• wekjak
    +7

    There are plenty of reasons to criticize Ellen Pao without engaging in sexism or racism. Given the details of her career, she seems like a bad fit for the reddit community. But, I believe that she is pretty much being paid to be a scapegoat for investors wanting to see returns on their investment.

    • sushmonster
      +6

      But many people on reddit ARE engaging in racism and sexism; are we really supposed to be okay with that because we think she's bad at her job?

      • wekjak
        +6

        I think racism and sexism is disgusting, but I expect it and think that there should be platforms on which it is okay to express it. I also think it's perfectly acceptable to ban it on other platforms. You don't have to be okay with it. That's not what I'm saying.

        But to reduce the dislike for Pao down to its crudest form is not doing justice to the situation.

      • blue2501
        +2

        Define "many". It's easy to generalize a large population like Reddit by seeing a few comments from the minority.

      • uncrtv
        +2

        You make a good point, but I don't think there is anything we can do. A large community like Reddit is bound to attract bad people with bad behaviour. A smaller community will be much more reasonable with its criticism, as you can see here on Snapzu. I don't think anyone here is okay with making racist and sexist remarks about Ellen Pao.

        • Rothulfossil
          +3

          It's at least part of the reason I decided to check out Snapzu. There are a lot of racist and sexist and horrible people out there. When reddit gets big enough and becomes more representative of the general population, these people come out of the woodwork.

          I really wish we could do more to eliminate that sort of thinking. It has to happen, but it'll take a long time and an obscene amount of work. For the time being, the only true recourse is to run away and group up with other rational people. (That's not to say Snapzu's community is inherently better than reddit's. Were this site to get as big as reddit, I'm sure we'd face the same problems. So it goes.)

          • smackababy
            +3

            Yup, and with that large a userbase there'd inevitably be some scandal where (pulling some super unlikely scenario out of nowhere) someone creates a tribe dedicated to posting sexualized pictures of minors. Then the Snapzu admins would have to step in and take it down or risk massive social or even legal repercussions, a small but loud segment of users would cry censorship and a chunk of the community would splinter off to the next platform (followed slowly by the rest of the users), and the cycle would repeat anew.

          • Rothulfossil
            +2
            @smackababy -

            It'd be nice if we, the users of Snapzu, could put together a manifesto detailing what ethical atmosphere we want to maintain here. We could definitely learn from the mistakes of reddit regarding hate speech, sexualizing minors, etc. As long as it's made clear from the beginning that this isn't an anarchistic platform with 100% free speech, but still encouraging discussion from all walks of life, we shouldn't have a problem.