Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/ <comment><USER3> It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now.

"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.

It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.

I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.

<comment><USER4> _It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can 't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them._

I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.

This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).

<comment><USER5> > basically everything you said

It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you.

> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general

I couldn't agree more

<comment><USER6> The same goes for Yishan Wong, who personally hired Ellen Pao, supports the recent moderation actions[1], thought he wasn't qualified for the job[2], and censored creepshots, right? The whole thing's been going downhill since 2012, I guess?

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring- an...](http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-and- Summer-2015/What-does-Yishan-Wong-think-of-Reddits-new-anti-harassment- policy?share=1)

[2] [http://www.redditblog.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo- reporting-f...](http://www.redditblog.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-reporting- for-duty.html)

<comment><USER7> I think you're trying to make a sarcastic point here (unless I'm mistaken,) but that's probably quite true as written.

Even /r/askscience supports this move [1]. It is one of the most heavily moderated subreddits on the site, with professional staff. These aren't rabblerousers, they are very hard-working volunteers who are fed up with the administration.

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_messag...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_message_to_our_users/)

<comment><USER6> The comment I replied to was trying to say that this _isn 't_ about the firing, and is about the process of limiting free speech and restricting subs in a non-transparent manner. I see none of that in the /r/askscience post.

It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the moment:

1\. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.

2\. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even if AskScience's mods are professional _scientists_ , they're still volunteer _AskScience mods_.]

The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits. In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints. You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're doing an awful job on the other.

By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1 (including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits) may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.

I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a _problem_ (i.e., Reddit staff were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well- intentioned.

(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)

<comment><USER8> > 1\. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including > speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and > past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.

That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I think both sections of the site are vile, but I _vastly_ prefer a uniform standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about ____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.

I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).

Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer- term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say, the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a _huge_ surprise to a lot of people.

Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit, Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to put that, and I'm stealing it.

<comment><USER9> People keep saying that FPH was not engaged in harassment and abuse that spread outside that group, and outside reddit.

But it clearly was. Reddit should just release some of the brigading details - and that has always been something that can cause your sub to be closed and your account to be shaddow-banned.

I do not understand how you can use the existance of vile groups as evidence of Reddit squashing free speech - doesn't the fact that those vile groups didn't get closed (unless they brigaded) evidence that Reddit allows free speech as far as possible.

<comment><USER8> > But it clearly was.

That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even _solve_ that problem in general?

I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Reddit accounts. We've long observed 4chan/goon "Redditors" in YouTube comment threads. I'm with you on releasing how they got there, and I think it would provide a lot of clarity.

One last thing, I have to correct you: I never said Reddit was squashing free speech. I wish they'd pick a consistent value on it, that's all, and I pointed out specific things said in the press about free speech. I'm less concerned about FPH than I am about something like /r/jailbait, which got removed because it became the squeaky wheel due to CNN attention. There are worse subreddits regarding sexualization of children, and Reddit fails to uphold its own standard there, which negates the standard itself. _That 's_ my problem.

<comment><USER9> Reddit does have a consistant position:

1) don't brigade.

2) don't dox

3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding

4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of rules.

Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of comments. In smaller subs this is very destructive. That is very clearly reddit activity that can be tied to FPH posts and FPH subscribers.

And if Reddit did apply their rules consistantly it would result in a lot more subs being closed - the pro-self harm subs, the pro eating disorder subs, and the pro suicide groups are clear contenders for banning. (To be fair the suicide groups do get banned. I think they've worked out an equilibrium of being as pro suicide as they can without getting banned).

(I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)

<comment><USER10> Brigading is not against reddit's rules[0], despite semi-popular belief. Some big subs actually encourage it by not allowing np (non-participation) links to be posted on their sub[1].

[0][https://www.reddit.com/rules/](https://www.reddit.com/rules/) [1][https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta_submitting_np_links_to_srs_is_now_banned/)

<comment><USER9> Brigading, on the scale FPH did it, falls under vote manipulation and don't break the site.

EDIT: Subs encourage use of non-participation links because for ages Reddit has banned subs that brigade.

<comment><USER11> Excuse me, but what is "brigading", actually?

Until now I assumed it was gathering lots of users to harass people IRL or on other web sites, but I guess I'm mistaken?

<comment><USER9> In Reddit context:

/r/ThisSubReddit exists. There's a post in /r/ThisSubReddit that someone doesn't like. They post a link to that post to /r/OtherSubReddit, sometimes with commentary (eg, "look at this idiot!")

That causes a bunch of people from /r/OtherSubReddit to visit /r/ThisSubReddit. That's okay, unless they start voting; or insulting; or harassing users.

The voting is not okay because often the brigading sub is much larger than the sub being brigaded. (FPH had 150,000 subscribed users) People generally agree that the heavily modded subs are better. Brigading makes it really hard for mods to do any modding. (If just 1% of FPH subs decide to vote that's 1,500 people. If your sub is only 800 subscribers you're going to get crushed by FPH.)

The harassment is not okay because, well, fuck those people who think it's okay to visit a self-harm support sub and tell people to kill themselves.

That kind of brigading has been risky for subs for a while now; plenty of subs got warned, temp banned, or permanently banned for this.

fatpeoplehate was warned multiple times about brigading. But the problem with FPH was not just on-Reddit brigading. They took it to facebook, youtube, a bunch of other websites. They also, if the admins are to be believed, took it AFK to people's IRL work / school / homes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the most telling points is from /u/imakuram, moderator for /r/books:

"This seems to be a seriously stupid decision. We have several AMAs upcoming in /r/books and have no idea how to contact the authors."[1]

They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support. Given that the key feature in ensuring the quality of Reddit is the moderation "donated" by the community, this is a deeply dangerous move, especially as many of the moderators are already irritated.

If Reddit forcibly take control of the subreddits, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a Reddit civil war.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csq5v3u)

<comment><USER13> Alexis is not helping matters either: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d?context=3)

<comment><USER14> i see people talking about alexis, but don't see a user named alexis posting in this thread. i assume alexis uses a handle other than his/her name?

<comment><USER15> Alexis Ohanian is one of the cofounders of Reddit who had left and has since returned as Executive Chair, he's also a current partner at YC, and goes by the username kn0thing on Reddit & HN.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexis- ohanian](https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexis-ohanian)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kn0thing](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kn0thing)

<comment><USER16> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBk4jMLZ5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBk4jMLZ5o)

kn0thing is a play on Alexis' favorite Metallica song....

"King Nothing"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most upvoted questions were simply disrespectful. The Reverend's answers were mostly boilerplate and often unresponsive to the question. The AMA seems to have been part of some PR rollout -- Mother Jones had an article three days ago about Jackson taking on Silicon Valley. The event seems to have failed the rollout's objectives.

Not a great moment for anyone: The AMA didn't always feature the Reddit community at its best, but the Reverend didn't show at all well under the spotlight of Radical Transparency.

Given all that, the timing and speed of the admin's firing hardly seems coincidental. Reddit seems to have blown up a number of ongoing events, and upset an important chunk of its community, which hardly suggests that her firing relates to some long-term issue.

I can see why Reddit might feel the event wasn't handled well.

But it is also very plausible that Jackson and his camp were deeply embarrassed, and insisted that someone be punished for that. So plausible, in fact, that I think Reddit really should give some account that demonstrates that this is _not_ what happened -- or admit that it did.

It is very surprising that this whole thing hasn't gotten more coverage in the tech press.

<comment><USER18> > Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most > upvoted questions were simply disrespectful.

I think anyone could have seen that coming. Anonymous accounts with community voting and an API to boot? This is only asking for trouble - especially if the AMA was done by an individual who wasn't familiar with the personality of the community or internet etiquette in general. Assuming every other AMA was respectful/successful - they were just playing a game of russian roulette.

I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit - don't get wrong I love the idea of an exchange of comments between the common person and famous people but I certainly wouldn't want to do it on an anonymous posting site.

Edit: To the downvoters - I should point out that assuming that reddit has automated systems in place to detect fraudulent voting - someone with a botnet could easily defeat it. It's easy to detect when the same guy is upvotting posts from the same IP or same block of IPs - how do you detect that when the voting are coming from all over the world? It doesn't even have to be a botnet - how do you know that the android/ios game you just downloaded isn't making web service calls in the background to a site like reddit? If I was a bad guy - I would definitely outsource development of some useful app or game and embed my upvoting code into that once it becomes popular.

<comment><USER19> > _I 'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit_

Some celebrities seem to be thriving on reddit. I've seen Arnold Schwarzneggar engage users on /r/fitness, and he has posted several videos (that tank one was one I saw recently) along with doing PR for his Terminator movie.

Whoever is helping him along seems to be doing a great job.

<comment><USER20> I would link to his reply a few days ago on /r/movies to someone seeing Terminator Genisys with their father, but the subreddit has gone dark.

He got reddit gold, had a perfect response, and added a handwritten note (an effective way of showing that he was involved, not just his publicist).

He has the team in place to be notified of these things and hit it out of the park.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The admin in question, Victoria (/u/chooter), is still posting, and gives every indication that it was not an expected nor voluntary departure: [https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter](https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter)

/u/karmanaut, one of the most prolific moderators, gave some insight into why this is such a big deal: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has_riama_been_set_to_private/csq204d)

> We had a number of AMAs scheduled for today that Victoria was supposed to > help with, and they are all left absolutely high and dry (hence taking IAMA > private to figure out the situation) She was still willing to help them > today (before the sub was shut down, of course) even without being paid or > required to do so. Just a sign of how much she is committed to what she > does.

> The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, > of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to > the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where > agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut > that [...] down immediately. We can't do that anymore. Part of it is also > that Victoria is an essential lifeline of communication. When something goes > wrong in an AMA, we can call and get it fixed immediately. Otherwise, we > have to resort to desperately try messaging the person via Reddit (and they > may not know to check their messages or even to look for these > notifications).

In fact, it seems that they actually _cut off_ active IAmAs in progress. [https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745](https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745)

If there's anything to be learned here for the larger technology crowd, it's this: There are human single-points-of-failure just like there are in hardware. And if you can't avoid having a SPOF, _don 't kick it in the face out of nowhere and expect the world to continue chugging along like nothing happened._

<comment><USER22> > Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting > right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had > situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, > and Victoria shut that [...] down immediately.

Righteous firing or not, a lot of this is a lesson in avoiding a SPOF.

<comment><USER23> From a systems dynamics point-of-view, single points of failure are problematic.

However, in human dynamics and the foundation of all leadership (and thus creating genuine followership), it requires a single point of accountability.

Leaders of any community are accountable to their followers. Leaders have to realize that the community and the purpose are always more important than them.

I think the reason why u/chooter was considered a leader (or top-notch liason between admins and mods) was because of her commitment to the quality of the AMA.

I think the reason why u/chooter is adored by readers was for the same reason, though typically expressed by her inate ability to capture the AMA guests voices, mannerisms, etc. She was being 100% accountable to the community and the purpose that she was serving.

This is a thing to be admired, encouraged, and emulated. Not scorned or spoken of in terms of an acronym.

I'm not picking a thread fight, as I think your perspective is very important within hardware networks and/or very relevant in process management, it's quite inaccurate when describing the human dynamics involved with building a community.

<comment><USER24> Given the bizarre nature of Jackson's comments in that AMA, I somewhat suspect that Victoria fucked up by writing down what Jackson was saying over the phone _verbatim_.

Doing that is _usually_ a good way to make somebody seem rather illiterate. For example, people are much looser with the way they structure sentences and organize thoughts when speaking in an unprepared manner.

When you listen to audio of them talking, everything seems normal because we have different expectations for written English and spoken English. When you don't get to listen to the audio but only read a transcript, then you start to get problems because then you have written English that only meets a spoken English standard.

<comment><USER23> The JJ angle has already been removed as the reason for dismissal. (Besides, Victoria is known, adored for actually being able to type down what the person doing the AMA sounds like --see Jeff Glodblum AMA).

See here: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png)

I suspect that this had much more to do with the one thing that a management team is more interested in: money.

\- AMAs are (or were?) probably one of the most visited subs on Reddit \- AMAs readers are often on pages for hours \- AMAs are on reddit-domained pages, so the "real estate" is valuable and "in-house"

If there was a management idea to "tweak" the AMAs to monetize it and Victoria thought it would not be true to the community, and spoke up, it would be easy to see why they would sack her.

This is much more likely to be the cause than capturing the typing down an AMA guest comments in the cadence they have been provided.

<comment><USER24> Pao _seems to_ directly refute Marc's claims: [https://i.imgur.com/0LZWrFp.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0LZWrFp.jpg)

It's not impossible that she is lying, but I think it is quite plausible that Marc's contact is not as authoritative as Marc seems to think. He is probably just repeating that person's speculation.

I'd also like to point out that if they fired Victoria for embarrassing Jackson, admitting that this was the case would be counterproductive because it would make a mob of angry redditors [even more] angry at Jackson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm really not trying to troll here.

Reddit started going badly downhill (where it was a visible and _public_ departure from what it was previously) from around the time that Sam Altman personally invested in the company nine months ago, an announcement that almost ruptured my cringe-pipes. I laughed internally at the notion that he thinks he's altruistic by giving 10% back to the users, whilst in the same announcement he mentions reddit reaching a billion users.

So, Sam was boasting that of his shares he owns 90%, whilst each of the "shareholders" (a reddit user) has 0.0000000001% – and that's exactly what I expect from investors.

Then Yishan Wong resigns, it felt more like a pushing, one month after Sam invests, and is replaced by Pao; who has a history of going after previous employers because she's angry that she's a woman. Nobody has the nerve to fire Pao because they're afraid of being called sexist.

This is Silicon Valley at it's most entertaining.

<comment><USER26> It's like Reddit is this persistent YC nightmare that he feels he needs to "right the history" on it and somehow make it successful.

And they're just massively failing at every step. Out of touch, out of clue. Reddit the company is at this point completely removed from the actual site. They went back into startup mode but you would never know it looking at the site. No new features, same old shitty reliability, nothing.

<comment><USER27> If anything, the site has gotten markedly _worse_ from a reliability standpoint in recent months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Marc Bodnick commented on why Victoria was fired:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png)

I consider him to be a reputable source and the claims are very plausible. Out of touch management never know _how_ out of touch they are.

<comment><USER29> This s the best information we have so far, but it's confusing. There have been a bunch of video IAMAs before

<comment><USER30> Video AMAs are easier to sanitise. They ask for questions then give the 10 most upvoted to the guys to provide a video response. Of course the 10 most upvoted may not be easy softball questions so they can remove these and the guest never knows about them. Right now the guest knows the questions but can refuse to answer them but then it is apparent they are ignoring difficult questions. With a video AMA they get to distance themselves considerably from anything out of their comfort zone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> More Context into the events that possibly led to the layoff: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/)

Alexis Ohanian's response: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has_riama_been_set_to_private/csq6ekp)

List of subreddits suddenly going private: [http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bxjyu/list_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bxjyu/list_of_subreddits_suddenly_going_private/)

<comment><USER31> > Due to an unexpected Reddit administrative personnel change /r/science is > temporarily private so that we can resolve the situation, our apologizes for > any disruption this may cause.

The doublespeak is weird. If it's a protest, say so. There's no direct relation between the employee getting fired and a subreddit that is not focused on celebrity PR going dark.

<comment><USER32> You've picked the wrong example here though. /r/science has hosted many AMAs in the past, so they are directly impacted.

<comment><USER31> Did I? Can't /r/science keep on functioning without AMAs through an intermediary in New York that's supposed to read questions and type answers for the supposedly smart scientists doing those Q&A sessions?

<comment><USER33> > Can't /r/science keep on functioning

Clearly the people best suited to answer this question do not think they will be able to do what they have been doing.

<comment><USER31> Clearly that can't be true. That subreddit is still valuable without AMAs. The people in charge just can't bring themselves to be honest with their users. Look at the re-opening announcement and spot the blatant lies and half-truths:

> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency > we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following > consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity > of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been > crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent > changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several > AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to > enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on > resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing, > we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the > inconvenience to the community.

> The comments in this thread will be locked.

They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked the comments. Father knows best.

<comment><USER34> dealing with rescheduling all future AMAs can suck up a lot of volunteer moderator time. Time that would otherwise have to be spent moderating the sub.

So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a reason to shut down the sub temporarily

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> People don't give a shit about 'reddit' as a thing, what they care about is the content people submit and the subreddits that foster the communities.

They seem to be going through their own Digg v4 moment here, completely disregarding users because they think they're big enough to survive without them.

<comment><USER36> Felt I should share this. There are a number of really good _established_ alternatives with great mods and admins for those who wish to branch out and check out something new:

www.snapzu.com - Excellent content and friendly community. Has a unique XP/Leveling system and ability to post content into multiple subs.

www.empeopled.com - Gives you more influence based on the amount of up-votes you've received. Use influence to steer future of the site.

www.theneeds.com - Good content but a lot of it looks automated, possibly using bots. No discussion so you lose a lot of that community feel.

www.hubski.com - Classic alternative, been kicking it around for 4-5 years, but still little activity. Community is small but nice.

www.spreadit.it - A dark themed reddit alternative that is similar to reddit and easy to use. Content and community is lacking however.

Note: I didn't mention the voat boat because I felt they have a little too much hate/racism on there.

<comment><USER37> Reddit still has those subs about beating women and lynching black people, right? Get over yourself, voat is better than every single example you listed.

<comment><USER38> I have yet to even see what Voat looks like because every time there's a Reddit event and someone mentions it, Voat is completely unresponsive.

<comment><USER39> Voat runs a modified version of the reddit open source code.

<comment><USER40> Wait, I thought it ran on a completely different codebase? It's hung from an ASP.NET framework running on an IIS server.

[https://github.com/voat/voat](https://github.com/voat/voat)

<comment><USER41> Trying to grow a site to Reddits size on IIS? That won't end well.

<comment><USER42> I think stackexchange are still running on IIS so it's probably close to doable - although I imagine they have some seriously smart people and resources way beyond what Voat will in the near future.

That said, does Azure play nicely with IIS? I bet it's expensive but can you scale that way maybe?

<comment><USER43> It's possible to scale, but you have to think about scaling ahead of time. Voat actually didn't and are now scrambling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "You'll get over it"

Many HN readers should recognize that as the words a certain admin of fark.com.

For those that don't recognize it, the short version of the story was the admins had developed a new front-end to Fark, but they didn't make a general announcement an update was going to happen. The just deployed it one morning... and left for a convention. When the change was discovered a little while later... well... lets just say it was not a popular change[1]. More importantly, nobody know what was going on, making emotions run even higher due to the lack of communication from the admins.

So after being left to stew for 4+ hours - and over 10k posts from confused and angry users - an admin does the absolutly worst thing possible, and made a single post with those four words: "You'll get over it". There were three main reactions to this. Many of us closed the browser and went back to work or otherwise avoided the drama. Maybe 10-15% of users spent the next day flaming the admins at about 10k posts/hour. Finally, about 1/3 close their accounts and left, permanently.

I suspect reddit is in the middle of a similar situation right now.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that the Fark story doesn't really end there. Years later, Fark admin Joe Peacock gave one of the more important talks[3] (at NOTACON 8) I've ever seen, about what exactly went wrong, and the bad decisions that made a catastrophe inevitable. Joe discusses what may be the most important lesson for anyone managing a place where users choose to spend their free time: if you don't _involve_ your user in the decisions and changes that affect them, they wil simply find another place to hang out.

[1] which some of us still[2] partially-revert: [https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme- un-v3-0-relea...](https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme- un-v3-0-release)

[2] when I remember; apparently haven't posted last year's fixes _sigh_

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI) (in typical fark style, a few of the talk's slides may be borderline NSFW)

TL;DR - just watch [3], where a fark.com admin gives some *very good advice on how to interact with your users.

<comment><USER28> This is a great talk for anyone managing communities. Reddit's current situation does bear many resemblances, especially with kn0thing's "Thank you for the feedback. I hope you change your mind about reddit, but if not, you're entitled to your opinion." response.

<comment><USER45> That statement from kn0thing made me think "pride does indeed come before a fall". Let's see!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is just amazingly tone-deaf on Reddit's part. I don't even read IAMA regularly and I knew Victoria was well-liked. What is Ellen Pao paying attention to if not their highest-profile subreddit? Did she have no transitional plan?

<comment><USER5> > This is just amazingly tone-deaf on Reddit's part.

They do not think like a business. They are a storage mechanism for other peoples content which their users generously provide for them to index. They don't make content, they don't generate revenue, they are stuck in a web2.0 model being valued on a per user basis. Reddit probably can't recover as community, but almost certainly not as a business.

> What is Ellen Pao paying attention to

Ideally the calls for her resignation, but it is to little to late probably.

<comment><USER47> I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as evaluators and filters for others' content. The thing is, almost anyone can evaluate content for basic human emotional or intellectual value. The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.

<comment><USER5> > I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as > evaluators and filters for others' content.

my post was a bit unclear, i meant they literally provide it to the site by finding it and posting it. They act as the first tier of the filtering mechanism(votes being secondary).

> The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to > replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.

reddit itself, and many other companies/communities are caught in the trap of placating a vocal minority and exercising to broad of a control on the culture. The Y-Combinator ethos is basically this. Make something that enough people love, rather than a lot of people really like.

This revolt is backlash against changing a well-ingrained culture to try an please discrete sub-groups. Whether these sub-groups are "right" or "wrong" was largely a question of the communities sentiment expressed in posts and votes. When reddit altered the culture here they lost critical mass.

It is happening on 4chan right now as well with people moving to various cloned image boards. Reddit needs it's users a lot more than users need reddit, so we will see what will happen. I am short on reddit and bullish on community choice though.

<comment><USER47> I basically agree with everything you've said here, so when I pose this question, just consider it food for thought:

Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority? Indeed, they are the ones exercising a great deal of control over reddit and its community.

Critical mass is pretty ambiguous. Is it defined by people who run subreddits, people who visit them, people who vote on them, people who buy reddit gold?

I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with basically a small handful of moderators. It was possible because it was very hands off.

Even though reddit has a very open philosophy, moderators of subreddits are anything but hands off.

<comment><USER5> > Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority?

sort of, they def have power within their own space and can bargain collectively. People hate Pao for many reasons. She is changing the culture (not single handedly) but with special interests. There are social justice/politically correct views being handed down from the company thus removing certain subreddits and restricting topics. Various other interests like moderators and users oppose these changes. That is what I meant about special interest. Many communities within reddit are hostile to one another and have sort of been playing a proxy war. Although, gun to my head, i think many of the people that would happily trade insults with one another, have slowed for now to unite against Pao/Corporate Reddit.

> critical mass is pretty ambiguous.

yeah i was qouting another poster. I think it is just enough people to generate quality content and discussion and cycle through enough depth to not let everything go stale.

> I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with > basically a small handful of moderators.

4chan had a coup d'état of sorts recently where many moderators and janitors were purged from the board. Moderation became much more strict and many were part of the social justice movement. They banned threads such as #gamegate briefly and some of the culture of the boards changed.

Also people are spreading to 8chan, wizchan, krautchan and irc further sharding out the culture that created many of the things that we regard as "internet culture"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ellen Pao has zero trust from the community.

A lot of people said this was because Pao is a woman and reddit is sexist. But then explain this reaction to Victoria.

Here's a thought: the reddit community despises Pao because Pao is in _no way part of the community_. She's a bizdev-turned-investor corporate suit who seemingly came out of nowhere to now run the site.

She's posted very few times since becoming interim CEO. In fact, only 56 posts.

* 3 short messages when her interim-CEO position was announced.

* 9 when she posted the new privacy policy.

* 8 for Nepal earthquake relief.

* 9 posts for the reddit 10-year anniversary. This, to me, is lame. This is a classic senior executive move where they hide in their office all year round and no one has a clue what the fuck they do, if anything, but they emerge just during the victory celebrations.

Since becoming interim CEO, she has an average ONE post every five days. One posted message -- not even one _submission_ every five days, which would be meatier. By contrast, Jack Dorsey has an average 5 tweets a day since twitter started. Is there any doubt Dorsey uses his own product? Well, we can see that Ellen does not use the product that she is running (unless she has some anonymous accounts). She made a gaffe recently where she posted a message publicly to a user that was meant to be private -- fair or not, that solidified the narrative that she is not a Reddit user.

<comment><USER49> I have no inside information on Reddit management, but as an outsider who's watched reddit grow over the years, I get the impression the core problem with Reddit right now is not Ellen Pao per se. Ellen Pao was brought in as a person to run Reddit as a business and make money and that's exactly what I presume she is trying to do, the issue here is the _vision_ of the company as a whole, the people (investors, shareholders?) who thought Ellen Pao was a necessary and good candidate to be the CEO.

Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision stays that way.

Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.

<comment><USER50> It might be useful to distinguish between the vision, the plan to implement that vision, and the execution of that plan.

I think what you're saying is that you cannot conceive of a plan that will successfully implement the vision to make money.

I'd add that execution seems to be sorely lacking, whatever the vision or plan, assuming a real plan even exists (which I suppose it part of execution as well, "have a plan").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I get that reddit is trying to run a successful business, but I don't think the staff is well served by assuming that the users will be happy little community-created-content worker bees no matter what they do. Users DGAF about the business.

All of the admins that were any good at interacting with the community are on the "reddit alum" section of the admin list (read: former employes). And more often than not, the staff doing the high-quality and visible community management was strangely the sysadmins and programmers.

Edit: not strange at all, I just realized that they were probably the only admins that were legit users too. Which would explain why I'd lump pre-sale spez and kn0thing in with people who actually interacted, they posted with their real usernames while also running all the sockpuppets making the site look alive.

</comment><comment><USER51> What a circus reddit has become. There's probably/hopefully more to this story but still. It will be interesting to see if reddit forces the hands of the biggest subreddits to open again.

Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like reddit to have "public facing" administrators

Many of the biggest subreddits are revolting against the "governing" and gone private in protest, for example:

/r/Iama

/r/science

/r/movies

/r/gaming

/r/history

/r/art

/r/AskReddit

/r/law

<comment><USER52> I'm actually surprised that reddit allows default subreddits to go private or disable themselves in any way. Each community should absolutely be able to moderate themselves, but at the same time being a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

<comment><USER53> > a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.

I'm blown away by what Reddit has been doing in the last few months. I thought it was just me being a get-off-my-lawn old user (since I've been on Reddit like 7-8 years or something) but then I had a young copyrighter (early twenties) talking to me about leaving Reddit for "other places" and that blew me away. I hadn't realized it was starting to trickle down for lack of better words.

<comment><USER54> >Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.

Let's think about the fact that this is possible for a company to do this to a full-time employee with several years experience next time an election comes up.

Unfortunately, not all of us get the luxury of advance notice on firings/layoffs

<comment><USER55> You seem to be making a statement about the law - I don't think anyone is suggesting that what Reddit has done here is against the law. Instead, what Reddit has done here strikes many people as rather stupid.

<comment><USER54> I don't think what Reddit did is illegal, I'm lamenting that it isn't. Independent of skillsets, people should get treated with a minimum of respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Pao actually tried submitting a PM to a subreddit. Not a screenshot, the actual URL for the PM.

If she has an area of expertise other than "diversity", she seems to be flubbing it.

<comment><USER57> Please don't lump this in with the anti-Pao brigade. Like her or not, the issue of admin-moderator relations goes back long before her tenure. I say this as a (currently inactive) moderator of a default subreddit.

<comment><USER58> Whichever side of the Pao debate you fall on, you have to admit that the CEO of a site that is of the size, scale, and simplicity of Reddit should understand the core functionality of the site.

<comment><USER59> Shouldn't this be a criticism towards Sam et al, not Ellen? She was offered a good job and took it. Good on her. The failure lies with how completely out of touch the ownership is.

They became good at money and bad at people, which usually happens. Unfortunately for them, reddit is little more than the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> /r/videos just went dark

Seems likely to me that the problem is now too big for the admins to fix even if they wanted too. They couldn't moderate that many large subs, they don't have the manpower. There's going to be an impressive amount of bad publicity hitting reddit tomorrow, I hope to hell they have a good explanation lined up cause they're going to need it.

</comment><comment><USER61> Good riddance to Reddit. Let it burn and go the way of Digg V4. Time to move over to something more grassroots.

Reddit has too many shills, too many paid-for content and way to much thought policing. Time to go!

</comment><comment><USER62> Something related I saw posted today is the news that the guy in charge of community at Digg ( /u/LordVinyl ) when the fallout occurred was hired to be in charge of _shadowbans_ , something that has seemingly increased a lot (maybe due to the Ellen Pao issue). The /r/videos post is down obviously, but a mirror is here:

[https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/192235](https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/192235)

The problem is that the poster and everyone else was subsequently banned, which created a bit of a backslash.

</comment><comment><USER63> The intense vitriol about Ellen Pao makes me very suspicious of most complaints from vocal redditors.

I'm not even really sure why the anti-fem crowd hates her so much. But man...wow.

If some of the things that I've read today are to be believed, the firing of this admin was a stupid act. Reddit and several other "web 2.0" companies made it big on "user generated content" which always seemed like it had the potential to turn into a gross corporate overlord milking their user-cow for all it's worth.

It seems like there are a lot of valley companies that just want to slap a sticker on your culture and hand it back to you. Or they want to say that the rules don't apply to them because they are so new and communicate with their employees through an app or some other horse shit.

In the end, it sounds like this young woman (the admin they fired) did her job well and it sucks when people aren't rewarded for that.

<comment><USER64> A large subset of vocal redditors hated Pao the moment she walked through the door. Now everything that happens on her watch is considered evidence of her awfulness.

Goes to show you just how powerful the MRA subreddits are. I used to be staunchly "free speech above all", but seeing how blind hatred can fester and spread has filled me with a lot of doubts about us, as a group of humans.

<comment><USER63> I'm with you there.

A couple of years ago a group of people that I was attracted to due to their professed reliance on reason and scientific method turned out to be virulently anti-female.

And then this fringe hatefulness just seems to have pervaded everything...even computing forums that are dedicated to what I thought were relatively dispassionate topics that are quite arcane have had death threats lobbed at people who just have a different opinion. It's fucking weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Top comment from that gizmodo article: "Reddit is legitimately full of the most self important toxic people ever. It's also home to a huge variety of all manners of genius and hilarity."

I will miss it. As an Old Person™, reddit was the closest the modern Internet has come to replicating the heyday of Usenet in the 80s/90s. But because it's controlled by a single corporation instead of federating among all internet service providers, it succumbed to the corruption of the pursuit of captial. RIP.

<comment><USER66> Why did usenet decline?

<comment><USER9> Eternal september; lack of moderation combined with massive trolling / spam / sporge / hipcrime flooding, etc; ISPs stopped offering Usenet access as part of their packages; to most users it's baffling in comparison to something like Imgur or Reddit.

An nntp2 / nntp3 could be brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Well, I'm sure glad I don't have to work tomorrow. I don't know how Reddit is going to fix this. Unless they have photographic evidence that Victoria was literally eating puppies alive, I don't think they're going to win the community back to their side.

I understand that if you're going to fire someone, you can't very well go around telling a bunch of people that you're about to do that. They still should have had a better plan in place to pick up the slack first.

<comment><USER68> Inevitably when you fire a competent person you are going to piss people off, even if you can adequately replace them.

People just don't like to see people that are clearly competent be fired. The reasons really don't matter to them. (and maybe they shouldn't?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> For those with PR, marketing and community management experience - if you we're in a position to try and solve this, what would you do to minimize the damage and move the community on as quickly as possible?

<comment><USER70> There are only three action approaches.

1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than just what relates to this specific situation.

2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit - there is nothing without them.

3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).

#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too late.

<comment><USER59> Are you actually a PR/marketing professional, or are you just volunteering your personal speculation?

<comment><USER70> The third part of the parent's conditional: experience with running or dealing with online communities (from building and operating sites that have them, since the 1990s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> So who's going to capitalize on this? Lots of users are pissed off and want to leave. People are pushing "voat.co" really hard, but it looks like a weak clone of reddit that will ultimately suffer from the same problems.

This would be a good time for someone to figure out a decentralized solution to the links+comments app. There is lots of research into decentralized reputation and recommendation algorithms. Combined with cryptocurrency there could be some real potential.

</comment><comment><USER72> This seems like an abuse of power to me.

The people who have closed the subreddits are the moderators. These moderators should represent the desires of the _users_. In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors. Even the AMAs are cut off. I think this is wrong.

Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.

While I don't know Victoria so I cannot sympathize, I can at least understand the moderators' cause. However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.

<comment> shock-value I would imagine that users by-and-large support the shut-downs (I do, as a user). Moreover, I don't think Reddit is the sort of site that fosters _friendships_. A sense of community, yes, but not individual friendships. And anyway, PMs and such are unaffected so you could contact an individual without issue anyway.

> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found > an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods > would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, > etc.) of power.

Why is that a problem? If the mods are actually acting in the best interests of their communities (which, in your scenario, are able to re-form on another site) then that's a positive result for them (in an altruistic sense).

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Here's the live thread - [https://www.reddit.com/live/v6d0vi6c8veb](https://www.reddit.com/live/v6d0vi6c8veb)

</comment><comment><USER53> I hate to do what is an essentially a "me too" post of sorts, but as an old, old Reddit user, I'm really confused by the moves made in the last few months.

I can't think of another time I've been immediately like, "Why?!" in reaction to Reddit's actions. Usually when I see a new feature, direction, policy, etc, my thoughts are, "Huh. Makes sense"

<comment><USER74> My only why moment I can think of was removing the vote counts on comments, (?|?)gate. But that was a minor little blip on the radar and I wasn't super bothered by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> For people comparing this with Digg v4 you should remember digg was already on a steady decline long before it completely imploded with the redesign: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reddit+digg#q=digg%2C...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reddit+digg#q=digg%2C%20reddit&date=6%2F2006%2061m&cmpt=q&tz=)

But reddit on the other hand still seems to be growing and haven't hit an inflection point: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit)

Even the recent fph drama barely caused a noticeable blip in traffic and was easily recovered from a few days later.

This event might be the start of the inflection point but reddit isn't going to die overnight anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER76> This does feel a bit like "Internet" culture meets Sarbanes Oxley (which comes into play when you are publicly traded).

There was a story about how unprofitable Reddit is [1] and given that one would expect it to start running out of cash. And when that happens it has to either get more VC funding or go to the public for additional funding. But if you're going to file an S-1 you really have to get your SOX compliance in order, and generally that has things like executives swearing that there isn't any illegal stuff going on, with jail time penalties if there is. And lawyers tend to be really conservative when it comes to "illegal" (advising against anything even nominally bad).

I, of course, have no inside information, but I'm not the only one wondering about this. An inability to raise funds would kill Reddit, and this "strike" action would seem to just accelerate that (fewer page views, fewer ad clicks).

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-once- bowed-1...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-once- bowed-130338011.html)

<comment><USER77> > illegal stuff going on

All of the conditions of SOX seem to be about financial disclosure, with the most general "crime-like" thing having to do with financial fraud. I don't SOX has much to do with e.g. online harrassment or pornography. It was enacted in response to financial and accounting scandals around 2000. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> One thing I find amusing about the whole history of social networks is that by far, 4chan has been the longest running consistent platform and with the least governance.

There is something to be learned there, not sure what it is though.

edit: Actually metafilter is older, but way less popular/influential.

<comment><USER79> I would guess it's less popular because it costs money to post.

On the other hand, so does Something Awful, and that site's significantly more popular than Metafilter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> This isn't another Digg V4. It's a riot - [http://gizmodo.com/256982/breaking- digg-riot-in-full-effect-...](http://gizmodo.com/256982/breaking-digg-riot-in- full-effect-over-pulled-hd-dvd-key-story)

<comment><USER81> The best part of that story is realizing I haven't seen the term "Web 2.0" recently.

<comment><USER82> My girlfriend is doing a master's degree in archival science on digital preservation. I hadn't heard so many "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0" thrown around in a while :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Alex Ohanian's comments about this ridiculous tire fire, and the Reddit community's unhinged responses. _Priceless_.

[https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing](https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing)

<comment><USER84> I've seen some of 'Alexis' comments and it really seems like he doesn't give a shit. 'Make something people want' amirite? what a joke.

<comment><USER83> Sorry, Alexis. A little buzzed last night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I have a question that will sounds like a rhetorical just for the sake of mindless bashing, but actually I want to ask it honestly, and I don't pretend that I know the answer.

Have Pao done anything good for Reddit since she's been appointed CEO?

</comment><comment><USER86> Hacker News is behaving weirdly with respect to this story:

It's been up for 9 hours and has 714 points but is lower on the front page than "What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?" which has been up for 18 hours and has less than half (307) the points.

What's going on here?

<comment><USER87> This thread reads more like reddit than it does like HN. So probably somebody behind the scenes sent it on its path downwards.

Might even be the right thing to do, since the whole situation is far from known and opinions boil over.

Who knows.

<comment><USER9> "behind the scenes" also includes users who flag. There's a small karma threshold for flagging, so many people are able to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Aaand this is how Reddit does. Because this is basically how Digg died and created Reddit.

Who out there has a reddit clone ready to take up the torch? Communities are fickle, and if you fuck with them they will abandon you quickly and en masse.

<comment><USER89> [http://voat.co](http://voat.co)

<comment><USER24> Wake me when they're not hosted on a pocket calculator.

<comment><USER90> Best I can do is an EC2 micro instance

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Generally its symptomatic of a business not understanding how it works any more.

In any business, employees will be fired, employees will leave.

The weakness here was that Reddit seems to have no business continuity plan for the one subreddit that gets the best publicity. Anything that attracts presidents, and A-list stars should have been able to lose an admin with minimal chaos.

Misunderstanding the role of a critical employee lead to this and now they have to struggle to catch up and figure out what the heck Victoria really did.

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm going to offer a wild suggestion - What if reddit is being purposefully dismantled to break up the social hive it represents? Is it possible that current events are he fruition of a purposeful strategy?

<comment><USER93> Honestly, I wouldn't even be mad if that was actually intentional. Reddit's community in the larger subs has been getting really awful of late.

<comment><USER94> Here here.

The whole dust up over /r/fph and the few other little subs kinda horrified me. I think reddit has often veered too far into laxness (the LONG existence of /r/jailbait) and there is still an amazing ton of blatant rule violations going on.

The only problem I had with the /r/fph thing was how inconsistently enforced it was. It seemed like a ban against a relatively small group so they wouldn't have to deal with pissing off one of the bigger problem subs. It ended up looking like a fake token gesture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Reddit admins have consistently shown themselves to be clueless in the past. They're only ever reactive to some scandal or PR disaster. I've never seen them try to get out in front and actually lead their community.

</comment><comment><USER96> This implosion has got me thinking - what would an alternative site to better? How could this be improved?

If we do see another Digg-esque migration, where will those people move?

<comment><USER97> It should be something decentralized and open.

<comment><USER98> Agreed fully, this and machine curation of news stories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> To complete the blindness trifecta, now all they need is for an admin to "seize" control of a subreddit(maybe /r/iama, since they apparently have devoted an entire department to it)

</comment><comment><USER100> I'd love to hear some people's opinions: what's the next reddit? Where will people go?

I've been looking at alternatives ever since all the stupid crap with mods came out (mods messing with submissions, resubmitting under their name, and deleting stuff they didn't agree with) and some of my favorite subreddits started to rot. And now, it feels like Reddit is really falling apart.

Any suggestions?

<comment><USER101> Within the next two weeks we're going to see just about every Reddit clone and/or variation that exists spring into action.

One of them will be lucky enough to gain enough traction to replace Reddit, though it will take a couple of years for the transition to complete.

I have next to no doubt that these are the death throes of Reddit. I'm not personally invested in these politics (though it is fascinating to watch unfold), but what I can say is that I'll gladly move away should the opportunity present itself. What I care about at this point is _I would like to consume content_ and for some reason _I can 't_. So now I'm sitting here writing a comment on Hacker News to publicly showcase my discontent when I could have been enjoying cat pictures.

 __Edit: __Reminds me of HipChat. It went down on a workday for a long period of time and I knew about Slack, our engineering team was swapped over by end of day. I don 't particularly care _why_ your service is down, whether it's a service outage or a coup, I just care about how long it will be down for and whether or not I can expect this to be a pattern.

<comment><USER100> I'm sure there will be a hundred clones. I do hope someone will just try a brand new way of doing content and people will be like "Oh yeah! That works really well!"

I've been disillusioned with reddit when I saw that the niche subreddits no longer get updated :/ and the bigger subreddits are ruled by an iron fist of mods. The content doesn't refresh as often as I'd like either (in the 2nd tier subreddits, the ones that aren't default but are still really popular).

Anyways, all good points. I used HC and Slack both and have to say that they seem almost identical to me.

<comment><USER102> > I do hope someone will just try a brand new way of doing content

I am with mine, and I encourage others to follow suite and try different tactics. Reddit is hardly the gold standard; but it is not without it's merits either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> I wonder if Reddit is big enough to survive these kinds of recent outcries [1], or if it's destined to go the way of digg, etc.

[1] Only a week or so ago there was a huge outcry about censorship, which resulted in a lot of negative personal information being posted about the current Reddit CEO. Now we have this.

<comment><USER104> >or if it's destined to go the way of digg, etc.

Does Reddit's competition of today have as much reach/popularity as Digg's did when that exodus occurred?

<comment><USER70> Won't matter. There's no real lock-in among text / link content communities. They're trivial to build, there will never be a lack of new variations. Reddit doesn't even have possession of the vast media (youtube, imgur) that gets posted to its service, making it that much easier to replace.

Imgur will probably see among the greatest benefit as Reddit erodes.

<comment><USER105> That's true about Imgur. It has already gained a sizable community not directly related to reddit before this fiasco, I wouldn't be surprised if it grew more quickly now. It has the infrastructure as well as the most popular form of content from reddit - unlike something like voat.

<comment><USER70> Right, the critical difference between Reddit and Imgur - Imgur contains the content. They're the host, rather than sending traffic off-platform. Just like eg YouTube. Those types of platforms end up being vastly more valuable; if you don't own or control anything on your own site, it'll always come back to bite you. Imagine Facebook hosting all of its photos on another site like Imgur.

With Reddit's approach, you end up creating lots of competitors; given the right context, or given enough time, those competitors will bleed you out. Twitter figured that out with TwitPic et al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> [http://www.randalolson.com/apps/default_subreddit_status.htm...](http://www.randalolson.com/apps/default_subreddit_status.html)

If you want to see which default subreddits are running or down

/r/netsec and /r/programming are down.

</comment><comment><USER73> Original HN discussion here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9821281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9821281)

</comment><comment><USER106> Quickly! Everybody back to Usenet!

<comment><USER107> If people could invent better moderation over nntp... it looks like people were looking at it even in 2010: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6048](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6048)

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> I get that Reddit is a business, but I don't get how they are handling their business right now.

They are pissing off the user base while not making any money.

Did they think a "lose/lose" solution was the direction to go in?

Regardless, they are just really fucking things up.

They can't seem to figure out what they are doing.

Do they even have a plan?

</comment><comment><USER109> sad that reddit turned out this way, completely opposite of what Aaron Swartz's vision

documentary about him - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ)

</comment><comment><USER110> From the post:

"As much as Victoria is loved, this reaction is not all a result of her departure: there is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits, which they feel is expressed by, among other things, the lack of communication between them and the admins, and their disregard of the thousands of mods who keep reddit's communities going. /u/nallen's response above is an example of one of the many responses to these issues."

</comment><comment><USER111> Ultimately this is about large companies needing to make more money using internet communities. To do this they have to change the community to make it mass market.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter) may help for the following.

We in Hacker News are a small percentage of the "Innovators" set. We are not who reddit is wanting to appeal to now.

Reddit started with Innovators like ourselves as a small site and grew to encompass "Early Adopters" from the other Internet communities, it has been growing out and nearly full of "Early Adopters" \- it needs to get more people, and to do this it changes the demographic. It needs people like our relatives and co workers who just use Facebook. It needs to grow because more people equal more money. They can and do accept the loss of the original Innovators and some of the Early Adopters as part of the cost to draw in much more revenue.

Thus, removing hateful subreddits, cleaning up the place is part of that. Another is increasing mass market interests - adding celebs and politicians. Another is increasing revenue through sponsored posts, like what Twitter is doing.

Allegedly the reason why this admin was fired was because she was against increasing the amount of corporate sponsored/promoted AMAs, and she was more in favour of community friendly content.

</comment><comment><USER63> The people claiming that Reddit needs to be more consistent keep saying that they only censor something when it bubbles up to the top. That's pretty much the only content moderation model that has EVER worked. No one likes it, and it seems hypocritical, but its what the entire internet does.

Look at Google. France complains about Nazi related material. They block Nazi material in France. They index massive amounts of porn, and take down individual images that offend people. It's sub-optimal, but it largely works.

Now, the thing that has changed is that normal people have started getting a dose of the kind of speech that they consider "hate speech" IRL from sites like Reddit. What they are demanding is that fringe positions remain fringe positions.

Something as mainstream as Reddit will not be allowed to serve up red pill/racist/homophobe/far-right content. They will keep doing this stuff until that content goes somewhere else. Maybe that's a good thing...I don't know, but at least having it in one place made it easy to see what crazy people are up to these days. Know your enemy, etc.

As for the corporate thing...that's always going to seem schizophrenic...corporations aren't rational people. They make snap decisions that seem reasonable in the moment because they lack functional memories. Fuck em.

Want something different? Find a way to spread the cost of running something like Reddit over a larger group of people in a decentralized model. And then get ready for the us vs them to move to "inner circle" vs "outer circle"...

</comment><comment><USER50> Some comments on why from the mod: [http://www.reddit.com/user/nallen](http://www.reddit.com/user/nallen)

</comment><comment><USER112> From the outside view it looks like people of Reddit are unsatisfied with their government and so they destroy their own motherland in an attempt to overthrow said government. Looks very much alike any coup d'etat. Human nature is in play again. It will lead to civil war and huge damage to the community. In the end there will be no winner.

</comment><comment><USER113> I have heard a lot of people here and in reddit say, "well we should just make something better and leave!" Maybe a lot of that talk is just anger or discontent coming out right now. The community is up in arms. The moderators are frustrated at both corporate reddit and the website/tools available to them. Users are mortified. But in all seriousness, I want to explore the question, why don't we? What is stopping us from replacing it?

\-- Technical challenges? No that doesn't seem right. Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this. The tools and technology are there.

\-- Building a community is hard? This seems more in line with reality. Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?

\-- Sites like this aren't the solution any more? This could be it. But if this isn't the solution, what is?

I haven't thought of all possibilities. But really, why not just replace it?

*edit: fixed typos, typing on phones is hard.

<comment><USER114> > But really, why not just replace it?

It costs money to run. Serious money if you're going to have employees. And, as voat have discovered, if you're going to become the favoured destination of the assorted gators, racists, pedo^h^h^h^hebeophiles, woman-haters, frozen peachers, and assorted bottom-of-the-barrel types that have been looking for reddit alternatives in the last few months, you may find it quite difficult to keep your hosting arrangements even if you can pay for them.

<comment><USER115> Right, anyone who disagrees with Reddit's management decisions is deserving of hyperbolic abuse.

<comment><USER114> It's refreshing to see someone agree that calling a person part of voat's core constituency would constitute hyperbolic abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'd probably call /r/IAMA reddit's strongest content asset in terms of publicity, I seriously can't believe there's such a disconnect there. When I found out about Victoria helping them out and all the work she was doing - <USER2> then the IAmA app, it seemed the admins got that, but I guess not.

</comment><comment><USER116> I can't wait for sama to make a statement about this.

</comment><comment><USER117> A time like this is an excellent opportunity to create a reddit competitor. Current alternatives(like voat.co) are focused on completely avoiding censorship and moderation, thus attracting the worst of reddit.

I am curious, what are your thoughts on how one could go about attracting the best of reddit?

I am working on a personal project that is very similar, but I wouldn't try to compete with reddit to attract all the haters and celebrity-gossip kind of people. Do you have some ideas about what kind of startup could attract the most intelligent and creative parts of the community?

(right now my project is focused on writers, "reddit meets fictionpress", but it would be very easy to pivot into something broader, if I can come up with a smart way to do that)

</comment><comment><USER118> I am not sure if this the truth (sounds like it to me) but in that case, I am 100% on Victoria's side.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png:medium](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png:medium)

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord /r/netsec went down too, quite surprisingly.

</comment><comment><USER119> Pretty sad that the free speech is disappearing from the internet with the speed of light and it gets replaced with propaganda. Victoria was a well known character of the reddit community and she did a lot for them. Sad to see her gone.

</comment><comment><USER120> 819 points, 421 comments, 12 hours old and still this is close to the bottom of the front page. Clearly HN users are finding this interesting. I guess I don't understand the HN ranking methodology at all...

</comment><comment><USER121> This is the exact reason why we started PushdUp. As a long time reddit user I was getting sick of the drama that was happening and decided to take it upon myself to create something different. We are still in VERY early alpha so there are bound to be some bugs. Come join the revolution. [http://www.pushdup.com](http://www.pushdup.com) , feedback is welcome and encouraged.

<comment><USER122> Loading animation in the beginning, I'm bored already. After loading, it just looks like some clickbait buzzfeed or auto-generated "read these 5 articles more, please" because of the big pictures set in a grid.

<comment><USER121> Thanks for the feedback. We are playing around with different layouts to see what people like more, so far the big picture layout isn't exactly what we are looking for but we are still working on it. I'm wondering if you actually read the article titles or if you just closed it down before noticing any of them?

<comment><USER109> hopefully your site takes off! i felt like he was a little too harsh, the site does look a little too simple maybe that could put some people off

<comment><USER121> Thanks, man. I want to keep it super simple, no distractions. I'm sure it's not for everyone, but I have a vision and I'm working towards it. Glad you stopped by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> wow what's crazy to me is that I was on reddit today, but didn't know about this till I saw this thread.

And even after going back to reddit I couldn't see any information on this until I cilcked /r/all.. looks like reddit censorship scandal is going out of hand :/

</comment><comment><USER123> The side effects of a subreddit not going dark are amazing. I'm waiting for the admin response.

</comment><comment><USER124> Reddit got "corporate" a long time ago. The lashing back was bound to happen.

</comment><comment><USER125> This is why they should have kept the lisp codebase

</comment><comment><USER126> This feels so much like the AOL volunteer revolts from 20years ago. Unpaid people vs. management.

</comment><comment><USER127> Go to: [https://voat.co](https://voat.co)

<comment><USER93> Too bad most of the community there is made up of the worst of reddit. Maybe if enough normal users moved there it'd be worth it, and maybe that will actually happen if reddit doesn't figure out how to salvage this, but until then, there's nothing on voat worth wading through the sewage.

<comment><USER105> If I recall correctly (it's down right now, not a big surprise) about half of the users are subscribers to voat's fatpeoplehate.

Those excellent people are the grassroots of the community you'd be joining.

<comment><USER41> You may be forgetting that Reddit was built on the same 'shit'. A huge portion of the real content of Reddit was porn and other repugnant topics. The admins of the time faked a huge portion of their posts to form communities around them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> Oh the schadenfreude

"I was subscriber to fatpeoplehate hate, so I did nothing; in fact I applauded it."

</comment><comment><USER129> I didn't take the FPH drama very seriously, but this looks kinda bad to me, so far.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3byzzp/admins...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3byzzp/admins_have_seized_control_of_rpics_mods_are/)

for extreme irony, compare this [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d?context=3) with this [https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3bz8jp/right_now_admi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3bz8jp/right_now_admin_ukn0thing_aka_alexis_ohanian/)

I still don't know what to think of it, and I can't keep up with it either.. but I just hope it gets thoroughly archived and documented on sites other than reddit and imgur. Because while I won't condemn reddit on a whim and call it a bad actor, I also don't find any of this trustworthy at all. I'd even say, unless the /r/pics "takeover" was the "root mod" (or whatever it's called, I never made a subreddit) locking out all other mods, if this was actually admins protecting "their" assets, made by the community, that'd surely be crossing the line for me.

As would be paying lip service to mods as to how swell everything will be to get mods to get subs back up, while people with scheduled AMA still don't know how to get in touch with the people Victoria had the contact info for. I don't have a link for the last bit, and it was just a claim by someone anyway (didn't check if they actually were involved with AMA stuff), so don't take my word for it - but that mod mail really does read so fluffy while making no real commitments to anything, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Anyway, I would rather see blacked out subs in support of something I agree with, than active subs that are testament to a shameful episode and state of things. They have my support to black out all the things, for days, weeks and months. For how ever long is necessary. If reddit becomes a place putting effort into again, I'll enjoy it like nothing was ever gone. Otherwise, might as well go out with a bang and some pride. There is infinitely more where reddit came from, and maybe a better site will be born because of all this somewhere down the road. Maybe reddit can reform, but it clearly needs some boundaries, so this blackout has my full support. Enough already, users and communities are not dough to be shaped however one wishes, to be disrespected like helpless dependents. It's a bit like that Fight Club bathroom scene: _" We cook your meals, we take care of you when you're sick, and we also make the sites that pay your salary worth visiting. Do not fuck with us."_

Yeah I know I'm being a bit dramatic, please take this with a grain of salt. It makes me sad rather than angry or indignated. Still, I don't think this is cool, at all. It's just not on.

</comment><comment><USER130> The blacked-out subreddits have _millions_ of users. Wow.

AMAgeddon.

</comment><comment><USER131> mhomde, your comment is dead.

<comment><USER51> why? I don't think i said anything untowards...

<comment><USER60> No, seems a one off, your past comments are fine, so is this one, I think you may have tripped a spam filter.

<comment><USER51> weird, maybe too many subreddit links looks like spam :)

<comment><USER60> it's undead, I'm guessing someone fixed it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> Who gives a shit!

</comment><comment><USER133> So much fucking drama. Can they not keep their site clean of this shit?

</comment><comment><USER134> #RedditRevolt

        sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 http://reddit.com " >> /etc/hosts'

</comment><comment><USER135> A tangential point, but I really abhor this style of writing:

"/r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/science, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos, /r/gadgets, and /r/movies have all made themselves private in response to the removal of an administrator key to the AMA process (... lots of other text ...) Major subreddits, including /r/4chan, /r/circlejerk and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, have also expressed solidarity through going private."

So you read the fist part, building a mental model of what's going on ("ok, so these subs went private, which means others listed did something different"), only to have to update it because someone decided to split the list in two, probably going for style.

I see this happening particularly in news reports and it's really, really annoying. You may actually fail to connect those two separate parts together if you're skimming.

<comment><USER136> The first list references the title (although "default" subreddits would be the better term), the second one are additional ones that are not in the default list.</comment></comment>


Are there Japanese software development / engineering practices worth learning? - <AUTHOR> At HN it is common to see articles advocating  practices such as iterative, scrum or agile. Have we in the West (again) missed a Kaizen-like take to development or are we 'at the top of the game'?<p>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen <comment><USER2> That's a good question.

The first thing that came to mind for me was the bad, namely Toyota's unintended acceleration debacle some years back.[0] If anything this illustrated (at the time) a woeful lack of any proper software engineering practices at Toyota that was to some degree indicative of a larger problem across their entire industry. No doubt this was due in large part to Japan's corporate culture and their admirable-yet-deleterious work ethic.

As far as the good, the first place I thought to look was Hideo Kojima's games, namely their engine technology. The history of the Fox Engine[1] and in particular the Decima[2] engine appears very interesting. Kojima games are almost always bleeding-edge with respect to rendering technology.

There's of course Nintendo. I had a friend who worked in software QA there, and there wasn't much good to say about it. That said, it was some years ago and one person's experience in one location.

Japan used to be a leader in robotics, though I'm not sure how true that is anymore what with Boston Dynamics in the spotlight in recent years.

To answer your question however, my guess would be no, probably not—Japan is likely playing catch up right now in terms of software practices. The Japanese development teams and researchers that do output quality, I'd imagine they just use common sense good practices recognized internationally. Namely: hire high-caliber talent, pay them well and don't overwork them. Quality usually follows regardless of any specific methodology.

That said, it'd sure be really cool if they were harboring some hidden gem software practice that the rest of the world could learn from!

[0] [https://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota- unintend...](https://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended- acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Engine)

[2] [https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Decima](https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Decima)

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked in Japan for a few years, mainly at small-ish software shops (some consulting shops, one making a CMS etc). We basically worked the same as I do in my home country (Australia) - 2 weeks sprints, JIRA, etc.

My personal experience is software is the same everywhere - some shops are organized, sprints etc, big on tests, others are waterfall and have basically no QA/testing.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.amazon.com/Japans-Software-Factories- Challenge-M...](https://www.amazon.com/Japans-Software-Factories-Challenge- Management/dp/0195062167)</comment>


The fake chemical compound Isaac Asimov invented to punk science writers - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5887014/the-fake-chemical-compound-isaac-asimov-invented-to-punk-science-writers

<comment><USER2> This kind of fiction presented as dry fact is absolutely the best. In my younger and more gullible years, I recall semi-believing in Congo, with the fake assertions that the story is as true as possible, but where no details are recorded, Crichton engaged in creative license. But at least with Congo I suspected a literary device.

When I read The Princess Bride, I was so taken in with the story about the hunt for the book, the subsequent disappointment with the realty of Morgenstern's work, and I never doubted that the book I was holding was in fact "The Good Parts" edition. I had in mind a vague idea of trying to track down the original for myself because the boring parts as described sounded nevertheless somewhat interesting to me, but given the author's difficulties in finding a copy for himself I didn't give myself much hope.

It was years before I found out the truth of The Princess Bride, and the truth tickled me to no end because I had never even suspected!

<comment><USER3> In eighth grade I used adamantium (fictional indestructible alloy that covers Wolverine's bones/claws) in a report on metals for science class. I knew Wolverine and the comics were fictional but I assumed adamantium was real. I remember that I tried researching it (very very early Internet days, I mostly used the library) but couldn't find anything on the subject. For some reason, I decided to keep my comments on adamantium in my paper regardless and without citation. My Science teacher circled the word and wrote "EXCELLENT!!!" next to it so I didn't figure out my folly until years later. I think he assumed I was joking?

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of my sixth grade teacher discussing FTL travel with me. I commented about how you would be "thrown backwards" (as in, with speed, like when a car accelerates). He interpreted that as me observing the 'time travel' properties of FTL, which made me sound a lot smarter than I actually was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title threw me off; "to punk" as a verb is not particularly familar to non-Americans of a certain age.

I first parsed it as having something to do with cyberpunk.

Good story though. Asimov is my hero.

<comment><USER6> I looked up 'punk' as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary, and found that there several ways that it has been used as a verb over time.

The definition that most closely matches the usage here is, "Chiefly in African-American use: to humiliate; to beat up, bully, etc., esp. for the purpose of showing dominance; to make (a person) appear weak or foolish."

I think that 'to punk' now means something closer to 'to play a prank on' but the OED hasn't caught up. For example, that was the meaning in the TV series "Punk'd" (an MTV hidden-camera reality show from circa 2003).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also Red Mercury, a fake chemical compound MI6 invented to lure wannabe terrorists out of the woodwork.

<comment><USER2> I've been surfing various Electronica radio stations through iTunes trying to find one that makes for good background music without occasionally sounding like there's an orgy going on in my office. I usually stick with a station for an hour or so before there's a barrage of curses or suggestive moaning. My current try is a station called Red Mercury, but I had no idea if or what it referred to, so it's awesome to see your post serendipitously. Is this like a reverse Baader-Meinhof phenomenon* where I saw a cool phrase and THEN suddenly found out the meaning accidentally? Or does Baader-Meinhof cover this case as well?

* As described here: [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some of what he wrote makes me think of quantum effects (as badly as I understand them, anyway) and homeopathy (which seems like it doesn't even try to reach the level of a pseudo science).

</comment><comment><USER9> I once liked his work (Foundation mostly), but I have a newfound level of sheer awe knowing he held a Ph.D. Best author on my shelf, maybe.

<comment><USER10> Check his wikipedia entry: "Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books ... His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System ... a master of hard science fiction ... also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much non-fiction. Most of his popular science books..."

All that and amazing sideburns - in the literary world, second only to Henrik Ibsen</comment></comment>


Label and train an object detection model without a single line of code - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/ai-is-more-accessible-than-you-know-1ed04ae0e8ef <comment><USER2> Nice post!

</comment><comment><USER3> very cool.</comment>


Ask HN: open-source version of Drobo's BeyondRaid? - <AUTHOR>

I'm really interested in setting up a fault-tolerant backup system at the house and I'm about this close -><- to buying a Drobo, but the price is kinda high. Drobo's tech is interesting because its not a traditional RAID solution and is expandable up to 16 terabytes. Does anyone know if there is an open-source version of their "BeyondRaid" tech that could be used to build the same kind of system, but DIY instead of buy? <comment><USER2> I'm in the market too. In my searching I've not found anything that looks as appealing in the easy-of-use department as the drobo solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> OpenSolaris/ZFS?

</comment><comment><USER3> OpenSolaris/ZFS?</comment>


The people running Silicon Valley are pretty much all white or Asian men - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/226725/the-people-running-silicon-valley-are-pretty-much-all-white-or-asian-men/

<comment><USER2> Sounds more diverse than F500 America.</comment>


Roll a D6: Why is it so hard to tell people you play D&D? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54VJWHL2K3I

<comment><USER2> I don't recall any of the girls I played D&D with looking like her...

<comment><USER3> Makes me wish I had a high school photo available so you could say whether or not I "looked like her" back in the day...

:-P

(Former gal RPG'er....married one of the guys I gamed with)</comment></comment>