> Reddit has had several CEOs, which the typical user rarely knew by name.
I have to say that is wrong. Yishan Wong was the CEO before Ellen Pao. He posted on the site often, he made a bunch of announcements on the site as CEO. Users were well aware of who he was. Prior to that reddit was under CondeNast publications and whilst the CEO of conde nast may not have been well know the admins such as kn0thing, spex, jedberg etc were all well know active users on the site from its inception. There has always been communication between admins with the users through the site.
>The idea that the CEO of Reddit has anything to do with the average user's experience has come about very recently
Again this is wrong. In terms of CEOs Yishan Wong engaged users this when he joined. This was not something that has come about in the last 6 weeks as a result of r/fph being banned.
>The mishandling of IAmA seems to have been done by Alexei Ohanian, but he's not being photoshopped onto Hitler.
Again this is wrong. Ohanian (kn0thing) certainly got involved in the immediate aftermath. I presume because they thought it would be accepted more easily by users if he said it rather than Ellen Pao saying it. He made a faux pas at one point and took some flak for it, but he understands reddit and he had some serious goodwill in the bank so he leveraged that and things are looking peachy for him now. But there is no indication that he was to blame for the AMA mishandling at all, his role appears to be cleanup.
"Several" was the wrong word, I guess, because they weren't CEOs before Yishan. Anyway, I still dispute that the typical user knew Yishan Wong by name.
As for Ohanian (kn0thing), I'm thinking of a screenshot of modmail I saw, which was the main primary source I've seen about how admins screwed this all up. Not sure how to find it again, as it was deep in a thread and Reddit's search is not great, but the gist of it seemed to be that (a) he personally had plans for big changes in how AMA would work, and (b) he was oblivious about how these changes would affect moderators, particularly those organizing an r/science AMA with Stephen Hawking.
I have to say that is wrong. Yishan Wong was the CEO before Ellen Pao. He posted on the site often, he made a bunch of announcements on the site as CEO. Users were well aware of who he was. Prior to that reddit was under CondeNast publications and whilst the CEO of conde nast may not have been well know the admins such as kn0thing, spex, jedberg etc were all well know active users on the site from its inception. There has always been communication between admins with the users through the site.
>The idea that the CEO of Reddit has anything to do with the average user's experience has come about very recently
Again this is wrong. In terms of CEOs Yishan Wong engaged users this when he joined. This was not something that has come about in the last 6 weeks as a result of r/fph being banned.
>The mishandling of IAmA seems to have been done by Alexei Ohanian, but he's not being photoshopped onto Hitler.
Again this is wrong. Ohanian (kn0thing) certainly got involved in the immediate aftermath. I presume because they thought it would be accepted more easily by users if he said it rather than Ellen Pao saying it. He made a faux pas at one point and took some flak for it, but he understands reddit and he had some serious goodwill in the bank so he leveraged that and things are looking peachy for him now. But there is no indication that he was to blame for the AMA mishandling at all, his role appears to be cleanup.