Ellen Pao was nasty subreddits' last defender, insider claims

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Oh my god, the drama coming out of this is delicious. It reminds me of the good(?) old days of message boards moderating drama.

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the comments on the announcement reddit seem to be equal parts support for his statement and hate for his statement. the significant thing to me though is that the supporting statements look like they’re averaging about 100 downvotes per post while the haters are being upvoted by about the same margin. i’ve never used reddit and this whole thing makes me pretty happy about that.

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Tell me about it. I was a mod on a message board for a while in the 90s. There were individuals who clearly made it their mission to test me as the moderator, working hard to post the most offensive stuff possible while remaining in the letter of the law–it was like a sociopathic game for them. And when they crossed the line and I deleted, they’d mount months-long harassment campaigns. It was a nightmare, and it was such a relief to walk away from the responsibility of being a moderator. Some people just want to see the world burn…

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This is me doing a little dance. Fuck you, KiA! Back to 8chan with you.

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Amen.

I moderated some smaller communities. I don’t miss it, but I still get a contact high off of other’s drama. Drama is so much better from a very healthy distance.

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Ellen Pao Not Literally Hitler - More at 10!

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I’m not sure if he’s telling the truth; or messing with them(when you combine interpersonal drama and actual cash, things get particularly brutal so I wouldn’t necessarily assume good faith on anyone’s part); but either way that is the most brutal, relentless; and utterly inexorable owning I’ve seen in a very, very, long time.

Ice cold, one nasty little surprise and agonizing-mistake-in-retrospect at a time; then slotting them all together into an elegant whole. Voat better upgrade their servers and stock pillows; because they’ll be overflowing with butthurt in the immediate future.

(Now, a non-awful person might wonder why this only comes out after Pao gets the chop; but it does fit rather neatly with the possibility that her removal, and the AMA controversy, are both part of a plan to clean the place up and get it ready for business; and that antagonizing the obnoxious is part of the initial self-deportation phase, to reduce the clutter for when they have to do a manual cleanup.)

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Aren’t the parts of Reddit where Pao would be considered literally Hitler also the ones most likely to think that being literally Hitler is a good thing(for a confused mixture of reasons either denying or celebrating, possibly even both, his more controversial career highlights)?

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I’ve seen people write terrible things in permanent marker, but I still use permanent markers. reddit is a good platform for some things, discussion of any controversy is not really one of them.

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“But… the most delicious part of this is that on at least two separate occasions, the board pressed /u/ekjp[5] to outright ban ALL the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge.”

I find the word “delicious” used by you in your post, and in the quote above a strange use of the word. But I guess it shows us why there will always be people on social media saying crazy, hurtful, racist, sexist things…because it brings up emotions that people deep down really like.

mmmmmmore popcorn

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Not really. Dickheads on Reddit are just dickheads. They’re not actually neo-nazis.

This is standard-issue Forum Drama, except that the forum in question is 1000x bigger than a regular forum, and Real Money is involved; so it’s 1000x bigger Forum Drama, and getting reported in the NYT.

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@beschizza can you link Wong’s quote?

Edit: found it

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I signed up on Reddit a couple of years ago and after all of this, I’ve been wondering if it’s worth it to stay. There are some good things there, but the signal to noise ratio seems to be getting worse.

I have said it about other general message board places like yahoo groups.
It all becomes usenet eventually.

So… question from someone who has never used it: Is Reddit still good for anything, is it ruined, or is it getting better? I’m always a little lost in these discussions.

Thanks. I added it to the post, too.

The beauty of Reddit is that as soon as there is too much noise, the people looking for quality can break off and start a new one. That’s how /r/games came about (they got tired of macros and memes), and I’m sure others have started off of that one. When it gets too big and popular, and the content suffers, start a new one and set up rules to fix the problems of the last one. I actually think this is preferable to the alternative. If you frequent Boing Boing or some other site, but hate the community, do you stop going to that site altogether and miss out on the content? Reddit lets you change communities without losing the content (assuming people submit to the new one).