
Details Emerge About Victoria Taylor’s Dismissal at Reddit - warunsl
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-about-victoria-taylors-dismissal-at-reddit/
======
jewbacca
Yishan Wong 2 days ago:

> Here's one.

> In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the
> sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under
> the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize
> its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where
> reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from
> the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.

> Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology
> manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview
> panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this
> one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde
> Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to
> employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent,
> bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After
> continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's
> ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led
> by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process
> would take a seat on the board.

> Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-
> improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a
> new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for
> the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as
> CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast
> to a position as minority shareholder.

> JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled/cszjqg2)

~~~
tptacek
It's interesting that people criticized Pao for not being very engaged with
the Reddit community (she was famously dinged for not knowing how to send a
private message). Yishan Wong's repeated indiscretions show the downside of
having Reddit's CEO also be an active Redditor.

~~~
nostrademons
"Downside" depends on which side you're on. From the perspective of an
ordinary Redditor, Yishan forthrightness and transparency has probably been
quite refreshing. From the perspective of the board, I bet they very much
appreciate Ellen Pao's professionalism and silence.

Reddit is basically a society of 36M people now, roughly the size of Iraq. If
it were a country, it'd be the 36th largest, bigger than Canada, Venezuela,
and Taiwan. r/IAmA alone has 8.6M subscribers, r/AskReddit has 9M.

The biggest challenge of a leader is aligning interests. Many of those
"citizens" are not aligned with the board, and are not even aligned with each
other. It's no wonder that they keep burning through CEOs. Yishan may have
been more aligned with the Reddit userbase (although even then, a good portion
of the site hated him) and clashed with the board, while Ellen tried to please
the board and ended up pissing off the whole userbase.

~~~
tptacek
How did Pao piss off the userbase? What are the charges on her indictment?

* She was CEO at a time when Alexis Ohanian terminated Victoria Taylor. But Ohanian was the chairman of the company, Pao's immediate superior. And the circumstances of Pao's accession to CEO didn't leave much time for the company to sort the problems of an operational chairman out: Pao was brought in as interim CEO at the same time as Ohanian was installed.

* She was a principal in a high-profile gender discrimination law suit against a giant venture capital firm where she previously worked. One wonders what this had to do with her tenure at Reddit, but it _leads off_ the popular petition for her ouster.

* She presided directly over the termination of David Croach, who had leukemia. Croach claims he was terminated because he was unable to perform his job as community manager, and that he was unable because he was required to work from San Francisco --- a policy created by Yishan Wong. Reddit, through a spokesperson, disputed the veracity of Croach's story. We don't know why he was fired, but it seems like we do know that he was not --- as Pao's critics are very, very fond of saying --- simply fired "for having leukemia".

* She is married to Buddy Fletcher, who presided over a failed hedge fund and is accused of impropriety. This too is prominently recorded in the petition for her ouster, and, like her lawsuit, has little to do with her operational role. She is also accused of having deleted posts critical of her and her husband, but admins at Reddit later clarified that she not done that --- which makes sense, since we're talking about someone who couldn't even figure out how to send a private message on Reddit.

* She presided over a policy that banned the FPH subreddit. Reddit "free speech" advocates are very fond of suggesting that Pao was cracking down on objectionable speech at Reddit, and doing so selectively, so that white power subreddits were left to stand while FPH was banned. Of course, this leaves out the fact that FPH was banned for _harassment_ , not for hosting hate speech.

What am I missing?

I don't know that any of these summaries are dispositive. Maybe the FPH issue
is more complicated than I realize. Maybe Croach's termination really was mis-
handled (if he was fired simply for having leukemia, he has a very
straightforward legal case against Reddit).

I only ask that we do not accept uncritically the notion that Pao placated the
board at the expense of Reddit's community.

~~~
jewbacca
Question: How comfortable are you with well-upvoted and -participated-in
discussion threads -- like the one we are participating in here -- suddenly
dropping out of visibility on a community you contribute to in a matter of
minutes, without explicit explanation and behaving other than how you might
expect from the published details of the local ranking algorithm and official
moderation policies, as this one has?

Your answer to this question might relate to the "popular" perception of the
leader of reddit in the past ~year, whether honestly and solely earned by them
or not.

~~~
tptacek
Very. I have pet issues that I'll participate in, but HN is not a forum for
resolving the tech industry's controversies.

To me, the most important moderation goal for HN is ensuring that members
remain collegial and capable of discussion, even though we wildly different
backgrounds and experiences.

"Hot" controversies --- Reddit is one, most political stories also --- can
harm that goal. People get nasty in them. If dropping hot stories off the
front page reduces nastiness, I am all for it.

Reddit is not HN. I have no idea how Reddit should be moderated. I try to
minimize my participation on Reddit, because it's not moderated in a way that
I find compatible with how I want to interact with people. That doesn't make
Reddit evil, just, not for me.

(I am a semi-avid consumer of the "good" stuff on Reddit, though).

~~~
jewbacca
Fair enough, I appreciate your perspective. Here is an attempt to communicate
my own, as someone "closer" to Reddit:

For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most
valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important
part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world
around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably
personal.

To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a
collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a
non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to
characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which
imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.

The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural
phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is
instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained
part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit
threads will exist and have an active discussion on _any_ given topic is a
given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own,
it is fundamentally not the same thing.

It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed,
something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big
and small.

One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which
the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand
comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up
as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on
the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with
Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the
problem with Reddit.

But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating,
and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.

For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular
subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are
systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements
currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is
broken.

\----

The main thing is (the perception that):

 _Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function._
That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.

\----

To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage,
having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems
to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything
that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the
damage.

Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao. _Especially_ after she made public
statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the
effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended
cognition, we intent to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we
don't consider important".

In the end, I very strongly suspect that the problem is much deeper and
probably well beyond any control of the central management. If there were a
way to, I would put money down on the prediction that the Reddit crisis, a
direct continuation of the exact same crisis that's currently associated with
Ellen Pao, will continue.

~~~
jewbacca
Also important to understanding this:

To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not
entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.

Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately
seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive
dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and
opinions.

To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit
as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly
and immediately under threat.

Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very
large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most
visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as
valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself.
So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have
in public.

------
exstudent2
It is the nature of the role of CEO that you're going to take the heat for all
company decisions. That's one of the justifications for their outsized
compensation. Greater risk = greater reward. No one is forced to be CEO and
being an executive essentially means you live your life on the line every day.
It's not for everyone.

There was another thread on this earlier today and I think my comment there is
applicable here too...

\--

Yishan seems to love to do stuff like this. While I personally find it
interesting, it also seems pretty unprofessional. Some issues with this
particular comment:

1\. Yishan no longer works at Reddit so I don't think he can be considered an
authoritative source for what happened.

2\. Yishan appointed Pao so isn't unbiased when discussing her.

3\. The CEO's job is to represent the company. The chairman's job is to
appoint the CEO. The outcome of events seems correct even if what Yishan says
is true. reply

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _It is the nature of the role of CEO that you 're going to take the heat for
> all company decisions. That's one of the justifications for their outsized
> compensation. Greater risk = greater reward. No one is forced to be CEO and
> being an executive essentially means you live your life on the line every
> day. It's not for everyone._

I rather doubt that Ellen Pao's job description included "Dive under the bus
to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too cowardly to own them."

Stop making excuses for assholes.

~~~
exstudent2
We don't actually know if that's what happened, this is based on a potentially
disgruntled opinion of a former CEO.

Secondly, "Dive under the bus to cover up bad decisions of coworkers too
cowardly to own them." is almost the precise definition of what the CEO role
is. You represent the whole company for better or worse. You are the face of
the company.

~~~
Avenger42
Why wouldn't it be "fire employees whose bad decisions are reflecting badly on
the company, even if those employees are also on the board of directors"?

~~~
exstudent2
That's certainly one of their tasks. Pao didn't execute on that though.

------
techman9
My suspicion is that Victoria was terminated for entirely legitimate reasons
unrelated to the operation of /r/IAmA. She was a valuable employee and
community member, and I don't believe the Reddit administration is foolish
enough to remove her just because they wanted to modify (and possibly
monetize) the format of AmAs. Much of the Reddit community frequently forgets
that Reddit is a business (owned by a multinational media conglomerate, no
less) that sometimes needs to make business decisions.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _My suspicion is that Victoria was terminated for entirely legitimate
> reasons unrelated to the operation of /r/IAmA._

If so, I really don't understand why there hasn't been an official
justification yet. So much of the rage could have been defused by a prompt and
earnest explanation of why she was fired. The fact that that hasn't happened
seems to imply that the real reason would only make people angrier.

~~~
tptacek
I don't understand why people seem to believe that if they just keep angrily
asking about it, the company will divulge the reason for Taylor's severance.
It is _extremely_ atypical for companies to reveal why they've chosen to let
employees go.

It is also, literally, none of our business. Did Taylor ask people to dig into
her personnel story? In a situation involving something as private and
sensitive and reputational as a termination, you would want more than tea leaf
reading: you'd want an overt affirmative consent from Taylor that she wanted
the world talking about what happened to her at Reddit.

Apologies if that's what's happened, but I haven't seen it.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Why do you think people believe that? Maybe they are just trolls? Maybe they
will just ask because it's easy to ask and someone might respond eventually.

It's not uncommon for a corporation to state why they are terminating an
employee. GM terminates known engineers as scapegoats for negligence resulting
in multiple deaths; many firms pre-announce mass terminations; some shut-down
with no notice, save a publicly posted letter on the front door of their
building telling the employees who show up for work that day that they no
longer have a job ("sorry! but we _tried_ ").

Anyway, reddit left AMA out to dry by not arranging some kind of transition
plan for the community, and instead created the perception of operating in
secret to unknown ends.

~~~
tptacek
I think people believe it because they want to believe it. Knowing feeds
drama. Not knowing starves it.

It is very uncommon for companies to reveal reasons for employee termination.
It may seem like that's not the case because the only termination stories you
pay attention to are the newsworthy ones where the cause was stated, but
that's an artifact of selection bias. Tens of thousands of people are let go
every year from tech companies and their stories are never told.

------
okasaki
Ehm. This was known since the beginning:
[https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0hcz/welcome_back/](https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0hcz/welcome_back/)

> Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by /u/kn0thing.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Interesting. It's the first I've heard of it.

IIRC, it was also known from the beginning that the r/ShitNiggersSay et al.
were banned, not for being offensive, but for doxxing people in violation of
Reddit's few explicit rules. Once the mob locks on target, inconvenient little
details like that tend to vanish.

~~~
pavedwalden
It was known, but oddly not widely known. During the r/jailbait shutdown,
Reddit was more successful in getting the word out about exactly where the
line was drawn.

This time around many users claimed that it was the beginning of a clean-up
campaign instigated by Pao. I don't know if the administrators failed to get
their message across or if they were simply out-shouted by the mob.

~~~
jonlucc
Well the only explanation provided in the FPH round is that they were being
shut down for "behavior not ideas". That's more of a "trust us, we did this
for the right reasons" to me.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Literally the very next sentence after the words "behavior not ideas" was
"Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on
their harassment of individuals," later followed by "When we are using the
word 'harass', we're not talking about 'being annoying' or vote manipulation
or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected
and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community
on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day."
Source:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/)

This is exactly what I was talking about. The truth is _right there,_ up front
and easy to access, but you'd rather uncritically believe the voice of the
mob.

------
midniteslayr
Here is the permalink to the comment made:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0thing_says_he_was_responsible_for_the_change/ct1ecxv)

I'm very curious to see if Alexis is responsible for the firing, then
shouldn't the backlash against Ellen Pao change to be against Alexis Ohanian?

~~~
xd1936
This was my main takeaway from the article. Ellen's changes to hate speech
rules caused some backlash, but it sounds like she had nothing to do with
Victoria's firing.

~~~
Someone1234
> Ellen's changes to hate speech rules caused some backlash

What changes to "hate speech rules?" Reddit still allows hate speech. What
they curtailed were subreddits who existed primarily to harass people both on
and off the site (e.g. other Reddit users, YouTubers, game streamers, people
with public Facebook profiles, random members of the public, the entire Imgur
staff, several Reddit admins, you name it).

That's why whenever this topic gets brought up people link to e.g. racist
subreddits which still exist today, and then ask "well, why was XYZ banned, if
those aren't?!" while entirely ignoring the fact that the banned subs were
banned for HARASSMENT, not for having controversial opinions.

Subs still exist with the same controversial opinions as those who got banned.
The difference is that the mods in the ones which survived actively follow
Reddit's rules and don't harass innocent people. The mods on the banned ones
were actively involved in the harassment and frankly should have been banned.

~~~
xd1936
What changes to hate speech rules? These changes:

[https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...](https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/)

I agree, they should have and should continue to be banned. It still caused
controversy. Yes, their reasoning is that these subs have users that leave
their cesspools and harass other people.

~~~
Someone1234
> What changes to hate speech rules? These changes

You linked to a page titled: "Removing harassing subreddits" that talks about
harassment and doesn't contain the term "hate speech." Can you clarify why you
think this has anything to do with hate speech rather than harassment?

------
markbnj
In what sort of corporate governance model does an executive chairman make an
operational decision to fire a line employee?

~~~
tptacek
A weird one, which the chairman has also taken an operational role managing
one of the most visible and important departments in the company:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9880953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9880953)

[http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-
reddit](http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit)

~~~
markbnj
You're right, that is weird. However, since he had operational responsibility
for "community" it sounds like it was his call.

~~~
tptacek
He's the chairman of the board. A lot of things are his call. I'm just saying,
that call made the CEO's job especially difficult. Keep that in mind if you're
ever tempted to say "the buck stops with the Reddit CEO."

------
Zigurd
At the time I pointed out
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9827489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9827489)
that it was Alexis Ohanian who fired Victoria Taylor and set off the
"blackout."

Ohanian seemed content to use Ellen Pao as a meatshield, whether she deserved
it or not.

Imagine that: A Silicon Valley soap opera with no heros.

------
itsdrewmiller
This is in the new york times?

> The protest was the latest episode in nine months of tumult for Reddit, a
> highly popular internet message board which has more than 160 million
> monthly visitors. Under Ms. Pao’s leadership, many users of the site have
> been upset with what they have perceived as _major challenges to free speech
> and a lack of censorship_. In May, Reddit users revolted when the company
> instituted _stricter guidelines against prohibiting harassment on the site_.

~~~
bpicolo
No, it's on a blog hosted on the NYT website

~~~
scott_karana
I think he was trying to point out the contradictory and incorrect sentence
that got by whoever copyedits the blog.

------
PhasmaFelis
So the Reddit mob was utterly wrong about Ellen Pao's complicity?

And they had such a good track record up 'til now.

------
jonlucc
This is _very_ similar to one of the reports swirling before. If true, it is
pretty awful for Alexis to keep letting Ellen Pao take the hit for it. There
are other reasons that people dislike Mrs. Pao, but she doesn't need this
final straw if it is truly Alexis' straw to bear.

------
AndrewKemendo
Notice also that this thread is now on the 5th page with 106 points at 9 hours
at time of writing 12:59am EST 7/14.

In comparison there are currently older posts with less points or comments on
the HN front page.

Obviously __someone __at YC /HN is driving this story down.

~~~
thaumaturgy
You're not new here, so you probably already know this, but when HN users flag
a story, the story gets demoted. A sufficient number of flags kills the story
altogether.

This is a very flaggable submission and that's probably what's happening.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Great point about flags but why is this story "very flaggable?" I don't see
anything that breaks the guidelines.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I can't speak for anyone else, but when on the rare occasion I do flag
something, it isn't just to enforce site guidelines but also to keep HN's
submission and discussion quality up.

This is an article about Reddit drama and there have already been a number of
recent submissions about that. There are only 30 positions on the front page
and Reddit drama doesn't deserve one of them.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I see it the opposite way.

I don't think it's just "reddit drama" especially since reddit is a YC company
and Sam Altman is on the board. Some of the revelations give some really
interesting insight in how, what is considered a wildly successful web-
startup, is (mis)-managed and some of the back-room dealings happen in the
supposedly "meritocratic" valley.

I think this is ripe for really interesting discussion actually - especially
when it comes to how a massively public company that came out of such a
technically oriented culture handles this much scrutiny.

------
tptacek
Why would Reddit have had a hard time simply installing Ohanian or Huffman as
the CEO? Why would they need covert machinations to put the founders back at
the helm?

------
codingdave
Why is an ex-employee (even if ex-CEO) being treated by the NYT as an
authoritative source?

~~~
revelation
I don't know, because this is the NYT and they will treat anyone as a source?
Frequently granting them anonymity when their position neither deserves nor
requires it?

------
protomyth
Reddit isn't Twitter or Facebook where a post on the wall is fine. Reddit is a
discussion platform which requires a bigger time commitment.

Having the goal to have celebrities / famous figures be part of the reddit
community seems rather naive. Given the time commitment, it would seem that
the pool of potential AmA's would dry up. Also, having Victoria do the leg
work would seem familiar to celebrities who would view it as normal to have an
event handler.

------
solve
Just doesn't make sense. Sure, quickly eliminate someone's role, but why
immediately fire the person? Why not even try to transition the person to a
new role? Was she employed as an independent contractor?

Reddit clearly has both plenty of money, and plenty of work to be done. This
explanation doesn't add up at all.

~~~
fuejduxhebd
Alexis Ohanian has long been a proponent of viral marketing and native
advertising on reddit. It's a very common thing for companies and movie stars
to do AMA's in order to promote whatever they're working on. I'm willing to
bet Ohanian wanted to make AMA's of this sort pay to play if they already
weren't, which led to some friction with Victoria. (Of course this is only a
theory.)

Here's him talking about marketing.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IyyIGg12QZw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IyyIGg12QZw)

------
gesman
Would be nice to hear Victoria's story from Victoria.

Regardless, I think with her reputation and respect - she'll likely be doing
something even more exciting.

She's wisely avoiding stirring muddy waters for now...

