Yishan was actually an incapable CEO and a bad choice. And all the complaints about Ellen apply to him too: he censored subreddits with no clear policy, he was at odds with his own staff and his own board, and he presided over lots of unhappy departures of valuable employees for stupid reasons. A lot of the problems we see now are his doing.

Did he get the same sort of personal, visceral threats?

Yishan was a massively unpopular CEO and both him and his decisions were strongly disliked. I'm sure he received his fair share of death threats, because internet, but there were also two points to keep in mind for his time as CEO:

- 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.

While we're at it, there were two unpopular firings last month at reddit. The Reddit Gifts guy, who was let go without much fanfare, and chooter (Victoria), who got the entire website to support her, go dark in protest, and fast-forwarded Pao's resignation.

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.

I agree that, from the public information, it sounds like both of those terminations were potentially ill-advised. (There's also rumors that both of them were loosely tied to Yishan's everyone-in-SF policy, as it happens, but only rumors.) Obviously there's more going on than the public will ever know, unless Reddit corporate email ends up on Wikileaks, so I don't actually have an opinion on them because I don't have anywhere near enough information to make having an opinion worthwhile.

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.

GP's example was that two reddit employees, in two similar situations, got treated differently. They had a different gender, and the woman was treated exponentially worse.

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.

Okay, now I understand what you mean, thanks. That did not occur to me at first. I think part of why was that /u/kickme444's departure was not well-publicized until after /u/chooter's, so it seems natural that the response was more muted. But more fundamentally, I'm not looking for sexism for the sake of looking for sexism: I'm looking for plausible causes of why one person was on the receiving end of way more obviously awful behavior than another, and how we can minimize the vitriol that anyone gets. If sexism is a plausible cause, and calling it what it is helps to eliminate it, then let's do that.

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.

There's something offputting about referring to people by their reddit usernames as if that's an important facet to their personhood. It makes me think, perhaps without justification, that you have your identity far too tied up in a silly website.

I don't know all of their names off the top of my head, and I assume most people reading don't, either, so I went with the Reddit usernames to optimize for clarity and consistency (and Googlability), at the risk of being depersonalizing.

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.

This is off-topic, but you might like this little thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3chaut/why_...

>So now she got all those threats because she's a woman? What?

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.

> 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."

I have a riddle for you. If literally the only content of what someone says is "Rape is Bad" and a person disagrees.... Does the disagreeing person support rape?

Let's get two things out there right now:

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.

Show me the other CONTENT in this post besides that rape and death threats are appalling.

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.

I'm not seeing any mention of rape of death threats in the post you pasted. You're projecting your own assumption that the peripheral vitriol the comment is talking about consisted of only rape and death threats.

Take a step back and try look at it with a clear head. Criticism can take many other forms, you know...

So by being aware of the actual vitriol that this person publicly received, which very much did include rape and death threats. I am wrong to think when that post mentions the vitriol being appalling, they are referring to the the rape and death threats which were said? Alright my bad, next time I will assume they mean that well mannered posts about the person's inability to manage a company, which also very much existed and probably in greater number, were in fact appalling.

Anonymity doesn't make any "normal person" start spewing death threats and rape threats. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is just an excuse bad people tell themselves to justify their antisocial behavior.