The summary of reddit drama isn't that exciting, just that they recently tried to implement some site wide changes (some good, some questionable) and it was met with fierce resistance.

This article from PC Mag really does a good job of summarizing what happened and what went wrong:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2487289,00.asp

While the reddit admins are finally putting forth some real responses on their own website and it looks like the reddit admins are finally making progress in restoring faith, it was easily on a spiral downward and proving to be a HUGE boost to their competition.

Only time will tell what kind of impact this will have but for now it's good to be informed about what's happening on the so called "front page of the internet"

I had no idea any of this happened. Reddit's not my go-to for social media or community. :/

Do you feel affected strongly, praguepride?

How can you tell :P

I work in a big soul-less corporation and it made me upset that the staff initially attempted the same kind of big soulless corporation treatment of the community. Basically taking them for granted, assuming that by giving them non-answers and deflections that they will just accept it, going to other media sites to issue an "apology" without really addressing the community itself...

Community driven sites cannot take their users for granted. Just like here, the site only exists because of content providers. There its people creating and posting cat pics, here it's GMs running games but the idea is the same: we are not employees, we are partners.

The admins aren't bosses, they're curators and caretakers. They keep things managable, keep the lights running, act as bouncers to the worst offenders but they should not assume that just because they have admin rights they can do whatever they want.

I was reading a story about how briefly reddit had a marketplace where vendors could open up a store to sell stuff. This married couple put all their effort into building up customers and using this reddit store front as their primary source of income. Then reddit admins decided to shut it down and that was it...they lost everything. Customer orders, customer databases etc. They couldn't even really contact their customers to let them know what happened, instead the URL they spent months passing out now just redirected to the general reddit merch store.

No warning, no discussion, just one day you wake up and everything you've built for is gone. Imagine the outrage if rPoL admins just one day decided no more adult games and without warning deleted them all. That kind of audacity could very well be the death of the site. It's not that the admins are or are not right, it's that the admins (of reddit) felt that they didnt' need to keep the community, especially the content creators, in the loop of major decisions which is ridiculous.

tl;dr: Community driven websites where the content providers are unpaid volunteers need to treat their community, especially content creators, as partners, not employees.

As someone who frequents Reddit but was not greatly affected by what happened (I don't frequent a lot of the subs that went dark in protest) it did make me grateful that some sites like RPoL do in fact, get it.

As much as there has been notes of issues over the years it's clear that Jase and the team are on the same page as many of the users.  Maybe that's the benefit of having a small'ish community, but it's certainly a case where I'm willing to trade quality over quantity.

All I know is that it's been going downhill for a couple of months. Don't think I've ever used the site.
This message was last edited by the user at 00:07, Tue 07 July 2015.

 I also had heard that Reddit was going down hill...fast. I have only been on it a few times, but when I heard that the site was starting to practice censorship by shutting down certain sites, I knew that was the start of the death throes. I was hoping to get the chance to explore the site some day. Guess that's not going to happen.

Most of the subreddits that were shut down a month or so ago should have been shut down long before then. Absolutely vile trash. I'm perfectly fine with corporate censorship if the stuff being censored involves borderline underage pornography and threads encouraging overweight people to commit suicide.

I don't really care about the recent drama one way or another, other than the fact that I'm endlessly amused by how sanctimonious and holier-than-thou some people on reddit are being about it. By the tone of some of the mods over there who blacked out their subreddits, you'd think they were a part of a revolutionary civil rights campaign, and not just complaining about poor community relations.

Whelp...after 210,000 signatures on a petition calling for it, the CEO of reddit resigns as part of a "mutual decision".

She'll still be an advisor to the board of directors but a new CEO has stepped up and nothing that has happened previously was reversed.

In addition the media is putting all sorts of spin, like claiming the revolt was because she was an asian woman as CEO for a tech company, nevermind that the 2nd main catalyst for the revolt was the firing of another woman admin.

Media spins what it can to tell "the best story" but I've never seen facts twisted so thoroughly as being part of it first hand. It's like everything that we fought for is wiped away completely by just labeling the whole movement as misogynistic and racist...

In reply to praguepride (msg # 8):

I hope it's a learning moment for most of those redditors.

This is why I go to 4chan over reddit. It doesn't have a high opinion of itself, and it's not trying to completely monetize itself [yet].

Well between that and the witch hunt of Tim Hunt (ha) make me a bit worried about the rising phenomenon of "trial by social media."

Someone posts a comment on twitter attacking someone else, the comment goes viral and brigades of social lynch mobbers rise up to destroy the person's reputation.

Now it's one thing if the accusations were actually true or even founded on realistic evidence but when it turns out the initial accusation was horribly mangled out of context, there is no repercussions.

The thousands of people calling for him to be sacked or demonizing the target as the worst offender to humanity don't turn around and offer apologies. The media is especially guilty of this because they will post inflammatory articles and the "apology" if any, is usually twisted to be an attack anyway.

Ellen Pao was ousted because she was at the forefront of a new censorship initiative which flew int he face of the past 9 years of Reddit AND she was at the helm when three very popular admins were terminated (including a guy who had leukemia, moved across the country because the company mandated it, and then fired him anyway a month later).

Now, don't get me wrong, it's the internet so of course that message was tainted by the same trolls underlying other such movements like GamersGate but the underlying message was completely lost, especially the fact that it was the firing of a female admin that prompted the outrage in the first place. Looking at the titles of articles though you could hardly tell:

"It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit" - NY Times
"Ellen Pao Was One More ‘Difficult’ Female Executive" - TIME
"How Ellen Pao lost her job but survived Reddit's swamp of trolls" - The Guardian

Never mind that she lost her sexual harrassment lawsuit HARD.
Never mind that her husband is currently charged with horribly defrauding police and fireman pension funds.
Never mind that when the revolt was rising instead of apologizing immediately she immediately turned and started giving promotional interviews to every site BUT reddit...

No, the narrative of the oppressed woman taking on the boys club of silicon valley reads better. Now I 100% agree that women are underrespresented in technology but we NEED to select better role models. Selecting someone who has a greater then 50% chance of turning out to be a scumbag is counterproductive on all fronts. It gives misguided "men's rights activists" and "gamergate trolls" more ammo and it undermines the women's rights movements to push people to the forefront who don't really believe in their cause.

Anyway, apologies if this gets to political but I think the tl;dr is that I'm very disappointed in the media coverage. This was something that people could have written an interesting enough article about. It involves reddit, of course it's going to get tens of millions of views because Reddit. There wasn't a need to put spin to further social agendas or throw in buzzwords and hot topics but I worry that some of these outlets, even respected ones like the TIME are so used to putting spin on things for readership that they can't control themselves...

In reply to praguepride (msg # 11):

This actually highlights how easy it is to marginalize an argument using ad-hominem, really. All you need to do is repaint your opposition in a light that makes it unsavory to follow. I don't really care about reddit or most of the people on it. But if it causes many of them to review how they vilified people before, now that the tactic has been used on them, I can only think that is a good thing.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:49, Mon 13 July 2015.

I don't think fighting lies with lies is a positive step in the long run...

I could be wrong but it reads like a management tactic I've seen over the years where you bring in a scrape goat to do all the bad guy stuff, firings etc., then you dump them and hope nobody realizes it was you all along.

Sadly it often works.

That said, I never liked this Ellen Pao person, not even one little bit.

Now that the chief engineer left she basically said just that. The reddit board set Pao up for failure.

The ex-CEO that appointed her made a smug joke that this was their plan all along, to manufacture a "crisis" so the co-founders could seize control of the board.

If that's true, then they're terrible people for manipulating lives and firing staff members for personal gains.

If it's false, then they're terrible people about joking about things like that.

It's one thing to make a joke months later after things have died down but rubbing it in days after it goes down is poor taste and I refuse to participate in following those kinds of people.

Voat.co all the way. Mwaaaaaaahhh <goat sound>