One of my rules of life is to never put a bitter weirdo in charge of anything. People on the fringes usually have a lot of strange new ideas, but they are just as likely to secretly harbor a lot of deep resentments about the core. Barak Obama is the most obvious example. He was a fringe weirdo growing up in elite private schools and that festered into a deep hatred of typical white people.
A corollary to that rule is to never hire a mentally disturbed grifter to run your company.
Reddit CEO Ellen Pao commented this morning about the firing of Reddit Director of Communications Victoria Taylor, a move that has resulted in a very public revolt from users of the site. Pao wrote that the site is working on better tools for its moderators, but it will be a while before those tools are made available. “The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so,” Pao wrote in a comment. She said that Reddit has hired new employees to help build these tools, as well as new employees to engage with the community and its moderators. “We are going to figure this out and fix it,” Pao wrote.Since she was hired in 2013, Victoria Taylor has worked on Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer sessions. She served as the main contact for celebrities and other high-profile figures participating in the sessions, helping to transcribe their answers to users’ questions over the phone. In response to her firing, Reddit moderators have effectively shut down many of the site’s most popular sections.
What’s amazing to me is that anyone would hire this woman in the first place. Her resume screams incompetence and she has a history of suing her employers. The only thing she brings to the job is she is Asian and probably lacks a penis. But, inside the Cult, she must have a lot of piety points, despite being laughed out of court a few months back.
I’m not a Reddit user, but I have looked at it from time to time. It strikes me as another Silicon Valley scam where suckers do all the work and some rich people keep all the profits. The Huffington Post is the best example of how the scam works. They relied on bloggers to provide content while Arianna Huffington kept the proceeds.
That works as long as the people running the scam remember to keep the mark happy. Huffington, like the Gabor sisters, has a strange charm that is very effective at keeping the mark happy. Pao is just a stupid twat focused on small time hustles. Putting her in charge of a sophisticated grift like Reddit was never going to work.
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I’m not as sure as Ganderson that Howie’s audience would find Pao “not guilty”.
BTW, Pao is only half of a very special power couple.
Pao’s husband also has his own interesting business history:
Case builds against former NY hedgie ‘Buddy’ Fletcher
http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against-former-ny-hedgie-buddy-fletcher/
Only head shots are available on the web- but she seems attractive to me!
Sorry Ganderson.
No need for the exclamation point.
Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.
I thought she was perhaps a 6 to 6+.
I wasn’t sure if that was high enough to clear Howie’s
demanding standards.
Reasonable men can of course disagree about this.
No offense intended.
Anyway, it’s good to see that Howie’s fans intersect here at the Zman blog.
All the Best,
Nedd
It’s interesting that so many of my readers are also Howie Carr listeners. Maybe I should start send Howie material from my blog.
None taken- an honest discussion among like-minded individuals! I should also mention that I have a touch of the yellow fever, so that could be an influence as well. And … try not to let all this destroy your faith in the integrity of the mentally disturbed grifter community!
I think the fact that Ellen Pao is “not guilty” in the Howie Carr sense has something to do with her continually being hired.
Yeah, I’m thinking the phrase “me boom-boom long time” comes up in her interviews.
“new employees to engage with the community”
What the hell does this mean, in non-Newspeak? When I worked, we engaged with the community all the time: you either provided what they wanted at a price they were willing to pay at a cost that didn’t crush the business (and with it the people who made it happen) or you stopped doing it and, er, went bust.
Doing the job was ‘engaging with the community.’ Selling the things they used was ‘engaging with the community.’ But no one said ‘engaging with the community.’ It was very much a case of ‘Find out what they want and what they’ll pay and if we can afford it, we”ll do it.”
Still, as Newspeak it is doubleplus good these days so it makes sense(?) that out of touch CEOs issue statements like this.