A tale of sexism, racism and corporate pressure”: Ellen Pao’s Resignation from Reddit

By Alfredo Lopez

The Internet -- always ablaze with controversy -- is a wildfire these days with revelations about more pernicious government spying, deals between governments and corporate "hacker companies", and Ellen Pao's resignation as head of Reddit.

I'll have things to say about the rest later this week but the Pao blaze is shining brightest right now and there are some important lessons to be drawn from it.

Since last Fall, Pao has been the "interim CEO" of the privately held corporation (a subsidiary of Conde Nast) that owns one of the Internet's most remarkable phenomenon. In its ten years of existence, Reddit has grown so large and become so complex that it defies definition.

At its core, it's a message board system, but with 160 million users and tens of thousands of message boards under its roof tied together by dizzying interaction, it is the closest thing the Internet has to a city. True to Internet culture, it's run by a kind of anarchistic democracy. People start message systems (called "subreddits") whenever they want about whatever they want and users who start them moderate and control them. You can post text, photos, links to any kind of content you want (including videos) and people answer each other constantly.

For the most part, it works wonderfully, making it potentially a model for larger societies -- except that in this case the "mean user" is male between 18 to 29 years old and living in the United States. Whether that particular demographic is a cause or an effect, the fact is that this is no utopia. While most subreddits are friendly informative communities talking about the subreddit's subject, there are subreddits that are virulently sexist, homophobic and racist. Reddit can, and sometimes does, quickly turn into a lynch mob of immature young men acting destructively and viciously.

Ellen Pao was brought in to deal with the craziness; the craziness has forced her out.

Essentially, the Internet is a giant community comprised of billions of people who connect to each other in virtually every way humans can redefining human relationship and significantly enhancing communication. What's more, the Internet is fundamentally designed by its users. It is as close to world-wide democratic communications as human society has ever come.

Reddit has developed a way of concentrating that collectivizing energy by building a system of sharing and conversation that is, for the most part, regulated by the people who use it.

What's it like? Make a list of the first five things you did today: maybe rising, eating breakfast, perhaps reading a paper or watching the news, riding or driving someplace and starting work. Now search for each activity on Reddit and you'll find several subreddits on that very topic: people sharing information, debating it, providing links on it, posting photos or videos of it...

For the rest of this article by ALFREDO LOPEZ in ThisCantBeHappening!, please go to www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2802