Reddit on Verge of Staff vs. Community Battle
posted Sunday Jul 5, 2015 by Scott Ertz
Reddit is an incredibly popular community on the Internet, referring to themselves as "The front page of the Internet." I have personally never understood the appeal of the site, but I have understood that it is a place where people can go and have frank, open discussions about topics of the day. The topics tend to be based on opinions that are not based in reality, but people are welcome to talk about whatever they like.
The community is falling apart, however, because of the decisions of interim CEO Ellen Pao. For those who follow the tech industry, that should be a familiar name, as she is the woman who lost the gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. The same attitude that led to the tenuous case also led to some decisions inside the company that is pushing the community away.
The turning point was the way the company handled firing Victoria Taylor, a popular admin on the site. In solidarity with Taylor, many boards closed to the public, making Reddit a very quiet place to be. As criticism mounted against the company and Pao in particular, she made a public statement, saying,
The bigger problem is that we haven't helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so. We do value moderators; they allow reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time.
We hired someone to product manage it, and we moved an engineer to help work on it. We hired 5 more people for our community team in total to work with both the community and moderators. We are also making changes to reddit.com, adding new features like better search and building mobile web, but our testing plan needs improvement. As a result, we are breaking some of the ways moderators moderate. We are going to figure this out and fix it.
While an interesting statement, it does not address the issue at hand at all. The community, in particular the moderators, have issues with how the firing went down, not about how hard it is to moderate. In addition to the privatizing of boards, a petition is also circulating asking for Pao to step down as interim CEO. Based on her poor handling of her own life, followed by her handling of the company, in addition to the public backlash received, that might just be the best idea right now.
