An online petition calling for Ellen Pao, the CEO of popular website Reddit, to step down has been signed by over 80,000 people who feel she is destroying the Reddit community.
i can't decide whether i find this fascinating or completely alienating. The biggest drawback to all of this is that reddit has been a place for spreading information that no one else wanted to handle. That is empowering to voters. That is going away.
I know it's not a popular opinion, but I don't blame everything that's happening at Reddit on Ellen. She's obviously made some poor decisions, and she's made the classical mistake of making major changes that affect the community without consulting it first, but honestly Reddit had some major design flaws that have encouraged a particular style of discussion that has only become more poisonous as time has gone by. The question that people should ask themselves at this point is, is Reddit worth saving? Is there any point in trying to "fix" it, or should people just move on?
If she's really on the team to commercialize the site, this will accomplish absolutely nothing. It's either go through the hassle of removing a person that's trying to keep the site in the black, or piss off .1% of the userbase. Granted, it's still a lot of very vocal people, but it's just not worth the cost. Even then, it really doesn't matter what the admins do at this point, everyone is just going to nitpick to find something else to complain about. Even if she's completely replaceable, it's still not going to do anything. I mean, the last 4 or 5 didn't do anything.