When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions.
Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know.
Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.
The responses to this event are entirely unjustified, because there is no information at all to base a reaction on.
> Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.
When you have people travelling from out of town specifically to meet the person you are about to shitcan, you're damn well right you need to do something like that. Either that or delay the action until such time as it will not disrupt something like this. Making the first notification of this be when said person arrives at your front desk is unprofessional and unacceptable, period.
Did you consider that it might not have been an option? That maybe it was an unexpected termination, and they didn't have a way to know about or contact the people arriving from out of town?
You don't have enough information to speculate like that.
OK, $FamousPerson shows up at reception asking for an employee who has recently been escorted off the premises with their possessions in a black plastic bag (been there, got the video and t-shirt). You sort of know that random $FamousPeople showing up is part of $BusinessAsUsual. You have just realised that you have apparently no procedures whatsoever for booking appointments for personal visits to the building (e.g. popping something on a corporate Google calendar or Outlook).
So, you get $HighRankingPerson - preferably one with good empathy and small talk skills - to meet $FamousPerson, explain that, unfortunately, there has had to be a change of plan today. Meanwhile $TrustedPersonalAssistant has Googled $FamousPerson, worked out likely food preferences and made contact with $FamousPerson's PR people/publisher/agent/whatever. Nice restaurant booked for lunch. $FuturePlans discussed over (rather good wine | excellent smoothies | extremely expensive vintage cheese and crackers | exceptional artisian toast). Limousine booked to get $FamousPerson back to airport in time for trip home.
Not rocket science is it really? (I speak as one who has been told to F$$k Off by Royalty).
Do you see any famous person bitterly complaining and starting petitions because their AMA fell through? It was probably quite inconvenient for the few people who got affected by this at the time but it hardly merits a subreddit let alone sitewide meltdown.
As an American who isn't an Anglophile, I didn't know that Prince Philip was so "colorful". People used to make fun of George W. Bush, but Philip takes it to a whole other level. In half of those comments he's just the village idiot, in the other half he's a master of British humour.
Edit: of course, opinions will vary as to which comment belongs in which category.
> Did you consider that it might not have been an option? That maybe it was an unexpected termination, and they didn't have a way to know about or contact the people arriving from out of town?
Then you get a substitute for the appointment, even if you have to delay it. You don't just tell the client that the appointment is cancelled and to have a nice day.
> You don't have enough information to speculate like that.
There is no information that can make the way the out of town guest was treated acceptable.
> There is no information that can make the way the out of town guest was treated acceptable.
Sorry, but is this guest the Queen of England or the Pope? Did the mods pay for his/her way to New York? As the GP said, this is an overreaction -- the mods act as if insulting one celebrity means that IAMA, a subreddit that was originally populated by regular reddit users, has been inconvertibly sullied. Or that they, the mods themselves, spent their lives savings to fly that celebrity into town. I'm not saying that the celebrity deserved to be snubbed, but non-conspiracy-shit happens, and firing/rehirings can be a chaotic process that yes, sometimes lasts longer than a couple of days.
Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith has a considerable staff who would have managed the situation with their customary grace and good humour. Piss off Prince Philip however and you could be in for a hard time.
Wow. I thought maybe it was just one comment, but Alexis really has been doing a job on reddit's PR. Why wouldn't you be more open an honest with people running the best known feature of your site?
In the end, the mods ditched reddit for actually handling AMAs, so I guess that's a good thing. Plus it'll mean reddit simply won't have monetization options as far as commercializing r/IAmA.
Having celebrities is more than commercialization. It's legitimacy...I've never liked (most) of the celebrity AMAs, but saying that you had President Obama logged in, however nominally, goes a long way to counter the perception that Reddit is just a place for Coontown and The Fappening.
> Sorry, but is this guest the Queen of England or the Pope?
Irrelevant. You make a commitment to someone, you keep it or make alternate arrangements.
> Did the mods pay for his/her way to New York?
Completely irrelevant, as this is about how the company treated a guest.
> As the GP said, this is an overreaction -- the mods act as if insulting one celebrity means that IAMA, a subreddit that was originally populated by regular reddit users, has been inconvertibly sullied.
I would argue that it has been. To what degree, and whether it materially affects the sub, remains to be seen.
> Or that they, the mods themselves, spent their lives savings to fly that celebrity into town.
No, they aren't. Not even close.
> I'm not saying that the celebrity deserved to be snubbed
No, but you are implying that it is a trivial occurrence.
> but non-conspiracy-shit happens, and firing/rehirings can be a chaotic process that yes, sometimes lasts longer than a couple of days.
I know shit happens. I almost used that phrase myself above. However, there is a proper response to shit happening. In this case there should have been some sort of alternative arrangement made for the person coming in, even if it was just a managed delay to figure something out. You do not just turn someone who came to town to see someone at your organization out on the street on their own.
Irrelevant. You make a commitment to someone, you keep it or make alternate arrangements.
How is it irrelevant? It's absolutely relevant.
When you make a commitment to someone to do a heart transplant, you better move heaven and earth to keep it and prepare for every conceivable contingency.
When you let go a public-facing employee, even if you mishandle the communication about it and a few people get briefly inconvenienced as a consequence, it's a regrettable mistake of the sort that unfortunately happen sometimes.
As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is not a campaign to bring her back personally.
Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.
> As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter
It absolutely matters. If it was something egregious and for cause, the company probably wouldn't have a choice but to terminate her on the spot. There are a lot of scenarios where they also wouldn't be able to disclose why she was terminated. If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened. They could have been scrambling as much as the community was.
Now, I hope that's not the case because I like and respect Victoria. And the way people like Alexis "Popcorn" Ohanian commented suggests that this really was a case of Reddit's admins not giving a shit about the community. But to my knowledge Victoria herself has not commented on the reason for her dismissal, so it's hard to know whether Reddit had a choice about how to transition.
Anyway my point is the circumstances around the termination do matter in evaluating the way the company acted.
If a single person is necessary for maintaining one of the most important parts of your website, you need a plan to handle their absence. It doesn't matter if she was fired, or if she quit, or got hit by a bus. A single person leaving your company should not be able to cause a breakdown of this scale.
> If that's what happened, yes the company made poor choices for not having a contingency plan, but they may not have had a real choice of how to handle it the day that it happened.
Well, that's the point of a contingency plan. Where I work, we have an emergency evacuation plan. They don't only start coming up with that plan when the building needs to be evacuated. They have it in place in case they need it.
But they didn't tell anyone this plan until way too late, so it failed. It's not even clear that they came up with that until the site was deep into the protests.
they didnt communicate the back up plan to anyone that would have needed it. In fact details of the backup plan only surfaced some 12-24 hours after the sacking and the subreddits going dark. SO whether there was a backup plan in place prior to this occurring is difficult to say for certain, that they have one now is not in dispute.
Ok, but that doesn't answer all of the communication points. They had an email set up (despite being a communication platform, but if that's how they needed it, ok) and then they didn't tell the mods what that meant. Are they each supposed to send a question about everything they thought Victoria was going to be doing over the next month to that email?
Sure? Questions go there, then the person will follow up with whatever human replies and act appropriately. People leave companies all of the time unexpectedly, the world ending drama made it hard for most people to take seriously. Any immediate issues could have been handled with some speedbumps, if the mods were willing to act reasonable and proceed forward.
It would take only a few minutes to come up with a simple last-minute backup plan (pick an employee to temporarily handle Reddit<->AMA, mods communication, and then tell the mods about it). That would be enough to give Reddit enough time to sort out something more permanent.
I've seen high-level departures from corporations for years and recently have been on the inside track of one (i.e. I knew about the departure before it was public knowledge).
From the time that I was told to when it was made public was weeks.
What was done in the interim was make sure nobody was left hanging. Key individuals and customers were called, things coordinated so that there would be no backlash.
Take a look at Microsoft and Gate's departure. Ballmer's departure. Apple and Jobs's.
I get that at-will employment means that either part can walk away at any time, but that doesn't resolve the company from dealing with the ramifications of said departure.
That's what this is about; that Reddit thought so little or had a thorough misunderstanding of her position as to not key in the mods, or otherwise coordinate handling of her duties is the straw that broke the camel's back.
1) had a transition plan in place for key employees, especially the most prominent public-facing employees
2) communicate after the fact; basically get all hands on deck to find and handle each of the AMAs happening that day and in the next few days, make a single point of contact to triage those needs and tell the mods
I don't know if you deliberately haven't been reading anything or what, but it wasn't just in reaction to the firing. This is just the straw the broke the camel's back.
People keep saying things like this, but what exactly was on the camel's back in the first place? "Bad communication"? Can you give me any specific, concrete examples?
>Bad communication. - they fire Victoria without telling IAMA moderators
I asked for things that were already "on the camel's back".
>Mods feel like they are volunteering for a for-profit company yet treated poorly.
They are volunteering for a for-profit company. What are some specific concrete examples of mods being treated poorly? I'm a mod of two subreddits (20k and 8k subscribers) and I've never once been "treated poorly".
>Recent top-down decisions that aren't the "reddit way". - banning of "hateful" subreddits such as /r/FatPeopleHate
Who gets to decide what "the reddit way" actually is? My reddit account is nearly seven years old now and I say "good riddance".
>A temporary(?) CEO who doesn't seem to "get" reddit, or at least is not the right person for the job. - that is very specific and concrete
That's laughable: it's not specific or concrete at all. It's an unsubstantiated, open-ended subjective opinion.
> Who gets to decide what "the reddit way" actually is? My reddit account is nearly seven years old now and I say "good riddance".
reddit admins used to say that they would never ban content as long as it was legal. Well /r/jailbait was technically legal, but they banned it. Then came FatPeopleHate and others. Some people think hardcore freedom of speech was the reddit way. It is no longer. Of course it's hard for a rational person to defend leaving those up, but it's just how some people feel about free speech.
Oh and then Pao used the phrase "safe spaces" which is a total shift from their previous stance.
bad communication - when mods email admins they are unlikely to ever be responded to. Victoria was the one point of contact within the admins that did respond to mods and try to resolve issues, other than her they were left to deal with issues themselves. SOmetimes that just wasnt possible. Honestly if you care look into some of the blackout threads plenty of mods will give you concrete examples of poor or non-existent communication, and we are not talking a mod of small subreddit with ~1000 subscribers, but reddits with 100k+ subscribers.
Overreacting by immense proportions is what reddit does.
I do not know any details about Victoria's firing and I do not care about them, but obviously somebody up there did a terrible job managing the whole situation.
Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know.
Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.
The responses to this event are entirely unjustified, because there is no information at all to base a reaction on.