> How tone deaf is that?

It could be that he's not allowed to say anything about the matter. It reads to me more like an honest attempt at damage control while at the same time not divulging anything about the situation. So far his communication has been the most reasonable and levelheaded of all the reddit admins. I doubt he's lost his touch with the community, rather that he's been gagged and cannot say more than he does.

I don't think the bad taste has much to do with him not being able to divulge things about the situation. Everybody understands they don't need or can't comment on the reasons why Victoria was fired. That's just common sense. Of course everybody is curious, but unless the reason is something that directly affects the userbase and the IAMA-system, it's fine to not disclose any of it. It might likely be something that concerns Victoria's privacy as well.

I don't really have a beef in this whole matter, but I did happen to read that particular post, and I read it a couple of times because the tone in it rang some faint alarm bells. If it hadn't been quoted here again, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but now that it is mentioned:

"We get that problem XYZ has a significant impact on PQR. I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems"

Normally this is the sort of thing you hear a manager in damage-control mode say. It's not a bad thing per se. You know the kind of blog posts that also appear on HN when some online service business experiences difficulty. One that is only slightly removed from his userbase, probably feels they genuinely care about them. Except they don't care quite as much about significant impact PQR, as they really care about something else even more. That is usually their business, their job, money, or a personal motivation/belief. Problem XYZ (and possibly impact PQR also) is getting in the way of that something else, and they want to rally the userbase to solve it, motivated by (the promise of) relieving the impact PQR (that the userbase does care about).

Mostly they just want things to go back to "normal". Fixing root causes of the problem is part of that, but only so far as it helps future problems like PQR not get in the way of "something else". Otherwise it's just a lot of extra work, unnecessary scary change, and if fixing root causes only slightly touches or affect the "something else", you can just forget about it.

But this was the voice of some guy who was expected, thought to be level-headed, "got it", and care about the same things as the users. Not just the manager of some online service business.

I've been burned by this sort of mistaken assumptions a couple of times myself. Some situations a bit more business-oriented than others. Call me weird, idealistic, or just disagree with me, but I'm a bit principled about these matters. People can talk straight to each other. Money is a legitimate motivation, but don't try to hide it, if that is yours. There's people with much sillier motivations. I'm no economist, but I read somewhere that this free market thing only works optimally when all parties have access to the same information. I think that goes for a lot of things, not just the theoretical free market that involves money and trade.

I'm not actually sure how to handle such situations optimally, yet. Currently I just try to notice it early, decide "ok this person is not who they were pretending to be", reassess the situation from there. It sucks, actually.

One last thing:

> because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after.

I can't think of a single interpretation of this text (in context of all the rest) that isn't complete and utter BS. In particular the "because" implication with the previous part.

This is the part that gets me. We're clearly getting PR-talk from Alexis. That would be fine if the expectation of Alexis was that he would simply be the Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. But that's not what was expected. Those of us who were around reddit when kn0thing and spez ran the place and it was held together with duct tape and good intentions remember someone who was an active member of the community and who truly had the community's interests at heart. We thought when he returned that we were getting that Alexis back, and we were happy.

But that Alexis appears to have "matured" into a vanilla businessman, and that's fine. What isn't fine is the mass exodus of admins who were actually redditors, the bringing in of a CEO whose goals clearly align more with monetizing than nurturing, and a series of decisions that have shown the remaining braintrust at reddit to have grown further and further away from the community.

It's fine to monetize reddit. It's fine to run it like a real, live company. What's not fine is to do that to the exclusion of all else, and risk jeopardizing the very community that gives the site value in the first place.

What we've seen from the actions of the executive team at reddit in recent months suggests that they simply don't understand how their actions are being perceived. They've either lost or pushed out the people at the company who had a finger on the pulse of the community, and now they're flying blind. It seems that the only thing keeping reddit going right now as a community is the lack of a viable alternative, and that's a very dangerous place to be for a company like reddit.

I don't know whether the executive team at reddit sees this episode as just another fire to put out or as a portent of things to come. What I see, as an active participant on the site, is a restive user base that increasingly sees itself as neglected and taken for granted by a dismissive and aloof leadership. There are many things keeping the user base in reddit's orbit, but most of those things come down to inertia and lack of a better alternative. If the latter is solved, the former will take care of itself, and reddit will hit a tipping point whereby its most engaged users leave en masse.

It's not there yet, but it's an existential threat that it doesn't appear the reddit brain trust is taking seriously.

Replying because I can't edit:

Raldi had a really good idea of creating an office of Public Advocate: someone in the company whose job it is to argue for the users in any meeting. That's a fantastic suggestion, and could go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of resentment among the user base.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/3c1m67/c...

I have buried far too many internet communities to think this is fixable by creating an ombudsman (something I explicitly suggested for what was, in the past, the biggest free BBS on the internet). The idea will get a lot of lip service and then forgotten completely.

> You don't have to think it's a problem of her making to think that she is singularly incapable of solving it. This is, after all, a person so far removed from the reddit community that she posted a link to her own inbox.[0]

I think she's singularly incapable of solving it, but that's fine. I don't think it's reasonable to expect her to be. She should be running a company and building a team that can solve it.

Yes, that's a bit of stupidity in her posting a link to her own inbox.

What was that about CEOs being responsible for building culture?

Pao may or may not be an idiot in the same league as Fiorina, Apotheker, and - arguably - Whitman and Ballmer.

But I think the Reddit flareup is part of a more general disgust with emotionally damaged management culture which is devoted to profits before people, but is so bad at people that profits tank too.

There's a point beyond which being rich and powerful doesn't protect you from shooting off your own head. Reddit management seems to have crossed that line, and the content farm idea stops working when contributors stop feeling like they're a part of a community and realise they're really just unpaid employees on a profit production line.

So it's not just about the AMA editor. It's about the fact that management is trying to control a community it doesn't pay and doesn't really own. The "Do what you like, but give us clicks" deal has been changed to "We run this farm, we tell you what you can and can't post, but give us clicks anyway, because $business$ - oh and by the way, fuck you."

The prospects for the future are not good, IMO.

> on a profit production line

Dude, what profit?