ELI5: Why Ellen Pao is the CEO of reddit? Who did choose her?

Sometimes I wonder if she's the Ticketmaster of the whole reddit thing. One of Ticketmaster's functions is to take all the heat for its high surcharges, while funnelling that money back to the performers. Ticketmaster exists partially to be the bad guy and the target so the performers don't get mud on them.

With any business, you generally have to be able to sell your widget for money or you will go out of business. The big issue is, Reddit's widget was free flowing, uncensored speech. When you monetize the Reddit widget for a giant corporation, then some of that free and uncensored speech is going to have to be curtailed to make it palatable to shareholders and directors.

Maybe Pao is the designated bad guy to take flak for all this stuff. Note that this has nothing to do with her abilities, good or bad, as a CEO.

I've read opinions that Pao is a terrible CEO, and you know what, maybe that's the reason she's where she is right now -- maybe she got put in the position she is in, because it's going to cause a huge backlash and a lot of shit is going to be slung. Maybe she isn't a great CEO but maybe she is really talented at being the target, catching the shit, and letting it slide off her.

I might have handled things differently. FPH was vile, but even worse, it was boring. Surely things could have been better handled -- surely the programmers could have made a way for certain subs to never get within 500 posts of the top of the page.

It is hopefully dying down now, but if I spend more time filtering out subs using RES than I do redditing, then I'm just going to go elsewhere. And not Voat.

In the end, after all the net neutrality and TPP and what the fuck ever today's bits of fuckery are, I'm going to probably end up the same way as when I was a boy with a psycho remote control Nazi for a brother -- locked away in my bedroom just reading books while the world fucks off.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread Parent