July 15, 2015

Former Reddit Leader Explains Why Trolls Will Soon Regret Taking Down Ellen Pao

Former Reddit CEOs Yishan Wong and Ellen PaoYishan Wong/Twitter and <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/18330449416/in/photolist-tVNkZj-qJJSrz-67aNkf-tVMPzS-tFy2Eu-67aN2s-7do1CE-dRFH9d-tFwMTw-t2735m-uUiSzR-67aMCN-vY8Vr8-4L5yz-dAvC1Q-rx3PaT-aVXEoX-uCp8Ze-9Co8PF-2ZnSw6-7R6AFn-umdsB5-vz7L1o-uWWWcL-rsmUwY-vWHcQ1-uP4Tn3-uWj7QT-vC2C3j-vXKu6c-vEN4jJ-uVve6J-vgoggL-u1aebS-6CcTZJ-uu1cDk-v1KGZb-vFhH2v-v1TdLv-6C8LHx-ubTK1W-rBFBNi-qSnwUq-rvqLrv-dx8V7q-vSvNRa-9K4Knd-vddjGr-fQ9B9o-cc4823">Christopher Michel</a>/Flickr

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Reddit’s latest CEO Steve Huffman might be about to do what former CEO Ellen Pao never dared: Purge the site’s notoriously freewheeling discussion boards of hate speech. Posting to the site Tuesday night, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong argued that Pao was actually the last best hope for radical free speech on Reddit—a claim that, if true, is deeply ironic given that the denizens of Reddit’s most racist and sexist discussion boards were some of the loudest voices calling for her ouster. “I don’t think there’s a place for such [hate speech] on reddit,” Wong says Huffman once told him. Huffman, who on Friday replaced Pao, is expected to announce a new content policy for the site tomorrow.

Wong, who ran Reddit between 2012 and 2014, has been defending Pao in recent days. Earlier this week he blamed the decision to fire popular Reddit employee Victoria Taylor—the event that precipitated Pao’s resignation—on the site’s other cofounder, Alexis Ohanian.

Here are the key parts of Wong’s post from last night, which is worth reading in its entirety:

[T]he most delicious part of this is that on at least two separate occasions, the board pressed /u/ekjp [Ellen Pao] to outright ban ALL the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge. She resisted, knowing the community, claiming it would be a shitshow. Ellen isn’t some “evil, manipulative, out-of-touch incompetent she-devil” as was often depicted. She was approved by the board and recommended by me because when I left, she was the only technology executive anywhere who had the chops and experience to manage a startup of this size, AND who understood what reddit was all about. As we can see from her post-resignation activity, she knows perfectly well how to fit in with the reddit community and is a normal, funny person – just like in real life – she simply didn’t sit on reddit all day because she was busy with her day job.

Ellen was more or less inclined to continue upholding my free-speech policies. /r/fatpeoplehate was banned for inciting off-site harassment, not discussing fat-shaming. What all the white-power racist-sexist neckbeards don’t understand is that with her at the head of the company, the company would be immune to accusations of promoting sexism and racism: she is literally Silicon Valley’s #1 Feminist Hero, so any “SJWs” [social justice warriors] would have a hard time attacking the company for intentionally creating a bastion (heh) of sexist/racist content. She probably would have tolerated your existence so long as you didn’t cause any problems – I know that her long-term strategies were to find ways to surface and publicize reddit’s good parts – allowing the bad parts to exist but keeping them out of the spotlight. It would have been very principled – the CEO of reddit, who once sued her previous employer for sexual discrimination, upholds free speech and tolerates the ugly side of humanity because it is so important to maintaining a platform for open discourse. It would have been unassailable.

Well, now she’s gone (you did it reddit!), and /u/spez [CEO Steve Huffman] has the moral authority as a co-founder to move ahead with the purge. We tried to let you govern yourselves and you failed, so now The Man is going to set some Rules. Admittedly, I can’t say I’m terribly upset.

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