The Tavern

tasonir wrote:@duvessa: this only proves that the quality of discussion improves in non-default subreddits. Those people sound entirely reasonable and not once called Ellen Pao a feminazi!

Imho the whole thing is overblown and vaguely reminds me of gamergate. People are upset over one thing, and there's a sort of generic nerd rage that's looking for a target. There's two camps that should be completely separate:

• the people against the anti-harassment policy, who tend to hate Pao as well as any sort of "social justice warrior". These people love the fatpeoplehate subreddit (a subreddit of hating/mocking fat people and nothing else) and think tumblrInAction is funny (they are wrong on both counts)
• The people upset over/surprised by victoria's firing. These people are generally reasonable and are asking for concrete things like being able to filter various moderation functions and communicating with reddit staff. I don't know the details because I don't mod anything, but seems pretty possible.

The problem is that group #1 is trying to work its way into group #2, to use group #2's larger numbers to advance group #1's interests. They've been moderately successful at this, although I don't think they'll ultimately remove Pao or bring back fatpeoplehate (although I'm sure there's plenty of other hate subs currently out there, which just aren't large enough to have been banned yet).

You can see evidence for this in the change.org petition for Pao to step down: https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-st ... reddit-inc

It was created 4 weeks ago, toiled in relative obscurity for weeks, reaching around 10k supporters. Then Victoria is removed, and it hits 100k immediately, being at 193k now, and probably over 200k in a few hours.

Reddit's already announced they are going to work on improved mod tools, and named a new admin to replace victoria, so basically group #2 is going to get what it wants, mostly. Though apparently the new person is no where near as popular as victoria, but that's life. I hope, and expect, group #1 to largely be unhappy internet trolls, now and for the rest of their lives

tasonir wrote:@duvessa: this only proves that the quality of discussion improves in non-default subreddits. Those people sound entirely reasonable and not once called Ellen Pao a feminazi!

Imho the whole thing is overblown and vaguely reminds me of gamergate. People are upset over one thing, and there's a sort of generic nerd rage that's looking for a target. There's two camps that should be completely separate:

• the people against the anti-harassment policy, who tend to hate Pao as well as any sort of "social justice warrior". These people love the fatpeoplehate subreddit (a subreddit of hating/mocking fat people and nothing else) and think tumblrInAction is funny (they are wrong on both counts)
• The people upset over/surprised by victoria's firing. These people are generally reasonable and are asking for concrete things like being able to filter various moderation functions and communicating with reddit staff. I don't know the details because I don't mod anything, but seems pretty possible.

The problem is that group #1 is trying to work its way into group #2, to use group #2's larger numbers to advance group #1's interests. They've been moderately successful at this, although I don't think they'll ultimately remove Pao or bring back fatpeoplehate (although I'm sure there's plenty of other hate subs currently out there, which just aren't large enough to have been banned yet).

You can see evidence for this in the change.org petition for Pao to step down: https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-st ... reddit-inc

It was created 4 weeks ago, toiled in relative obscurity for weeks, reaching around 10k supporters. Then Victoria is removed, and it hits 100k immediately, being at 193k now, and probably over 200k in a few hours.

Reddit's already announced they are going to work on improved mod tools, and named a new admin to replace victoria, so basically group #2 is going to get what it wants, mostly. Though apparently the new person is no where near as popular as victoria, but that's life. I hope, and expect, group #1 to largely be unhappy internet trolls, now and for the rest of their lives

Siegurt wrote:Group #2 doesn't seem to really be getting what they want:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/06/technol ... index.html

The company is working on building tools for moderators and providing different search options and she also introduced a new liaison for moderators, Pao said.

We are taking three concrete steps:
Tools: We will improve tools, not just promise improvements, building on work already underway. u/deimorz and u/weffey will be working as a team with the moderators on what tools to build and then delivering them.
Communication: u/krispykrackers is trying out the new role of Moderator Advocate. She will be the contact for moderators with reddit and will help figure out the best way to talk more often. We’re also going to figure out the best way for more administrators, including myself, to talk more often with the whole community.
Search: We are providing an option for moderators to default to the old version of search to support your existing moderation workflows. Instructions for setting this default are here.