Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Reddit, one of the most popular sites on the internet and a social media platform that is almost entirely user-driven, has been in open revolt since June. Last week, that revolt culminated with the dismissal of CEO Ellen Pao. Reddit’s users thought they’d won victory for their values of free speech absolutism and resistance against the…
It’s looking more and more like Ellen Pao was, in some sense, set up to fail by her male board of directors. Her predecessor Yishan Wong says it. A top Reddit engineer said it right after quitting. It might sound conspiratorial if it weren’t about this particular site.http://gawker.com/top-reddit-eng… But this is Reddit. To the site’s…
Victoria Taylor is not someone who many people will have heard about prior to Thursday 2 July, yet she has worked closely with everyone from Barack Obama and Bill Murray to Snoop Dogg, along with hundreds of others, as part of her job at the so-called “front page of the internet” Reddit. In the space…
Internet communities like Reddit have always been toxic environments that survive on the backs of unpaid labor, and attempts to corporatize them fail because of it. Some of the worst trolls on the Internet are celebrating victory, as embattled interim CEO of Reddit Ellen Pao stepped down yesterday after what can charitably be described as…
Earlier today, I took my children to my great-grandparents’ grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto. They don’t have a big headstone, or a nice spot. But they have a big place in my heart: He came to Canada from Barbados, she from Jamaica, and he built two(!) houses for their extended family. They sent their…
After a week of revolt and months of protesting, Ellen Pao stepped down as CEO of one of the largest digital communities in the world. Reddit users, of course, were thrilled to find that Pao (aka user/ekjp) was leaving, and celebrated the return of long-time redditor (and sometimes critic of the company) Steve Huffman, aka user/spez, as…
Reddit has a problem. It’s a well-documented problem, which, oddly, is a big part of the problem. Every six months or so, from the depths of the sprawling site’s underbelly, a network of disparate communities which seem to feed off of bigotry and perversion rise into the greater public’s consciousness. For many people, this is…
Photo Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive officer of Reddit, will be succeeded by Steve Huffman. Credit Robert Galbraith/Reuters Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned from the online message board on Friday after a week of ceaseless criticism from scores of angry users over the handling of an employee departure. Ms. Pao…
“My dearest Ulmus,” the message began. “As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.” This is an excerpt of a letter someone wrote to a green-leaf elm, one…
We are moderators for the website reddit.com, a place where, on a typical day, millions of users read and share content in self-contained communities called “subreddits.” We volunteer our time to help manage the subsection called IAmA — a popular part of the site where thousands of interviews, known as “ask me anythings,” take place….