We Owe Ellen Pao an Apology
Six years after the #RedditRevolt, I think one is long overdue.
It was the summer of 2015 — yet another lazy high school break for me, free from waking up at 6 AM, wearing uniforms, and math. What was a better way to spend my time as a jaded, apathetic 15-year-old than hours of scrolling on Reddit? With just a few posts from the admins, what was usually a normally functioning part social media, part news aggregate website devolved into chaos and revolt.
It all started with an announcement on June 11th: five subreddits would be banned in an effort to battle harassment on the site. Among these was a fairly popular subreddit called r/fatpeoplehate. Its purpose was, you guessed it, to hate on fat people. Since it had over 150k users subscribed to it at the time, its absence did not go unnoticed.
Reddit in those days could be described as a wild-west internet environment. Not quite as unhinged and feral as 4chan, but still with questionable enclaves hidden just below the surface. Notable examples include r/jailbait, a subreddit exclusively for creepshots of underage girls, r/cutefemalecorpses (do I have to explain this one?), and r/imgoingtohellforthis, which was devoted to low-effort jokes and memes that were both racist and criminally unfunny.
Ellen Pao, who was only interim CEO at the time, got the brunt of the hate for this decision. A dark cloud of despair and distrust for the new Powers That Be fell over the site with cries of censorship and calls for Pao’s resignation. She soon earned the moniker “Chairman Pao” for getting rid of such bastions of free speech as r/shitniggerssay and r/transfags.
There was much buzz about this apparent travesty on Reddit, but things were mostly calm until the firing of Victoria Taylor on July 2nd. Taylor was a beloved figure on Reddit as she was the one liaising between site admins and individual subreddit moderators, as well as organizing and conducting the wildly popular “Ask Me Anything” Q&A sessions on r/iama, whose highs include President Obama in 2014 and lows include Woody Harrelson’s infamous Rampart reminders in April of 2015.
At this point, the site exploded with activity. A picture of Pao shot to the top of r/punchablefaces. Multiple large subreddits including r/askreddit and r/iama went private in protest. A change.org petition calling for Pao’s resignation accumulated 10,000 signatures in the days following. Reddit was a mess and completely unusable at the time.
And the kicker? Pao wasn’t even responsible for it. In a post announcing her resignation and replacement by current CEO Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, the site’s co-founder, revealed it was his decision, not Pao’s, to fire Taylor:
[...] I have admired her [Ellen’s] fearlessness and calm throughout our time together and look forward to following her impact on Silicon Valley and beyond. It was my decision to change how we work with AMAs and the transition was my failure and I hope we can keep moving forward from that lesson.
The vitriol spewed at Ellen Pao was completely unwarranted.
This uprising that was later dubbed the #RedditRevolt only aided in revealing the true nature of Reddit’s userbase: they were openly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and REALLY anti-fat people (the exact reason why there was such heated and prevalent anti-overweight sentiment on Reddit has vexed me for some time). These users typically disguised it as being anti-social justice warrior because it was easier to get people (me included, at the time) to rally against shrieking dyed-hair feminists and make joke after unfunny joke about being “triggered” and identifying as an attack helicopter.
Since Pao’s resignation, the Reddit administration has banned more subreddits that have violated its ever-evolving harassment guidelines, but it always seemed to be too little, too late — the Incel movement that has claimed far too many lives in mass shootings had its beginnings on Reddit, as well as the subreddit r/the_donald’s rise in popularity during the 2016 election cycle. And, well, we all know how that went. Voat, a website that grew in popularity during the high points of the revolt, devolved into an alt-right haven that was eventually shut down.
Many of its users these days complain about the “Facebook-ification” of Reddit following the introduction of new guidelines, features, and a revamped layout, but fail to realize that Reddit has remained exactly the same, and users aren’t even that much more covert when expressing their misanthropic views.
Pao has since spoken out about the backlash she received for the decisions made at the time, and has revealed that not only was Reddit’s userbase against her, but that she faced discrimination while working at Reddit:
The former chief executive also said that "there was somebody who would not report to me — insisting on reporting to the board — and that, as CEO, that didn't feel great."
"There were so many examples, it's hard to list all of them," she said. "It's hard to know what part of it is race-based and what part of it is gender-based."
With the recent surge in anti-Asian sentiments in the United States, it’s hard to brush off Pao’s treatment as just her making some bad decisions or being bad at her job — especially considering that most of it (at least, her treatment by users) was the fault of Alexis Ohanian. But, as a now-deleted reddit user pointed out at the time:
But he’s [Ohanian’s] not a DESPICABLE SJW WOMAN so they [Reddit users] will do nothing about it.
