In the end, I just want to get along with everyone. I don't like the thought of living in a society where everything becomes a matter of whether you are one of Us or one of Them and that's where we appear to be heading.

They don't sell Nazi flags in their store or (afaik) let people advertise using them, so this doesn't seem as inconsistent to me as you make it sound.

https://www.google.com/search?q=nazi+swastica&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...

Not to mention copies of the Mein Kampf, etc.

Thankfully, the various non-Nazi uses of the swastika appear to be the most popular, but you can find plenty of Nazi items. I dislike the meaning of both symbols, so I have a hard time imagining any logic where it's okay to sell one of them but not the other.

We only burn the bad books, right?

I guess the argument one could make is that the confederate flag is more dangerous and relevant today, but I don't really buy that.

Occam's razor suggests this is just an easy PR grab. They get a few headlines in mainstream tech press for free, and very minor backlash from "free speech nutjubs" as the only downside.

Also side note: reading Mein Kampf doesn't make you a nazi, indeed if more people had read it back in the day somebody might have stooped that little corporal.

Reddit spent years building a freewheeling culture. Pao decided to impose standards on that, and her guiding principles weren't well articulated. In the end, it was a really bad copy of Disneyland, and the fact that the effort failed was no surprise.

I'm not sure the company really knows what happened, given that they think they've given their users what they asked for, but they're also telling their users that they're spoiled kids.

I think you nailed it there. I'm not a Reddit user, but from what I have read there never seemed to be clear set of guidelines that were evenly enforced by the Reddit staff.

Okay. But reddit isn't "those with power". reddit isn't making it illegal to do it elsewhere.

Nope, but then again, being that place is what made it grow so large in the first place.

I tend to agree with what I think you're saying but I wonder if you realize what a controversial opinion that can be to some people. Consider the reaction to Rand Paul's criticism of the Civil Rights Act. Should one be able to operate a restaurant/business/country club that won't serve [blacks, LGBT, Muslims, whites, hispanics, cops, etc]?

>Reddit is a private company and so is not obliged to provide a platform for anyone's free speech, that also is a facet of freedom.

We must be careful not to confuse commercial viability with government censorship. At some point, advertisers will leave a website that continues to foster vitriol/hate speech/illegal content because they do not want their brand associated with it. This is freedom of speech in action.

If we were talking about what's legal to publish in your own newspaper, I agree.

If we're talking about what's appropriate to force others to view by brigading with a small number of people to take over a website to use it as its own platform to harass its CEO, I disagree.

That said, I think the moderation Pao symbolised on Reddit as a whole was a very wrong move. The Community certainly did. All the subreddits are individually moderated and the subreddits are opt-in; there's very little need for an overarching moderation of Reddit major.

Combine this with the rules for moderation being so vague everyone was asking what they actually were, and the reason given was "safety". Safety?

To me, "Safety" is a red-cloth term. It smells of the agenda used to rule the masses by fear and security, and to me Reddit is the exact opposite. But in reality, it was probably just an honest answer to Reddit's Community and investors both, that they wanted Reddit to be a safe product.

Well, nobody joined Reddit because it was "safe". It's the wild west of the interwebs, subreddits progressively darker as you find more weird stuff and you have to tell yourself "no - I don't need that" (who hasn't ventured to r/aww - darkness comes in many shades).

tl;dr Reddit is set up as a wild west with moderated towns, it is counter-productive to clamp down on everything with "safety" as the rallying cry.

They stepped in because moderators of a banned sub was found to encourage and even directly participate in harassment of other people. And they only caved in after a. incessant complaints from the public and b. some personal threats against imgur employees who took down some images the abusers uploaded.

More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_wa...

This is, joking or not, way out of proportion to what happened, which is, a single harassment-focused group was disbanded.

That wasn't the only event that transpired. I'd venture to say things got really intense after Victoria was let go and sub-reddits accounting for 33% of visits were shut down in protest of how the affair was handled (poor communication, no transition planning). I think the disconnect between the mods and Reddit's leadership is what got Pao fired; not the shutting down of FPH.

No. Free speech is a principle that any party can choose to respect. Free speech has been one of the very core values of Reddit right from the beginning, in the form of the ability to create and manage a subreddit with very minimal restrictions.

Being a platform of free speech was the single biggest reason Reddit grew to be the giant community that it is today.

Then Pao comes along and repeatedly shows that she doesn't respect free speech at all. What do you expect the users to do, other than revolt?

It's easy to brush off these incidents as the doings of "the ugliest users", but remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. History books are filled with people being silenced due to their expression of uncomfortable ideas.

For example, John Stuart Mill's utilitarian defense of free speech in On Liberty is equally applicable to private parties and specifically says society and individual people should be open to expression of views they find abhorrent. He specifically covers widespread social ostracism as well as government laws. According to Mill, free speech is definitely not just about freedom from government restrictions.

I doubt you understand the principles of free speech better than John Stuart Mill. Or if you understand his argument in On Liberty and disagree, please explain why.

You have the right to say whatever you want, you do not have the right to say it in my home. I'm curious as to whether or not these individuals understand this, or are just another level of troll trying to stir the pot.

Furthermore, I do have the right to say it "in public".

But, where is that "public" on the internet? I can make a website - a home - and invite other people to come visit me and listen to me ramble, or respond etc. But there is no public space, is there? And if not, should there be?

Most people don't own the homes they live in. Yet the landlord still doesn't get to tell them what to talk about over the dinner table. That's great, but imagine the government sold all sidewalks and public places to private interests, which dictated how you should dress and walk if you want to get out of your home, or to work. Should that be allowed?

Imagine getting thrown out of a mall because someone overheard and disapproved of your conversation there. Does that ever happen? I know there there is no clear line, but that there is one; e.g. if you trail other people and talk to yourself or a friend about them (especially if it's nasty and aggressive) in earshot, that's not exactly cool. But what, other than sanity, would stop all mall owners to agree that anyone e.g. declaring to like the color green should be kicked out, and to hire staff to enforce it? Would that be legal? If it was, should it be? And if it wouldn't be legal, why is that? In what ways, if at all, could or should this applied to the internet?

Most people (63%) own their homes in America, and there are protections in place for people who rent. Your landlord cannot monitor you.

When it comes to the mall though, it's more a matter of scope and scale. Overhearing something in a mall affects a handful of individuals and the intent was not to broadcast. If you stand up on a table in the cafeteria and start spouting hate speech, you can and will be escorted out by security.

The internet is different, because you cannot accidentally overhear a conversation. Said anywhere on the internet, especial a place like reddit of HN, it is viewable by the entirety of internet users. So direct comparisons to the physical world will always fall short.

Reddit is only banning subs that brigade.

It's really been awful and hard to avoid. I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined. That and the increasingly popular /fatpeoplehate and I was pretty close to never visiting even the small well-moderated subs, the leakage was too strong.

And this recent thing, where there have been days where 5 of the top 10 highest voted stories across the entire site were literally titled: "Ellen Pao is a cunt"

Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.

Reddit can be a great place. Subs like /r/webdev and many, many others are very informative and a great way to meet people. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of racism / hate on the subs I frequent because none of them are main line.

Mind linking it?

http://web.archive.org/web/20150611112054/http://www.reddit....

I think there's an interesting cultural weirdness about Reddit here. Part of the problem with brigading is that if you link to another post in another subreddit, you're already logged in and have exactly as much power to upvote and downvote and comment as you did on the subreddit where you came from. There's the entire "no participation" community-by-obscurity trick, where subreddit CSS hides voting links if the hostname is np.reddit.com (this is supposed to be used for translations into the hypothetical "NP" ISO-631 language), but the fact that it's a CSS trick points to underlying discontent.

On the other hand, Reddit is a great platform for small communities precisely because you're already logged in. I've never created a Lambda the Ultimate account and only think about it maybe once every six months, but I'm subbed to /r/types, so anything that flies by gets onto my Reddit home page.

I'm not sure how to reconcile these two problems. A client-side aggregator would solve the issue of visiting each independent site, but the shared login mechanism is also crucial, and is both a blessing and a curse.

First is realizing that there are technical solutions. Some people say "you don't want technical solutions to social problems" but the fact that subreddits have no protection against brigading at all is a serious design flaw with reddit[1].

Second is some way to require subscription for some period of time for votes to appear or to count. The CSS-hack stuff was silly, and as someone who has been on reddit since its first year, I have never seen the CSS-side of reddit because I never turned it on.

One of the big complaints from the blackout was the complete lack of tool support and this is an example. Reddit tried to paper over the technical shortcoming with rules and social hacks but once different reddit communities who didn't like each other realized there was a way to attack each other they did so.

[1] to be fair I wouldn't have realized it either if I was in charge of the subreddit design

It was disgusting and made me take a break from reddit immediately.

In particular, I'm subscribed to no general-purpose or wide-purpose subreddits. A few city/geographic subreddits mentioned it in passing, but, like, /r/programming or /r/nycbike or /r/radicalchristianity are going to treat any post about it as off-topic. You can't just post an advice animal about it, or request IAmAs from everyone involved, or say that today you learned whatever-it-may-be about Ellen Pao, or what have you. Nor can you do this about any other topic, which is why I bother to read these subreddits.

Then on r/all NSW/offensive are disabled by default (the same way NSFW is rigth now - you need to change your account settings).

Problem solved, FPH will never make it to people who don't want to see offensive staff.

And even among technology, I have no interest in seeing things about Ruby or Go. Again, it's not that I dislike the languages, it's that they're not professionally relevant to me at the moment so it's not what I visit Reddit for.

So what we need is some way for subreddits to be tagged with their own content: /r/rust about Rust, /r/python about Python, /r/sandersforpresident about Bernie, etc., and some /r/all equivalent that just matches what I'm interested in -- which is exactly what https://reddit.com is for me, right now. I don't need /r/all to be fixed; I have no interest in even seeing "all technology" or "all religion" or "all presidential candidates".

FPH being or not being on /r/all is irrelevant.

(I echo the comments that say that Reddit has great subreddits like /r/Haskell and it's easy to mis all of this when you are just subscribed to a few subreddits.)

Because I seriously doubt it.

Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site.

Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.

Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.

As I expected: downvoted for pointing out the truth. HN is terrible.

You don't think the downvotes are for this hyperbolic insult?

What is even slightly out of sorts about comparing Ellen Pao to Paul Graham?

I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that both sites have an element of sociopathic and downright evil people influencing the culture. And reasonable people can still disagree about the level of accountability for the actions and inactions of Pao and Graham.

There are plenty of details that don't line up well when making that comparison, but I read the comment as intending to illustrate all the hyperbole around Ellen Pao. There are a lot of people on the Internet talking past each other this week.

He wasn't dealt with. He deleted his account in a frantic and futile attempt to avoid exposure.

Violentacres/Violentacrez (had to block him twice) set himself up as king of the reddit underworld. The admins cast a blind eye to his antics, and in return he prevented the raw sewage from gushing onto the clean streets of the reddit front page.

He was a troll from the start, and deliberately so, even in his choice of username which he had stolen from a popular blogger at the time. This illustrates the kind of brinkmanship that was his trademark - it is not quite impersonation to steal someone else's anonymous handle, but it is not quite ethical either.

His one good point was that he kept the other reddit trolls busy via interminable (literally) troll-fights.

Doxxing is doxxing. It doesn't become 'exposure' when people you like do it.

I meant that the reddit admins didn't 'deal with' Violentacrez. Chen doxxed him, destroying his career, despite the full knowledge that Violentacrez had innocent dependants who would also be hurt badly. If Violentacrez deserved to be 'punished', then whatever punishment was meted out should have fallen exclusively on him.

>It doesn't become 'exposure'.

Bad choice of words. I intended the term in a literal sense, not a judgemental one. It was revolting how Chen made Violentacrez crawl in the false hope he could salvage some part of his livelihood.

>...when people you like do it.

I dislike the people who doxxed Violentacrez very much. I disagree with the use of doxxing as a tactic.

The /r/SubredditDrama posts in regards to the incident are correct as I remember it:

Part I - violentacrez: https://archive.is/7ygdr

Part II - CreepShots: https://archive.is/8AVd8

Part 2 above ends with a link to VAs alleged last comments with an alt:

http://i.imgur.com/E8fCA.png

It's a common meme that violentacrez was "special," had some kind of sway with the admins beyond any other moderator, received instruction from the admins that was unique and not the usual ban threats that many subs get in modmail, and so on. Most people who say these things heard it from someone else, because the actual story is that he was barely tolerated. He even says so himself in your linked thread.

I don't get the elevation of violentacrez to something special. I see it a lot (friendly with the admins! The admins asked him to help with creepshots! it's all over this thread) and I don't get it. He was a power mod. So are hundreds of others. There are a bunch of Reddit yarns that put the Kubrick lunar landing to shame; some of them are making an appearance in this thread.

The admins asked violentacrez to help with the /r/creepshots. Later history got rewritten to say that he had created it, maybe to throw him under the bus.

Genuinely curious: why?

That's a highly subjective opinion...but it's how I felt. r/shitredditsays probably captures a bit of what made me uncomfortable.

> we

> them

Gah.

SRS are notorious for brigading and messing with peoples lives.

IRC networks are still running just fine with minimal intervention.

I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?

I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).

That employee got cancer in 2012. He got a salary for almost two years while too sick to work, of the total three years he was at the company. Four months of that salary undo Pao. Then he got an additional full year of health coverage when they finally couldn't wait any longer to fill his position. He was never well enough to even move to the Reddit officers, which was the plan when they hired him in 2012.

That's not just not despicable, it's laudable, and it's better than how you'd be treated at 99% of companies in the US. And somehow this became twisted by the furious mob into a story about a vicious CEO firing someone for having cancer?

(Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick. Although ironically in this case this employee didn't even qualify for that since he got sick before he was at the company for 12 months.)

That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is appalling. Seriously appalling.

> somehow this became twisted by the furious mob

There's no mob here. If anything, most people seem unfamiliar with this episode.

> Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick

Except where one qualifies for protection under the ADA [1].

> That's not just not despicable, it's laudable

There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao. My overall view of the situation, and likely this goes for others, is in how it was ultimately handled, where Pao said one thing to the employee then did another, more than once. I can see a situation where this could have been handled openly and candidly, with humanity, but that's not what happened.

Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'. Not knowing what would have happened, Pao could have addressed the uncertainly in an honest way, but instead she chose to lie to and then fire the employee. I'm not a one man mob, and I respect your difference of opinion, but that to me is despicable.

[1] http://www.cancer.org/treatment/findingandpayingfortreatment...

Top post on multiple reddits, various random threads upvoted to /all, brought up in this thread by multiple people as a reason the CEO was despicable.

>There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao.

While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years of paid time while he was unable to work. Also under he he got an extra year of medical insurance.

>Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'.

He was supposed to move to the office in 2012. He was never well enough to do so. At the time he was finally let go, he still didn't have a move scheduled. He was still 2 to 3 months away from being able to to start the job. Note his woolly timelines, especially in his followup comments, where 5 months later he was still not ready for full time work.

Changed your mind is not lying, "Sorry, we actually need to someone to start this job immediately, we can't keep waiting."

All this is giving him the most charitable reading of his posts, a post he made at the height of rage at the CEO filled with obvious dog meat like: "Does anyone know of any Reddit alternatives?" "I don't know anything about why Victoria was fired, but he's some speculation as to why she was fired." Etc.

So yeah, I find it despicable that people find this despicable, that comments all across the internet are calling her 'human garbage' and whatnot for treating an employee better than 99% of other companies would have. It's absurd. The story should have been, "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly!"

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo...

It was on HN a while back.

It looks like Dacvak deleted his own posts: "Edit: I've removed this post. All future discussions regarding this subject will be between me and reddit."

Subreddits and their communities are not neatly contained in clearly labelled bottles.

Some of the things I see people say on the internet makes me wonder what kind of social lives those people can possibly lead while being so hopelessly devoid of any empathy.

Just like Facebook, it's almost entirely related to what you subscribe to/follow. /r/chess was entirely mum on the situation, for example.

I find it telling it was negative a majority of the time. Usually "mods" get +1'd just for being mods (common on many forums). It shows, to me at least, that what she said rarely was supported by the community.

I would argue that decisions of large bodies of anonymous people are historically and demonstrably inaccurate, misleading, nearsighted, and wholly terrible for not only the decision they're making, but also the good of the body itself.

Groups of people, at a sufficient capacity, are simply some of the worst, most base, and utterly abhorrent things to exist on this planet, and claiming that the disapproval displayed by the group calling itself "Reddit" is "telling" would be, to say the least, a misstep.

Having a trend over time allows for a better judgement as karma is a metric that can change drastically over time. A generally disagreeable person can have a huge spike in positive karma but that doesn't mean they're liked overall. So it helps that the chart shows as far back as 2013.

A slow overall increase with several downward trends means you're generally agreeable but have a controversial opinion (opposed to the "collective group mentality"). A slow overall decrease with an upward trend now and then means you're generally disagreeable and occasionally say something the community agrees with.

Her karma over time tells me that she's generally disagreeable with a few moments that brought her from "negative" to "neutral" and that before the subreddit bans her popularity was spiraling downwards, hit a full catalyst, and the apology was rather well received.

If her karma was overall positive and only trended negatively in light of the subreddit ban and the Victoria mishap - it'd be telling of a very different story. The fact that it's been consistently negative is telling of the larger picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias

And do you know something about Victoria's firing that everyone else doesn't? Do you know why she was fired?

Including, but not limited to, "I hate this person so will downvote everything and anything they say."

Which makes you a disagreeable person if enough people hate you enough to downvote anything you say.

In the past, factions went to war in order to take absolute power. When they achieved it they would destroy all rivals and enforce strict conformity. They would try to avoid the necessity of constant fighting to hold on to their position by employing various means to cement their legitimacy in the minds of the ruled. One of these was the idea of an aristocracy which had an inherent right to rule. Another was harnessing religion to declare that the rulers held power by divine right, making rebellion a sin. Regime change would only come about through violence.

In a democracy the competing factions can bide their time in the anticipation that they can get into power again. Because of that, they do not feel compelled to use violence to seize power, and by the same token, violence does not have to be used to suppress them.

An interesting side effect of democracy was the relaxation of the need for absolute conformity. This facilitated social mobility, commerce and the flourishing of literature and scientific exploration, all of which would have been seen as subversive and dangerous to the status quo in the older way of doing things, and consequently, rigorously suppressed.

Democracies have been known for only a few brief periods of human existence. They emerged for a few hundred years, in a very limited sense, in one city-state within Greece, 2500 years ago. And then disappeared until just over 200 years ago, with some spread since.

Fewer than half the people on Earth today live in democracies (though it's close: 48%), only 12.5% live in full democracies. Far more live in autocratic regimes than any other of the forms measured by the Democracy Index: 37.6%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

The fastest growing economy in the world is solidly autocratic: China. Despite the claims of the benefits of both democracy and capitalism, many critical advances have come from countries which lacked one or both institutions: Nazi Germany developed jet aircraft and missiles, Communist Russia was the first to orbit satellites and put man in space.

I'm not opposed to democracy. But it seems it's got a few challenges as well.

(There's a story there. It's interesting.)

There are numerous states that have functioned quite well that _weren't_ (or aren't) democracies.

Nazi Germany was, in fact, a democracy. Hitler stood for election in Germany's presidential elections of 1932. While he didn't win a majority of the July vote (none of the _six_ candidates did), he was appointed chancellor following a series of inconclusive elections.

A concern of mine is whether democracy brings wealth, or wealth democracy. Causality's arrow is sticky.

In fact I don't know of a true democracy (defined here as a democracy where no group is excluded, where votes are counted fairly and where each person who wishes to do so can vote for whatever he wants) that has since transitioned into anything else.

None of this, of course, means that democracy is a good system, merely that it is sticky.

Reddit is also not a democracy -- it's a series of benevolent dictatorships, where the content is decided on by anarchistic vote, but can be controlled ultimately through a supreme leader, empowered by the virtue of their age (the oldest member of the subreddit gets to decide the content of that subreddit).

Am I the only one that sees this as possibly the greatest potential "turnaround" story ever created?

In a similar fashion, if Barack Obama posted something like "Mom and apple pie are both great.", it would be downvoted by his political foes and upvoted by his political allies. That should not be taken as an indication that "the community" opposes or disagrees with his viewpoints on Mom and apple pie.

I disliked her for

* Firing Victoria, who took AMAs to the next level. I enjoyed them a ton.

* Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl

* Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"

* Treating the community with disdain and contempt, while not understanding how reddit works at all. She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive. If these people are unhappy with her and leave, then the passive majority (such as myself) will follow them to wherever they go.

But no, I'm probably a misogynist and a racist who hates Ellen Pao because she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, amirite?

The Victoria specific AMAs tended to be short, done on the phone where she types responses, and oriented around'My new movie is out Friday don't miss it' instead of a conversation. I prefer the raw format myself.

>Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl

That this became the battle-flag for everyone to pitchfork is seriously appalling:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9868887

>Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"

I'm personally only familiar with the banning of /neofags because I know people who were targeted and harassed by that reddit. It was clearly banned for the behavior of the mods in the reddit, and not for content, as evidenced by other reddits with much worse content not being banned at the same time.

>She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive.

What does this even mean, all her detractors were also the ones creating the content? Most of the reddits complained about wanting more powerful mod tools, not less control: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cuw90/megathrea...

Incorrect. She did some of the best ones. The ones with Bill Murray and Sean Bean really stick out in my mind as being really great. You couldn't see either of them, but thanks to her you could make out inflections, emphasis and character. It was like hearing them talk, rather than having them type. Either way, regardless of what you think I loved the AMAs that Victoria assisted with, and so did a whole lot of other people. Pao took that away from us, and you're saying that we shouldn't criticise her for that?

> That this became the battle-flag to pitch-fork

He was almost recovered. He would have rejoined work in a month, but she rejected that. That reddit was so benevolent to him was thanks to hueypriest and Yishan Wong. She reversed this policy. Now you're saying its appalling that people are criticising Pao because Yishan and hueypriest were so nice.

> What does this even mean?

It means that the people most engaged with the site (top submitters and moderators) were unhappy with her. The site depends on these people for quality content This was written in really simple English, I don't see what your trouble with understanding it was.

I feel like you were in the flow of a "point-by-point takedown" and had to say something about the last line, but that left you looking pretty silly by the end.

While she was CEO he got 4 months of the almost two years being paid while too sick to work. He got an extra full year of insurance.

He never had a move date scheduled. He was "2-3 months away" and in his AMA when asked where he was working today? He said he still wasn't feeling well enough for full time work - this was 5 months later. "Sorry, we can't keep waiting, we need someone who can do the job immediately."

So yes it is appalling that this became the reason to be furious, while treating an employee better than he would be treated at 99% of other companies in the US. In a reasonable universe the story would have been: "Wow, reddit treats employees amazingly."

* I resented that she fired Victoria, because I liked Victoria and what she brought to reddit. I didn't speculate on why she was fired at all. But let me speculate a little now - it wasn't for performance reasons judging by what every single person who has worked with Victoria says.

* I relayed what the employee in question said about it on reddit. If its a question of trusting what he says or what Pao says, I'll err on the side of the former, because of the duplicity that Pao has exhibited in recent months.

I hope that clears it up.

It is unreasonably acceptable for death, rape, and other threats to be used as a form of outspoken criticism online, and as an outspoken critic, I don't appreciate being lumped in.

On the other hand, I don't think that she did a very good job managing the crisis (the first one caused by banning certain douchy subreddits, and the second one caused by the firing), which is one thing a CEO needs to be able to do.

Besides, these people have always been there and haven't caused any large scale problems, and they didn't when Ellen was appointed (which is when they should have started protesting, assuming you buy the misogyny charge). It was when some quite heavy handed restrictions started to be laid down with regards to freedom of speech that the uprising began to grow.

Personally, I'm glad she's gone, I much prefer reddit to be an extremely politically incorrect place. Take fatpeoplehate for instance - is it hurtful to fat people? Sure. But that subreddit can be easily blocked from your feed. Should someone have to do that? I think yes, they should, because if the new policy is to not hurt anyone's feelings, a whole bunch of content has to disappear.

Now that's just my opinion of how I want reddit to be - it is up to the owners of reddit to decide how they want it to be.

Was turning the front page of /r/all into a cesspool of hate the right way to protest her decisions? Maybe not, but honestly, what alternative is there that would have actually had any effect?

You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of why FPH was banned - it wasn't because of offensive/hateful content like /r/coontown; it was because of active off-site harassment & brigading that the mods couldn't control.

One of us has a misunderstanding on that and I'm not so sure it's me. I'm aware of the brigading claim, but not of any widespread evidence. And even if so, then how do you defend the inconsistent enforcement of that rule amongst other subreddits like /r/srs? If you're going to use a rule to close a sub, then by god enforce that rule consistently if you want people to take you seriously.

https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Shit_Reddit_Says

If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.

As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy. Not that I need to defend reddit's decisions, nor automatically become on their side. Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.

No evidence was given, so you don't know either.

You are correct in that they are free to do as they choose with the website they own, but not taking into consideration your userbase's opinion of your actions seems like not an optimal recipe for success. Treat your users, who produce all your content and manage the majority of your business through voluntary moderation with zero respect, authoritatively decide what is "on or off topic for discussion", and see what happens.

> If you were aware of the reasoning behind the ban - that it was because of alleged brigading, and not because of just hateful content, then that makes your post above (trying to make readers of your comment believe that it was arbitrary due to an offensive sub) quite deceptive.

Oh I'm aware of the stated reasoning, and I:

a) reject it on the grounds that it is not consistently applied. If <subreddit x> is banned because of <rule y>, but that rule doesn't apply everywhere, then it wasn't actually banned because of <rule y>, because a "selectively enforced" rule is not really a rule. They're trying to use unemotional logical reason to explain their actions, but they are not acting logically.

b) don't believe them, in part because the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech, which is most definitely a change from the original culture and spirit.

> As it happens they many times explicitly explained why SRS no longer meets the bar for banning under their current policy.

I'm not at all aware of the details of this but I would like to learn - is this common knowledge?

> Further, even without them explicitly saying why they did not ban SRS, it is not inconsistent - it is merely incomplete.

I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background. Or, if you want to exercise your right (as the platform owner) to completely control all content, then simply state that outright. Or don't, and just continue to subtly move in that direction without discussing it, and see what happens, which I'd argue is exactly what has happened here. What happens is, your users (a significant portion at least) revolt, the story ends up being splashed through mainstream media including financial news, and before too long someone "resigns", "because their growth targets were inconsistent with management". (Do you believe that one also?)

Yes, see the 3rd FAQ of the announcement post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...

> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.

See the 2nd FAQ

> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,

Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech". Not that you have or should expect free speech on reddit anyway etc.

Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals. If a subreddit has been banned for harassment, you will see that in the ban notice. The only banned subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers is r/fatpeoplehate[2].

Harassment vs Brigading: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...

"When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site."

"We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected" Agreed.

"worry for their safety every day" Oh please.

"because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day." Laughably, transparently false. This sounds like the thruthiness that comes from the minds of MBA's and is accepted (in public discourse) on wall street, but it does go over so well on reddit.

Look, if they want to ban "harassment", which I don't argue that fph was at least in some way, then just state the facts and ban it, it's not so hard. It is the completely unnecessary lying that fired up the outrage, imho. Just say "poking fun at fat people is malicious and we're no longer allowing it. Sorry.", and I don't think there would have been a shitstorm.

>> I disagree. srs is infamous for brigading, and this behavior can be easily observed. So, if brigading is grounds for banning, then srs should be banned. If brigading is just one aspect of a complicated formula, then provide some background.

> See the 2nd FAQ

It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass[1] individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.

That in no way excuses srs. As far as I understand, brigading is explicitly a bannable offense. srs brigades. srs has not been banned. Once again, inconsistentcy & dishonesty leads to mistrust and anger.

>> the statement that reddit is not intended to be a place for free speech,

> Where did you read that? From the post above, they're trying to carefully balance offsite harassment & free speech and acknowledge that this is hard. Incidentally note that they said it's a change to their management policy, not "haha gotcha we were never free speech".

http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-its-not-...

"It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time."

Now, combine that with some of the interesting commentary on "safe spaces" that we see coming out of our institutions of higher learning on a regular basis, and draw your own conclusions as to whether the uprising was based on pure unsubstantiated paranoia or not.

> Not that you have or should expect free speech on reddit anyway etc.

As I said before: force a culture on your users and observe the result. It's certainly the right of reddit's owners, but I don't think they'll like the result. My opinion seems to be fairly consistent with the actions and words of the new (old) management, at least so far.

EDIT: on SRS specifically:

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...

"May I ask why /r/shitredditsays[1] has not been banned despite being caught multiple times sending death threats and doxing, and even admitting to doing these things? I think most people would be placated if there were just some consistency in how the rules are applied."

"Sure. We did not ban SRS because the behavior you're referring to, while definitely falling into our current definition of "harassment," happened long ago. We don't put policy into place in order to retroactively ban backlogged behavior. If their harassment becomes a problem again, we will revisit that decision, but until that happens this is where we're at."

Which is a blatant lie, as everyone knows. Again, if you want to selectively ban subreddits, just do it and say why you are doing it, I really think the backlash would be relatively minor, why the compulsive lying?

> Which is a blatant lie, as everyone knows.

I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, and is actually pretty reasonable. How did you determine that everyone knows this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro

Then go here and click some links - notice anything?

https://www.reddit.com/r/shitredditsays

I believe that tends to violate site rules.

Ah, here's where the change was proposed: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/p0yaf/meta_...

Seems like this is vote manipulation

https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_vote_c...

"Don't edit the CSS of your subreddit to willfully mislead users."

https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_vote_c...

> I don't know that, and upon further inspection it is not obviously a lie, so there must be something wrong with your ability to deduce things if you feel that everyone knows that.

Once a conversation reaches the point of pedantry it's generally a good idea to just stop.

Some hires and the chilling effects thing are maybe the biggest unambiguous positive developments. The subreddit banning and the salary negotiations thing were received with mixed opinion, but even if you agree with what was banned, the handling of it was questionable and seemed very rushed.

And then there was last week, which derailed the site over a weekend and made national news outlets for the whole week. A lot of details about internal dealings came to light, and none of them particularly painted reddit in a good light. There is no plausible way the amount of good shes done in the last 10-12 months outweighed the massive damage that was inflicted.

It is also worth noting that the people who do have access to a lot of internal information about the inner workings of reddit 'mutually' agreed that she shouldn't be the CEO. Undoubtedly the backlash -- some of it misguided -- played into this, but frankly a large part of being the CEO of a community-based site is PR.

No plausible way the day to day internal changes / hirings / firings that you are not privy to have had a balancing effect on this? What was your methodology in assessing the damage that the blackout caused to reddit that you used to measure against the good she could have plausibly caused in order to form your rational opinion? A cursory look at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic does not seem to indicate any lasting impact.

It is not worth noting that random employees (actually, not random: ones who' have enough of an axe to grind that they'll risk their job to break NDA) think a CEO is bad. That is the case at almost every company, small and large. Find me one where you can't find 2 employees that agree there should be a different CEO etc.

Sorry but we are looking at it from a necessarily uninformed outsider's perspective so we can't possibly have a meaningful opinion on whether she was an effective CEO.

And even if I was an employee; well there are always disgruntled employees, their opinion isn't reasonable either.

These are absurd arguments. By the same logic, the CEO of whole foods could hold a press conference and just go on a racist, hateful rant, and I couldn't possibly have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as a CEO.

In any event, the people I meant who did have the internal data weren't employees, I meant their board of directors.

And is it possible that a CEO is really awesome, but really really unlucky, and it just _looks_ like they are bad at their job outwardly? Sure, there is some non-zero chance of this; much like there is some non-zero chance of damn near anything.

Perfect information is an impossible ideal; arguing that a rational opinion is impossible regardless of any circumstance since we don't have access to all the information which exists would imply that no person can have a rational opinion about anything, ever.

And yes, literally it is true that the CEO of whole foods could go on a huge racist rant and you could not have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as CEO. Or rather, what you want to say is "in this extreme example, this CEO is clearly ineffective", but we know of morally shitty CEOs who drive huge company growth & profits and are therefore effective CEOs.

Anyway, can you show your work that you were referring to behind your analysis of the magnitude of the damage that the recent reddit blackout did?

More substantially, if all AMA teams really are going to be running the show without official reddit support, this cuts in a couple of ways. It shows a maintained lack of faith in reddit from the moderators, and it also is going to make the logistics of AMAs more difficult. The AMAs are unique content which is a substantial draw of new users, where a ton of the work was already done by volunteers. The logistical strain is going to make for less or worse content, pick your poison. High profile guests, especially those not technically savvy, are less likely to participate without admin support being available.

Strategically, reddit almost certainly wants to be involved in this -- they want to be tightly coupled, enough that the group can't spin off their own version.

I don't think this damage is irreparable, but I do think it's going to take substantial work to fix. And I mean, don't take that from me, take it from them -- https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap....

The main issue (no one to coordinate AMAs) was dealt with in a matter of hours without serious consequences. The "monumental cluster fuck" image is due to hundreds of people with an axe to grind who piled up on top it, mostly with unrelated "anti-SJW" complaints.

I think the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet (though it has many positive aspects in other contexts) is wreaking havoc on our ability to debate some topics because you wind up with a situation where many people get upset about a legitimate grievance and some overly troll-y subset of those people goes overboard with their backlash and then the whole issue ends up in this very unfortunately binary "us versus them" where rational but legitimately upset people get painted with the same brush as the vocal minority of troll-y jerkwads (or alternately, they have to just excuse themselves from the debate to avoid being painted with that brush).

eg. "Gamergate" (there is an inescapable core truth to the fact that game journalism is broken, perhaps irreparably so, that got completely lost in all of the personal-level misogynistic bullshit) and this reddit situation where the community had every right to be upset at the recent moves they have been making (though to reiterate, I think some forms of the backlash were, as reddit's announcement stated, sickening).

My big concern is this populist approach to firing people. Enough people don't like a company officer? Cobble a "movement" and generate enough controversy to force them to step down.

I think unless they egregiously violate company policy or violate the law or do something which would bring damage to a company it should be up to the company to direct the fate of an officer... Not popular sentiment.

Maybe she deserved to be fired, maybe she was a terrible officer. Let the company make that decision. I dont like tho mob rule aspect to her stepping down.

Her job was to preside over that mob. And apparently to monetize it. Pissing off that mob means she failed at her job.

In addition, not understanding that you are firing a key employee shows a dramatic level of ignorance. Reddit has so few employees that even an adequate CEO should know what every single employee is doing. This is just basic Management 101--"Know What Your People Do" or its corollary "Never Piss Off A Secretary" aka "Know Who Has The Real Power In Your Company".

Finally, from her attempt at PR positioning you get headlines like this: "It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit". Really? "Fighter of sexism". Um, she fired a woman, you know? And her behavior at Kleiner was far from exemplary. Her case for sexism would have been a whole lot stronger if she hadn't appeared to be sleeping her way up the corporate chain.

Overall, the problem seems to be the same tone-deafness as so many at this level of privilege: "The rules don't apply to me. How dare these plebeians attempt to make the rules apply to me!"

But this is not the company firing her --it's the internet firing her. I don't like this approach at all. management by popular opinion is not good. Imagine managing a professional sports team by popular vote --it'd be nuts.

[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/19/us-toyota-executiv...

So far as an example from the automotive industry, look at Rick Wagoner from General Motors. He lost the firm $82 billion and 90% of its market capitalization while he was CEO. And the board did nothing to correct this. With their capital gone, loss of confidence by the market, they were forced into bankruptcy.

That's a really bad example to cite because managers and coaches quite often do get fired when the fans start getting too angry.

Regarding "mob rule" this is a free country and people have a choice which website to read and to contribute to. If people want to go away from reddit that is their choice. The company that owns reddit does not need to follow reddit user wishes, but they have to face the distinct possibility that those users will leave and the consequences thereof.

You can call it mob rule, but other's can call it the matter of ordinary people exercising free choice.

It's almost like she just sucked at her job and the public backlash and getting fired were both predictable consequences of that fact.

As if officers need to walk on eggshells. What should matter ate results rather than dictated by the winds of public opinion.

I wish the board, management, etc. in these situations would who resolve and say, no, sorry, this is our choice, we stand by it. But no, we see them capitulate to public opinion.

Sometimes that opinion does coincide with"the right thing to do" but let the company execute the right thing. Don't let the mob become your upper management.

> “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -H. Ford

Users present solutions to their problems, when you listen you discover what their problem actually is. In the above case, faster more reliable transportation.

edit: Jobs was a cofounder of what is(or close to) the most profitable company in the world. He saved the company from bankruptcy and is arguably the best quality control engineer ever. Rules always have exceptions but thinking you are the exception often helps to prove the rule.

But we have seen this play out many many times. Someone is accused --accused, not proven.. and the slightest whiff the company drops the person like a bad contagion. And, so now people expect this from companies. Complain enough and have someone fired. Someone said something crass while drunk 'aha!' fire them, behavior unbecoming. As if these people, unlike us, are not human and can't err. We're scared to see our ugliness in others. Oh the terrible reminder of our frailties! OMG, they were caught in a sting operation and had a rendezvous in a bathroom with a stranger! [Do the private sex lives of executives really matter? Oh but public perception, gasp!]

I don't think companies and organizations should manage by popular opinion. No one will be willing to make bold choices for fear of upsetting some base of people.

If an officers' views are contrary to the official org position, or behavior was egregious or against the law, then sure. If the organizational action simply coincides with popular opinion, then fine --but don't take action _just_ because of popular opinion --that's, to me, not right and gives away control to the whims of the moment.

I think the line needs to be drawn more clearly than that, because we should have populist control over companies.

I'm more concerned about companies that really impact us, for example huge banks, energy conglomerates, people behind the TPP and TiSA.

But when the leader of a company who publishes the words of its' customers - a complex relationship, indeed - tries to curb some of the harmful speech of those customers, I don't think it's a reasonable populist standard to say that people supporting that speech can oppose it.

I think this was the right thing to do from a product perspective. Pao didn't really know how to use the site, and didn't ever particularly like the users. I don't know if Huffman likes the users, but one would assume that he would at least know how to use the site he helped build :)

She tried to share a link to a private message. That's the equivalent of my mom emailing me and saying, "Here's the picture - c:\\user\desktop\pic.jpg" - it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works.

Then everyone who replied was shadowbanned and every post was deleted. So no, she literally didn't know how to use the site.

The new CEO doesn't know how to make lists. Is he going to catch shit for it?

===

kciuq1 1758 points 3 hours ago Maybe the first priority is to learn how reddit works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And they've officially denied shadowbanning anyone in that thread.

Do you have any proof of this? That seems highly unlikely.

Can you cite something on this? I really doubt it's true, but if true it's devastating.

Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10836833/Penn-and...

It's my estimation that if there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous or pseudonymous discussion comments it's very likely that a few individuals will a make death threat (which are likely not intended to be taken seriously). My point is that stating that death threats were made is not particularly interesting, as that's not a rare occurrence when we're talking about very large number of comments by very large number of people, some of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.

"Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here:"

Could you refrain from sexist comments like that?

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

It is a good read.

Also, in such communities, strong anonymity is prudent. It does protect griefers from consequences, I admit. But more importantly, it protects all users from meatspace risks.

Edit: This is an old discussion. Especially if one replaces "Redit" with "Usenet".

I think HN is great too. The knowledge of some of the commenters here can be very educational.

The community is not a coherent block. To give the impression that the criticism stems from an organized group of people that applaud and tolerate death threats is the equivalent of binding it to a strawman and lighting it on fire with gasoline.

The day I discovered I could do that quickly made Reddit my favorite site on the web (/r/NFL, /r/homeimprovement, /r/television, etc).

I'd love to see a discovery feature similar to that of Pinterest built into the signup process that algorithmically signs new users up for subreddits most related to their interests.

But isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure in their curation or moderation?

How does a si but isn't that really a huge indictment of their ability to run the site? If the users who really like the site I'll do it by avoiding the horridness of the main promoted content, doesn't that signal some sort of failure of their curation and moderation?

How does a site like that survive long-term?

It might be better to ask users a series of questions about their interests when they sign up, and then create each one a personalized list

Global curation could help reddit, but the site actually needs very little of it. It can survive without main promoted content at all.

I used Pinterest some in the early days, but I'll avoid like the plague, now.

The worst part is all they did is intercept the search result for someone else's website and force me to give them all sort of marketing data they can sell in order to get it.

Gross.

"Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful."

Simply put, you will find trolls and people writing death threats wherever you look. These people do not exactly discriminate.

They're weak hiveminds. Individuals, if they exist at all, are rare and want nothing to do with the rest of you.

When foreign hiveminds come into contact, one attempts to absorb the other, and failing that, to destroy the other. Memes are highly infectious, and so it's often important to police memes to make sure no foreign ones disrupt the hivemind's self.

One or another hivemind sent off a few spurious signals, and a few highly excited human units acted on those. The hiveminds in question don't feel responsible because they didn't intend to send those signals (or want to pretend they didn't).

> Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.

Like any popular site, Reddit attracts everything from enlightened discussions to 4chan-level casual trolls (and worse). Pointing out the issues with threats and indicating that the community could be better without individuals who would publicly threaten the life of another person seems very reasonable to me.

Actions like the banning of subreddits for the actions of a few bad actors belie the notion that this is how you and they describe it.

If you don't have a coherent content policy -- and no sane person could argue that Reddit does -- then you're better off with none at all.

The subreddit was filled with photographs that were either a) creepshots taken off the street without the subject's permission and b) friends-only Facebook posts shared with the public without the subject's permission (which is a violation of Facebook's TOS).

Then, on top of that, they were harassing imgur staff members for enforcing their ToS.

CoonTown, as disgusting as it is, wasn't doing that, at least not in the sheer volumes of numbers FPH was. Most of that sub consisted of making racist statements about news articles and misinterpreted statistics.

If there were in fact some legal concerns, then I stand corrected.

Ellen got so much shot for the "we're banning actions not ideas" quote (in this thread even) yet here's an example of it being used - leaving absolutely vile subs live because they don't brigade and banning subs when they do brigade and she's getting shit for that too.

Pick.

Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that.

Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems:

1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community.

2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place.

3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product.

If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely unsuitable for the next crisis which will require yet another made up explanation.

[1] http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon.

The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.

Which do you believe is the correct explanation? Can you see any other possibilities?

Because that's what the admins have basically said, by their actions.

Nope, the Reddit admins just haven't closed those subreddits yet. But they will. They've closed the child porn subreddits, they've closed the revenge porn subreddits, they've closed the hate groups that bleed out into the larger internet. r/coontown will be closed, too. It hasn't yet, which is a shame, but if you read into that fact that the reddit admins approve of it, then be prepared to be disappointed in a few months when it gets closed, too.

No matter how much you dislike someone, death threats are always the wrong side of the red line.

And people who should have had the sense to see there were vile pighumpers in their midst did not moderate their nastiness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"I'm convinced that there is a highly vocal group (of young men, most likely) that are hell-bent on breaking Internet communities and even corporeal communities with their grotesqueries. And when they're challenged, they howl "but you're censoring my free speech!""

why do you think that internet communities need to be so heavily moderated?

Anything less doesn't get heard - or it gets ignored. A certain pirate group that asked the U.N for help, was ignored, and resorted to boarding ships and capturing prisoners comes to mind.

I've known very few people who cared to have Pao as CEO since her taking the position. Anyone who gave attention to Reddit Corporate disliked her being in that position and felt her politics would get in the way (and they did). The only people who seemed to like her in that seat were those with the same ideological and political leanings as her (not a big surprise there). [0]

The fact people had to get "up in arms" and make a huge fuss about her to get her out of the position shows action should have been taken sooner, rather than later. But nobody pays attention to the quiet protests. They only give notice to the extreme.

Yes - some of the comments against her were extreme, unnecessary, and irrelevant to her position and the problems surrounding her. I saw death/rape threats, totally uncalled for. Anything less was ignored.

[0] And her Karma tells the story. It's almost always been negative. https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png

That is humanity. People are narcissistic assholes. If the average person wasn't scared of what would happen or how they're perceived they'd punch you right in the face for looking in their direction.

That's what internet anonymity does. Brings out people's true essence. You see it with road rage too. The protection of the vehicle and the quick flight make giving the finger in response to a reasonable mishap an easy answer. A "FUCK YOU" for accidentally veering into your lane. Sound reasonable?

Yeah there's a few Mother Teresas out there, but most of them are self righteous a-holes too. What a world.

I disagree. Some people: yes. Average person: I don't know, I suspect probably not. I've met a lot of people from different parts of the US, Canada, and around the world. A great many of them have exhibited a tendency towards genuine empathy. That too is human nature, it's not all narcissism and self-interest.

Relevant as always.

You mean this?

> [1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.

All that opposition - strong enough to convince "Chairman Pao" to resign - reduced to death threats? All those arbitrary bans written off as a just punishment for criminal behavior? Something tells me that we haven't seen the last of "safe space" Reddit.

Altman is not justifying the arbitrary bans (or any Reddit admin shenanigans) here, that is not the topic of this sentence. He is talking strictly about one dangerous activity that gets offenders banned: death threats, which Ellen Pao (the human at the other end) received.

We don't know why Pao went out. We can suspect it was the backlash (more likely), or disagreements with the board [0] but we can suspect.

But that does nothing to make her opposition entirely legitimate, when at its strongest it was hijacked by namecalling, cyber-bullying, and yes, threats to Pao's life. The subset of Redditors who did this deserve to be told how shitty it is. The remaining, legitimate opposition should recognize the distinction.

[0] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/technology/ellen-pao-reddi...

Why don't you believe her when she says it was a disagreement with the board over the future of reddit?

"We don't know" when the person in question is saying "this is why" is not very respectful.

However, you're right. The two reasons are not mutually exclusive.

Do you see another reference to the overwhelming opposition inside the user base? Anything in the vein of "the mounting opposition convinced us that there's no point in fighting our users"?

Because from what I read in the announcement, the opposition is presented as a vocal, hateful and criminal minority that should absolutely not be mistaken for the "sweeping majority" that was "incredibly supportive" of the CEO.

Reddit has ALWAYS loved irreverent and even incredibly offensive puns.

Redditors would be calling her Chairman Pao even if she was well loved just for humor value.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yishansucks

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0SO8xk4b...