Ellen Pao steps down from Reddit, are the trolls winning?

Ellen Pao leaves Reddit

REDDIT calls itself, "the front page of the Internet." For Ellen Pao, it was a rabbit hole into a world that got curiouser and curiouser. 

"The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas," Pao wrote in the Washington Post. "Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning."

It has not been a good year for Pao, who earlier lost a sexism lawsuit vs. a former employer, venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; and then, three weeks ago, she lost her job as Interim CEO of Reddit.

Since her departure - she resigned, not fired - the Reddit universe has been in turmoil. Some say she was set up to fail.

The freedom given to Reddit's unpaid moderators to monitor the communities, or "subreddits," also gave rise to racist and sexist sites under the guise of freedom of speech. The hate and venom on these sites are the main reason Reddit has had difficulty win advertisers, an Internet platform's lifeblood.

Pao was tasked to rid the platform of those subreddits. Along the way, she released a popular employee, Victoria Taylor. Even though one other bosses asked to her fire Taylor, the redditors blamed her. The backlash came back a hundred fold.

Pam's critics claimed censorship. In protest, some of the moderators shut down their sites. An online petition circulated and reportedly collected 200,000 signatures calling for Pao's firing.

However, there may be something more behind all that hate and venom hurled at Pao that shows the dark side of the Internet.

Pao, a lawyer and businesswoman who has a resume centered in Silicon Valley, inspired much controversy and vitriol from numerous Reddit users when she decided first to ban several popular subreddits dedicated to racist, sexist, and fat-shaming posts; and then to fire popular employee Victoria Taylor, administrator for the site's popular "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) subreddit where celebrities and other notable personalities field questions from users.

Pao was hired eight months ago to replace previous CEO Yishan Wong, who stepped down amidst another bout of controversy surrounding, among other things, his public conflict with a former employee. 

In her own post on Reddit, Pao reaffirmed the sentiment behind both her closing of the aforementioned subreddits and her reaction to vitriol on the site following both unpopular decisions:

"I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity."

Pao will be replaced by site co-founder Steve Huffman.

Last week, Reddit's chief engineer, Bethane Blount, announced her resignation after just two months on the job.

Although she claims her departure is not related to Pao's resignation, Blount also said she believed Pao’s exit was an indirect consequence of gender discrimination, and that Pao had been placed on a “glass cliff.” It is a term used to describe women being set up for failure by being put in leadership roles during crises. According to Re/code: 

“Victoria wasn’t on a glass cliff. But it’s hard for me to see it any other way than Ellen was,” Blount said. However, she added that “I wouldn’t say my decision to leave was directly related to my gender.”

Being named "Interim" CEO weakened her authority and made her an easy target for long-time Reddit regulars.

Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, who is replacing Pao, added that he thought some of the messaging around Pao had gotten extremely ugly. “I don’t think Ellen has been in a position to defend herself,” he said. “It’s okay for redditors to be angry, but I thought some users crossed the line when it became personal.”

Board head Sam Altman described the vile — and some have described as misogynistic — criticisms of Pao in his memo to the site.
“It was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you,” he wrote. 

We can't ignore that 75 percent of Reddit users are males who have claimed the Internet as their playground and they don't want some outsider - especially a woman - interjecting herself in their exclusive game.

Seen from afar, Reddit is not about creating a virtual community, its about the giving an individual a sense of power, whether they deserve it or not, and whether the redditor uses it for good or evil is not considered. That internal struggle to define Reddit is what claimed Pao as collateral damage.

Pao isn't the first woman to be bullied by the Internet. Writer Jessica Valenti of the Guardian writes if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous on the Internet. “I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of constant, round-the-clock abuse.

“If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community,” wrote Altman.

But, there's a silver lining in this dark story. As the Reddit story played out into its third week, the tide began to turn. Huffman swore that he would continue to purge Reddit of its hate-filled content.

So let's let Ellen Pao have the last word:

"So it’s left to all of us to figure it out, to call out abuse when we see it. As the trolls on Reddit grew louder and more harassing in recent weeks, another group of users became more vocal. First a few sent positive messages," said Pao in an oped in the Washington Post published over the weekend. "Then a few more. Soon, I was receiving hundreds of messages a day, and at one point thousands. These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words."

The battle continues. And ... the body count keeps rising.

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