I think you're underestimating the backlash on firing Victoria. See reddit is currently trying to find a way to make money for it's investors. It needs to both grow larger and return more money per user in order to accomplish this. Current rumor on the firing is that Victoria was pressing back on a lot of these monetization strategies so they got rid of her. The simple fact is that Snapzu and Voat can exist being smaller than reddit, but reddit can't exist being smaller than what it is.
If reddit continues to hemorage users to other sites, investors will pull out and reddit will be sold all the same as Digg was. Afterall the primary reason Digg went down was the community's distaste in efforts to regulate power users, and it's monetization strategies. reddit was the promise land of a more equal impact of user contribution, and a more fair monetization strategy than what Digg delivered. Victoria was a band-aid on reddit's current functional deficiencies and a liaison between the community and delivering content which generated money. They just ripped off that band-aid w/o fixing the underlying issues.
It's possible that the backlash will grow into something that will have an effect on reddit's revenue stream. However, that still remains to be seen. I don't think people really appreciate just how many contributors there are and how diverse the demographics are. We look at the bigger ones like /r/politics and /r/atheism that have a strong liberal demographic and judge the whole site by them, but that's a mistake. There's a CNN article posted on reddit about over 150,000 names being posted to a petition to remove Ellen Pao as CEO, but what people don't realize is that 200,000 users isn't even a tenth of the biggest subreddits. The number of users, both active and lurkers, number in the millions.
Yes, this could grow into a real problem for reddit in general and Ellen specifically. But that doesn't mean it's guaranteed.
I think you're underestimating the backlash on firing Victoria. See reddit is currently trying to find a way to make money for it's investors. It needs to both grow larger and return more money per user in order to accomplish this. Current rumor on the firing is that Victoria was pressing back on a lot of these monetization strategies so they got rid of her. The simple fact is that Snapzu and Voat can exist being smaller than reddit, but reddit can't exist being smaller than what it is.
If reddit continues to hemorage users to other sites, investors will pull out and reddit will be sold all the same as Digg was. Afterall the primary reason Digg went down was the community's distaste in efforts to regulate power users, and it's monetization strategies. reddit was the promise land of a more equal impact of user contribution, and a more fair monetization strategy than what Digg delivered. Victoria was a band-aid on reddit's current functional deficiencies and a liaison between the community and delivering content which generated money. They just ripped off that band-aid w/o fixing the underlying issues.
It's possible that the backlash will grow into something that will have an effect on reddit's revenue stream. However, that still remains to be seen. I don't think people really appreciate just how many contributors there are and how diverse the demographics are. We look at the bigger ones like /r/politics and /r/atheism that have a strong liberal demographic and judge the whole site by them, but that's a mistake. There's a CNN article posted on reddit about over 150,000 names being posted to a petition to remove Ellen Pao as CEO, but what people don't realize is that 200,000 users isn't even a tenth of the biggest subreddits. The number of users, both active and lurkers, number in the millions.
Yes, this could grow into a real problem for reddit in general and Ellen specifically. But that doesn't mean it's guaranteed.