The main problem I think most people had with it wasn't that there was action taken. It's that it was arbitrary, there were no guidelines given, and there was no consistency.
If there had been a set of community guidelines published, a week given for moderators to rein in their members, and then the ban hammer had come down, I doubt anyone would have cared.
It was probably incompetence rather than malice -- same as firing Victoria -- but the fact is that there were arbitrary actions taken with no explanation, warning, or chance for people to prepare.
There were all of these things. There just wasn't completeness - i.e. they didn't (yet?) ban every sub that was in "category 3" harassing people IRL. It was not arbitrary: those ones were actively harassing people. There were guidelines: they existed before, and she posted them in response. There was no inconsistency: subreddits failing to meet these criteria were not banned under this policy. 100% of people upset on these grounds are in the wrong.
Analytics showing brigading statistics would be dead simple. It would establish a clear, objective metric and back the notion of behavior, not ideas, being targeted.
I also kind of doubt objective numbers would justify the actual banned subreddits; I think it would show a lot of other ones were just as bad or worse, but weren't so unapologetically disgusting.
The reddit anger towards her was mostly accumulation of cultural change that has been going in reddit management every since Yishan left (also ~30 employees were fired/let go in a very short period) and firing of Victoria just the tipping point. It also helps that Victoria was very well liked.
I honestly dont know who is to be blamed for reddit going the shithole but at the end of the day CEO needs to take responsibility.
That's what it boils down to. The buck stops at the CEO's desk, even if the CEO wasn't directly involved with the problem. This is really not much different than the CEO of Target losing his job after someone hacked its customer data.
I'm not. I'd prefer all of the communities stay on a site like reddit, where specific users get banned for clear violations of harassment rules, rather than the entire communities getting shut down because of the actions of a few. Most communities on reddit had clear anti-harassment rules and moderators usually banned it when it was seen.
Now, instead, the communities are moving over to sites like voat.co and 8ch.net - communities that won't get policed in any way whatsoever. And in many cases, the communities encourage harassment, brigading, and general nastiness. This is going to make the Internet a worse place in general for all of us.
How?
Wouldn't that make it a better place, because you won't even know that they exist. Unless you looked, anyway.
Your opinion is offensive to me, yet I don't want to silence you, because freedom of speech is more important than people getting offended.
Type two is /r/coontown or other hate subs. They're clearly offensive. I wouldn't let them on my site if I ran it, but they exist. The key here is they stay mostly to themselves. I wasn't aware of them before all this.
Type 3 are problem subs. Things like /r/FPH. There often offensive, but on top of that they branch out to act in the real world or in other subs. They don't stay confined to their one little corner but actually make things worse for everyone. Never if your topic isn't flat out offensive doxing or causing actual harm fits here.
What they did was a small hit against some of category three. It wasn't much, but it's the most I've seen in a long time on Reddit. Given the amount of stuff I've seen in the last year against various people in the games industry in other places, some of that organized on Reddit, I'm happy to see something done.
There are still tons of subs in category three that they haven't done anything too. The vast majority of them. And I really don't care about category two things, I'd be fine if I didn't wanted to ban those too.
By no means did she clear up Reddit. But at least I saw she tried to do something, dipping her toe into the battle. And I'm worried I'll be back sliding on that.