“Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.
What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists
I don't even use Reddit and Sam's quote was so odd it caused me to comment below (probably turning more and more grey by the moment).
In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community.
I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.
Considering that it was Sam who brought in Ellen, what do expect him to say? if that isn't enough to warrant 'corporatespeak' over-drive, consider that Ellen really enjoys suing her employers and she still hasn't been able to completely pay her legal fees for the last case she lost.
Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?
She walked in to a hot mess of a situation after the previous CEO resigned on the spot and kept the company from falling apart (which I thought was a live concern at the time). You try doing that some day.
I imagine it's a lot easier to just have the cash and power to swap out those who threw their hearts out on the line. Big pictures obscure the small pictures of the lives caught in the meat grinder of the march of capital.
Becoming a VC has become the new beginning of the end for any humanity left in a human being.
It's hard to ignore the external circumstances that lead to the previous CEO resigning on the spot. Maybe not everyone needs to work in the most expensive city of all to keep a favorite pet startup in startup mode.
Maybe. I'm sure a large amount of redditors (maybe not majority) appreciate a well-run IAmA which manages bringing in celebrities and other big names. Pao's actions as CEO directly impacted their ability to do that.
Banning fph was a good start. "The community" is actually Reddit's number one problem. It has allowed a large contingent of hateful assholes to congregate there. If this continues the company has no future.
I suspect she pissed off a very small, but very vocal minority. Most people (myself included) don't really know or care about Pao one way or the other.
Sam and the board are happy and pleased with her performance because she played the part of the suit pushing an over-corporate monetization-focused agenda and then eventually was offered up as a "sacrifice to the reddit ideals", and at the same time she moved the goal posts entirely so now the new CEO and board can "scale back" Ellen's initiatives but only part way, therefore simultaneously putting them in a more monetize-able position AND making them look like they are "fixing what Ellen did".
My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.
Supplemental note: I'm not saying they did this by design or that this means Ellen succeeded. The ideal outcome for her would have been to manage that negotiation and positioning herself, identifying and settling into the middle ground and coming out the other side still in charge - this didn't happen, and the turnover does not make any of the parties look good. Still, she tried and probably benefited the business-side of things in some way - the next 12 months will see whether these benefits outweigh the reputation costs.
With reddit gold most of Reddit has no problem with Reddit making money if they do it the right way. But if it means censoring content and speech and changing the community interaction that is totally unacceptable.
I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.
The job she did was sort of a phenomenon, in that someone like me who never even thinks of Reddit was reminded numerous times why that's a good thing. Most CEOs don't do that!
What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists