Anonymous asked:
Oy vey. I hate to have to get into this, but since everyone else is twisting the story, I will grudgingly give my perspective. Source: read Reddit daily, though practically never post except for occasional forays into /r/nootropics which is well-insulated from site politics.
So first of all - Pao originally got in trouble for banning the subreddit /fatpeoplehate, which was about hating fat people. There was sort of a free speech issue there, and I’m glad people questioned it, but her team said that it wasn’t about the idea banning them for saying mean things, it was about banning them for “brigading”, which means inciting people to actually do mean stuff (in this case, find fat people on Reddit and yell at them and downvote their posts). Brigading is against the rules, is a nasty thing to do in any case, and in the end most Redditors (including me) agreed that the ban was justified despite the site’s broad anti-censorship policies. Yes, there was some ill will because nobody would touch /ShitRedditSays, which was a social justice subreddit dedicated to brigading the opponents of social justice, but at this point I don’t expect anybody to apply the same rules to the SJ people as the rest of us, so whatever. The point is, the rules she used for everyone else seemed fair enough.
The problem started when the administration started shadowbanning anybody who complained about the new policy or about Pao personally. Shadowbanning is when you give someone a special ban that makes it look like they’re not banned, so they just keep posting but nobody else can see their posts. It’s usually only used for spambots and the absolute worst kind of troll who can’t be dispatched any other way. Banning people who disagree with admin decisions is excessive; shadowbanning them is way beyond any conceivable pale unless you are *aggressively* signaling that you don’t care what users think. This was when they lost me.
Then they fired a very popular Reddit employee with zero notice or explanation, which disrupted a lot of communities that were depending on her work. They still haven’t explained why, and it brought to the fore some long-standing resentment by the community leaders that the admins were running roughshod over them and totally failing to support them. I don’t know that much about this because I’ve never been involved in any community management, but a lot of people temporarily shut down their communities in protest. which brought a lot of the site to a halt. Some people started a petition to fire Pao, it got lots of signatures, and eventually she decided to quit.
People were very angry about the issues, and rightly so in my opinion, but I won’t claim that this was entirely about the issues and didn’t relate at all to Pao’s personal characteristics. But contrary to what you’ll read, the characteristics problem wasn’t that she was a woman and that all Redditors are sexists who hate women. It was that she was kind of the new poster girl for people who accuse everyone else of sexism in order to cover up their own personal failings. She had just come off of a gender discrimination case where she sued her former employer for millions of dollars for firing her. The employer presented this spectacular paper trail of misconduct and poor performance on her part, of them giving her warnings again and again, et cetera, and the court ruled that anyone would have been justified in firing her and there was no gender discrimination involved. Then she turned around and threatened to appeal unless the company give her $2.7 million, which coincidentally was exactly the same amount that her husband had recently been fined for some kind of fraud charge that they needed to pay off quickly. Worse, the media ignored all of this and framed it as “LOOK A WOMAN IS IN TROUBLE THAT MEANS ALL SILICON VALLEY NERDS EVERYWHERE ARE SEXIST AND SHE IS A HERO”. She was kind of the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley, entitlement, shoddy Internet journalist hit jobs, et cetera. Redditors are pretty into Silicon Valley politics and they were following this very closely and mostly using her as a symbol of what not to do. Kind of the Donald Trump of the tech world.
And then someone announces that she’s the new CEO. She’d never had anything to do with Reddit before, didn’t really seem to know how to use the website, and apparently got the job because she was a personal friend of previous CEO Yishan Wong.
You’ve seen some of the (fully justified) Donald Trump mockery on Tumblr. Imagine if tomorrow, Yahoo announces Trump is the new Tumblr CEO. That gives you a pretty good idea of about where Redditors’ feelings were. And then the next day CEO Trump decides to ban slash fanfiction because it’s immoral. And then he deletes the Tumblrs of anyone who complains about him. And then he fires the most popular Tumblr employee (are any Tumblr employees popular? Imagine there was a non-terrible Tumblr employee, and new CEO Donald Trump fired him). Do you think there might be a little bit of hostility?
But she was a woman and Redditors are mostly men. According to scandalous rumors, some might even be white men. And so of course the entire media lights up about how the only possible explanation is that Redditors are a bunch of racist, sexist neckbeards. You might think I’m exaggerating, but I refer you to Vox: “Former Reddit CEO explains “what the racist-sexist neckbeards don’t understand” - where, for example, the former CEO says that Redditors are racist sexist neckbeards, and that this whole affair was actually part of a Xanatos Gambit to protect free speech, which is now cancelled because we have proven ourselves unworthy of it. At this point, are you starting to get a sense of why Redditors and the Reddit administration might not be on entirely peachy terms?
In other words, it was exactly like every other day in the tech culture wars.
