Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-08-06/reddit-a-nine-year-case-study-in-absentee-management

by richardw • 11 years ago

71 73 11 years ago

Fede_V• 11 years ago

Very interesting article. There was a data viz (gender vs visits) that was needlessly flashy, when a simple x-y scatter would have been more clear.

One part struck me though:

Erwin sees evidence of it already, pointing to the recent debut of Upvoted, a Reddit podcast delving into the site’s most compelling stories. “Reddit is very much trying to establish itself as a curator of its own content and take back some of that space from BuzzFeed,” Erwin says.

The 'content' on Reddit is made by its users. Sure, it's annoying when Buzzfeed packages it up into an article and sells it for clicks (though if you visit Buzzfeed it's your own fault) but it does not belong to anyone.

Reddit, by itself, is an empty vessel - its only value is in retaining its creative users and staying user friendly enough that those users keep drawing more and more people in. The vessel itself is completely worthless. As much as it sucks to have to cater to the whims of the users, they represent the only real value Reddit has.

I will be watching very closely to see how the new admins get rid of the truly toxic subreddits, while still retaining the culture of openness and anonymity. It is a very difficult tightrope walk.

impostervt• 11 years ago

According to Reddit's user agreement, you own content you submit, but you give Reddit a "do whatever you want with it, even to make money off of it" license.

https://www.reddit.com/help/useragreement#p_17

mahouse• 11 years ago

Is it me or this is stupid? I mean, this is the digital world, you can make as many copies as you want, so if you give them a licence to whatever they want with it, what are your options after submitting something?

bcostlow2• 11 years ago

Yes, but I think the larger point is, if Reddit pisses off the people creating interesting content, they will leave.

Reddit's user agreement doesn't mean jack if nobody is submitting anything.

seiji8• 11 years ago

At the beginning of online video, YouTube started with the same "we can resell your videos and do whatever we want without asking you" clause. Vimeo didn't have that. A lot of content producers would only upload to Vimeo (vimeo also had full HD support years before YouTube). Over time, people realized they can't beat the reach/speed/search/recommendations of YouTube, so now everybody gives in and lets GooTube just do whatever they want with the content in exchange for better and more-consistent-across-platforms exposure.

norea-armozel2• 11 years ago

This oddly reminds me of how YTMND was back in the day. Now it's mostly a niche site, but when it was semi-popular among certain segments Internet users it had some conflicts erupt between users such as atheists vs Christians being a classic spat on the site. Reddit seems to exhibit some of that coarse nature in its user base at least from my own experiences.

I'm not sure Reddit's owners can herd the users into compliance. For me the most likely outcome will be the slow decline of Reddit because users that aren't even affected by the policy changes and enforcement (even helped and protected with the banning of subreddits like /r/beatingtrannies and /r/fatpeoplehate) will see it as a possible threat to how they can submit content to the site. It's that unintended effect that Reddit's owners need to be aware of because it's what's killed smaller forums and sites.

thearn4• 11 years ago

Ah YTMND... what a sharp rise and steady fall

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=YTMND&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%...

moron4hire4• 11 years ago

I find it really hard to believe that Reddit's users aren't like the rest of the internet. Only 1% of users on a site create content, followed by 9% "participating" on top of that newly created content, followed by 90% just lurking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Even if it's not that exact breakdown, I'd be extremely surprised if the lurking users didn't dwarf the active users, and the just-commenting users didn't dwarf the actual creators. The "content" on Reddit isn't made by its users, either. Redditors are just collectors, no less than any Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, or G+ users. No less than BuzzFeed or BusinessInsider.

arprocter2• 11 years ago

I'd guess the lurk percentage (I assume you mean lurkers are people looking at the site who don't have accounts) may be lower than usual, because you can't subscribe to subreddits without an account

rndn3• 11 years ago

Reddit is pretty much a case study of upbringing without effective punishment. In real life kids behave because they have skin in the game—if they misbehave, they are not allowed ice cream. On the contrary, if you are banned from reddit, you can simply reset your browser and create a new account.

I doubt you can fix reddit with a smarter design, because that won’t change the troublemakers. To fix reddit, you would possibly have to profoundly change the way our civilization socializes the young, remove inequality and provide more psychological support. Or you would have to build a better reputation system and use that for sorting, but that’s likely going to be incompatible with anonymity and it won’t be as fun.

fulafel2• 11 years ago

Upbrining without punishment definitely is definitely possible and practiced semi widely (google around). Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

moron4hire4• 11 years ago

However, it is more effective at discouraging behavior than negative reinforcement.

rndn3• 11 years ago

I was trying to keep things in the most general terms. A problem is certainly that you can hardly talk to the mob (I’ve tried that in some cases of cyberbullying, racism etc. on Reddit). You simply get downvoted and your comment gets buried.

It seems that there too few feedback loops in the Reddit community, possibly because it’s so easy to be ignorant online, and the popular ones are also of pretty low quality (SRS, subredditdrama, …). Those who can provide high quality feedback are too few and probably also don’t care enough.

artmageddon• 11 years ago

Punishment is a pretty bad way to address misbehaviour.

As someone who's anticipating having kids in a few years, I'm genuinely curious as to what a better approach is.

belenos46• 11 years ago

Yeah, says everyone except every reputable psychologist ever, and any parent who hasn't raised an out of control little monster of a child.

Negative reinforcement works better than any other form of reinforcement, except when paired with positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, just like innumerable studies and common goddamned sense tell you.

crusso• 11 years ago

My first thought was that your comment was a little out there, but then I realized that I'm not that big on punishment with my own kids. I just let life punish them and stand by to assist them if they're in over their heads as well as to advise them on how to avoid future pitfalls.

Punishment that I would inflict would be fairly orthogonal to the real hazards that they'll face in life, so I haven't seen much point in it. I guess I'm more of a hippie than I thought. ;)

saurik• 11 years ago

You are confusing explicit and implicit punishment: the world "punishes" me for doing risky physical things in a way a video game doesn't; I can jump off a building and "die" in a video game, and potentially lose nothing. There are effectively no ramifications of any form on reddit for being an asshole or a bully or a troll: except in some isolated corner cases, for actual users (as opposed to people using reddit as a brand outlet, such as a developer of a popular video game) the value of a reddit account is effectively zero... people are unlikely to recognize it, if thy do people are unlikely to have read many of your comments, and you can always make a new one that is nearly impossible to ban. This effectively destroys the normal mechanisms we have as humans to keep people from being horrible, and reddit fails to replace with mechanisms that matter in the same way.

magic_beans• 11 years ago

According to vet and animal behaviorist Ian Dunbar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Dunbar), the best way to train dogs is not by punishing them when they do something "wrong", but to reward them when they do something right.

He also tried this method on his own children and it worked quite well for his family :D

seiji8• 11 years ago

Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site. It's a complete illusion they have for themselves to feel more special. Reddit is a billion dollar company and unless you are in corporate management, you have no say. You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.

Reddit is actually 5 things: the software platform, a global hosted instance of the software platform, engineering to improve the software platform, operations to maintain the global hosted software platform, and managament/moderation/"admin"/peopleing of the global hosted instance of the software platform.

"prommie" users of Reddit think, because they use the global hosted instance of the software platform, they have skin in the game for all other issues as well. If that is actually true, you aren't a "company," you're a weird democratic-socialist commune. Companies must make difficult and annoying and sometimes flat out wrong decisions in order to survive, and you can't be answerable to a million mostly anonymous keyboard jockeys who feel no repercussions.

lagadu• 11 years ago

You can have opinions and attempt to have influence, but you have no flat out rights unless you are a decision maker at the corporation.

That simply isn't true, as evidenced by Digg. The users, as a whole, are the one thing of value Reddit has and Reddit inc. has very little control over them.

danielweber2• 11 years ago

There are three distinct groups who all have power: owners, moderators, users. (We saw the power of moderators when the blacked out the site in protest.) Any of the three, if they unite, can end the site.

I've seen all sorts of communities go through the death spams where the owners get annoyed at all the users and wish they would disappear because it would make their job easier. I saw 'pg going in that direction here at HN, complaining what a bother the users were, but he sensibly saw HN as a loss-leader for YC and hired 'dang to be a professional moderator. So the owners and moderators are on the same page.

But most places can't afford professional moderation, and so the moderators have power, and that dynamic can lead to the users feeling (rightly or wrongly) as if they are being abused.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

The users can get a new site easier than reddit can get new users. As long as the majority of users are happy, admins have the most power. But scare off enough and it snow balls into another Digg.

xienze• 11 years ago

Reddit has this strange power inversion dynamic where the users think they are entitled to run the site.

To be fair, Reddit isn't what it is without the users. So there is some legitimate amount of power that the users have.

debacle• 11 years ago

Reddit is a zero dollar company without users. The software platform is value-less and easy to recreate. Reddit pays for hosting, and if your business model is "we pay for hosting," your business is fragile.

todayiamme2• 11 years ago

"""James Erwin, a Reddit moderator of several subreddits including r/history, argues that Reddit’s unwillingness over the years to provide strong, hands-on leadership to the site’s community is at the heart of the company’s lackluster business performance. Without a firm editorial grip, the flourishing of disreputable subreddits opened the door for BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others, which sift through Reddit content and repackage it to advertisers in more sanitized conditions. “Reddit is watching other people eat its lunch,” Erwin says."""

I think this loses the magical thing Reddit has - extremely strong intent signals from millions of people who are constantly voting on these items.

An interesting route to monetisation for Reddit would be divorcing the hive mind from the more passive viewers. There are probably a sizeable number of people who really don't care about the discussions / community interactivity element within Reddit and don't even possess accounts. What if Reddit created an independent app which used the live data from all of these sub-reddit upvotes, comments, (sentiment analysis?) and the rate at which something got picked up to do their "buzzfeed"-esque curation? Reddit's repackaging would create that neutral advertising-safe space, which could be successfully monetised in different ways.

An example of this would be say a deep-connect with content providers like Netflix and Hulu as well as whatever sub-reddits exist for movies, where they have a curated, passive viewing experience of say short-movies culled from a combination of Youtube, Vimeo, and Netflix to create a unique mix that wouldn't exist anywhere else. This would create a constantly changing, dynamic "TV-like" experience. Some viewers would like to engage around what they've watched and then Reddit could close the loop and get more data. I'm sure there are other interesting things to do with all of the photos they have in their dataset. As well all the articles and user-submitted content. (a better Flipboard type app?)

Reddit the company doesn't have to fight with reddit the chaotic force. They can just harness and use it to achieve a scale of manual curation no one has ever attempted before. It could become something quite special.

seiji8• 11 years ago

All the weirdness from Reddit seems to come from historically mixing the CEO role with the Community Manager role. There should be an entire department only dealing with on-site issues and that department should have absolute authority. Reddit grew from a 2 person company where everybody did everything, but did it actually grow up once it got bigger? Reddit has had a valley golden child touch since the beginning, so normal company growth patterns haven't always happened where would you expect in the lifecycle of a company because "lol reddit—we're differunt!"

Having the CEO be at the mercy of users in a multi-million-user fractured community is like having Tim Cook be the top level escalation for Apple tech support. Sure, the users may love it, but it's not sustainable for a company. Give the users an outlet for their rage and moderation problems, but don't touch the toxic waste personally.

todayiamme2• 11 years ago

What I'm trying to say is that they don't even have to touch that entire "community" thing. It's a massive headache and it's better to leave it alone than try to whip it into something monetisable. They can treat it as a loss-leader, extract the data it generates, and spin-off revenue generating assets from it.

mhomde• 11 years ago

Community dynamics is incredibly hard, managing it under growth and after a certain threshold even more so, and radical change is almost impossible.

It's easy to say that someone has been too lax or too firm but it's such a complex issue. It's really hard to force a community in certain direction. It's more about sowing the seeds with tools and ux and less about policies and rules... and then apply a light touch help it develop in the direction you want.

There's also a question of what the ultimate goal is. What's best for the most users? For making the most money? The biggest median satisfaction? To fulfill some aspirational teneth?

I think one of Reddit's fundamental problems at this size is that it is grown on the seeds of anonymity, user moderators and upvotes/downvotes.

It has served them well for a long time but chaos always ensues when a community reaches a certain threshold, and more pressure needs to be applied to keep it in check (if that's what you want)

Upvotes/Downvotes is a blunt tool and threads easily changes into who agrees with whom rather than promoting thoughtful comments.

User anonymity is great, but requires features around it at a certain size. A country has borders to keep criminals away and community needs a way to keep trolls at bay. If you just can create another account what's the problem with being a troll? One remedy might be a smarter karma system where more visibility is given to users that's posted interesting content, kinda lika slashdot.

User moderators are great when it works, like in some channels. But it's also a source of petty power struggles and dictators defending their fiefdoms. Reddit of course benefits tremendously from the work the "power" incentivizes these moderators do for free, but I keep wondering if at a certain size there needs to be more automation and checks and balances to avoid user moderators becoming destructive or slanted and put too much focus on the meta. Then again maybe some subreddits should be biased and let the mods rule as their will. It's a little weird though for big general subreddits for things like news and countries.

Anyway, Reddit is probably too much set in it's way to enact radical change without the users revolting, and there isn't proof that the model doesn't work, just that it has its problem, as all models probably would.

As I said, community dynamics are complicated. Will be interesting to follow Reddit going forward.

Grue32• 11 years ago

A well-managed site wouldn't grow on the Internet. Look at Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, they became some of the biggest communities on the internet precisely because they were "everything goes", whereas Something Awful or Metafilter fell into obscurity (and SA became big in the first place when it was less restrictive). The less you "manage", the more likely your site will end up in Alexa top 100.

flanbiscuit• 11 years ago

What happened to Something Awful? My friend was really into that site and tried to get me to join but I ended up gravitating towards Reddit in the end(around 2010/11)

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

That was absentee managment as well (lowtax basically disappeared for several years).

gipp• 11 years ago

Among other stuff, Let's Plays (basically an early version of what guys like TotalBiscuit or PewDiePie do on YouTube now) started on SA and got really popular across the Internet, leading to a huge influx of very different users that completely changed the character of the site.

larzang• 11 years ago

The core SA audience at its height are in their 30s now, and the internet has changed.

The people who used to deliver content solely on SA for the audience there now have global reach through other platforms. FYAD and FYAD-lite alumni are behind most of weird twitter, they run large communities on Facebook and Tumblr, and some of them even write for the Guardian and Jacobin among others. Youtube replaced SA-based LPs just as surely as it replaced YTMND.

Meanwhile, the administration policies have been as consistently outdated as the forum software, driving dedicated communities to offsite forums and casual information-seekers to the greater resources of Reddit.

seiji8• 11 years ago

almost like you need to do things Without Their Permission

morley• 11 years ago

You named three sites. The top 10 is Google, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Ebay, Craigslist, Twitter, and Reddit. I would call three of those (Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit) "unmanaged," although that's a stretch. That's hardly "more likely" than the 7 "managed" sites.

Grue32• 11 years ago

Leaving aside the sites that are not communities, you have Youtube (got big because of lenient enforcement of media copyrights), Craigslist (got big because it allowed all kind of stuff, up to and including prostitution), Twitter (people complain about Twitter lack of management on HN weekly, and it never turned profits). The only exception from the rule is Facebook. Zuck's running a tight ship over there and it did beat "unmanaged" Myspace.

easytiger• 11 years ago

No one will ever understand why yahoo is in the top 10,000 websites. Brute force SEO and bundling i'd imagine.

boldpanda• 11 years ago

As a Reddit user and advertiser, I was disappointed when they doubled their ad CPM's in June without notice to advertisers (as mentioned in the article).

I can understand incrementally increasing the price with demand, but doubling the cost of CPM's without notice is a big fuck you to advertisers.

Now they're more expensive than Facebook and with less targeting capability and you can't change or edit your ads once their live.

puranjay• 11 years ago

Question: What has been your experience with Reddit ads? I've heard that they are barely profitable for anyone save a few niche industries.

tempVariable• 11 years ago

I'm not not parent, but - I've purchased a few time-blocks for a different campaigns over last few years and it brought in significant traffic, a bit more conversions, but despite being able to target a subreddit, it is still hard to get your money's worth if you are promoting a brick and mortar store. Unless that store offers tangible goods sold online as well. Location constrained and in-person transaction type of services saw less of a bump in revenue. That is probably true for online advertising overall. My 2 cents

silverlake• 11 years ago

Who ran Reddit between 2009, when Alexis and Steve left, to whenever Yishan became CEO?

kemitche• 11 years ago

Erik Martin (hueypriest) was general manager during that time.

ihuman• 11 years ago

According to Wikipedia's Reddit timeline[1], they didn't have a CEO until Yishan became the CEO. I'm assuming they had some sort of leader before Yishan, however.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit#Full_timeli...

bittercynic2• 11 years ago

The criticism of the aesthetic of the reddit homepage is misguided. By not following current trends in web design, reddit has stronger credibility as a free-for-all where you might find interesting material.

If you want content curated by editors who are directed by big money, there are a million other sites for that.

krapp• 11 years ago

I've never understood the implication that a simple layout necessarily correlates to better content. Is it because sites that don't look modern evoke a sense of nostalgia for the less corporate "old" web? Is it just hipsterism? Clever marketing on Reddit's part?

It comes up on HN too, whenever someone complains about the awkward layout, there are worries that somehow making the site look better or perform better will degrade the culture.

bittercynic2• 11 years ago

The current style (as I interpret it) is to have a very minimal amount of text, edge-to-edge images, and for the designer to control the user's experience very closely. Sometimes this is great! I think DigitalOcean's design works perfectly, and is a positive example of following current trends.

One of the main appeals of reddit is that it's a free-for-all, and the current design reflects that. If you're looking for chaos, reddit looks pretty good, and many of us do like some chaos from time to time.

zeteo• 11 years ago

The article is terribly condescending towards Reddit's founders and moderators. They have created and grown it to be in the top 10 of US websites. The site is still growing very strongly. Yet they're presented as an immature bunch who have no idea what they're doing and need "adult" supervision, e.g.

Those cats can't run anything
in retrospect, one flaw with [Condé Nast]’s hands-off approach was an assumption that Reddit’s founders would know when and how to ask for help. [...] Looking back [...] more hand-holding would have been a good idea.

Articles like this are a barely veiled attempt to put pressure on Condé Nast and the other owners - Reddit needs to be instilled with a corporate, PR-oriented mentality ASAP. Its spirit of "open discourse and peer-to-peer learning" is incomprehensible to corporate America. On the other hand, the impressive user base seems ripe for more aggressive monetization. So the old deal has become inconvenient:

During the courtship of Reddit [...] the company promised that if the deal went through, it would leave the founders alone to run the site with minimal interference

dobs• 11 years ago

The article is terribly condescending towards Reddit's founders and moderators.

Quibbling point, but I found the article fairly flattering toward moderators. And as in the article, it's moderators who're often the quickest to call the admins out for the burden their inaction places on us. A lot of what reddit is now has been accomplished by moderators in spite of that burden.

schraeds• 11 years ago

Digg did the same

rabbyte• 11 years ago

If this article is a case study, it's only conducting research on the business challenge and ignores the societal impact. Reddit community members are treated as incidental targets for advertisers and the study observes the difficulty in marketing a brand to an environment hostile to brand messaging.

The article serves the intended readership well, and I found many of its points interesting, but it feels hollow to not mention that there is more to learn here. I'm left feeling like the take away is that creating a safer environment for advertisers is the same as creating a safer and healthier community but that necessarily excludes a kind of community; one that exists regardless of what Reddit does and one that is largely unserved by the corporate web. Communities that avoid mainstream, are suspicious of money's affect on authenticity. It's unruly, bad behavior too, but there are several ways you can slice that. Shaping it to fit a neutral channel that is friendly to advertisers is only one way.

Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

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