Thursday, July 9, 2015

Ellen Pao is Wrecking Havoc Again

Elen Pao Wrecking Havoc
Don’t you just love self-proclaimed feminists who try to use their company positions in the guise of political correctness to bully everyone to submission?

After Ellen Pao lost her gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins she was appointed CEO of Reddit Inc. Once she got hold of that tremendous amount power that goes with the position, Reddit entered into a new age of censorship.

A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top", has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground. They also believed that action must be taken to prevent Reddit from being further run into the ground.

Hence, an online petition asking Reddit to oust interim Pao has added more than 100,000 signatures since 3 July 2015, when news broke that a popular employee of the site was suddenly gone and volunteer moderators shut down hundreds of the site's communities in protest.

Reddit users speculated that the employee, talent director Victoria Taylor, was fired. Taylor posted a comment that seemed to support that viewpoint, saying she was "dazed" by the news.

Taylor helped run the popular "Ask Me Anything" or iAMA feature, which has featured guests such as Bill Gates and President Obama.

To protest her apparent dismissal, moderators set that subreddit community to "private," blocking it from view. Although Reddit has paid employees, many of its communities are moderated by volunteers who aren't part of the company.

Since 3 July, the site has been thrown into utter chaos, as volunteers hid hundreds of other subreddits from view.

Cofounder Alexis Ohanian has taken "responsibility" for not communicating news of Taylor's departure better and begged for moderators to put the blacked out subreddits back online.

Pao also responded, promising better tools for moderators. But that wasn't enough for the petition's creators, who wrote in a post, "Along with their apologies were, again, empty promises to improve their communication with the community and provide tools for the moderators as they have promised to do so years ago. As of right now they have NOT issued an apology in a site-wide announcement or blog post....We will not stop until we see action taken."

The petition was started earlier this year, but its signature count has skyrocketed in the last few days. As of 6 July 2015, the petition attracted 180,000 signatures.

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