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_...