114 million visitors, 5 billion pages – community management at Reddit

It's interesting that this interview really does focus completely on the quality of the user experience, and never says anything about the quality of the content. My impression is that the company has a completely laissez faire attitude to content quality.

It's shocking to discover that 8 years ago, Reddit's front page content looked very similar to Hacker News today: https://web.archive.org/web/20051201042755/http://reddit.com...?

Although the basic user interface hasn't really changed, the content now is totally different. Low quality posts tend to rise to the top, and this effect has become more obvious as the user base has expanded. The lowest common denominator is the meme post (an image with a few words of text).

Obviously this trend is a broader issue which is seen in other social media. But for Reddit, the subreddit concept has worked extremely well, and it has at least extended the site's useful lifetime as a source of good quality content and discussion.