I am Steve Huffman, the new CEO of Reddit. AMA. (2015)
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
Reddit is saving a little on bandwidth since I stopped, and I've gained some time and energy. Seems like a win-win.
The reddit experience I've had in the last few days is actually the best I've had since I signed up 12-13 years ago. All the smaller niche subreddits I forgot about are back to front and center, all the community interaction is on AskReddit, answers, etc again and the overall communal aspect is back. It reminds me of how much the site has really changed and, like you, I'll probably be gone once it goes back to normal.
If someone says they only see crap on Reddit it's their own fault. It doesn't take a ton of effort to cultivate what you want.
While I’m familiar with many of those tricks, I haven’t even thought about them in probably, literally years.
The current Reddit UX does not encourage and maybe doesn’t even support that view. If that’s something you’re doing, I can say with some level of confidence that you’re a Reddit Poweruser. The only time I ever really thought about tricks like that is when I used the Reddit Enhancement Suite, which, as far as I know, is not a part of New Reddit, at all.
And despite what anyone’s insular, private group of friends may say, I strongly suspect that New Reddit is the one that the vast, vast majority of users user.
No doubt, those people are masochists, either knowingly or not, same with the people that use the official app. Old.reddit and/or third party apps made a huge difference in usability of Reddit, there is a reason so many people are up in arms over this change.
If it took subs going dark for you to see what was available to you all along that's yet another massive failing on reddit's part to provide value. To people who have been living that dream via third party apps, that was a normal Tuesday. I don't know a better way to put it, I constantly hear people say "I've been using the app, it's fine" and then also saying things like you did, the truth is the app is not fine, discoverability is shit, the features are limited, etc. Apollo is a power tool for reddit similar to how RES was, I won't wade through the reddit BS to use it without an app like Apollo.
Its discoverability is difficult. It is still possible.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304341...
The key part is the "overflow menu"
> Visit a community that you’d like to include in a custom feed. On the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a Community Details box. Click the overflow menu (⋯) in the top right of the box.
> Select Add To Custom Feed then choose Create A Custom Feed.
These show up when you use the drop down for subscribed and favorited subreddits or on the sidebar (if that is expanded).
(VERY late edit)
The other thing about multis - you can make them public and allow other people subscribe to them.
As an example: https://www.reddit.com/user/shagieisme/m/orangecats/ which is the combination of six subreddits that feature orange cats.
Furthermore, users may be added to a custom feed.
All you'll see at reddit.com are subreddits you've followed.
My favorite contribution to that subreddit was one of the first logos. They held a contest and my submission was a drawing of Snoo with his bum facing the viewer with a dollar in between his cheeks. Ass Credit.
I can't believe people voted for it lol, but that was when the subreddit was a lot less serious.
You can still see the remnants of that work by going to old.reddit.com/r/askreddit: Hover over the Snoo's talking and wait for the tooltip.
It helped with the noise.
An hour later (without doing anything else) I got banned site wide for 3 days for "ban evading".
That really pissed me off and I haven't used reddit ever since (except for google search results). I'm definitely happier without reddit.
And another popular imaginary reason for bans is the crosspost feature. If you ever crosspost anything from the snowflake sub they will automatically ban you with a script, for using this stock Reddit feature.
Since Monday I've stopped visiting Reddit to try to get less addicted to mindless reading. I've caught myself opening the app like 5 times already, but so far experiment was mostly a success. Need to keep up for a month more I think.
I know the story goes that you can avoid it by carefully selecting the right subreddits, but in my experience the trash content bleeds into everything. Even the technical subreddits I followed have become inundated with low-effort posts and people who just want to pick fights.
> I don't think they're losing anything of value when I stop browsing. I've been using old. for years, and always been pretty strict about blocking ads.
Thanks for being honest about it. I suspect Reddit is well aware that the average user (who views ads) is not likely to be among the angrier power users who are pulling the strings. If anything, I'm starting to get a sense that the non-commenters and casual users are getting sick of the mods using their power to shut the conversation down. The average user doesn't use Apollo and doesn't care about this drama. I think it's easy to forget this when the vocal minority of power users are upvoting angry topics and mods are shutting down subreddits.
But as time went on a one or two of the communities I liked got banned and others were forced to tone down discussions. Although I have an interest in controversial communities though so this may not be a universal experience.
But what finally made me leave was that the quality of every community I like just kept dropping and at the same time I was receiving an increasing (and significant) number of hateful messages.
I guess I don't play the Reddit game very well. I generally aim to be controversial since I believe the most productive type of speech is speech that is both highly controversial and well reasoned. Agreeing may earn upvotes and social goodwill, but if all you ever do is agree with those around you using new words you may as well not contribute anything.
I think Reddit's incentivisation of agreeableness, it's clamp down on controversial subreddits and its popularity basically guarantees conversations on Reddit today are maximally unproductive. If someone has a new opinion they are downvoted, and if that opinion is also hard to refute downing is often paired with abuse.
I know this isn't really on topic – I have nothing interesting to say about their childish CEO or narrow-sighted push for monetisation. I guess I'm kinda just sad about what Reddit as become. I like HN because discussion here are rich – there's generally a wide and interesting range of views for any given topic. But HN is fundamentally limited since topics are generally tech / business related. And this is the gap I wish Reddit could have filled.
Reddit is now completely dominated by repulsive echo chambers ruled by angry opinionated mods.
Any idea contrary to the hive mind is either agressively downvoted and shouted down, and/or blocked/banned by overzealous mods.
Just as one example, try daring to say that most men aren't rapists in https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes ...
Can't quite find the link right now but there was a well upvoted post there that was simply, "god I hate men."
They're not even interested in discussion at all. It's such a toxic misandristic subreddit, under a paper-thin pretense of being about female empowerment.
I'm really not a person who clutches pearls often, I think what gets me is the silencing of any dissent.
Posters shouldn't be getting banned for simply expressing an alternative opinion with no rudeness.
Rule 3 on there is "no tactless posts generalizing gender". But every third post is about how all men do x...
Subreddit rules mean nothing when interpreted by rabidly terrible mods, so coming into any new subreddit I don't feel comfortable to post anymore, lest another such mod should ban me for having an opinion.
I definitely think it has gotten much worse overall in the last couple of years.
That's why HN is so great... I often see opposing worldviews expressed here without animosity between posters.
> reddit has a lot of cash. Monetization isn't a short-term concern of ours. Yes, we will continue to experiment with different efforts so that when time is right we know what works and what does not.
So it was always about money. Guess their "experiments" have concluded that pissing off your entire user base is a strategy which works.
You probably won't get incredibly rich, though.
Reddit is not profitable, though.
They're burning through investment cash just to keep the lights on. That can't last forever, so they have to do something.
If they operated like archive.org, they could sustain themselves. They don't want to do that, because it doesn't result in big returns for investors.
they wasted, and continue to waste, bunches of money, for nothing
They may be wasting money, or maybe not. If they chase away all the people like you, and end up with a userbase of vapid morons who just watch idiotic TikTok-style videos on it, and this makes the company billions in profit, then that money wouldn't be "wasted".
I mean, it sucks (IMO) if running a discussion board service for people to have intelligent conversations about various niche topics is financially undesirable compared to running a social media site for people to share and make moronic comments about moronic 1-minute videos, but that seems to be just how humans are.
On a more "suave" note, they are a Dodo but this is the XXI century.
they certainly cannot say, “hey board, we decided we’d like to just be a modest profit company”. spez would be out of a job.
the other option would be not taking funding and building a business organically. would reddit have been able to become reddit if they hadn’t taken all that vc money? i’d say probably not but i don’t know anything about anything.
And people clearly want to do it, and care enough to do it for free. Up to a point, at least.
The mods mainly were protesting because they relied on these tools. Reddit responded by making exceptions for these tools, and threw in exceptions for accessibility-focused tools to boot. (Taking the "think of the blind and deaf people" argument off the table.)
The only people that are still upset are the people who just want to continue to use ad-free readers, without paying money.
Reddit is a digital drug dealer that just raised prices on its addicts. The power users you describe are the least likely to delete their accounts and leave. Their rage over something relatively trivial is just a testament to their addiction.
I am definitely in the minority, but I am upset that Reddit plans to monetize my writing by selling it to LLM companies (without an opt-out).
To be fair, we're not in the short-term horizon of 2015.
Did something change about ads since 2015 (likely) ?
Did their cloud costs go way up ? (possibly, since the redesign seems extremely slow and resource heavy, compared to the old site)
They have 2000 employees now. They had fewer than 200 in 2015.
This makes Wikipedia seem prescient. It also has basically all user-contributed content, and user moderation
You can point out a lot of its flaws, for sure, but at the end of the day, the product actually works
Reddit for me is barely functional, I still used old.reddit.com
Of course that was the intention all along -- to drive users to mobile -- which is just sad. Destroying value on purpose
In a bubble, the business is ultimately a failure and it deserves to die. It's just sad given the quality of the content is so high in contrast to the platform and the lack of an outstanding of alternative for people to congregate around, as Reddit once was for digg users.
But it hasn't enshittified
I would be really happy if Reddit ended up like Wikipedia. You can argue that Wikipedia could make better use of their funds (you can always argue that), but look at what Reddit did with their funds
They basically dug a big hole and are ruining the product to get out of it. I'd rather Wikipedia have extra cash than be in the hole, and desperate
I'm more surprised that anyone thought it wasn't about money.
Reddit is a business. An unprofitable business. They have to do something to turn a profit eventually.
A car company could maximize short-term profits by reducing quality. Reddit could sell your location data to the highest bidder. Apple could threaten to delete all your pictures unless you buy a super-pro account.
And generally companies don't do this, because the backlash. The backlash is good. Often the backlash is even good for the long-term health of the company/world.
I think to say that short-term-profit-oriented behavior from companies is inevitable isn't true, the backlash often wins, and long-term strategic thinking is actually the norm.
Like KIA cheaping out on basic anti-theft measures (at least in the United States where the regulations don't demand it).
I’m just baffled at their pitiful attempts at doing that the past few years. And how it’s now culminated into where we are this week.
2,000 employees. What are they even doing?
It's a damn shame that Huffman didn't get the sort of guidance and counseling to walk that wire.
> "I have lots of ideas! But, I'm sad to say, I don't want to publicize them here until I've got more support internally. It's shitty if you're on a product/dev team to come into work and find everything's been upended without any of your input."
Took three years but now we know the answer.
Not sure if it was ever re-established, but it's surely burned down again now.
I actually pre-empted the blackout and went cold turkey a few days early.
I feel like I need a sobriety avatar but honestly I'm satiating with a combination of other feeds.
I'm pretty sure I showed up around the time slashdot were writing about reddit re-writing the site in python:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190616155639/http://www.aarons...
none of which are adequate for dialog IMO but I run irc and discord for that mostly when I'm not harassing chatgpt
I don't understand why he'd return instead of starting something new.
I was the second engineering hire at a lifestyle business turned VC funded startup. After we went public and I could see disclosures including how many shares were paid out to the C Suite. The board and some first time C Suite members got the same level of equity in their comp package that I had received over six years of working there.
Some replacement/new C Suite positions that had been in the C Suite prior received a few times what I received to start and received additional packages every year.
Rank has its privileges.
Some with no vesting schedules at all.
https://medium.com/@theBoardlist/three-things-no-one-tells-y...
1: https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huffman...
To me that unpacks to a mix of lost potential value on having the user on the official client for data harvesting + advertising purposes + having full control over user experience, and subtly trying to get rid of 3rd party clients without just shutting the APIs down.