Reddit boss apologises after staff sacking causes 'revolt'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/33395268/reddit-boss-apologises-after-staff-sacking-causes-revolt

by adzicg • 11 years ago

117 166 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

anon3_• 11 years ago

The irony is reddit is a community website, the content is there thanks to the users, not just the moderators.

Pao has so far shown herself to be deeply out of touch with core values of reddit, I could elaborate.

However, Pao or not - how can you make a community-based site like reddit profitable without betraying the fact your users are doing the heavy lifting? I could elaborate here too.

rasur• 11 years ago

Then please stop teasing, and elaborate.

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

1) Elaborate.

2) Who do you think is doing the heavy lifting at Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, any other social network?

adzicg2• 11 years ago

FB is an example of a system where all content is there due to users, but it's profitable. On the other hand, at least from what I could see, FB never really promoted any kind of special culture or community ethos.

based on that, at least two good ways to make a community-based site profitable would be to use it as a platform for this party profit - allow others to embed profitable apps/games/... and take a percentage of their income, and sell ads based on people's interests.

istvan__4• 11 years ago

FB is actively changing how you see the world through it by removing the content you do not like to see. This is how it yields to more divided society.

http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...

istvan__4• 11 years ago

I think profit must be driven out from communication channels if we would like to have a non-dividing, truly open community. There are proofs that profit oriented social sites do not serve the community and yields to a highly divided society[1]. Corporate interest is against community values, since there is only one dimension to take care of, increasing the profit. The Reddit situation shows this, there is much damage done already, and we are going to see a lot more.

[1] http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...

officemonkey4• 11 years ago

"Making a profit" may not be a realistic goal. I'm a huge fan of Goodreads.com and I totally understand why Amazon bought it. A small section of the population reads several books a year, but they represent 80% of all book sales. Creating a community where book readers go to find more books is a huge benefit to Amazon.

Pao's mistake (and one she continues to make) is forgetting that without contributors there is no reddit. I was around to see the center of gravity shift from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. The one thing I'm certain of: it is overdue for another shift.

oldmanjay2• 11 years ago

That "Slashdot to Digg" shift was not the exodus that was detrimental to the site. It was more like siphoning whatever the opposite is cream is off the bottom. Slashdot got a little better when that happened, in my opinion.

exstudent22• 11 years ago

She went into more detail in the NYT:

But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato...

I think MOST Reddit users would disagree with how things have been handled and she does indeed seem out of touch with the user base. I don't see this turning around and instead see it as an opportunity for up and coming players to steal the user base (just like Reddit did to Digg).

jgrahamc• 11 years ago

I suspect Pao is right. Most people who use reddit won't care about this. It's very easy to get in a Silicon Valley bubble thinking this stuff matters.

EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.

placeybordeaux• 11 years ago

Most likely the lurkers don't care, but if a majority of mods or content producers care it could be a serious issue.

Content producers are a tiny minority of the site and mods are a tiny minority of that.

zzleeper2• 11 years ago

True. But there is a large overlap between those that do care and those that create content, vote, comment, and are mods.

Thus, you are alienating exactly the class of users that you don't want to.

kumarm• 11 years ago

I am a heavy reddit user and think Moderators acted immature.

Remember just like mods have an issue with administrators, Many subreddit users have issues with moderators :). I am surprised this didn't come up.

trynumber9• 11 years ago

Pao is right, if only because the majority of reddit users don't have an account. These people are simply annoyed by all the non and meta content. But who expects a tick to care about the health of deer?

fizzbatter• 11 years ago

I think it's a question of "important" users. If enough content mods and creators leave, will there be enough to fill the role immediately?

If not - i imagine it will be pretty visible to people on the fence, which will only snowball more. Just as with Digg, this can happen quite fast, and i think a snowball is the only true way this would happen.

With that said, i think the most important part of the equation will be another "player". If voat.co (or others) are not able to handle the immediate traffic, then i think it's much less likely to succeed. Reddit had a lot of troubles handling Diggs load, but they managed overall. Voat has been taken down multiple times due to Reddit's against-user actions - so it doesn't seem likely that Voat will be able to handle the traffic when Reddit users need/want it most.

Personally i'm hoping someone can find a way to distribute this whole social content idea - but in a UX friendly, web based way. I don't think Voat, or anyone else, will be able to handle taking in the Reddit userbase without falling into the same pitfalls as Digg and Reddit. Something decentralized seems like the only solution.

berberous• 11 years ago

She's right that, as a lurker, I don't really care. But it seems like all of the moderators and content contributors do, and if they leave, what does it matter what the lurkers think?

vidarh• 11 years ago

Most people would not have cared about the original firing, but many more do care about the way it was handled.

She should also not underestimate how quickly Reddit latches on to these kind of memes even when people might not personally care so much. That she's already widely known around Reddit as Chairman Pao is not exactly a good sign.

waterlesscloud5• 11 years ago

"EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature."

Downvoting for disagreement is officially sanctioned on this site. It's annoying, but that's how it is.

frostmatthew• 11 years ago

EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.

Paul Graham has said he thinks it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement[1]

Also, you may want to familiarize yourself with HN's guidelines, which state Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

datasage2• 11 years ago

In any situation like this, the most vocal will be a minority of all users. But that is not a good way to measure the sentiment of the entire user base.

In addition, those that are most vocal are some of the most important users on Reddit. They make the community what it is. If you loose them, then rest will leave soon after.

duaneb3• 11 years ago

Actually, the most vocal subreddits are also by far the subreddits least worth anything. My entire reddiy experience has been utterly unaffected by this drama and I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that Pao is bad for Reddit.

natural219• 11 years ago

It might be true that "most" Reddit users are uninterested in this drama and will use the site anyway. The problem is, I suspect, that the core users who create, run, and curate good subreddit content are the ones that matter, and once those users leave it's a simply a matter of time until the good content snowballs away to the next site.

nota_bene• 11 years ago

it's a simply a matter of time until the good content snowballs away to the next site

And that "snowballing" movement could be created easily with https://www.iWouldDo.it

holyjaw4• 11 years ago

I think it's easy to see the major outbreak of support for Victoria and the mods of the default subreddits, but I personally couldn't care less. Yes, it's clear Reddit has a significant number of difficult problems to work through with their unpaid non-employee volunteer moderators, but I, as a user who has long-since unsubscribed from the majority of the default subreddits, was unaffected and don't care.

I'd hazard a guess and say that even a large portion of the users who are constantly commenting in all of the major posts with things like "down with Pao!" and "let's go to voat.co!" probably don't care a fraction as much as their virulent comments would indicate.

forgottenpass• 11 years ago

Of course they have to paint anyone dissatisfied as a vocal minority. I hope it's just damage control, but I suspect they believe their own bullshit. Alexis too thought it was just a vocal minority when he was posting to reddit publicly laughing when the first few subreddits went offline.

He has since apologized, I'd hope he's sorry for being out of touch with the userbase. But everything Reddit has done makes it look like he's sorry he got caught.

A lot of the moderators I've heard from aren't satisfied at the statements released to them as well. There was a lot of talk about getting better moderation tools out, but Reddit doesn't seem to realize that the clown-car toolset available to mods is just a concrete and undeniable example the mods can point to about how the admins entirely ignore the "community" the entire business is built upon.

pbreit2• 11 years ago

She's probably right but it's such a tone deaf thing to say. Take some responsibility and apologize for more than not having all you mod tools in place already, blah blah.

Zigurd• 11 years ago

It's worse than tone-deaf. It's a trueism. A platitude.

Without a "vocal minority" she's got no content. Does AOL have a "vocal minority?" Yahoo? They'd give their right arm for a "vocal minority."

This is what the vocal minority wanted to talk about: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/38q8ew/reddit_int...

gotofritz• 11 years ago

I don't agree with your statement at all.

djhworld2• 11 years ago

I'm too much of a fairweather reddit user to really have that much of an informed opinion on it really, I only I ever frequent the main programming subreddits, a few local ones and /r/games. My frontpage feed doesn't subscribe to any of the main subreddits either.

As far as I'm concerned this whole "revolt" seems like it's on some other planet

mahouse3• 11 years ago

On the most populated planet, for that matter.

brobinson• 11 years ago

On the highest-revenue generating planet, hence kn0thing's priorities having "get the blacked out subreddits back online" before "work out a plan for going forward".

http://www.reddit.com/r/modclub/comments/3bypwq/rmodclub_ama...

Reddit really needs PR people. The administration's interactions with the community during events like these are almost comically bad.

peatmoss• 11 years ago

Same experience here. And reading a few of the comment threads on reddit to try and figure out what's going on completely cured me of feeling too sympathetic toward this revolt. The "men's rights" mix was a little strong for me. Some of those threads left me feeling like turning in my man parts.

mjklin2• 11 years ago

It's looking to me that the Wikipedia business model is the correct one for a community site like Reddit. What are the chances of a Reddit clone surviving on donations?

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

Well, Reddit Gold is already basically donations. Have they released earnings information?

officemonkey4• 11 years ago

Well, I believe Reddit Gold saved Reddit. There were four people working in a corner of the Wired Offices before Reddit Gold. Afterward, they became a prize property.

dageshi2• 11 years ago

I see the bar fill up most days, I actually think reddit has missed an opportunity by not expanding reddit gold and doing more interesting things with it.

datasage2• 11 years ago

I tend to agree with this. It would better align the goals of the organization supporting the community with the community.

holyjaw4• 11 years ago

business model

I'm not sure what you mean here; are you referring to the annual donation drive? I love this model, but I know a lot of Wikipedia users who absolutoly hate the (admittedly non-invasive and pretty respectful) banners requesting donations.

mjklin2• 11 years ago

Yes, the fundraising appeals are annoying. But they keep their independence from marketers and the community has a stake in the site.

They are not lying when they say "if everyone gave $5 the appeal would be over today". It's much easier for them than for a local PBS affiliate because of the huge user base. As the internet grows up, I hope users will learn to value things appropriately and not expect them for free.

shostack5• 11 years ago

Reddit user of 8 years here.

Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.

I hope they realized how much power the community holds. Reddit is fickle with a long memory, and if the winds of favor start blowing the other way, there will ALWAYS be someone dredging up the past any time you try to do anything in the future.

Pao and any others involved in these decisions have done irreparable damage to their community and its trust in Reddit's leadership. Reddit's success is built on a notion of trust that few, if any social networks could ever achieve because Reddit has consistently made choices in favor of the community, not despite them. When that starts changing, so does the trust and the rest of the relationship.

But maybe that's the goal and they are trying to drive out the people who care about that while retaining the users who just want cat pictures and celeb AMA's who don't give a crap about the drama or increasingly intrusive advertising (I'm looking at you Alienblue feed ads that I can't downvote enough). I'd be shocked if they didn't start selling audience data to brokers like Axciom or Neustar at some point as well.

"He said the team were also looking into ways to "improve being a moderator"."

Given how things went down, I wouldn't be surprised if that implied restricting the ability for mods to make certain subs dark in the future. If you are a content portal, you can't be letting your pesky users turn off the tap whenever they want...bad for business.

I always wondered why Reddit never introduced paid subscription-based subs. Let the community monetize and promote the platform, give them recurring revenue and take a cut. Suddenly you are helping your users and helping Reddit. Sure free alternative subs might be more popular for easily duplicated content, but certain content areas could do quite well.

Oh well, it was great while it lasted.

--EDIT--

Please don't interpret my statement about them not providing details of the firing as a presumption that they should have or that I expected them to expose themselves to liability--I'm not ignorant when it comes to how these things go down. My (perhaps not clear enough) point is that there is no real acknowledgement that she was good at executing on her job (from the standpoint of the community and our perception) and the entire way this has been handled has been in a cold corporate manner.

I get they are a business, but when you run a community like Reddit, the Reddit employees who actively engage are part of that community, so it becomes an inherently personal matter, like when you have to explain to a child why you are divorcing your spouse. Sure you could just not explain it, but you increase the likely hood of deep emotional scars that never heal if you handle it poorly. As much as they would like this to be an internal situation, the community is intrinsically intertwined in this so some deeper explanation that satisfies this curiosity is more or less necessary to bring them around. Not saying that is fair to Reddit or Victoria, just stating how the mob works from my experience after 8+ years.

djhworld2• 11 years ago

Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.

Is it really in anyones best interest to know? Firing of staff is a personal matter between two private entities.

officemonkey4• 11 years ago

I know the moderators didn't like the firing, but the lack of a thoughtful transition plan put the AMA subreddit in jeopardy.

That _is_ Pao's responsibility, and she failed in having a plan, and the community called her on it.

wvenable• 11 years ago

Companies usually don't fire people who are well liked and doing a good job. They also fired the reddit gifts admin.

I think it's obvious that there is a forced changing of the guard happening at reddit and given the people who were fired were some of the most popular with the users and moderators I can't imagine those changes will be well received by the users.

However, firing of staff is a personal matter and neither the company nor Ms. Taylor are going to say anything about it. So now we just have to wait for the other shoe to drop to find out what is really going on.

danso2• 11 years ago

Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.

It's standard practice for a company to not disclose why someone was fired, and this is often to the benefit of the former employee. Why do you think you're entitled to know the private details of Victoria's employment?

waterlesscloud5• 11 years ago

Well, a Reddit CEO didn't hesitate to make public negative comments about a fired employee.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_...

aestetix• 11 years ago

It is, however, standard practice for a company to evaluate an employee's list of duties to ensure that the tasks they were handling continue to be fulfilled.

zyx321• 11 years ago

Is it standard practice not to disclose to anyone that someone was fired at all? Is it standard to fire your main community manager and not replace her, to just stop replying to the community's emails? Is it standard to not cancel a terminated employees appointments? Is it standard to let your celebrity guests fly halfway across the country, wait an hour for their scheduled appointment, and only reveal what happened when their agent calls to complain?

zzleeper2• 11 years ago

Oh well, it was great while it lasted.

Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.

res0nat0r• 11 years ago

This is overblown (like most internet nerd rage that transpired at Reddit the last few days).

I bet most folks who don't frequent the site, and haven't used it over the holiday weekend will come back and not even know anything had transpired and don't feel any decline. I've used the site daily for a long time and it is fine by me. Maybe I just don't get upset that I can't say and do anything I want on the site because I know that is silly.

Shutting down creep subreddits like fatpeoplehate and others is totally fine and isn't stifling anyones free speech. No one has a right to be able to post whatever they want on a 3rd party website, fortunately to many and unfortunately to some the Internet is no longer the Wild Wild West.

xq• 11 years ago

> Oh well, it was great while it lasted.
Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.

I've also been around since nearly the beginning (coming up on tenth cakeday) and I feel very similarly.

I expressed as much in Alexis' modtalk thread, and I was glad to see many others doing the same. Site usability issues aside, frankly I couldn't care less about the admin-moderator and moderator-user dynamic of the default subs. The large-scale reddit community lost my interest years ago in typical Eternal September fashion.

But I feel, on the whole, betrayed by the new direction of the site. Not only does it not reflect the early days of reddit that drew me in -- it doesn't even seem to reflect a natural growth-driven evolution of the platform.

I find myself losing all remaining interest in reddit and suspect I'll delete my account in the coming weeks if there aren't major changes to

(a) the horrendous attitude of the [user-facing] admins,

(b) communication channels between reddit engineers and users who try to contribute to site development,

It's been a great run. Really, what an amazing decade. But, at least for me, these recent events are just the final blow. They represent a turning point in reddit and a turning point in my own life. These discussion silos of the early 2000s all feel bloated and fairly useless now.

raldi• 11 years ago

As a ten-year user, I can attest that people have been saying that since 2005.

holyjaw4• 11 years ago

Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.

That is none of your business. That is none of -our- business. Anybody who thinks they deserve to know why Victoria / u/chooters was fired has either never worked a real job before, or has a vastly over-large opinion of themselves.

shostack5• 11 years ago

I never said I/the Reddit community deserve to know. Please read my appended edit to my original comment. My point was that while we are not entitled to know, that may be the only thing that can placate the mob in this situation, like it or not.

toufka• 11 years ago

Very much unlike other products, Reddit is a community. It's curious that Pao et al. have not spoken to that community. They spoke to NYT, to TIME, to BBC, but not to reddit. It's really strange.

shostack5• 11 years ago

And certainly not for lack of want by the users. Just look at all the AMA request activity. However the community knows Pao would never do it as it would be akin to walking into a pitchfork mob.

go1dfish• 11 years ago

Now it's time for them to apologize for hiring former digg admins that brag about nuking users.

https://archive.is/cCxX3

They are quite literally TRYING to build reddit v4

https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/352e9y/introducing...

hoopd11• 11 years ago

I have a strong suspicion that in the same way new CEOs and managers like to do 'spring cleaning' of their staffs that reddit might like for the mods with the old-reddit mentality to leave so they can be replaced with new mods more in line with the "safe spaces and monetezation" goals of the site.

legohead• 11 years ago

My god, what a horribly written article, and by the BBC?

Reddit went into virtual lockdown, with many of the sections made private after Victoria Taylor was fired.

Sections? Private? Explain this to your users, or use better wording.

About 100 chat sections, or sub-reddits, that together have millions of readers are believed to have been shut, although are many are now again public.

Just..what? "have been shut", "are many are now"

There had been no explanation of why she was suddenly sacked, said the administrators.

This makes no sense. Administrators are the employees/company. So you're saying that the company just fired someone without knowing why? Maybe you meant moderators?

mahouse3• 11 years ago

Sections? Private? Explain this to your users, or use better wording.

That's implying the reader knows or wants to know how the website works.

orionblastar• 11 years ago

Anything they say to the press can be used in a discrimination lawsuit. Pao is a lawyer, she knows when to keep her mouth shut to the press.

It is better to say she doesn't know why Victoria was fired, than give an actual reason that can be investigated. A CEO that doesn't know what their own organization is doing is a poor CEO, but better to be seen as a poor CEO than one that has a political agenda and fires people based on discrimination principles.

Pao needs to be vague so they can't use her words against her in a lawsuit. It is obvious she is trying to clean up Reddit to get better advertisers by banning subs and users and firing people whom she thinks allows certain behavior to go unpunished.

I heard that some users were posting links to her husband's Ponzi schemes, and they were getting deleted. http://nypost.com/2015/03/18/users-lash-out-at-reddit-boss-f...

protothomas• 11 years ago

To be fair it's on the Newsbeat "magazine" section of the bbc which is intentionally more informal / gossipy and also aimed at a young demographic. Still a fairly shoddy article though I'd agree.

SirensOfTitan• 11 years ago

But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.

This is an incredible simplification.

If we follow the 90-9-1 model: 1% of reddit's user base contributes new content, 9% interacts with that content, and 90% are lurkers and consumers. The 'vocal minority' are the content creators and contributors.

Reddit has hardly changed in its existence. Things like a search that works or reasonable moderator tools have been promised for years to no avail. Reddit has never had any decent product leadership, but their attempt to reign in control of content has been disastrous.

Moderating content outside of removing illegal content is a really slippery slope. It's incredibly difficult to get content standards right. Reddit, as it becomes more mainstream, seems like its trying to get content standards under control, but the cost is immense and might eventually end up alienating its userbase.

mreiland12• 11 years ago

Where to begin.

The 'vocal minority' are the content creators and contributors.

That term, content creator. That's a bit disingenuous in this case. It's rare for anyone to create content specifically for reddit, the vast majority of this content you're talking about is re-posted to reddit from other sources.

Reddit, as it becomes more mainstream

Reddit is one of the largest sites on the internet, how much more mainstream does it need to get before you stop characterizing it as "becoming mainstream"?

The truth is, the company made a decision and the moderators got ansty and threw the users under the bus in an attempt to make a power play.

The most virulent detractors were a vocal minority, they were the mods of a few large subreddits.

adevine4• 11 years ago

I call BS. One of the things that convinced me this (that is, how reddit treats and responds to its mods) was a real problem, and not just some "angsty mods", was the reaction from /r/AskScience. AskScience is one of the best subreddits, largely because its moderation is so good. The fact that the AskScience mods stood up in agreement with what was going on, and pointed out how non-responsive admins had been, made me believe this is much more than a "power play".

pbreit2• 11 years ago

Reddit is 99.999% user generated content.

It's a high-traffic site, sure, but I wouldn't call it mainstream. I would consider much lower trafficked sites like Expedia, Zappos and Huffington Post more "mainstream".

soneil• 11 years ago

You might want to take a look at some of the top AMAs reddit has seen - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/search?q=ama&sort=top&restrict...

Worf, Buzz Aldrin, Obama, Bill Gates, Elon Musk ..

The people who "revolting" this time were the people who brought us these. I don't think it's fair to write them off as re-posters; they've put huge, huge amounts of time and effort into curating some of the most engaging original content reddit has ever seen.

clamprecht• 11 years ago

I have to disagree with your point about reddit's search. Search has been working for several years now - give it a try. The thing it doesn't do is search through all user comments (it only searches through the main posting title and comments). To implement the last part would be much more expensive.

I agree with the main point, though, that you shouldn't fuck with the reddit community.

*Edit: I'm a redditor in the 9 year club.

bjterry• 11 years ago

The lack of comment searching is pretty bad though. I'd say that when I want to search reddit it's for comments more than 50% of the time. For example, if you're looking for product information the answer is more likely to be in a comment than in a post title. Google is able to do a decent job of this though with the right query.

glogla2• 11 years ago

But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.

I think she is trying to paint the "blackout" as the same as the fatpeoplehate banning, which created similar, but different shitstrom. Some people even believe that.

But this is different - the fatpeoplehate incident was about hateful people no longer being able to feely practice their hate and harassment.

Blackout is about people realizing they are on the ship, and the captain has no idea what she's doing, and the ship has quite a few icebergs in the way.

kybernetyk• 11 years ago

Blackout is about people realizing they are on the ship, and the captain has no idea what she's doing, and the ship has quite a few icebergs in the way.

Luckily there's many other ships you can jump off to if the iceberg gets too close.

People migrated from Digg to Reddit. People will migrate from Reddit to whatever will come next if the need should arise.

fizixer• 11 years ago

At the same time this might be not be that different, i.e., customers of a company interfering with the internal decisions. If firing a certain employee is that bad for the company, investors would be a lot more upset than the customers. (and TBH, the likelihood that one single individual is that integral to the company is practically zero; not saying it was a good decision; I don't think enough details have been made public).

Even though I admit reddit is a strange place, somewhat halfway between a company and a governing body with democracy-like structure. Still, given the sheer amount of userbase, it's unlikely that the activism of the mods and a chuck of active users (who are upvoting the boycott related posts) would seriously affect it (i.e., bring the website down in the long term). Probably such internal decisions would change the flavor/nature of the website.

ForEnglandJames• 11 years ago

She's not counting the loyal lurkers such as myself that have cut ourselves off completely. I have blocked reddit on all of my devices as a result of this ordeal. I'm curious if there are many others like me.

Retra2• 11 years ago

She's not counting loyal lurkers as 'virulent detractors?'

mcphage2• 11 years ago

the loyal lurkers such as myself that have cut ourselves off completely. I have blocked reddit on all of my devices as a result of this ordeal.

I'm curious what you mean by "loyal", then.

s_dev• 11 years ago

Reddit user of 5 years.

I don't see a Digg like exodus happening yet. I recall leaving Digg and thinking with the new version that these guys were taking the piss and completely out of touch with users.

Reddit hasn't gone quite that far but it definitely used to pride itself being a free speech platform and thats changed now - locking sub reddits is restricting ideas and behaviour despite what the admins say. You're only even in favor of free speech so long as you tolerate things that are mean, awful and sometimes even hateful. The bans, firing and lack of communications weren't a good idea and didn't result in a "safer" reddit.

I don't think Ellen Pao is the right person to run Reddit. I think Reddit is facing the same dilemma the music industry faced when they realised that their best customers were also the ones to pirate the most music.

shostack5• 11 years ago

Part of that is there doesn't seem to be a great alternative yet. Even Voat doesn't cut it. Simply different dynamics to the Digg migration. Reddit set the bar way higher and there is no better alternative yet.

holyjaw4• 11 years ago

The Digg exodus was due, in part, to Digg rapid-fire iterating over new site-wide designs in an era when the web was still learning how to deal with things like asynchronous actions and dynamic (vs. static) content. One of the other major issues with Digg v4 that I can remember was the use of iFrames to ensure all traffic never left digg.com. This was also around the time of the Facebook "like" button earning prominence on most sites.

Long story short, EVERY user was affected by Digg's changes and bugs. The issues Reddit faces now affect only the moderators; users only feel the secondary and tertiary affects of these conflicts.

There is not yet any impetus for a mass exodus.

iaw4• 11 years ago

Excellent analysis. I suspect that the secondary and tertiary affects have a lagged but similar impact on the user base as Digg's failed redesigns.

pbhjpbhj4• 11 years ago

As I recall it the problem with Digg was that preferential treatment was being given in secret for pay, or that is how things appeared. Also that a voting ring had been established such that ordinary users could never get stories off the bottom spots - they simply got duplicated by part of the 'diggerati' and the alternate story gained the early traction needed to launch it to the top pages. Thus the apparent notoriety, the focus that people crave, that pays users back for their submissions was missing from the loop. Then the redesign came and rubbed everyone up the wrong way; but it seemed to me more like the straw that broke the camel's back (i.e. the last in a line of bad things) rather than a reason in itself.

Similar things have happened at Slashdot, user disenfranchisement as the (new) owners try to screw out every last cent from the site forgetting it needs the community to be what it is. Hit with a second punch of not entirely well executed redesign and you've got problems.

But then I think HN perhaps goes the other way, the more I stay the more I hanker after some simple redesign to address the site's deficiencies (collapsing comments threads for example, spacing the up- and down-vote buttons). I'm a big believer in "if it ain't broke ..." but also consider that a design should move with browser/web developments to, in an evolving way. Mind you dang seems to do a great job with the moderating.

politician2• 11 years ago

From my perspective as a digger during the Digg exodus it snowballed because a viable alternative existed at the time that the trigger event happened (Reddit, Digg v5).

There is no viable community for redditors to flee to this time, but there are probably dozens of teams of people spending the long weekend attempting to cobble together replacements for Reddit.

I've said elsewhere that I'm confident that Reddit will muddle through this debacle because they're the only game in town. But a highly-active contingent of their user-base is now in play, competitors will appear on the horizon over the next few months to draw them away, and they may succeed.

matchagaucho3• 11 years ago

Reddit is just not sustainable on $8M per year in ad revenue. Urgent changes are required.

Sponsored AMAs are the first of many possible monetization strategies to take Reddit to $100M per year, which in turn increase the value of employee equity.

AMAs are ridiculously undervalued when looking at the quality of celebs and their monthly unique visitors.

If Reddit's own internal culture is indeed blocking the evolution of Reddit as a media property, then Ellen is simply making the tough, fiscally responsible decisions.

Snoop Dogg, a Reddit investor, didn't become a $135M franchise by undervaluing his content and services. Reddit shouldn't either.

adevine4• 11 years ago

Totally disagree on this one, and I see in this sentiment the same thing that brought down Digg.

"If Reddit's own internal culture is indeed blocking the evolution of Reddit as a media property, then Ellen is simply making the tough, fiscally responsible decisions." I call major BS, because reddit is NOTHING without its "internal culture". Anything that has a whiff of promotion or spam on reddit will kill it, at least if it's done in a way that doesn't respect its user base. For example, it was rumored that Victoria Taylor was against video AMAs for the reason that it would turn them into light puff pieces, instead of the insightful, humorous, and sometimes hard-hitting interactions that the best AMAs are.

matchagaucho3• 11 years ago

Promotions can be done natively while preserving "culture".

If J.J. Abrams does an AMA to promote Star Wars this December, does anyone really care that Disney paid $200K to show an exclusive movie trailer to Reddit fans?

If even 1% of Reddit users take that video viral, it'd add millions to the opening weekend box office numbers.

[edit: nevermind measurable viral outcomes. The core question remains, can Reddit can maintain it's culture with native ads/sponsorship?].

iaw4• 11 years ago

The challenge you face with your analogy to Snoop Dogg is that Snoop isn't dependent upon his fans (analogous to user base) to produce his music, only to consume.

What value does Reddit provide as a server by offering a forum where users volunteer to create, rank, and moderate their content for them? What about that value isn't dependent on the community that creates content? What about Reddit prevents voat or frizbee from acquiring its community?

matchagaucho3• 11 years ago

True, the content creator/consumer relationship is not a perfect analogy.

The secret sauce to Reddit is a formula comprised of anonymous identity, freedom of speech, user generated content, witty humor, cat pictures, atheism, technologists, reward systems (gold, up vote) and transparent communication.... all baked in a social oven for 10 years.

In turns out, that all those social network qualities happen to represent a significant population of the real-world; and everyone, from politicians to celebrities, are acknowledging that fact.

Without knowing the specifics of voat or frizbee, I just don't see another community coming along that can replicate this formula in the short-term.

Reddit is actually in a good position to introduce healthy dialogues that involve brands, UGC producers, and consumers.

albinofrenchy• 11 years ago

Sponsored AMAs are the first of many possible monetization strategies to take Reddit to $100M per year, which in turn increase the value of employee equity.

There are a thousand different ways marketing people can shove celebrities down peoples throats. If you turn AMAs into exactly that, you wont get $100M a year; you'll just ruin something kinda novel.

grey413• 11 years ago

Even if you're not invested in reddit's fate (I'm a fairweather user myself), this whole debacle has been a fascinating example of how to screw up community management, and how that in turn ruins public relations. Good community management is all about managing expectations and cultivating your userbase so that they'll support you during rough patches. Likewise, good public relations is all about controlling and influencing the narrative. Reddit-the-company, has apparently failed on both fronts. First, they shut out their core of dedicated, free volunteers, giving them literally no reason to be loyal to the company. As a direct result, reddit lost out on one of their best tools for managing the narrative. So when Reddit co. undermined their most prominent, productive volunteers by firing their staff liaison with no warning, it's no damned wonder that the moderators turned on their "bosses". Result? Instant PR nightmare, with next to zero available leverage for controlling it.

The whole thing is a failure of management, pure and simple. Reddit's board should be looking for blood.

sixQuarks2• 11 years ago

Reddit's biggest mistake was to raise $50 million at a $250 million valuation. They are now a profit-seeking enterprise that goes against the grain of what the site is all about. This is the beginning of the end.

dopeboy• 11 years ago

They were a profit seeking enterprise from the beginning - they just kept punting until that round. At some point the rubber has to hit the road.

I don't have the answers but I don't think monetizing the 31st most traffiked is impossible. They have to think harder and dig deeper.

sixQuarks2• 11 years ago

I agree, they should be able to monetize it, but when the CEO doesn't know how to use the site, that's a big problem. She simply doesn't understand the user base. Reddit needs someone who understands the users and does a good job matching up advertisers that want to reach those users (in a way that doesn't feel like advertising). Perhaps only allow Reddit-approved advertisers.

staunch• 11 years ago

"I want to apologize for how we handled the transition yesterday,"

This is a great display of distancing language.

1. The "I" becomes "we".

2. Use of "apologize" over "sorry".

3. Specifies the mistake as one of "handling".

4. Refers to abrupt firing as a "transition".

cmsj• 11 years ago

Also, "I want to apologise" is different to "I apologise". It's understandable that people want to put as much self-sparing language in an apology as possible, but it's the worst time to do it.

lepht• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance

pbhjpbhj4• 11 years ago

Still no answer on the reason for the dismissal of the Reddit staff member, other than speculation that it concerned a particular AMA. Disappointed that they appear not to have even asked the question; if they had surely they'd say there was "no comment" or refusal to answer or whatever.

IMO it makes a lot of difference if they were planning the dismissal for a while and screwed it up or had to react to something like gross negligence or misconduct - as the BBC was required to when Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear) hit a member of the production team and the series was postponed mid-run.

Would be ever so interesting to see Reddit's stats and stats on exit pages and the URL's visited outside Reddit by browser put off by the blackout. Maybe the NSA will release an analysis at some point ;0)>.

mahranch2• 11 years ago

Powermod and poweruser here. By that, I mean I mod 1 or more large default subreddit and have been on reddit a long time.

We, the mods, have been asking for tools to properly manage our communities for upwards of 4-5 years now. Pretty much as soon as subreddits were created, we were needing tools. But back then, it was less of an issue because you only had 20,000 subscribers (if you were lucky). Now, subreddits have 9 million subscribers and the tools that were promised? Non existent. Instead, they roll out things like snoovatars and redditgifts. It's literally a slap in the face and just goes to show that management is so completely out of touch with their own site that you can't help but laugh at it all. They spend money hiring media coordinators, "creative director of video", "Head of round-up" (yes, those are real positions at reddit) and sales reps instead of talented software engineers and coders to support the people who keep their website chugging along. The people who do it for free.

The issue: They started focusing on profits too soon. Reddit, back when it was seeing a few million hits a month, was only a half finished product. Now it sees 170 million unique hits a month and nothing has changed. It's still an unfinished product. But after getting their $50 million investment, instead of putting some of that money back into the website to bring us the tools we've literally been begging for, they redoubled their efforts on finding ways to monetize the site.

How to fix: Fire their CEO or whoever is responsible for laying out the company's current goals. They were wrong. Anyone who actually knows and understands reddit knew those goals were going to fail. Which means (or proves) whoever was in charge was operating and making decisions out of ignorance. They were making decisions without understanding their product. It would be like me getting hired as the CEO of Walmart and I just start making business decisions without knowing anything about their corporate structure or needs. It's an obvious recipe for disaster.

The most surprising thing out of all of this was the realization that the management at reddit was truly and really out of touch. I didn't want to believe that to be the case because I like reddit. It's a sad thing to see something you love being run by people who just don't know their own product.

ObviousScience3• 11 years ago

As someone who hasn't really had to deal with managing large communities or being in the moderator position you're in... could you give a few examples of tools you wish they'd provide for community management or ways you wish the reddit corporate team would be in better contact with the community (besides the obvious notifying when firing liaisons coordinating things)?

mahranch2• 11 years ago

I'd love too, but that would expose who I am on reddit because I've recently recommended some of those tools to the admins. They're attempting to have yet another dialogue and I'd prefer to keep this account and that one separate.

However, the consensus among the other mods I've talked to say that tools to deal with undesirable elements, vote manipulation and other related curation tools (possibly even the ability for mods to IP ban someone from their subreddit) would improve the quality of individual subreddits (and by extension, reddit itself) so much I can't really put it into words.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

"At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it's time to get Reddit functioning again," Alexis Ohanian wrote.

I like Alexis, I've read his book and seen his TED talk and think he is overall a good guy. That said both this comment and the way he reacted on reddit was extremely poor. This "apology" for Pao is shit and completely empty. After years of ignoring the mods and the hard work they put in to make reddit possible they tell everyone "You've had your fun, now start making up money again". I'm not just ready to leave reddit for something like voat like I left digg for reddit but this is not the first thing reddit has done recently that rubs me wrong. Maybe this is just their Google-"Don't be evil" transformation where they do things that the community thinks are not in keeping with their stated mission but continues to use the platform because it's better than most everything else out there...

superuser2• 11 years ago

The point brought up on Reddit (but not posted here) in the comments is salient: if she were apologizing to the Reddit community, she would have made a Reddit post. But she didn't do that - she went through old media channels. This is in no way, shape, or form an apology to users, it is damage control with investors.

Reddit boss apologises after staff sacking causes 'revolt'

Related Stories