Assuming she was completely horrible and a terrible CEO... Assuming that! How could someone's lack of ability to do their job (or anything else for that matter) make the type of death and rape threats that this 'vitriol' was seen being expressed with less appalling?
You are falling into a common pit where you may think it was good she has been replaced, and you may be right, and gosh darn it you are certainly entitled to that opinion. But when you reply objecting to a comment that is basically just saying the type of hate a woman got on the internet was horrible, you become part of the problem by basically saying she deserved to receive those threats.
So now she got all those threats because she's a woman? What?
You know the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] right? It applies to male and females alike.
And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point out Pao did an atrocious job and was an awful choice for CEO, and you'll never hear the board admit that.
Did he get the same sort of personal, visceral threats?
- He wasn't in the middle of a bunch of massively controversial fraud/discrimination lawsuits and other issues
- Reddit's administration wasn't a damn soap opera at the time, so people didn't care as much.
PS: You don't need to be a woman to receive death threats. It's not an exclusivity. People are assholes, like I said. I've worked long enough in the video game industry to know this as a fact. Unfortunately, America has this very weird narrative about women which only serves to reinforce the stereotypes they claim to fight. And since it's past 1AM in Europe, we're seeing this narrative dominate the comments... it's pretty sad.
But we don't mention those, no no. It's only "sexism" and "mysoginy" because we don't like what happened to a woman. When it's good for a woman, that's just sheer luck. Or white-knightism, whatever floats your boat.
Please.
However, unless I misread this thread, the conversation wasn't about whether employee terminations were well-advised. I was talking about which Reddit employees received interminable ugliness from Redditors, and whether it was correlated with what the public knew about their performance in their jobs.
To my knowledge, there was no public discussion, vitriolic or otherwise, of either /u/kickme444 or /u/chooter's performance before their terminations, so I'm not sure what point you are making. (There were some comments that received flak for supporting /u/ekjp's "Removing Harassing Subreddits" post.)
edit: I should also note that I'm not taking any position on the merit of /u/ekjp's departure, as mediated by the Board. Probably it was the right thing to do for the site, and quite likely it was the right thing to do for her, as well, but again, I'm not privy to anything that would let me have a well-informed opinion. I am only taking a position on the vitriol leading up to it. I think we'd both agree that it would be a bad thing if the vitriol was causative -- either if the Board relented to the worst parts of the mob (instead of, say, to respectful argument about why she's the wrong CEO), or if she stepped down because she couldn't take it any more -- and I'm hoping and assuming that it's not the case.
My example was that two reddit employees, in two similar situations, got treated differently. Thad a different gender, and in this case, the woman was treated exponentially better.
So my point was that you can play the "let's find the sexist" game. Or you can just admit that there are other circumstances at play. I'm not saying sexes didn't play a role, I'm saying Pao wasn't hated because she was a woman. Nobody gave two shits about her until she started making unpopular moves.
Kindness does not cancel out or excuse vitriol. If women get more kindness and also more vitriol online, getting less vitriol to women is still important; I am not concerned about some sum between positive behavior and negative behavior.
Let's say that the Star-Belly Sneetches either get rich beyond their wildest dreams or find themselves starving and begging on the streets. The Plain-Belly Sneetches don't tend to do better than middle class, but they don't do worse, either. To me, there is a single obvious injustice here worth our immediate efforts. If we make sure that Star-Bellied Sneetches have a place to live and food to eat, and if they still get super rich sometimes (i.e., there wasn't an underlying economic problem that advantaged some at the cost of others), then we can look at why that is and why the Plain-Belly Sneetches don't. But worrying about the Plain-Belly Sneetches first is misplaced, and it's clearly not the case that there's some net equality between the two groups because their average wealth is the same.
That said, for all four of these people, that "silly website" was not only their job and livelihood, it was also very much a passion of theirs. It's entirely reasonable for it to be a strong part of their identity, and I think it's a bit disrespectful to deny them that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3chaut/why_...
No one in this chain of comments said that; besides maybe the GP you are defending. I referred to her as a woman and said the type of hate was horrible. There was no causation there.
>You know the ....
No shit, whats your point how does that justify ANYONE getting death and rape threats for doing their job in a manner others consider badly? So what if some of the people threatening her were probably also female? Or was there a different equally horrible point?
>And it's pretty scummy how your comment implicates GP said she "deserved to receive those threats", when all he/she did was to point out Pao did an atrocious job and was an awful choice for CEO, and you'll never hear the board admit that.
I am sorry I didn't mean to implicate that. I meant to flat out say that is what the the GP was effectively doing.
That person decided to reply to a post of which the only content was saying that the internet acted poorly.(basically a truism), and they made a post that disagrees as a response, the only way that post furthers the conversation as a reply is with them supporting the very hate the original poster was talking about.
Look if a person does not want come across as supporting rape and death threats it is best not to disagree with posts which are only pointing out how horrible those type of threats are. It's a pretty basic idea. And if a person does want to support rape and death threats, they should just flat out say so, that way they can be removed as a user on whatever sites want to have actual conversations.
This is the same discourse BS that we get from politicians, name-dropping "terrorism" and "paedophilia" to pass random bills, laws or make people swallow unpopular opinions.
It's frankly repulsive seeing it happen here too. "Oh you disagree with me? YOU SUPPORT RAPE."
1. Nowhere in this thread was someone saying "Rape is Bad", without a bunch of other words around it. Nor was there anyone saying "I disagree", without a bunch of nuances and explanations around it.
2. You're still playing the politician game, trying to reduce the argument down to what suits you best, even after being called out on it.
I'm not falling into this trap. If you want a sensible discussion, please feel free to actually try and elaborate rather than present riddles and try to play tricks.
Patrick_Devine 2 hours ago | parent | flag
As an occasional user of reddit, this whole ordeal has confirmed the reason why I prefer not to hang out in its forums. I have no idea whether Ellen was a capable CEO, but the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally (through other news articles and here on HN) was absolutely appalling.
Take a step back and try look at it with a clear head. Criticism can take many other forms, you know...
My response above was written assuming that the intended 'parent' post was the one being linked as the 'parent' at the time.
That post is no longer the parent of your comment, instead the parent is a post which your post actually works as a relatively legitimate reply to.
I am saying this as a way of acknowledging, all my further replies (some of which may have been made after the parent changed, without me noticing) are clearly deserving of down votes in the current context.
What the fuck is this? And how is this relevant? And when was the last time you heard a similar comment about a man?
It seems like she's been the subject of vitriol primarily for being a woman, since a lot of the vitriol predates the past few days.
I have seen literally no evidence that she was harassed simply for being a woman.
To me the uptick in personal insults seems obvious, and uncorrelated to a long history of questionable decisions by Reddit admins. Although I think her being labelled as a feminist false accuser is as much the reason as her being a woman.
Pao was the face of reddit as CEO and had to rightly "face the music", not because she's a woman. I find it incredible to see things boiled down to "they hate her cuz she's a gurl".
Well, the litmus test can't be simply whether the harassment solely targeted her gender and nothing else. Sexism (and other forms of bigotry) have a more insidious nature to them.
I don't think she was responsible for nearly so much of the stuff Reddit reacted negatively to over the course of her tenure as some would think, but I think the primary blame for that perception lies with Reddit's leadership as a whole and their astounding lack of communication to their audience. They knew that Pao had been the subject of a high-visibility lawsuit heavily steeped in social justice implications, which she rather badly lost - it doesn't take a PR genius to think that if you start introducing sweeping social justice-driven changes to your site while she's in office as CEO, people are going to presume that she's the one driving them. That could have been trivially defused by saying "This was a decision made by our board" or "This initiative is something we've been working on for the past 3 years", rather than just sitting by and letting the bogeyman grow and grow.
As another example, as best I can tell, Ohanin let Pao take all the heat for Victoria Taylor's firing, and then clarified that he was the one who made the decision to terminate her only after Pao had resigned. A huge amount of unrest could have been deflected off of Pao if Ohanin had said "Hey, I'm the one that made this decision", but that wasn't said (if I'm wrong, please let me know; the first reference I saw to this admission was timestamped around ~1h ago). In fact, reddit's leadership as a whole was extremely wishy-washy and vague about the whole thing, despite the fact that it upset the volunteer base that makes reddit usable enough to incite mini-revolt.
Leaping to claims of sexism seems lazy and just a little-too-convenient for me. I think that if her husband had been in the CEO role and the same things had happened, given his PR image problems, you'd have seen the same magnitude of criticism and outrage (but then, of course, people would level claims of racism as the cause, which I think would have been equally as wrong).
More like passing off a lack a simple lack of ability at KPCB as gender discrimination, having the temerity to file a meritless suit on that basis, losing it so conclusively, and then further demonstrating her lack of ability at Reddit thereby harming something a lot of people love a lot.
I find that easy to see how that is vitriol-inducing.
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletch...
Many of the insults we men use on each other just don't work on a woman. For example, what would calling a woman a "dickless wonder" even mean?
Similarly, let's say I wanted to insult a guy raised by a gay male couple. It would make no sense telling him "Your mother is a whore".
She was previously fired from Kleiner Perkins for unsatisfactory performance.
Perhaps the Reddit board has come to the conclusion she might not be ready for a CEx position.
What does this have to do with the parent's post?
We detached this subthread and marked it off topic.
When do we hear "so and so CEO did a horrible job and was forced out by the board."? Never. So are we to believe there is no such thing as a terrible CEO? Will we hear Sam saying "We made a terrible decision putting her in charge."? Never. Even if it was the actual truth.
Pao does not get a pass on this dynamic for being a woman.