Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.