Best article I’ve seen on this yet. Give it a read.
I’m a casual Reddit “lurker” (i.e., I don’t even have a user name) so I’ve been watching this all from the sidelines. But I know the site and it’s culture enough to feel informed and it’s been frustrating to see so many people get this wrong.
This swelling trend of gender issues in tech (and in many ways, in general) is good for gender issues. But- like most trends- is bad for every other issue because it makes it a gender issue. Real problems get co-opt, on both sides, by people with agendas and those real problems often get left unresolved as the attention, discussion, and debate are swept away on the issue of the day.
In this case, a site with real community problems and a real leadership challenge got co-opted by the gender issues crowd because the leader in question was apart of that movement and ultimately both sides of the gender debate managed to make the real problems a platform for their problems.
What I like about this article is that it stripped away those distractions and got to the heart of what Reddit is facing and ultimately must address. In doing so, it inadvertently demonstrated perfectly how a trend issue can destroy a legitimate problem by painting it with the wrong brush.
I think we should talk about gender issues. I think we should talk about every issue. But I think to do so requires us to be critical enough in our thinking to not let ever issue turn into every other. We have to be just as willing to say “A is not about or because of B” and not let those who would use the opportunity of A to talk about B distract us into debating the red herrings.
But that’s just my opinion...
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