Reddit's pathetic attempt to quash dissent
reddit.com
Reddit tried to sticky this post for moderators around 12p CST today, and they've since tried to bury it. Thought it might be good to back up the link here.
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Reddit tried to sticky this post for moderators around 12p CST today, and they've since tried to bury it. Thought it might be good to back up the link here.
I mean they're just doing their job. Blame the board of directors and CEO. What are they supposed to do? Contradict the main strategy and get fired?
They're a PR robot, not really acting as a person but a machine
They’re also a VP of Community. As someone with such a specialized purpose specifically in this area, we should have expected a better performance.
I disagree completely.
First, I thought we'd already collectively agreed that "I'm just following orders" doesn't cut it as an excuse.
Second, he's a VP, and as someone in a position of leadership he's very much an active part of the problem.
I've known companies where a VP title doesn't mean much of anything. At the end of the day, he takes orders from the CEO and the board. What do you expect him to do?
The only thing that would make people happy would be reversing the changes. Is he gonna come out and say "hey everybody, I've unilaterally made the decision to go against the board and reverse the changes"
They would just delete the post and fire him.
Or would he say "yes we are a very bad company and our CEO did bad things. I'm very sorry but this is the best I can do"
He's getting a sit down and is lucky if he doesn't get fired.
There's literally nothing he can say that will a) stay in line with his job title and b) alleviate the concerns of the users
Also "just taking orders" is a valid defense for many many many transgressions. It only really breaks down when we start going into crimes against humanity / war crimes like at the Nuremberg Trials. And I don't know about you, but a private company exercising their God given right to fuck their consumers is a bit different than mass genocide.
Having said all that, and on a tangent. What would you do? You're a Nazi soldier. You're not a zealot, just the average Joe Schmoe who joined the army because of a long family history. You think of yourself as a good and tolerant person and don't really like the Nazis but you go along with it because you rather like breathing.
Your commanding officer gives you a gun and tells you to shoot a Jew in the head. If you refuse, you get sent to prison for insubordination or maybe just get shot in the head right on the spot.
What do you do? If you kill the Jew, you end up getting tried for war crimes after the war and boom you're getting executed anyway.
Really the best thing to do is shoot yourself in the head because you're busted either way. That's the position people like the VP are in. There's nothing you can do. I don't blame him the slightest- he's doing his job. Blame the people giving the orders.
As VP he most likely stands to get a decent payout from the IPO.
It's easy to think of Reddit as a dictatorship where everyone is deathly afraid of big bad spez, but the reality is that these types of corporate structures are usually completely rotten at the top.
Let me put it another way: do you think if spez were to be run over by a bus tomorrow, anything would change?
I'll ignore your comments about the Nazis before we Goodwin this thread, but dude, what an awful comparison.
Ok maybe I went a little overboard on the comparison - I spent some time reading about the Nuremberg trials because of your comment and how lots of people used the "my superiors ordered me to" as a defense
My point mainly is - regardless if VP agrees with it or not. He probably does agree with it otherwise he wouldn't be VP.
The point is he can't really contradict the board's decision regardless. Yes I agree it's not spez by himself. They're setting him up to take the fall just like they did with Pao back in the day.
I'm just saying - VP is just doing his job. He likely doesn't have much influence, at least on this topic. Spez publicly put his foot down and that's that. Can't contradict at this point.
And I understand "I'm just taking orders" isn't always a defense, we also must consider that this is totally legal and unethical for them to do. I don't agree with it - which is why I got off reddit. But it's their private platform so they're well within their rights
Tldr: hate on the board and people who steer the ship imo
We need to take responsibility for what we do. "Just doing my job" has been an excuse used for centuries to do atrocities.
But this is not an atrocity. This is a bad attempt at PR that would have been done by any employee because they would have been told. I don't have anything against a PR person, just the Reddit corporate leadership