It's jarring -- that is, newsworthy -- to see overt sexist or racist remarks with hundreds of upvotes, suggesting at least widespread if not majority support. So, yeah, that fact is going to find its way into many articles.
What is the argument against Pao anyway? It seems like the only non-personal complaints I've heard are that FatPeopleHate was banned and a well-liked moderator was fired on her watch. Is there more to it?
There's lots more to it. While I agree with the banning of FPH, the underlying policy that justified it was deeply flawed. The harassment policy was woefully vague to the point of absurdity.
There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago, and as we found out today, only last week dedicated employees to work on it; after the defaults revolted.
This is a small subset of all of the complaints of reddit's direction under Pao's leadership.
Honestly, I think she's a lovely person. I don't think she deserves a percent of the shit that's been thrown her way, but she definitely hasn't been an efficient CEO for reddit.
and by lots you mean...that's about it. Honestly if "There's the fact that she promised better moderator tools something like 6 months ago" was a good criteria for booting a CEO, Reddit would have had ~20 CEOs by now.
That was the actual problem, that mods have never had the tools they need, but that's not why she's resigning/being fired.
No, there's more to it. Because I don't want to drag her personal life into it (which does play a role), there were the huge problems with the AMA app, the new privacy policy (which while I agreed with, many didnt), Reddit Notes (the reddit cryptocurrency; perhaps the most jaw-droppingly stupid move in her tenure), and really, many more things.
You must be detached from reality and what a CEO does if you think those deserve being fired for. And seriously even insinuating that her personal life has anything to do with this is frankly disgusting behaviour.
Let me ask you about Brendan Eich, previously CEO of Mozilla. He contributed money to anti-prop 8 causes in California. He was fired from Mozilla because he supported anti-gay marriage causes. Was it wrong of mozilla to fire him because of his support?
If you say it was wrong, I will respect that we have different views on this issue.
If you think it's OK to fire Eich but not even bring up Pao's personal life, I will call you a hypocrite.
What you're describing are basically non-events in the history of bad decisions made at reddit (and like half of them come from Yishan's tenure, anyways). And reddit survived just fine every time, mind you.
There really wasn't anything overly egregious here except an angry internet mob. If it weren't for the subreddit blackout (which, again, was from an issue boiling over for years) timed so soon after the FPH shutdown I would give good odds it would have dissipated and we wouldn't be seeing this resignation today.
She was the CEO, she ultimately bore responsibility for every single decision made in her tenure. Regardless if initiatives were started under a previous CEO, she allowed bad decisions to be made public in her tenure where she had the power to stop them.
Like it or not, the CEO is ultimately responsible for every single thing a company does. That's pretty much their job.
Edit: Also, I have been on reddit for nearly 10 years. I've followed every stupid decision made since comments were implemented. I have never seen a period of bad decisions like this before Pao.
Edit 2: I also think it's sort of shitty for you to move the goalposts. You basically said "there's nothing else major" about Pao to criticize. As soon as I brought up three more things to criticize - well, they weren't important and everyone else is responsible.
Victoria's firing was the final straw. The general complaint is that moderators are in an abusive unpaid relationship with reddit and are treated like crap, that she is/was completely out of touch with the reddit userbase (going so far as posting a link to her own inbox in /r/self in a grandma-emailing-c:\\paths.jpg fashion; something she later explained as an administrative mishap), that she got rid of well-liked programs such as redditgifts and was behind other much less popular programs and very unpopular decisions on the site. And the whole lawsuit thing didn't help, either.
She doesn't deserve the blame for all of it, but things easily snowball on reddit. Once the mob finds its pitchforks, there's no stopping it. That's not unique to reddit in any way.
>It's jarring -- that is, newsworthy -- to see overt sexist or racist remarks with hundreds of upvotes, suggesting at least widespread if not majority support. So, yeah, that fact is going to find its way into many articles.
There is a polarising effect which occurs in these kinds of threads (or communities discussions as a whole): once the vitriol has met a critical mass the more moderate people tend to just avoid the whole thing (not participating, likely not even observing). So all that's left are the extremists who keep perpetuating it.
What is the argument against Pao anyway? It seems like the only non-personal complaints I've heard are that FatPeopleHate was banned and a well-liked moderator was fired on her watch. Is there more to it?