9 years ago
54
Former Reddit CEO says Ellen Pao was framed
Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong accuses co-founder Alexis Ohanian of setting Ellen Pao up for a fall.
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http://www.businessinsider.com
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Really, over the past week or so, my opinions of Ellen Pao and Alexis Ohanian have switched. I though Alexis had minor administrative issues and Ellen was the one really fucking things up. Now I think Alexis is the asshole and Ellen is the one who just was having trouble as an administrator. I mean seriously, he saw that entire drama go down, and he just sat silently until she was finally ousted, until she finally couldn't take it anymore (I know she said she had differences of opinion with the board, but let's be honest here, it was the community). What a piece of shit. He let a person get death threats for something she didn't do. Just let that sink in to you for a second. Alexis was the person who deserved to get ousted, not her.
I mean seriously, fuck that. Reddit's top brass at this point are just acting like a bunch of high schoolers, and the community is acting like middle schoolers. I pretty much only go on sports subreddits when I go back there. I'm so glad you gave me an invite code
Ellen was a fish out of the water with no one to help her and so she did practically nothing. But she pulled some crazy shenanigans in the past which are public record so blaming her is easy. She reacted modestly and safely (which angered the community that wanted actual communication) but Alexis reacted by throwing gas on the fire for the lulz.
We all know how he felt about the whole thing with his "Popcorn tastes good" comment in r/subredditdrama. What a poor excuse for a human being.
Yeah, he doesn't seem like he's sorry. He's saying "don't poke me with your pictchfork". And he continues to say "we don't talk about employees terminations" even after Yishan revealed the actual reason for the firing : Alexis hated Victoria's post and ordered Pao to fire her. Yishan, rightfully, blames Alexis for letting Pao take all the blame.
I don't know. What happened?
I was with you until this line. What does her being a woman have to do with this?
Sorry, I didn't mean that in a way that her gender influenced it. I would have said "He let a man get death threats..." if it was a man. It was just a style of writing. Wasn't trying to imply that her gender had anything to do with it.
Edit: I edited it, just to make the message a bit more clear.
Gotcha.
I'm glad I made the switch to Snapzu.
Where the crowd is intelligent enough to cover their own accidental display of institutionalised sexism.
...only joking /u/picklefingers ;)
Or how someone can say "institutionalized sexism" without being covered in 12 tons of hypothetical fecal matter in 5 seconds.
That's certainly a great benefit of the site. I got tired of all the hypothetical fecal matter. I had to take a lot of hypothetical showers.
Honestly the main and only huge mistake I have seen been made was not informing and preparing the AMA mods for the major changes to their sub. It seems like they didn't go private out of protest alone. They couldn't figure out what to do and weren't prepared for Victoria leaving. Also, it was pretty evident from the beginning that /u/kn0thing was responsible for letting victoria go. /u/kn0thing actually said as much at the time it happened, but no one would listen because you can't stop the Ellen Pao hate train. I was following all the drama closely from the beginning at SRD.
Basically what I'm saying is please don't jump onto another hate train. All of this witch-hunting and hate is by far the worst part of reddit and the community.
I'm not on a hate train. I was never on an Ellen Pao hate train to begin with. More of a dislike train, and I still hold to my opinion that she should not have been CEO from the beginning. I think the way that the reddit community reacted to all of this was just sad and immature. Here's the thing. As far as I can tell, /u/kn0thing only really referenced it in a couple of somewhat buried comments, and it seems the only comment of his about it that gained traction was made after Ellen's resignation. However, Ellen was the one who actually made a public announcement apologizing. I can forgive anybody who didn't know about kn0thing's participation because most people aren't into digging deep into those reddit threads. What people do see is a CEO apologizing on the front page for what has happened so it is only natural for people to think it was her doing. At any time, he could have cleared up the accusations and taken a huge load off of her. But he doesn't.
And I am in no way advocating for a witch hunt. That is one of the most toxic aspects of the reddit community and I hope the vigilante justice side of reddit stays far away from snapzu. I am just expressing my opinion on Alexis. The way he has acted (and failed to act upon) in the past 10 days has made me lose all of my respect for him. Even in the case he wasn't the one to fire Victoria, he hasn't spoken out AT ALL about the treatment that Ellen received. It took Sam Altman, who isn't an active redditor in any way, to break the silence about Ellen's treatment.
Don't forget "popcorn tastes good".
There will likely never be a concrete answer as to what happened, who was to blame, and how it went down. Likely it was a cluster-f*** of many people dropping balls, waiting to see what would happen, and bad decisions. It is what it is now, however. I am horrified at the mob mentality that was shown and the pure hate that was spewed towards Pao, whether or not she deserved any blame. No one should be treated like that.
It will likely forever be a thing of "he said, she said - but really we can't talk about it" from Reddit, no matter who the CEO is.
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But this tale of drama is kinda ridiculous, not gonna lie.
I agree though that the treatment of Pao is unacceptable however. No matter if she did anything horrible to the site, death threats and personal harassment are unacceptable.
Yeah, at this point it's worse than a Days of Our Lives episode level drama.
I just can't imagine getting to that point. Like, I can count on two fingers the number of people in my entire life I've actually wished physical harm upon. Not even death, but maiming possibly. Those are people I know in my life, not on a computer screen. And to get that angry over someone who truly has no idea who you are beyond some pixels on a screen (if they even know that much) is just baffling.
This is what happens when people with very little experience with how the real world works are given a direct line to anyone they don't like.
99% of the people who sent those messages probably would never do anything and are just idiots overstating their ridiculously blown out of proportion rage. However, since there is no way of separating the cruel but harmless jackasses from the actual threats, all of those now have to be taken seriously.
I just hope our future generations understand better how to respect each other through the web, as it is an amazing tool that has far better purposes than this.
The future of the internet is so very unclear for just this reason - the people who feel a brazen sense of anger for things and people that are so far beyond their control. It is both a boon and a burden for sure. Even when I was new to the internet (hello 1994), I never go to the point where I felt that bloated sense of self-importance over others on the internet. If anything, I keep feeling smaller and almost struggle to have my voice heard.
To be honest I feel like the title is a bit sensationalist (and I know that is the title on the source page). To me, it implies that this was a deliberate action to make Pao look bad, which is not my impression after reading Yishan's comment. Reddit just reacted by throwing all of the blame onto Pao before knowing anything about the situation (even before anyone knew whether there was a valid reason for letting go of Victoria). I agree that Alexis should've come forward earlier, but even if he did very few people would've seen a comment downvoted into oblivion, and the Pao hate train was maximum velocity rather quickly so there was barely any window of opportunity to do so.
Edit: After thinking about it some more, there were other options, such as making a post on /r/blog or /r/announcements for transparency. I guess in general the entire situation was just handled atrociously anyways.
Yishan is largely responsible for what was blamed on Ellen Pao.
If you look at the team page of reddit, you notice that most of them left or were fired, most in them last year. Why? Because Yishan said "You're all moving to SF or you're fired!". Most didn't want to relocate. This meant that reddit became staffed by a majority of people who didn't know reddit, and didn't know the community led by a CEO that didn't know reddit and had not much people she could rely on to teach her.
According to admin deimorz (who ironically was exempted from the move by being a remote worker from Canada), this is the root of their latest woes.
And the ultimate irony in all of this is that the move was engineered to foster better communication!
Reddit is really unprofessional. Why would air their laundry in such a way?
I guess its good for them, look how much traffic they are getting over this whole fiasco. Every one and their brother is writing an article about Reddit right now. People that have never heard about Reddit are going to check out all the drama and see what this is all about.
"There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary."
Popcorn tastes good!
I don't think Yishan Wong is part of Reddit (the company) anymore, so he can say whatever he wants and Reddit can do sod all about it. So I don't think this reflects on Reddit's professionalism -- which is abysmal, I agree, but not because of this. I think it's very likely that the actual current management dearly wishes Wong had just shut up.
All I can say is, it's very hard to form an objective opinion based on all this drama. Bear in mind, Wong left his post as CEO over a disagreement with the board (I think it involved "office space" or some such), and because he was just fed up. I don't recall the exact words, but that's the gist that I seem to remember. Point is: I don't think it's unlikely he has a chip on his shoulder, and may be more inclined than it's due to say damning things about Reddit's board. Then there's the author of this article, Weinberger. I remember him as one of those "progressive" types who will fawn over a woman CEO just because she's a woman, regularly banging on about society's terrible misogyiny and all that jazz. So I'd take his editorialising with a grain of salt, too.
Not that I'm defending kn0thing, mind you -- smug git did annoy me with the popcorn thing. But I'm saying, we don't really know. kn0thing is on record on that very thread saying he reported to Pao, which makes me inclined to believe there is not much substance to this article.
Wow. Just wow. I can't believe the way yishan and kn0thing are going at each other. You'd think they'd say that stuff behind the scenes.
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I just feel like the whole reddit boat is sinking. You can tell it's not in good hands when office politics are so bad that it's leaking to the community and firing up a shitstorm. If any of the heads of reddit were really competent at what they do we wouldn't hear a thing about it. I'm glad I jumped ship to Snapzu when I did.
The more and more I read, slowly all of Reddit's administrative staff seem like toxic idiots. Every time shit goes down different admins say and do different things, despite they now literally sit next to each other in one office, no unity. They let their dialogues with the users be emotionally influenced, no basic sense of PR. They make ambiguous rules, then only enforce them when they want. They administrate a community that makes them all the content they could ever want and then treat them like dirt when they want something in return, I can hardly use the site without RES, a user-built extension to add simple functionality to "The Frontpage of the Internet". What a joke. Ever tried to get into contact with the administration? Forget it, even the default mods need connections for that.
Reminds me of past times where Bulletin Boards were the shit and teenagers could get their first fix of power by moderating. Good thing I left that behind, like I did Reddit now.
Great. So what?
Talking about it now does nothing. But thanks for the visions from the future, Captain Hindsight.
The whole situation was handled incredibly poorly from the top down, regardless of who's "to blame".
We'll see how true this is, after the court case.
I have to say, Reddit has been a ridiculous source of drama for the past few weeks. Its almost like someone is scripting this stuff.
I doubt if this is legit. These are insiders to reddit and they've been known to manipulate their masses with drama. "Popcorn tastes good". Also, though I've stopped reading all the updates from the reddit ceos/admins/mods now, in the last ones I've read, there really was no indication that what they're saying here is what was happening.
By the numbers:
* Pao is leaving the CEO position but still staying in the company
* People are suspicious and unhappy of the above
* For her to be effective, they need her to be liked, or at least tolerated
* People are getting shuffled but, policy-wise, they are going ahead with their changes
* They want to do above as painlessly (for them) as possible
To me, it seems like what they're doing now is muddying the waters, defusing the blame and absolving Pao of blame. The end game is still the same, they just want everyone scrambling around, chasing non-issues
Drama after Drama.
Don't they know how to create anything else?
Over this period of time I am actually confused as for whom to blame or what the hell is happening.
Oh Snap!
If your the boss you take the good and the bad. It looks more and more like it was a mutiny from within to get her to step down,(Along with whipping Reddit into a lynch mob) just my opinion.
Like it was just one thing or one person. For a melt down of such epic proportions there are wholesale problems with the systems and many people will have contributed. Dispatching the CEO is no guarantee the rot will stop.
What an incredible bunch of asscunt mega-egos. Go die, and disappear on the scrapheap of dead bits!
"Asscunt" sounds like the outcome of some terrible surgery.