Reddit Names Marty Weiner, Early Engineer at Pinterest, Its First CTO | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Names Marty Weiner, Early Engineer at Pinterest, Its First CTO

techcrunch.com

77 pointssarahkpeck45 comments

There are comments from /u/spez and /u/jedberg on the reddit thread:

/u/spez: "I cannot overstate how excited we are for Marty to join us!"

/u/jedberg: "Omg /u/spez. Worst decision ever!

I am of course totally kidding. I've spent a lot of time talking to Marty about both technology and engineering culture (even specifically reddit's technology) and I can't think of a better choice than Marty to be CTO of reddit! Just don't let /u/MrWeiner anywhere near a console."

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3hgni3/reddit_n...

It is clear that Reddit is facing some problems with scalability. I often get server errors during peak hours. But I think that politically-based censorship, which is being enforced by many moderators (with the help of Reddit admins), will kill this service sooner than scalability problems. Users will simply left Reddit when they will become censored. Many users I knew already did that. Moreover, moderators of many subreddits want to have more powers, including ability to see user IP address, ban users basing on IP address and ban users globally (not only on subreddit they moderate). Granting them these privileges will accelerate the decay.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Leakeverything/comments/3c0d9e/some_...

It is no coincidence, that /r/europe mods are the ones who ask the most loudly for more powers. They massively ban users on their subreddit, for variety of reasons, but the most common last months is criticizing current EU immigration policy. Some users create new accounts and come back after few days. That's why they want to have the ability to ban IP addresses. It is much harder to change IP address.

Exemplary user stories:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3b86ws/mods_of_reur...

https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/374s5i/thi...

There is no need to bring reddit intra-site politics here. I doubt readers could care less about SJW vs anti-SJW factions on another site. Furthermore, the actions of certain moderators have nothing to do with this staffing announcement, so you are doubly off-topic. It would make me happy at least if we could contain reddit politics to reddit itself.

Readers already pointed out here lack of IP banning tools as one of the technical challenges Reddit is facing. I wanted to bring up the context of such demands.

Reddit's response to the community woes has been "we are building technology to respond to these concerns.

The hiring of a new CTO is likely designed to address these concerns.

So airing these concerns here seems pretty on topic to me.

What are you referring to you when you talk about politically-based censorship? I was increasingly turned off by the growing racism, misogyny, and hate that I saw daily on Reddit, and am quite happy to see many of the most disgusting subreddits finally done away with. I suspect that for every free-speech absolutist worried about Reddit refusing to sanction such vitriol there are many more that will be happy to find a more inclusive, welcoming Reddit. I know I'm one of the latter.

Advocating against censorship and arguing against banning subreddits is not equivalent to supporting those subreddits. Basic, undergraduate-level logic.

The fact is that there are plenty of hateful subreddits explicitly supported by admins and mods (e.g., SRS) but the hate is pointed in the 'right' direction (i.e., +SJW).

And the point of the above is that there is clearly bias shaping the site's content from the very top. This stands in direct contradiction to the founders statements years ago about creating a "bastion of free speech".

The article is about hiring a CTO to take on scaling challenges, which only matters if they plan to grow. I don't see any evidence from any recent statements that they're prioritizing ideology (of any kind) over growth and profit. If keeping SRS and banning everyone else gets them growth, that's what gets them growth.

> Users will simply left Reddit when they will become censored. Many users I knew already did that.

I wonder if there are actual statistics here (reddit probably could compute them, but may not want to release them publicly). I'm an avid redditor, so I obviously disagree with this, but most non-redditors seem to have the impression that the place is disgusting filth and needs to step up its censorship of racism and the like. And I think there are way more non-redditors than redditors.

If you want to argue that it's the right business decision for reddit to be more of a bastion of free speech, as opposed to simply a moral imperative, that needs to be backed up with an analysis of potential new users as well as potential ex-users.

Yeah, it's kinda sad to see this happen to Reddit... I feel like there is so much potential to create unique revenue driving efforts beyond the standard ad based concepts that Reddit should be exploring..

No, this canard keeps getting brought up over and over again. /r/europe has a serious problem with racists posting all kinds of hate speech. A couple of years ago, the moderators started cracking down on the racism and banning the racists, and now the racists are all crying censorship because a popular subreddit now has a policy against hate speech.

And /r/subredditcancer is a subreddit that exists for hate groups to complain about getting banned from the rest of reddit. Hell, one of the moderators there, KrustyKoonKrackers (username is a KKK reference and contains a misspelled racial slur) used to be a moderator of /r/coontown (good riddance to that hellhole), and another ex-coontown mod, /u/DylannStormRoof (named after a racist mass murderer), is very active on SRC. I've seen SRC repeatedly lie and distort facts to claim that they're getting banned from places for no reason, and every time, it turns out that there's a very, very good reason, and the poster was just lying for sympathy. I can't believe anything anyone says on SRC.

Only if you consider information about terrorist attacks as a 'hate speech'.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3b86ws/mods_of_reur...

(This post was delisted many times by mods, despite the fact that its author is Turk, so he cannot be racist against himself.)

Moreover, /r/europe moderators explicitly admits their practices:

>Censure or visible islamophobia. One has to choose.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3b6fgi/mégathread_a...

In the first thread, it looks like the mods admit to making a mistake.

>It is much harder to change IP address

Turn on and off the airplane mode while on 3G or 4G data - and you will have a new IP address. It's that simple, takes 5-7 seconds.

From experience, legitimate users with a dissenting opinion will leave after an IP ban. Determined trolls however who want to deface the service will change IPs and come back with vengeance.

What is a "founding engineer"? It must not mean founder, since then one would just say "founder". It's clearly not Director of Engineering, CTO, or VP o E.

I had just assumed this was new phrasing used by recruiters and business people trying to get early engineer hires that they don't want to give a real title to (because if/when the company grows they'll bring in adults to run things and get those titles.)

Note, seriously asking - and not trying to take imply anything negative about Marty's (whom I don't know) abilities, or contributions to Pinterest.

Former head of engineering at Pinterest here. Marty was one of the first three engineers at the company. He is an amazing guy -- smart, personable, fun to work with.

This is a boon for Reddit and as a Reddit user I'm very excited. Fortunately Pinterest has a strong bench and can afford to share the wealth of their amazing engineering team.

Basically "Engineer hire #1" (or similar) that was on board super early but wasn't part of the founding team when the team itself was formed.

I am guessing the distinction is to delineate the fact that the engineer did not join 1+ year from company founding, which is often the case for Engineer #1.

So basically founder minus the shares?

Well in the case I saw it was founder minus the shares plus quite good pay.

and not promoted to direng/cto or (s)he would have use that title, though maybe the company has a policy of not promoting interally

Same way the Mercury Seven were "founding astronauts": the first class, the inaugural group, etc.

likely first or second employee that joined the company

Ok, since "founding" is misleading (or at least distracting) we've replaced it with "early" above.

Interesting, since the TechCrunch article uses the phrase 'Founding' Engineer

The HN guidelines ask submitters to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. In the latter cases it's standard practice for us to change them here. I don't really think the Techcrunch title was misleading, and you were certainly right to post it as is. But the word "founding" did spark an off-topic subthread, and in cases like that we've found it's easiest to just remove the objection.

What are the technology challenges is Reddit facing? Clearly not scaling as it's been pretty reliable. New features? What more feature does one need from Reddit? It's pretty good for what it's doing.

Reddit still borks during peak hour, after all this years. But not as often as it used to. There was a huge discussion about reddit not implementing better moderation/spamming/vote-rigging and site wide feature tools that has been promised for years. Basically reddit has been bit stagnant feature wise for some time now. Lot were promise with lotsa new hires but nothing much to show for it.

With spez being back, hopefully it will change. he doesnt have a habbit of bullshitting, unlike recent CEOs.

I mostly read Reddit while not logged in, so I've never seen any latency. I guess it's mostly because of authentication/personalized content stuff, which should be easy to fix, by doing less of them or lazy loading.

Maybe they serve more cached content to not logged users while being more careful about serving up-to-date one to the logged ones? It's just a wild guess I have no idea how it works.

Reddit definitely makes use of it's CDN and caching for logged out users. Since they make up the significant proportion (exact statistics escape me) of visitors, it's not surprising that's where their effort has been directed.

In contrast, every page load by a logged-in user requires unique database queries for things like vote status on submissions and comments.

Its a lot more than that I am sure. Considering its the 10th most visited site. Handling 1000s of comments per second (if not more), among other things, is no trivial thing.

Their shadowbanning is the worst, I have an 8 year old account and I was shaddowbanned countless time, I was finally un-shadowbanned after years of whining about it.

I have a feeling Spez will get this right. Lets see.

I'm always logged in into reddit, but have no personalizations (like favorite subreddit, etc). I know that doesn't really guarantee anything, but reddit still borks at peak time for me. I'd assume it's very little compute for my personalization to load.

The moderation tools are absolutely archaic. Moderating any subreddit of sufficient size requires a small army of bots and third party tools.

Basic forum moderation tools like IP banning persistent troublemakers and spammers are still not available.

hello, what challenges in particular? Are you a moderator?

edit: I saw you posted a few challenges :) I don't work for reddit but if you're a moderator Id be interested to PM you about something around that...

I am a moderator of several large (300k plus) subreddits. Same username here as there, or also @gmail.com. I'm happy to chat about the challenges of moderating these large communities.

It's widely held that modmail is horribly designed.

The admins have recently made some changes to that (threaded modmail), so there's definitely some improvement in that direction though.

I can't say how often, but I've dealt with Reddit issues pretty frequently (at least once a week) where for at least three to five minutes I get the alien mascot (yes I forgot the name) saying the site is down/needs maintenance. It's not so good. Maybe if it was just once or even twice a month it wouldn't be so bad, but for me it's noticeable (so much so that I remember it happening).

Maybe one day they will fix search?

Most people I know just use Google for site search by adding the site name to the query. More sophisticated queries can use site:reddit.com syntax, but usually adding reddit to a query should have the desired effect.

If any DuckDuckGo guy around here, is there a command for reddit search, like !rd or something.

The only DuckDuckGo ones I know of (!r, !reddit) use reddit's own search. Not sure if there are any others that don't

What's an example of a search you did, and a submission that belonged in the results but wasn't?

(sound of crickets chirping)

How about using Algolia like HN?

I met Marty Weiner last summer. Really nice down to earth guy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com