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0 pointsjacquesm10y ago0 comments

What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit?

edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.

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idlewords10y ago

What were Terry Semel's qualifications for running a site like Yahoo? Or John Sculley's for running Apple? There are routine examples in tech of people without domain experience being asked to bring themselves up to speed on the job.

The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO. I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.

jacquesmOP10y ago

I'm sure this happens a lot. But I'd have expected more of an effort to gain the trust of the users, which would seem to me to be an important element in all this.

Reddit is not exactly an ordinary business, Yahoo and Apple are not comparable in that the cohesion between Yahoo users is much lower than between redditors and Apple makes hardware and is much more a business in the traditional sense. > The level of abuse being directed at Pao seems disproportionate to her deficiencies as CEO.

I have a hard time attributing recent events directly to Pao, though with her being CEO I guess ultimately the buck does stop with her.

> I can't avoid the niggling thought that this is really still about ethics in game journalism.

That could well be the case (though I fail to see the connection), but that still does not explain why she was initially picked and that's what my question is about. I can't imagine it was just a roll of the dice.

tptacek10y ago

A lot of this conversation assumes we all know what the role of Reddit's CEO should be. But we probably don't: the title means radically different things in different organizations.

It seems from easily available evidence that Reddit's core business challenge was taking a runaway successful online community and reliably monetizing it. If the CEO role at Reddit was primarily responsible for dealing with that problem, it's not surprising that the kind of person who filled it might not be congenial to message board nerds. The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.

The knee-jerk response to this obvious point is that someone brought in to monetize a community could easily damage it by being tone-deaf or compromising it in pursuit of profit. But most of the things Reddit Inc did to damage its community predate Pao, often by many years.

This is the stuff I think about when people point out that Pao was a terrible CEO for Reddit Inc because she didn't know how to send a private message.

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yarou10y ago

How does any CEO get selected? I'd imagine it has something to do with knowing the right people. I wouldn't necessarily blame Pao entirely for what transpired, but it works both ways. Nadella, for instance, has been attributed with many of the positive changes that occurred recently within Microsoft. Was he single-handededly responsible for all of these positive changes? Hardly.

Human beings are poor at grasping complex and sometimes chaotic systems. Hence we concentrate our emotions on a single target. The amount of vitriol in this instance may or may not be warranted, but I'd hope that someone who took the job title of CEO was prepared for it.

hawkice10y ago

I keep getting the sense this is some major inside-baseball stuff getting played out in public because moderators and admins on Reddit have giant megaphones. The complaints seem reasonable, the responses seem reasonable, but almost none of it has any impact on users of the site.

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