A new team at Reddit | Hacker News Reader

A new team at Reddit

blog.samaltman.com

368 pointsgatsby352 comments

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened.

Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, etc.--all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).

This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we'll make the best of it.

October 1: Yishan wants all employees to move to San Francisco.

Early November: "jk, we're moving to Daly City."

Even though Daly City is a BART away, the fact that this decision happened in 1 month is absurd.

It was never a "jk, Daly City." From the initial announcement it was mentioned that they were considering options a little south of SF proper.

Moving an office like this scenario and timeline can and in most cases, does cause tectonic shift in the company's dynamic. There's a ripple effect through far reaching aspects of the employees lives that effect there work.

On another note- Office location can be the most personal aspect of business to an exec processing the decision. A territorial undercurrent is in play.

In my experience you always loose employees when moving offices. It's a really weird feeling just after the move and takes a while to get back into the grove.

My last company was the first place I've worked that moved offices while I was there, and we definitely experienced a 'weird feeling' and we lost a bunch of people. Everything just felt off after the move, even though things went smoothly, and our new space was objectively much nicer (upgraded from thoroughly class C space to a nice class A building).

I was trying to stick it out and wait for the culture and mood (which had been fantastic beforehand) to get back in the groove, but our best people started to leave one by one, then one of the founders of my current company reached out to me personally, and it was too hard to pass up.

The key element in moving offices is buy-in. It affects everybody. If you treat your employees like they're part of the furniture during the planning phase then you're going to have exactly the effect you describe. Not saying that was the case but I would not be surprised if it was.

Last place I worked, we moved just a few blocks away, from a really, really awful crappy warehouse in Sunnyvale to a pretty spiffy new facility also in Sunnyvale. I don't think we lost anyone due to that move. So, lesson is to make sure your new office is awesome and not that geographically far from your old one?

Not geographically far can limit you to a tiny distance if you have commuters on caltrain, bart, and muni. Lots of people scoff at the change going from a 5 minute walk from the transportation depot to a 15 minute walk makes, but that made me leave a company. Of course, virtually nobody doing that walk fails to understand, but execs drive.

riverbed?

Sunnyvale is a bit of a different story because I assume everyone is driving to an office in Sunnyvale, at least the last mile, so you can move a mile and not impact anyone that much.

Up in SF, moving the office one mile can add 30 minutes to some people's daily commutes each way.

Absolutely. If lots of reddit's employees are living in the East Bay (feasible since the office is in Soma), a company move to Daly City would make their commute an absolute nightmare. A normal BART ride would turn into a reallllly long BART ride (if the office is anywhere near the station) or a soulcrushing commute over the bridge. I commuted from the Sunset District (essentially Daly City) to Oakland for a year and it was horrendous.

Meanwhile, moving from one office to another within Sunnyvale won't change much considering there are many ways to get in and out of there.

I mean, moving a few blocks isn't that material in terms of people's commutes (and implied relative power/importance/influence).

Moving from one city to another can be highly disruptive.

Last company I've worked in moved headquarters 6,500 km. Most of the business-critical employees and developers moved with it.

All this drama about relocating office a couple subway stops seems ridiculous.

Daly City is a world away from 520 3rd. There is nothing of any kind worth mentioning in Daly City. There is culture, entertainment, education, recreation, and all the benefits of real city life steps away from Reddit's current office. In addition the building at 520 3rd has a tradition of housing famous Internet companies.

and, more importantly, bart is only convenient in a very narrow corridor of sf, so this could be turning 15-25 minute commutes into hour plus commutes, spanning two transport systems in sf. A recipe to make your employees hate it.

As someone completely unaffiliated with San Francisco, all of this honestly just makes the employees sound like primadonnas. While it may be cool to be "steps away" from that stuff you listed (and I doubt you're being fair to Daly City), it certainly shouldn't make or break a job that you're otherwise happy with.

I understand the argument about exacerbating commutes (even though it sounds crazy for a short-distance move) but I think this one is quite weak.

I'm shocked that you value your free time so low.

Let's do the math.

There are 24 hours in a day. You should be sleeping for ~8 of those leaving 16. Assuming you are supposed to be at the office for 8 hours (pipe dream, but let's just go for it) that leaves 8 hours of time for other stuff. If you previously had a great 15-30 minute commute then you would have 7 hours of free time to work on side projects and do things you want to do. That would be a pretty sweet normal life. Adding an extra hour to the commute cuts your free time down by ~30%. That is a big deal.

I also find it very helpful to include any time spent commuting as "working time" when considering where to work. You should also consider the increased cost to commute from a more like this. An extra hour of driving 5 days/week represents a non-trivial amount of money. So the salary needs to compensate, or the time at the office needs to go down.

No matter how you look at this, a move like this is asking all of the employees on the short end of the stick to effectively take home less money (not exactly a pay cut, but the end result is the same).

Edit: oh and I'm not from SF, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This has nothing to do with SF.

SF has <500K actual residents.

The bay area has something like 15 million people.

Do the math.

One either has a shitty rent/house payment or a shitty commute.

> SF has <500K actual residents.

2013 US Census estimate is 837,442, which is considerably more than 500,000. [1]

> The bay area has something like 15 million people.

The 9-county Bay Area has approximately 7.1 million people as of 2010. [2]

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

[2] http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm

Thanks! So lets say there is ~8-9x in the metro for every 1x in the city.

NYC by comparison has ~2.5x in the metro for every 1x in the City.[1]

__________

[1] 19.9 million vs 8.4 million.

BART is not your conventional subway, and the 'couple stops' are a lot further than usual.

At my old company, as the lease at our slightly too small and horribly boring office park was set to renew, moving was floated.

Everyone in the office was immediately for it. However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs, and everyone else assumed that meant into the city, centrally located, with cheaper rents.

We ended up staying in the office park that no one really liked.

However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs

A company I worked at in the 90s moved their office from downtown Chicago to the suburbs, seemingly so the executives would have a shorter commute. As a consulting firm, most of the employees were younger, didn't have families, and lived in the city and so ended up leaving the company when their commute changed. They also had trouble recruiting because of the new location. Having the only office in the suburbs didn't last long and they had to re-open a downtown office.

Were there other decisions by Yishan that you pushed back on? How many? Possible he felt that he did not have enough influence as CEO, not enough confidence from the board and couldn't run the company as he desired.

Yishan was likely fired or strongly recommended to resign. And we are all being polite about it for Yishan's sake and to maintain positive community around reddit. We will forget about this probably by tomorrow.

Thanks for the clarification as, at least for me, it did not sound true but the additional details help. That's pretty interesting. Yishan seems like a pretty reactive person especially considering the drama of him ousting a former employee on their performance publicly.

I was curious what you were talking about, so I found it: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

It's not nearly as clear-cut as you made it seem. He was going around telling people Reddit fired him for no reason even though he was doing good work, which wasn't the case. Then he speculated he was fired because he raised concerns about revenue.

The only question is whether Reddit told him why he was fired when they fired him. If they didn't, well, whatever. But to go onto a public forum and speculate like that probably isn't the smartest decision.

If Yishan hadn't stepped in with a correction, then it would harm their future prospects as a hot place to work. Employees go where they think isn't lame. I'd have second thoughts about trying to join Reddit if I'd read "Yeah, Reddit seems to fire people for no apparent reason and has problems with employees communicating concerns to management."

On the other hand, I feel terrible for David, even if he got himself into this. Now people will unfairly prejudge him to be a slacker, bashed on Yishan's comment, no matter how hard he works in the future. The only way he can hope to change that is by working hard to get stuff done, combined with the extremely annoying process of making a portfolio demonstrating that he continuously gets stuff done.

Yishan went way, way too far in that case. Much further than was needed or appropriate.

He always seemed prone to saying things that were of questionable judgment. I have no idea how he was at running the company, but I suspect Reddit will be better off having someone else speak for it at least.

I've been thinking it over, and I think you're right. If this sort of public response were the norm, the nature of the internet means that any CEO of any company would hold quite a lot of power over the entire future of every employee.

Right now you can do poorly at a programming job without it affecting your entire future. That's important because people have down periods in their lives. It happens.

If you get fired and go out to a bar and tell people that you got screwed by the scummy company, that's pretty normal. And why not let someone feel better about themselves? There's no reason for anyone else to believe their stories. Feeling like you got screwed is better than feeling like a failure. Depression can ruin your life if you don't find ways to cope, even if they're irrational.

Let's say he even convinces someone not to go work for Reddit. That sucks, but the potential employee should've realized that of course the former employee who publicly admitted he was fired is going to say something bad about the company. It's just one side of the story.

I was recently shocked to accept that only 17k people voted on the Obama AMA, even though 3M people viewed it. The disparity between participants vs lurkers on a site like Reddit is so large that it's hard to fathom. How many people saw Yishan's response? There are 4k upvotes. Applying the Obama AMA ratio suggests 700k people read it. Realistically it's probably closer to 40-100k, but still, what if it was common for everyone to go on the internet and badmouth employers and employees and so on and 0.1M people get to watch? A website like glassdoor, but for companies to go and rate their employees for all the other employers.

Yishan's reply to David generated over 1250 responses. David's comment saying "I was laid off" in total generated just shy of 5k comments. How likely is it that out of 40k people who viewed this, 5k of them left comments? It seems entirely possible about half a million people watched the CEO of Reddit lay the smackdown on a former employee who didn't even really say anything too out of line. Distasteful and in bad faith? Sure, but it's not like he was saying Reddit is an awful place to work. Envisioning a future where this is commonplace and people jeer from the sidelines like http://i.imgur.com/kQxF02o.png isn't a reality I'd like to live in.

Yishan was in a really tough spot with that comment. It sounded like morale among existing employees was being significantly negatively affected by this ex-coworker going around spreading shit about the company. A CEO needs to consider how his actions will be viewed by everyone involved in the company; it's quite possible that neglecting to act would've caused enough of a productivity & morale hit that he judged calling the employee out to be the right call, even knowing what it would potentially do to his & the employee's reputation.

That said, your comment is precisely why people generally avoid bad-mouthing former employees, and why smart employees avoid bad-mouthing their former employers. Worst case, it blackballs a person or organization forever. Best case, it just makes everybody look bad. Better to keep your mouth shut and let other people draw their own conclusions.

I do believe that California defamation law still needs to be fixed though.

I don't want it to sound like you are being dishonest about this, and it's possible there were things going on in Yishan's head that you were not aware of, but "a new team at reddit" in 8 days makes it a bit hard to believe this came completely out of nowhere.

It has been a very busy 8 days.

Any credible board will have a succession plan in place, ready to trigger if the CEO resigns/has to be fired/gets hit by a bus.

Also, what people say and what they do are not always equal.

That doesn't make any sense. What would such a short timeline imply, besides that it came out of nowhere?

It's not really a 'new' team, though, it's people who were already very close to Reddit.

That's called contingency planning. After getting an investment of $50M I'm pretty sure they did their homework on this and having the CEO resign simply triggered a series of pre-defined steps. You don't get that kind of investment without having at least the basics in place. (Or at least, you shouldn't...).

i too doubt this was the only thing that suddenly made him resign. there has to be more that went on behind the scene that even altman is not talking about...

Well paul graham did say "You could parachute [Sam] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."

I am reminded of a HBR study showing headquarters of major firms all tended to move closer to the home of the CEO even if that impacted retention - will have to find the reference.

As a side note, how is reddit on "asynchronous working" (if that's what remote working is called these days). How would the board have felt about the move if Reddit was more ready for being location-agnostic?

Edit: it seems I misunderstood your comment (and probably the geography of SF.) So if I understand it Reddit already was remote-friendly but both CEO and board wanted to have everyone in same office (which office being the point of contention). May I ask why you were going the "unusual" route of from remote to centralised - is Melissa Mayer right?

Edit: William Whyte in collected articles (Exoding Metropolis). Noted downthread as in a Joel Spolsky article. I am always late to the party :-)

Cf http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EsvEFIamv3oC&pg=PA38&lpg=...

I am reminded of a HBR study showing headquarters of major firms all tended to move closer to the home of the CEO even if that impacted retention - will have to find the reference.

I am reminded of Motorola (oh, how the mighty have fallen) years ago, when they decided to open up manufacturing plants in Libertyville and Harvard IL.

What were the deciding criteria?

Communities with good amenities (parks, schools, etc.)? Nope, middle of farm-ville Illinois. Nothing wrong with that, I'm from a small town.

Good access to existing talent? Nope. Far away from Chicago and the other tech employers in the region.

Easy access to transportation (planes, trains, automobiles)? Nope. Way off the highways.

Close proximity to the CEO's house? Yup.

Daly City is 9.7 miles from the reddit office, for all practical purposes it sounds like Yishan wanted to just move offices in the same city; the Daly City part doesn't seem like it's important. Or am I missing something?

with a highly competitive job market, especially where many of the people in a city with poor public transit do not have cars, 9.7 miles is annoying enough to cause people to choose somewhere else to work.

When I lived in the East Bay, it would be really hard to accept a move to Daly City (from downtown SF), because it's another 20 min each way. And East Bay BART riders wouldn't even have to change trains! For CalTrain riders, it's a doubling of the commute or more.

Maybe a part of the solution to the highly competitive job market could have been not annoying your current employees by forcing them to move to a city with poor public transit?

Was that board's decision, or Wong's?

9.7 in San Francisco miles is a long commute.

I've never lived/worked in SF, but I had pretty much the same thought. Living in NYC, 9.7 miles is an almost unfathomable distance.

When Citibank built the tower in LIC, I'm sure there were people that weren't happy, but I doubt they lost many employees. That's about 7 miles driving distance from wall street.

Also strongly depends if "Daly City" was "Daly City three minutes walk from BART" or "Daly City in an office park by a freeway somewhere"

Which is practically all of Daly City.

I think the conflict is more cultural than people realize: an office in Daly City is tremendously easier to reach and if you're coming from South Bay -- essentially you exit the freeway and park.

On the other hand, getting to a point in SF from the freeway and parking usually takes at least 30 minutes (in addition to the 30+50 minute drive from the starting point in the South Bay or Peninsula). SOMA area is reachable by Caltrain, but Caltrain is unreliable, doesn't run as frequently nor is SOMA the only place where people have offices (and walking to further reaches of SOMA, or the area of Market, or FiDi is an often dangerous - especially at night - 20-30 minute walk).

Daly City is reachable from SF by BART, but that supposes you live near a BART station in SF and the Daly City office itself is close either the Daly City or Colma BART station. In general I'd say it's easier for an SF resident to get to certain parts of Daly City (those accessible by part or by San Mateo county buses running from SF are easy if you live near BART) than it is from someone in South Bay to get to SF. Driving is very easy if you live near 280/35/19th Avenue -- getting to Daly City from Mission especially is not particularly difficult).

That brings the cultural issue: different people prefer to live in SF vs. South Bay or Peninsula (some live in one place whereas they'd prefer to live elsewhere, of course). To hugely (but completely meaninglessly) over-generalize you can imagine the Peninsula as the OSI stack: physical and network layers are further south, middle-ware is in the Peninsula (Oracle in Redwood City), and presentation (end-user applications like AirBnb) are in SF (again, this is only loosely so: there are web app startups in South Bay and there are systems and middle-ware companies in SF). Intuitively it makes sense: I can't imagine starting a Foursquare in San Jose (there isn't a critical mass of people -- not all of them geeks -- cloistered around any given landmark to gain sufficient traction).

In many types of companies, you want both: which is why companies always seek to locate in either transit accessible parts of South Bay/Peninsula (Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo downtown areas), run buses, locate in SoMa, or have multiple offices (this sounds like a "no-go" for Reddit, but Square, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and my own employer -- Cloudera -- all do this). Yet, if a company has a very strong SF-oriented identity (at least for its Bay Area office), a compromise location (especially if the compromise isn't just an SF office near 4th and King) could definitely upsetting existing employees who might also feel that they are no longer as valid as potential new employee the company wants to hire from South Bay.

I commuted on Caltrain for 5 years and found too reliable!

Let me put it this way: I found Caltrain to be reliable on average, but the 75th percentile to be terrible. Major delays are going to happen multiple times a month.

s/but completely meaninglessly/but _NOT_ completely meaninglessly/

oops.

Plus many folks in sf don't have cars, prefer not to drive, and want to avoid paying $1k/mo for a car (parking in mission is often $350/mo; insurance at $60; gas + note).

Yes: this is one key point, avoiding car ownership (and making do with zipcar et al for weekend trips) is pretty much the only way to make SF affordable.

(Background: I'm deep in South Bay, but that's taste and preference not an absolute view I want to impose on others).

> Intuitively it makes sense: I can't imagine starting a Foursquare in San Jose (there isn't a critical mass of people -- not all of them geeks -- cloistered around any given landmark to gain sufficient traction).

It's not uncommon for a startup's initial userbase to be geographically far removed from the company's headquarters. Facebook's was in the Ivy & NESCAC colleges in New England even after the company moved to Palo Alto. AirBnB's was in NYC. Twitter, I've heard, took off in Austin after SxSW. Orkut got Brazil despite originating in Mountain View. WhatsApp first took off in the Ukraine and then India, also despite being based in Mountain View.

I don't know why this is - intuitively, I'd expect it to be where the founders are, because that's who they can directly talk to. But the data doesn't seem to bear that out. Maybe it's because of random chance - if you model a successful startup as a cluster of users who happen to have an unfulfilled need and an entrepreneur who happens to stumble upon the solution to that unfulfilled need, then it makes sense that many initial userbases will be geographically separated from the company simply because there are more people far away from you than people close to you.

San Francisco attracts startups and talent because it's a cool, fun, sexy place to live. Bright young talent demands those sorts of conditions.

Daly City is a suburban hellhole. If “cities” like Daly were desirable places to live, Provo, Utah and Tacoma, WA would be IT meccas.

The traffic in that region guarantees an ungodly commute by car for anyone who wanted to stay in SF and drive to Daly for work (1 hour commute = $40k in pay worth in happiness http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141514467/small-changes-can-he...). The public transportation is… lacking.

I can’t speak for Yishan’s motivations, but if I were on the board, I would push for his replacement simply due to the talent attrition that would inevitably occur if he got his way.

SF cool, fun, sexy? Have you ever been there? I found it dirty, scary, and smelly.

Well, it's a city a lot of people like but certainly those adjectives could be applied to just about any good-size city--and it's why a lot of people also don't really like cities period. I'd add that, if your experience with SF is going to a show at the Moscone or elsewhere nearby, that general area (Market, Tenderloin, etc.) is definitely less nice than much of the rest of the city. But it's also fair that SF, for a variety of reasons, also has more street people of various sorts than most cities do.

Honestly I loathe the place. Not for any of the reasons you just listed. (“scary”? SF??)

I was born in New York City, grew up in L.A., started a company in SF, and live in Chicago, but the only place I've ever been held up at gunpoint was in San Francisco at 4th and Mission.

I mean you were on Mission street. I raise an eyebrow to the "loathsome gentrification" stories that pop up pretty regularly.

You got stuck up in front of Denny's?

That sounds like bad luck. Within San Francisco, 4th and Mission seems like one of the less likely places to be held up at gunpoint since it's so busy.

What are your reasons, out of curiosity? I'm a reasonably-sized guy, so I rarely feel personally scared, but I don't have to look far to see some really sketchy situations.

So is every world-class city.

That's what makes it cool, fun and sexy.

Yeah, that sounds like a better description of my 3.5 years here. Of course, don't tell any of the SF-lovers exactly where you live, because they'll just blame your experience on you not living at exactly the right block. Live in Soma? Oh, that place has no night life. Live in the Mission? Oh, you're too close to the BART station. Live in the avenues? Too far away from the city center. And so on.

"dirty, scary, and smelly"...Have you ever been to the East Coast? I would say SF is on par as far as dirty and smelly goes. Scary? I think it's pretty underwhelming but I come from NYC/Philly/Baltimore area so that might bias my viewpoint.

And yet plenty of "bright young talent" seems to do just fine in the rest of SV. "Demands" is overstating it a bit.

"Suburban hellhole?" It's important to realize that many people hate cities, and would much rather live in suburbs. Why are there so many huge suburban areas around (most) large cities in the US?

You have to contextualize those demographic moves.

The post-war American suburban drive was in large part driven by economics and policy. Mortgage subsidization from the 30s with the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the GI Bill in the 50s made loans available to mass consumers, while the HOLC's discriminatory redlining policy and the deindustrializing of cities (driven chiefly by lowered shipping costs) caused dense urban areas to become less desirable.

Mixed in with this you also had suburban-oriented urban planning (lots of highways, little public transit investment), brand new car driving infrastructure, low energy costs, lots of cheap land to expand to and in the 70s and 80s rising urban crime.

If you were looking to live somewhere, you had lots of incentives to prefer the suburbs. Today, most of these trends (energy cost, crime, job markets) have changed course.

"cool, fun, sexy"? It's a disgusting place with a corrupted government and 40 years old development policy and an even older infrastructure. Fun, sexy? How about not being able to find a single coffee shop open after 9:30PM on a freaking Saturday near Market St?

Any real world class metropolis like Hongkong, Shanghai, Tokyo or New York would blow SF out of the water in the "cool, fun, sexy" department.

I happen to agree with everything you just said, but by American standards, it’s… well it’s in the top ten, I guess.

Compare Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, or New York City to Daly City and then tell me where San Francisco falls on the scale.

I moved to SF from my college town of Springfield, Missouri. It's a town of 150k people surrounding by the rural Ozarks. Obviously, there's nowhere near as much art, music, comedy or "culture" as in SF, but it's immensely easier to get around, and much more convenient to do normal errands like buying groceries, household items, etc. And don't even dare compare rental and home prices. I certainly won't claim Springfield is a "better city," and I don't know exactly what criteria you have in mind, but for day to day life it's far more convenient.

This is what people overlook when they trash the Midwest or "flyover country". I guess they may think it's cool to ostracize people who live in "Provo, UT" (which is nice, by the way) because they don't go to enough art festivals, but the business of day-to-day living is much less complicated in those places. If you just want to raise a family and go do simple recreational things together, your life will be immensely bettered by not living in a high-population urban district; you'll have a lot more money and a lot less headache. Image-obsessed twenty-somethings, like the ones often employed by tech startups, may think it's cool to ostracize suburbia and ignorantly claim that no one with "real talent" will want to live there, but most of them will be singing a different tune as they enter their 30s and try to live an actually significant life.

Market street is not a very vibrant part of the city. Nevertheless:

http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=coffee&find_loc=San+Fra...

It's expensive. Difficult for commuters, even if you live in the city, just to get around. It's style over substance, and it attracts brogrammers, not "bright young talent", which can exist anywhere.

The guy grew the company 5x. I don't think attrition is the issue.

I assume he left because it wasn't his company anymore, it was run by the board. If the board can override his will as CEO and accept losing the CEO over office location, that by default means the board did not really value him. I would expect that hurts. Some things you can't prove with data, these are subjective decisions that fall into the realm of a CEO's responsibilities to look out for his team. It wouldn't be so far fetched to believe that Yishan felt that the board did not allow / trust him to do his job.

It's almost certainly not really just about office location.

One could say the same thing about the mandate to move to SF or lose your job. Not everyone wants to live in the city. You might call suburbia a hellhole, but some of us see the city that way, particularly given its cost of living.

Sounds like a nice bike commute. Especially with the weather there.

There's nothing like biking 10 miles in the cold fog along a freeway...

You have a really interesting definition of cold.

Apparently it is "you might have to wear a jacket".

The standard California definition.

I saw someone wearing earmuffs in 55 degree weather in downtown mountain view.

you haven't met the drivers out here. They're bad, there mostly aren't physically separate bike lanes, and you often don't even get a ticket for killing a bicyclist. It's not worth it.

edit: Also -- sample size of 13 -- 70+% of the people I know who bike commute daily have been hospitalized. I also know someone who did 6 months in a nursing home after some bitch ran a red light, hit him, and cracked his pelvis; he won multiple surgeries and the inability to stand up for months.

That's a good point. I'm too NL centric here, old ladies here would have no problem with a bike trip on that distance but not having bike lanes changes the picture quite a bit, especially if the drivers do not exercise care.

My mom routinely does 100 km trips and she's in her seventies.

NL's infrastructure is orders of magnitude more bike friendly than California.

Silly question, but why Daly City?

It's much cheaper to work and live in Daly City than in San Francisco. It's probably a lot easier to expand there as well. If you buy office space in San Francisco, you either buy just enough for your current team with some wiggle room, or you buy as much as you think you need for the entire time you plan to remain there, which may be 2 or 3x the size of your current needs. It costs a lot of money to own property you're not fully utilizing, but companies do it, many sub-lease the space to offset the cost, but for smaller companies, this means they move offices pretty frequently. My company is in their third office in just the past year :P

Actually, there are regulations in SF about leasing space you don't actually need. I don't know all the details, but my employer just moved to a new Soma office and we were prohibited from having a huge meeting space, and instead had to partition it and use some as workspace.

Ah OK, I guess my direct experience with larger spaces comes from the south bay, but all the same, this explains why my current office keeps moving! So this still highlights what is probably a benefit of places outside of the city :)

I'd bet Yishan lives in the peninsula or south bay and didn't like his hour-plus commute into sf. Public records say Palo Alto, so yes -- he wanted a much better commute.

They'd lose a ton of sf employees though; it's a shit commute for them.

It's super interesting anyways. I wonder if it has anything to do with trust? Maybe Yishan felt like this was a decision that was up to the CEO, and got annoyed when the Board asked Yishan to do due diligence. Did Yishan see this as the last straw in a string of challenges by the board -- or maybe that it was indicative of how the Board would challenge his decisions going forward?

I see a lot of negativity on this topic, but I for one am extremely excited about Alexis returning to Reddit in a more substantial way. I've been on Hacker New for a while (with different accounts) but have only recently started to use Reddit. Alexis is one of the most inspiring guys I've met ... lets just say I am a big fan. So, I'm really happy about this.

Me too, and it'll be interesting to see if/how he deals with what's become of his baby, once a democracy but now a "failed state ruled by warlords". He doesn't strike me as someone who'll turn a blind eye to the mod problems like the outgoing guy did.

Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit?

I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringing will be the one who figures out how to retain the spirit, activity, and engagement of Reddit, while satisfying that 10x, $500mm valuation.

This ain't sexist, this is anti-elitist.Cutting and pasting monetization templates from other media properties, and building projected revenue models off of traffic numbers just can't work here. It's not Buzzfeed or Business Insider.

I was suspect when Erik Martin left (had the pleasure of meeting him in NYC, he lived and breathed what makes Reddit wonderful), and this really seems to solidify what I guess should've been pretty obvious.

I genuinely hope Ms. Pao holds things together, and the return of Alexis helps things out. The more I've learned, it seems Alexis was already gone by the time Reddit really took off and has been writing and speaking ever since. Curious how his operational prowess shows through the new chairmanship role.

Rant done. We're praying for you Reddit.

> Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO

> Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator)

> There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things.

I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Ellen Pao leading reddit in the long term.

Also from today's reddit blog post[0] by Alexis

> Instead, I joined the board and have done everything I can to not be a helicopter parent, but rather support reddit and all the amazing people who make it work as best I can. But reddit is and will always be my baby

Alexis wants Pao as the permanent CEO, but the next few months are a testing ground for her.

Edit: Source: http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-int...

Given her background, I think it will be Pao as a very operations focused CEO and Alexis as a fairly involved Executive Chairman focused on guiding culture and general direction.

It could work out very well for Reddit.

Thanks for your rant.

I am hopeful for Reddit's future because of its community.

I've been using Reddit for over 8 years, through many transitions, and I still go to it everyday to read and interact with many friends I've met there.

I believe that everyone currently working on Reddit knows why it's great, and is interested in making it even better.

I believe in Reddit's team, and I believe in Reddit.

I think if you check how active u/kn0thing is on the reddit thread about this, you might feel a bit better. Although u/ekjp is rather less active there, so it should be interesting to say the least.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/

Of course time will tell. Reddit is full of great little communities (and some really messed up ones). Let's hope they can keep things good for the users and not do a digg.

Trust me, "pulling a digg" is the last thing I want to do. I have a copy of that infamous Businessweek cover in my apt.

http://thedrilldown.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/kevin-ros...

She's been involved in Reddit for some time (at least a year before they hired her in early 2013) as second in command, I think she can handle it.

Ellen was also an EE major as an undergrad (at Princeton, which is known for its hard sciences, IAS et al...), a partner at a firm that has invested into many other consumer audience startups (i.e., I'd think she knows very well the difference between a site like Reddit and BI), and a reddit user prior to her role at reddit.

Finally, why should we hold a law degree someone has obtained 20 years ago against them? (Fwiw, this is a background quite similar to Peter Thiel: years in "the elite", until finding a better home).

Ellen has the operation prowess, analytical mind, and a ton of other skills that have been the reason she's been so successful at reddit so far. Remember: reddit is not a media company, it is a platform for communities -- thousands of them -- to share and we have a team in place that is going to turn this into a network of a billion people, worldwide.

reddit has doubled in traffic literally every year since Steve & I launched it. Granted, it was smaller in 2010 when we left, but I've been an advisor since (and gotten up to a few other things since - like helping Steve launch hipmunk and investing/advising in a 100 or so startups) but the core reddit product is for better/worse still the same as it was when we left.

I'm excited to work with Ellen, Dan, and the entire reddit team to develop reddit with the vision Steve & I had in creating it, but with the benefit of 10 years of experience & learning from it.

Why are you telling the public of his reason for resigning? Isn't that something he should be allowed to do himself?

probably because his resigning involved a provision about not talking about the terms of his resignation.

Re: "he had the original product vision for the company"

I thought Alexis et. al. originally started a company doing something else at the beginning of their application and acceptance to YCombinator, and Paul Graham had the idea for reddit and convinced them to do it instead of their original plan.

When Aaron Swartz was fired (edit: used to read quit) and the other founders of reddit tried to remove his founder status I remember being convinced by their arguments and being disappointed in Swartz.

When I later read the thing about it being Graham's idea it really changed my mind--the other founders' original idea was their own sort of Infogami (Swartz's original startup), and while they switched to developing reddit a little before Swartz, they ended up holding a much weaker exclusivity claim.

Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea, but liked them, so he suggested the "front page of the Internet" idea.[1]

And Swartz was fired, not quit. He went to Germany then didn't show up for a couple weeks when he got back. [2]

[1] http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/reddit-co-founder-speaks-power-open-i...

[2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html

Thanks, edited the part about quit. I didn't mean their idea was an infogami in the sense that it was functionally similar to infogami, but rather just that it something that similarly never worked out.

> Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea,

http://www.just-eat.com/

This seems to be a perenially popular bad startup idea. Sergey Brin's previous idea, before teaming up with Larry to found Google, was a startup to let people order pizza via fax machine.

It's not a bad idea at all. But that search engine turned out pretty good for them too.

This seems like a big governance challenge. This is a big challenge for boards and CEOs. CEOs like to have full authority, and be held accountable. Boards like to be able to ask questions. In the end, the board's only true recourse is to fire the CEO.

Here it sounds like the CEO wanted a freer hand, and left when the event signaled a change in governance. (You can't take $50mm and not expect questions)

Heh. I love the conceit that anyone would believe Wong resigned only over "location and amount of money to spend on a lease".

Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. " (http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit)

I can believe it. Yishan always seemed very dramatic and reactionary. I could see him resigning in anger after not getting his way.

Relevant context: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

From the NYT: "That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."

He was being honest and I actually respect him more for putting a former employee that obviously was trying to get sympathy from the Reddit community, in his place.

Was he being completely honest? It was really a case of his words against another's words, and we don't know which parts were true or half-true or plain lies, from either party.

Reddit is a magnet for people who have an unhealthy appetite for over dramatic "justice porn." That's all I'm going to say about your feelings.

No kidding.

No this is not something to respect someone for. This is unprofessional and a liability; if anything Yishan said wasn't documented and documented really well the OP has a libel case. It doesn't even matter how true it was.

He also publicly spoke out about someone's work ethic and performance of which we're only getting one side of the story anyway. If his real name is associated with his reddit profile then future employers will see the CEO of a public internet company lambasting him. Whether it's deserved or not at the time is irrelevant; there are plenty of people who, for one reason or another, do terrible at a job and later are highly valued. This could ruin any attempt at redemption.

Total outsider and I felt very uncomfortable how the dirty laundry was being aired publicly. I don't get this new model of business in the Bay area. One person posts stuff online. Then someone posts something online as a rebuttal. Don't these people realize stuff online stays with you forever and has consequences? Heck .. I change accounts every little while on HN (losing all my precious karma) to make sure I don't mess up in some way.

> Don't these people realize stuff online stays with you forever and has consequences?

I call it "thinking with your tattoos". People simply aren't cognizant that decisions and actions have long-term consequences. You may really want that tattoo on your face, but it will make you virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. They're simply unable to project out complex interactions of consequences, their brain simply can't do the calculus or views it as overstimulus or something simply filters out everything to do with long-term planning and executive function.

CEO exercised right-of-reply to potentially tortious statements from the employee. Also public interest.

> if anything Yishan said wasn't documented and documented really well the OP has a libel case. It doesn't even matter how true it was.

In the U.S. it does, since untruth is a required element of libel.

> In the U.S. it does, since untruth is a required element of libel.

The employer would have to prove it's true in a suit hence my comment. Paper trails are king.

"putting someone in their place" and "wise public statement from company executive" rarely go together.

I thought that was one of the most unprofessional and disrespectful things I've ever seen any CEO do. It was childish and rash and deeply unfair given the huge power asymmetry between a CEO and a former employee.

In a situation like this don't trust the manager to have an unbiased take on the matter anymore than the employee. I've known bosses who disliked an employee for personal reasons and managed to convince themselves that the employee was lazy/incompetent/whatever else as a justification for firing them.

That was a thoroughly classless move on his part. The reddit or HN community might eat that kind of thing up, but it's recruiting poison. Anyone contemplating taking a job at reddit would have to think twice about working for someone who would permanently and capriciously destroy the SEO of a former employee like that.

How would you handle somebody who, after being let go, would use a public forum to besmirch the previous employer? E.g., here he calls the company management "two-faced" https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

Companies have to act and usually act quickly, handling a public issue privately, no matter how successfully, would leave a lingering impression of "Yahoo hires just about anyone with a fake diploma" or "Uber drivers beat up passengers with hammers as often as they please".

Practically any other way. Responding as he did shows an incredible lack of judgement that shouldn't be tolerated in any employee, let alone the CEO.

The response lacks all proportionality. A former employee is saying mildly critical things about you in a public forum? Ok, I don't think anyone is really going to mistake that kind of rumormongering for gospel. Destroying that person's future employment prospects from on high is not only unnecessarily cruel, it also creates a story where there wasn't one before. We never would have heard about the thread if he hadn't done this. It certainly never would have made the mainstream news.

He could have said nothing. He could have sent the employee a private legal warning. Or he could have posted a nice non-response to indicate that they saw the thread, but as a company staffed by adults Reddit is above that kind of name-calling. He did the opposite and looked like a child.

In addition to being really poor form, his response very likely opens the company up to a lawsuit. If I were the besmirched fired employee, god forbid, I would immediately be contacting an employment attorney.

Agreed. I don't think Reddit could afford to pay me the kind of money that I'd require to work there. What an awful place. Hopefully it'll be better now that Yishan Wong is leaving.

Yikes!!

The context, is a spill-the-beans IAMA from a disgruntled ex-employee provocatively made on reddit itself.

The CEO has a right-of-reply and a duty to protect the reputation of the company against accusations, and he fairly exercised that right.

There was no slanging match, and the response consisted of a single post amongst hundreds in that thread.

I don't see a problem with having both positions made public after the ex-employee initiated the public confrontation. As always The truth is probably going to lie somewhere in the middle.

> Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun

Sounds like he didn't give any notice at all, and they had to scramble for a new CEO? Is resigning (or being fired?) with no notice typical for CEO positions?

I hope not. Then again I recently learned many resign via email instead of in person. I feel like an old person now.

This is very confusing to me. I'd say that maybe that's typical for other situations, but resigning effective immediately because the offices wouldn't be moved sounds very, very odd.

I would be really disappointed if a CEO left day-of rather than at least allow a transition period where a lead investor didn't have to step in. (Unless it was the board that wanted him gone asap?)

Wong didn't want to move the company to SF. The board did. That's no small thing to disagree on.

I could absolutely believe that, and if it's the case that's what should have been said, not some technically-correct-but-obviously-downplayed pablum that insults the intelligence of every reader.

The disagreement about "location and amount of money to spend on a lease" sounds like code for "disagreement on whether we need an SF office big enough to consolidate all our remote workers or not."

This is 100% not true. Yishan wanted the team to move to the same location and the board supported him. This was a question of office location, not centralizing.

What about the office location was so contentious that the CEO would quit?

Generally such a resignation is about being-overruled (board no-confidence), rather than just the particulars of one decision.

With ~sama's revelation that Wong preferred a Daly City HQ, the battle-lines could have been:

Pro-Daly-City: "more space, cheaper, less-cool, longer-runway, more employees who've self-selected for willingness to do Reddit muckwork vs. glamorous SoMa networking, outsider perspective"

Pro-SF: "continuity with current employees, top talent prefers SF, worth the extra cost/cost-of-living, more transit links, closer to other media/advertising"

It would be interesting if startups would get together and do some real analysis on location.

My company is in SoMa, and recruiting is not super easy, I'm confident if someone really wanted to work at Heap, they'd work in Daly City or Sunnyvale. Location has never been a great selling point.

Maybe there is a certain kind of candidate for whom not being in the city is a dealbreaker, but I'd like to see numbers.

That's not to say that this isn't a common and seemingly true myth of recruiting, but it would be interesting to be able to dispel or confirm it.

I live in the peninsula and you would have to be my dream job to get me to drive to soma regularly.

I do it once a week and, starting driving at 7:05 AM from San Mateo, it takes until 8am or just before to get into soma. Leaving at 8-9 would take longer.

I don't drive. I caltrain. Train at least gives some alone time to get work done, the main issue is it restricts your schedule if you want to take fast trains. I train from Sunnyvale every day.

Do you have anything to support your claim that top talent prefers SF? Just curious.

Someone's paying the sky-high residential rents; it sure seems like it's top-compensated tech workers.

See also: Google, Apple, Facebook, et al running comfy buses for SF residents to their distant HQs.

And now the Reddit board is another data point. They didn't trust their CEO's call, unless they got more proof about employee retention after choosing a non-SF location.

The top talent you describe is highly unlikely to take what is almost certainly an inferior compensation package at Reddit as compared with places their talents will be better recognized (financially), if compensation sufficient to rent in S.F. is a concern for them.

Yes, SF is crazy expensive and it makes effective compensation smaller. Still knowing that, companies choose to locate here, companies send buses here to help hire San Franciscans, and Reddit's board feared that an HQ move to a neighboring city would lose employees. Those are all strong indicators that desired talent likes to be in SF.

It's not necessarily top talent.

It's young / youngish single people who are willing to kill their bodies with insane hours at the office that most startups are after.

Those people are generally in SF, or at least the kind of people who can actually afford to live in SF on ~$100k.

It seems to me that Daly City would be more sensible and/or comforting for the people that are being forced to relocate from locales such as Salt Lake City. That's something that hasn't really been brought up in this thread; maybe it was seen as a compromise for the people that are being forced to relocate. And maybe the board was opposed because they wanted to use the opportunity to cull the "wrong type" of employee from reddit, i.e., the type that prefers the suburb to the urb. Just some cynical speculation with absolutely no data behind it; just wanted to throw out the possibility that Daly City is probably more familiar to SLC folks than SF.

Many of the SLC employees are moving to the East Bay.

Maybe I'm missing the context here, but Reddit is in San Francisco. They're in the same SoMa office building Wired is in.

Yes, the context is that it used to be a somewhat remote team and when the latest round of funding was raised everyone outside of SF was essentially forced to move to San Francisco.

Okay, thanks. (I'm not really sure why someone's downvoted me for asking the question; it's not like I said "ha ha, OP is stupid for saying this." I was, in fact, missing context.)

Maybe Wong wanted to move HQ to the Valley proper, rather than SF itself?

Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.

But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley.

Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.

> Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.

Is there any evidence of that? Seems quite interesting..

Apparently that is William Whyte's rule:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/OfficeNewYork.html

It was already folklore back when I was first part of a company discussing new office locations, in the 90s. (My father may have even mentioned it when I was child.) Since then, I've observed it often – though in fairness that may be confirmation bias.

The ~cschmidt sibling reply highlights a Joel-on-Software post about the phenomenon from 2003, attributed to a 20th-century urbanist/organizational-analyst, William Whyte, perhaps as coined in a 1958 book.

Here's a critique of a Connecticut tax incentive from earlier this year that notes all 5 resulting corporate relocations reduced their CEO's commute:

http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/07/16/connecticut-taxpayers-...

Thanks for the replies guys!

> Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.

Sam himself obliges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604199

I can say firsthand that company location is a much bigger deal than you'd imagine. Some people don't care, but others are extremely opinionated about it.

Relevant context: Wong wanted everyone who worked at Reddit to move to San Francisco in an attempt to increase cohesion. http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-f...

Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?

The disagreement was on where the HQ will be located.

Odd, onewaystreet claims Yishan didn't want the company moved to SF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603996

kickme444 refutes onewaystreet. kickme444 is a reddit employee.

I read those comments as: board+Wong agreed on centralizing to Bay Area, disagreed on exact new HQ location/lease, board seems to have insisted on SF city proper, Wong wanted elsewhere. (Turns out per ~sama: Wong wanted Daly City.)

Not sure whether to trust employees more or less ;)

Valid concern

From the previous thread here[1]...

From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.

...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.

> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.) i'm skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too. the only thing i felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable to move, and i think they have been.

To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.

This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...

So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office < 50 miles away? I'm very skeptical. My guess is that Yishan was being ousted so that Alexis could eventually be CEO again. Pure conjecture but that's my gut feeling.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127

Please delete some of your dashes, they are breaking layout.

Nice words, growing it 5x is great.

Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal.

But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?

I think "growing it 5x" is referring to headcount, not traffic. That's certainly been my impression given the site is still just as unreliable and poorly administrated.

Seems like someone is trying to revive "reddit the startup", with the VC cash infusion, dickhead move to the bay and Sam Altman asking Alexis to "finish the job" (what ridiculously embarrassing wording).

No, it's traffic. 35MM to 175MM.

5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).

Reddit is a company with a huge user base and any investor willing to do his job (in spite of the moral or social implications) is going to want to squeeze that teat for every drop of ARPU he can get.

Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?

Where else are the users going to go? Try WhoaVerse.

WhoaVerse: A reddit clone where you can talk to Atko and 5 of his or her alt accounts.

Become a partner today!

Imgur, most likely

> if it isn't broke don't fix it

This is the kind of mentality more companies need. It is why craigslist is still running a site that looks like it is from 1999. The opposite thinking is why digg when down in flames.

Have you done a search on Craigslist lately? They're still going for a basic-HTML4-user-agent "theme" (since that's basically their brand now), but the implementation is actually quite dynamic/AJAXified and CSS-heavy. (Also, apparently they use Redis everywhere on the backend for Matryoshka cashing, among other modern practices.)

Also, Digg's failure had nothing to do with a visual refresh; it was that they changed the dynamics of the "social game" the site implemented to make previously "winning" users suddenly irrelevant in comparison to sponsored posts by companies. It'd be like Youtube doing DMCA takedowns on all the "celebrities" with million-subscriber channels.

My point was just that users want the same experience as they got when they started using the site for the most part. Too many changes and you risk driving away your user base. Changes being anything from visual components to mechanics of the site.

They have made a lot of user-facing changes though, verified phone number, map search and map views for listings, search by distance, and contact info masking are a few that come to mind.

The point is that the user experience for craigslist is the same to user.

CL isn't successful because of its terrible UI- it is simply a social network that happened to have capture the largest slice of the market.

I agree 100% that the correct course of action for Reddit is to remain the same so far as growth keeps moving forward and no alternative threats pop up. My point is that the growth credit should go to those who built the machine that is still being used almost exactly as they left it.

What I can say is that Yishan was successful leading the reddit team in keeping up with reddit's growth from an infrastructure standpoint. No small task, especially since Reddit was crashing and burning all the time before he came on board but you don't see reddit go down due to load nearly as much these days (even at 5x usage). Bottom line, praise him for that -- keeping up with the growth, not driving growth that probably would have occurred regardless of who was in the captain's chair.

Craigslist used to be...

...the largest real estate site in the world.

...the largest dating site in the world.

...one of the largest job sites in the world.

It's now an also ran in everyone of those categories. They lost every single major market they were the dominant player in. This isn't Craiglist winning, it's Craiglist losing.

I don't share the same view you have. I believe CL is a significant player in each of the three categories you mention.

CL does around 300M revenue across all categories, that's less than what the larger players in each individual category makes.

By that logic, Craigslist was probably never the largest in those categories. Newspaper classifieds and old job sites like Monster and etc. got the revenue. CL's strategy was always to get the rest of it.

> Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing.

It can easily be a deal breaker if you have a family to consider.

(Not that I know anything about this case.)

"In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal"

Office locations are a huge deal for me as it directly relates to how much of my time per day I'm expected to waste (twice) performing a mind-numbing activity while not even being paid for it (not to mention cost of fuel, etc).

I don't know the specific distance they were talking about in this case, Daly City isn't very far from SF proper, but as someone who lives in "San Diego" an office in "San Diego" could be across the street from me or it could be 45 miles away... and there's no way I'm driving 90 miles a day for work.

> In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal.

Location is a make-or-break proposition for a lot of people. If you have employees with lives outside of the company, location will matter quite a bit.

From the top, it might be easy to rationalize a decision that adds 20 minutes to an employee's commute time, but (hopefully) your employees aren't stupid. Time is money, and what they see is that you've just added several hours to their work week -- hours they could be spending with friends and family, or spending on hobbies or relaxing. If the change is seen as arbitrary or for selfish purposes (eg. making the lives of one or a few executives easier at the expense of everyone else), that location change can seriously sap morale.

I hear what you're saying. As an employee location does matter to me a lot.

As the CEO of a company that doesn't get my way w/r to where I want the office? Is the appropriate reaction to rage quit?

It's just weird, CEOs need a calm hand on the tiller, even if they're directing the ship towards bold maneuvers.

After this and the public employee debacle, I would not picture him as C-level executive material of a small company, let alone one the size and potential of reddit.

I logged out of reddit about a month ago. I changed my password to something incomprehensible. To me, reddit has become a link aggregator over being a social place. I still visit about a half dozen subreddits daily, but only insomuch as to get my news.

I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.

I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.

The trend that finally sent me out was when good subreddits focused on specific topics started turning into show and tell for adults - and usually just amounted to, "Hey I bought that expensive thing that all of the group says is THE one to get, here is a picture of it in my house, it probably looks similar to the one you have". I suppose in a way, the recent investment might match that consumerist focus.

Each subreddit needs a good set of mods, especially when there are thousands of subscribers.

Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it".

Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people actually started talking again. r/twoxchromosomes has a no-images-unless-it's-Friday rule.

The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.

Absolutely. And the popular subreddits are already sort of pre-disposed to fluffy content due to their intended subject matter. I'm not saying the mods of r/funny should do anything, except maybe remove duplicate posts on the same day/week that content was posted.

But there are some subreddits that used to be good conversation hubs, that simply got overrun with trash because the moderators weren't paying attention, or were too scared to set up and enforce rules.

>The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.

Which is fine, but you have to make some attempt and consolidating that type of content as much as possible. An example being to let /r/gaming run wild with the image macros and meme posts, but then rule those out on the subreddits for specific games. If you don't, you just end up with each game's subreddit becoming basically a filtered version of /r/gaming.

I totally disagree on the "link aggregator" assessment. I've been a redditor since late 2007 / early 2008. It originally appealed to me because it was a link aggregator. The links I am interested in seeing are, for example, thoughtful articles or important news stories. I liked having links and a place to talk about the links.

I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.

I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.

Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.

I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.

http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1she85/how_reddi...

>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.

>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.

Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.

Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.

I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)

Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.

Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun, I am happy they are coming to a close and I am sure the new team will do a far better job and take reddit to great heights.

Heh.."sort of". But seriously - good moves @sama. This part of your post seems to be getting less attention but it should be highlighted. It's tough as hell to jump into the middle of a fire when a top executive resigns, and it's commendable that you rolled up your sleeves and did it. At some point, if ever possible, a post about the past week would be hugely interesting.

Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.

1) Personally responded to feedback emails.

2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!

3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare.

Hoping for great things!

regarding 2), sounds interesting. Got any more information on that?

Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?

There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly.

Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.

Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.

He could be talking about Quickmeme?

Here is a terrible overview from a quick google search: http://www.themarysue.com/reddit-bans-quickmeme/

Aww, thanks. Responding to each and every feedback email was something Steve + I took very very seriously. If only we'd had Front back then ;)

https://frontapp.com/

Straight from the horses mouth - answer here from Yishan on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CE...

Here's the announcement on the reddit official blog: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html

I find it rather ridiculous and unprofessional that his personal site is the version of this that's up here.

Huh? Where do you see his personal site?

There's a few things that I'm guessing could have contributed to this final straw that broke the camel's back moment:

- Yishan's response to the ex-employee publicly calling him out and revealing their work performance in a non-professional manner. (not undeserved, but not professional for a CEO)

- The response or non-response to the Fappening.

- Not a lot of movement on making the site work great for mobile leading to the rise of Alien Blue and other clients gaining popularity.

I don't know if there was a lot of pressure to improve revenues since generally the audience is pretty allergic to blatant advertising but we shouldn't forget that Reddit is a business.

Could the new team please review and censor some of the unquestionably evil subreddits? (ie: brutalizing women, dead babies, animal sex, etc). There's just no reason whatsoever such places ought to exist.

Out of conscience, I chose to stop reading Reddit for allowing such subs to exist. I am not asking others to do the same or to adopt my beliefs, but I say this because I really enjoyed being a redditor. I'd like to return, but not if pure evil is allowed to continue there.

Not trying to be rude or anything, but I feel like you should also have a problem with the internet. There are many different websites, I'm sure, a lot for things that are pure evil. I'm actually very curious, why you only choose to boycott Reddit? What's your justification for still using the internet?

Roads connect me to the entire world, just like the Internet. When I arrive at a destination, it is a separate dwelling than all the other dwellings.

Make sense?

I suppose a little.

Actually, I modified the analogy to "arrive at a city". I feel like Reddit is more like a city than a single dwelling. And I can understand continuing to use roads while avoiding certain cities.

I still don't agree with your original point, and maybe the analogy is biased in your favor (it is your justification after all, so I cant really counter), but yeah, fair enough, I like your justification. Thanks for entertaining my curiosity.

Yep, you ar not asking the others to do the same, you wanto to implement censorship and deny others that possibility without even asking. Some ideas: get off the internet, a lot of very very evil things are going on there. Also, start fighting movie companies and TV: a lot of evil evil things happen in movies.

Amazing the the new SVP of Product is a guy who one day said "It would be cool if reddit had a secret santa." While not working there.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-sant...

It is very surreal.

Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.

This had little to do with Yishan, and more to do with having a user base that abhors changes.

Yep, the "digg exodus" is almost mythical in reddit-history.

eurpoeans colonizing america is almost mythical in western-history.

Which is funny, considering most on Reddit are all about being progressive..

I don't think it's fair to conflate a progressive political ideology with website layout. The two aren't remotely related.

You can subscribe to a progressive ideology and abhor a dramatic redesign of a website. Just because someone is "progressive" doesn't mean they need to accept all change.

Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011.

We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed.

I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.

This. I've been back multiple times over the years to run some small campaigns for some big startups there and can't believe how bad and rough around edges their tools and processes are.

If I didn't love reddit so much there is no way I would've put up with them to run a small campaign.

I'm not sure what scale you are operating at but for me the guy trying to test an MVP the self serve ads were great. I picked:

An ad spend ($5)

My Target subreddit

When it runs

And then a few days later my ad was live.

For $5 it was ridiculously simple and easy.

Can you elaborate on what you were looking for?

New PM on ads here. Completely agree and it's one of my top priorities to fix. Feel free to ping me directly if you ever want to give me more detailed feedback - ryan@reddit.com

Hey Ryan,

I didn't see your comment before I posted, but definitely take a gander at my previous comment for a good place to start.

Good luck!

Not being able to use redirects = non-starter. The first thing you learn when you work in the advertising industry is not to trust other people's metrics.

My previous company came to reddit with an ad buy with a floor of ~5k/mo and a budgetary ceiling nearing $10k/mo if we saw better then expected numbers. The strategy was to target city specific sub-reddits with contextual ads. I went ahead and utilized PRAW and US Census data and brought that together with our internal data to target the top 300 cities for us. After doing all the legwork and presenting the reddit advertising execs with resources I put together we were told they couldn't scale to that level, and to instead look at targeting 3/4 cities with the same ad. This is probably the biggest road block I see for reddit trying to monetize at a level that Conde Nast was thinking when they "acquired" the company.

I'm guilty of abhorring UI changes. Very rarely do I see them as justified. I largely prefer incremental UI changes rather than grand overhauls. The latter seems to be a minimal increase in functionality and a maximal increase in glitz.

I think Reddit has been taking the incremental approach, especially when it comes to rolling functionality into the main engine from all the (now less useful) browser plugins.

That said, there's still a question that remains. Is the UI a mess? Maybe? Yes? I'm not sure. I'm so familiar with it at this point that I can't tell what's wrong with it. Most of the operations I care about are readily available. What, in particular, could use improvement?

Personally, I feel it could be a bit more tabulated or lined up, if that makes sense? One tiny thing would be to change "submitted 10 hours ago by $username to $subreddit" to "$subreddit - 10 hours - $username", which I would argue is less "glitz", it's slightly less informative for newcomers to the site, but friendlier on the eye for repeated use, at least for me.

I'd also some subtle visual cues to separate posts from each other. I know it's not modern, but I still like the look of forums; lots of little boxes to me actually feel less cluttered than lots of little boxes with no clear boundary around them. And I feel similarly about HN, which could do with some application of max-width on the comments the very least (if not the "boxes with subtle gradients and tasteful hints of shadows" style I am so fond of)

Some things do help guide the eye, even a subtle gradient for example is a cue where you are scroll wise in a post that is larger than the screen; not that useful, but still not nothing, and I believe such things add up in addition to being friendlier to the eye. It's not about "design" for me, I don't like when that gets in the way of functionality either. Just keeping on iterating and smoothing things out.. I also don't like big overhauls, but I also always thought that while Craigslist proved that websites don't have to be shiny, it wouldn't have hurt it to have been made it a bit nicer over time. There is a lot that can be done without changing the location on the screen of any of the elements, just the looks and the space between them.

But since no userbase that big will ever agree on anything and the default is no change.. maybe give users an easy way to create and share their own styles, and use them on some or all subreddits? Subreddit styles are one thing, a wonderful thing, but I bet you this would spawn a whole new wave of creativity and fresh designs, and who knows, maybe that in turn can give pointers on how to improve the default look (or simply provide several as options). Even as is, there are many subreddits which are perfectly greyish white and decent, but still a lot nicer looking IMHO than the default.

There are a lot of usability issues but the most blatant anachronism in my opinion is having to refresh the entire page to check for orangereds. Long polling has been ubiquitous for a decade, and nowadays everyone is using WebSocket for push.

"Stagnating" with huge user / traffic growth is bad thing?

When you're never going to be profitable, yes.

Never is a strong word. We're alot closer than you probably think.

> The UI is a complete mess.

Isn't that kind of subjective?

And as long as we're being subjective: It's got my favorite comment UI of any given news site - built in comment collapsing, ability to link to specific comments with parent context, flexibility in URLs, etc.

HN could stand to borrow some of these improvements.

> HN could stand to borrow some of these improvements

Which ones, besides comment collapsing (which we definitely intend to do)?

how long does it take to write a comment collapser? -_-?

I'm sure most people here could do it in a couple hours or a weekend.

And they have; there's an extension for it. But it would be nice if it were baked in.

Being able to link to a specific comment, with a context history. Right now, I can link to a comment, but you have to keep clicking "parent" to understand the full conversation.

As an occasional Reddit user, I find that particular feature rather confusing. If anyone wants to suggest a "native" way to do it on HN, i.e. that would fit with the existing design and be simple and intuitive, please email hn@ycombinator.com and we can talk about it offline.

I personally find it annoying when I follow a comment parent by parent only to have to find the original comment somewhere inside what turns out to be a really large thread. Something as simple as having a link to the original post in each comment might help navigation a bit too.

Undoing of votes would be nice. It's so easy to make an irreversible mistake.

We're definitely open to that.

I wish reddit would remember my folds / unfolds per comment thread. Always stinks to read the comments, collapse some of the discussion for readability, click a link and then return to find the entire thread expanded again.

Simplest solution I've found to this is just use your browser tabs.

That doesn't really scale well, however - if you're reading dozens of threads over the course of a few days, well, good luck.

In that case I'm pretty sure RES saves the state of the collapsed threads.

Yup, it does.

I agree, that would be nice - for now, I use RES[1] which provides this.

[1] http://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Wow, I hope not. I have most of the things they added turned off in settings, and the UI of the site as it is seems very difficult to improve upon, as long as all the images and such are off.

I would much rather they focus on making it fast and stable (I quickly tire of "we took too long to make this page for you"), and leave the UI alone.

they just launched http://www.reddit.com/live

UX changes are the reason Digg died.

This seems petty; you really didn't need to post the details of the resignation. Sorry Sam.

> It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total.

I'm sure McDonalds sold more hamburgers in the last 8 days than my local butcher sold steaks too. If HN would ever reach that degree of attrition it would be reddit.

At the risk of being elitist, let's hope that never happens.

Man, the whole thing reeks!

The big guys invest in Reddit -> weeks later a wedge issue is found, CEO is isolated and out -> blog post to convince the masses that this is still the good old Reddit: 'Look! Ohanian is coming back!'.

The way this announcement desperately tries to water down the significance of the event, speaks chapters, IMO.

Why did he write: "It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total."

Was that a dig at Hacker News?

No, I think it was just to emphasize how much Reddit is growing.

HN is targeted at a specific audience and is more like a subreddit for a particular topic. It wouldn't make sense to compare them directly.

Not to mention half of the user accounts at reddit are just stupid novelty accounts...

I'm exaggerating of course, but there are still a ton of novelty/alt accounts that people create on reddit.

No, why would he do that?

I think it was a humorous factoid rather than a dig; I don't think Sam Altman is attacking HN, nor do I think he thinks, or expects anyone reading his post to think, that HN / reddit scale comparisons are meaningful given their very different intended audiences.

Fair enough! I was thinking that theres not much of a comparison to draw as the hacker news crowd are quite different to the reddit crowd. I'd come here for an informed discussion and expertise... and assume I'd get mildly humorous trolling, lolcats and memes on reddit!

I felt like it was a joke. "I'm the shit - look what I did with Reddit in only 8 days, grew it 5x more than Reddit."

No, it was just an interesting observation to put some context around just how massive reddit really is.

It's an odd comment given the fact that HN has never really tried to grow. There's a certain audience for HN, and it seems to be understood that growth for growth's sake can sometimes put that at risk. (anybody remember back when PG would ask everybody to post really obscure stuff for a few days when HN was seeing an influx?)

It would be interesting to see a comparison to /r/startups

I'll go check it out, are there any other similar subreddits the community could suggest I should check out? I already am a follower of /r/bitcoin and /r/bitcoinmarkets for reasons you can probably guess!

Seeing as how Sam Altman is president of Y Combinator, and there's a reason Hacker News' URL is news.ycombinator.com... yes, yes Sam Altman was definitely intending to insult Hacker News and everyone involved with it.

I assumed he was just poking fun at the home team, but it's nice to see HN users arise passionately in its defense.

I don't know if it was intended as a dig, but even as a casual and mostly-lurking HN user I perceived it that way, and was mildly offended on HN's behalf.

Will this affect Reddits offer to sell 10% of their last round to the community?

Presumably Yishan was heavily involved in the logistics of that.

No, it will not.

I don't think so.

I really liked the "move to Daly City" idea. Millbrae also seems like it would make sense.

What's the benefit of moving to Daly City vs SF proper? I'm not from the bay area, so I'm not familiar with why this would be a problem.

* Rents less extortionate. ($2? vs. $4-5?)

* Big floor plates available.

* Better accessibility (280 and BART) vs. a lot of SF.

* Less dysfunctional city government.

* No city-specific taxes.

I don't know the specifics of the deal. Reddit's current office space is rather...compact.

So, I'll accept that "Reddit must move" is a must. Where they move, and how it's done, seems like a fun challenge for whoever comes in as CEO and for the COO. Very glad this isn't my problem -- immigration is the #1 problem, housing and housing costs #2 problem, office space maybe tied as #3 with general cost inflation, transit, and traffic.

Because the whole point of being in SF is that you can attract talent that wants to live in the heart of the city. To put this in perspective, it's like a company moving out of SoHo and going to New Jersey. It's technically not that far away but once you're out there, you're not within walking distance to everything the city has to offer (food, culture, etc.).

While I'm speculating, I'd imagine the advantage is simply that you can get more space for less money. Daly City is (in a very relative sense) inexpensive, especially given its proximity to SF.

The downside is that Daly City doesn't really have anything to offer but cheaper rents; I suspect it'd be a terrible place to be stuck in for lunchtime and after-work options, nor from what I've seen would it be a terribly pleasant place to live. (That's subjective, of course.) Being in SoMa is a job perk in and of itself, given how many interesting things are within walking distance. If you're going to move out of SF there are considerably more interesting places to target that would still be within relatively quick BART or Caltrain commuting distance.

I work really near the current Reddit office. The SOMA location means:

1) Lots of good but expensive ($10-30/day, easily) lunch options. Reddit provides lunch, and most of the employees seem to eat there, so no much of a perk.

2) Shitty walk to BART -- it's 20min to BART and then the BART wait, BART trip, and whatever on the other end. BART is nice if you're within a couple minutes of a station, which basically means DT oakland, berkeley, or FiDi/market st for offices. Or Daly City!

3) Caltrain, but Caltrain confuses me; I'd always rather drive. You can do Caltrain to Millbrae and then BART, though, for Daly City.

4) 280 proximity (but, Daly City does it better).

5) Bay Bridge sort of proximity (but, 30-45 minutes to wait to get on it in the evenings 5-7pm). This is objectively a big win for Reddit's current location vs. Daly City -- people in Oakland/Berkeley who drive to work. (I do this, and aside from costing me $1k/mo pretax all-in in a paid off car, it gives me a 15min each way commute at 10a and 7p 95% of the time).

6) Utterly extortionate housing rents -- $3500++ for a studio, $4500 1BR. If you were lucky and got here years ago, it can be half that, which is still expensive in absolute terms, but based on Bay Area tech salaries sort of reasonable. Otherwise, insane. Daly City is 50-75% of that, or less, and Pacifica/other San Mateo County/Western SF areas are options. It's faster to go from Ocean Beach to Daly City by car than Ocean Beach to SoMA via Muni.

7) Obnoxiousness whenever AT&T park has an event. Parking goes from $12/day to $90/day, and crowds of roving drunken assholes take to the streets. Usually in the evenings, but baseball has day games :(

Daly City is south and west of San Francisco. It's served by BART (the regional rail system that spans the SF bay area and runs between SFO, Oakland (and its airport), Richmond, Pittsburg (north east bay), Dublin/Pleasanton, and Fremont) and Interstate highway 280, which runs N-S between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

DC is a 25 minute BART ride for me from Oakland. I could totally envision commuting there for work. Great taquerias, easy freeway access, cheap(er) rent, fewer crowds (than downtown SF/SOMA).

At the same time, any business move is disruptive and should be considered carefully.

That's great for people from Oakland.

If you live in sf, you most likely don't live near bart. So now you have to take muni to a bart station; I'd be astonished if such a commute was much less than 1 hour. Each way.

Depending on where in SF, transit (SamTrans) could actually be faster than Muni to SoMA. It really depends on where.

Mission does have BART, and that's a high-density-of-hipsters area.

This is such a strange thing to resign over. For cooler companies like Reddit and more name brand places like Google and Apple, location is not incredibly important for hiring, but it's HUGE for retention.

When you're excited to start a new job it's easy to overlook the commute. Things come into perspective 6 months later when you're wasting up to 1/12 of your life on a bus/train.

I've personally made this mistake and have noticed when interviewing candidates that one of the top reasons they give for wanting to leave their current position is that it's too long of a commute.

Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons.

Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.

"then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons."

To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment.

"first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF"

I can see his point. I've worked remotely and not remotely more than a few times. When you work remotely, you really don't feel connected to the rest of the time and communication and overall progress does suffer over time. No matter how much you try to stay connected, it's just not the same.

Well, Mozilla's CEO had actually donated money to anti-gay causes.... as opposed to reddit, where what the ex employee was saying was false

"It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Zing! =P

8 days.

Knowing nothing more about the issue, I honestly believe he's right in wanting to move the office out of the most expensive area in the Bay. It's a strain down the line.

Unless something fundamental changes in city planning I'd expect a certain degree of crowding out of that area.

I've always had a gut feeling that Sam Altman is not what he acts like. Just because Paul Graham says he is great doesn't mean he is. It's just his personal belief and could be just a propoganda.... Nothing can be believed in this world anymore, news are not actually news, People don't mean what they say, they say what they don't mean, they act different that the reality and internet world is going crazy, unethical, greedy and more... Start ups are just made to make money, People are easy to fool, one guy comes up and make millions, says start up is great and all the people like Donkeys and Yaks start a 'Start-up'. Why? To make money.... doesn't matter what their action's effects are, they are just crazy to make money. They are dishonest, greedy but they call themselves successful...why, because they earned money... Bring on the Artificially intelligent machines, get rid of the humanity... sooner than later...

This post has an interview with Pao and Alexis: http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-int...

This came out of the blue and unannounced on reddit.com. I have a feeling there's more to this than announced.

I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.

though, it seems, that employee was incorreclty shitting all over reddit. The situation appears far grayer than "CEO shits on employee"

Agreed, but it is very very uncharacteristic to show up and just respond in kind.

uncharacteristic of what?

A CEO. Anything to be discussed though has most likely already been said in the multiple thousand comment threads that spawned as a result of this incident.

Understandably there's very little details here, but I'm curious to know if Alexis is moving to SF, he's played a big role in the NYC tech start-up world recently.

Alexis is stepping in as Executive Chairman not C-level, I don't think that would require him to move to SF, just take regular trips there.

He replied on reddit :

  Splitting time! There's a small reddit office in NY.
   
  edit: The team is moving to SF and I'll get a cot in the office.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1...

> It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure [8 days], reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total.

Interesting, indeed.

Yishan, I'd like to buy you a beer.

So do reddit employees still have to move to San Francisco in a month?

we are asked to move to the Bay Area still, but timing is flexible per employee. That's been the case since before Yishan stepped down.

Of course, once everyone is on site, it's very dangerous to be the one employee left offsite.

Redshirt.

I think the answer to that question will probably explain a lot about these events.

Oh, good. Put a SJW at the top of Reddit's chain of command. The drain circling is making sucking sounds now...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint

I'm not going to lie: I dislike a lot of what's called "social justice" (there's no justice in a lynch mob) -- but that complaint is a pretty straightforward sexual harassment case?

So standing up against sexual harassment makes you a Social Justice Warrior?

2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminating in his resignation. He likely already knew his days as the CEO of reddit were numbered.

This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.

reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.

You are mixing the point here, the speculation is true.

Actually, maybe we should listen to someone with an inside perspective, rather than speculate?

and you created an account to say this?

Just playing devil's advocate here, and please know I mean this with all due respect, but you are a Product Manager who has been there 4 months according to LinkedIn.

I do not claim to know the inner workings of Reddit, but can you really be 100% certain that you were privy to all of the meetings, etc. where such signs may have been observed?

Again--zero disrespect intended here, but it strikes me as uncommon that a recent PM hire would be involved in all of the board meetings, hallway conversations, etc. where some of this power struggle may have occurred.

The culture at reddit is one of openness. We're also a super small team (about 30 in SF), so any kind of issues/arguments are easily recognized. Through the relocation announcement, the ex-employee issue on reddit, handling of the #celebgate, all employees and the board were supportive of Yishan for the most part. If there was any animosity, it certainly wasn't enough to call for his resignation.

What Sam is saying is truth. Yishan wanted the new HQ closer to the peninsula because he believed it was the best thing for the company (cost savings, south bay commuters, etc), and probably less so, for his family. The board disagreed, and there were a number of employees who disagreed. Yishan may have felt that he wasn't given enough trust and reins he needed to execute the company the way he thought it should be if he was CEO. This was the sole reason for Yishan's resignation, as I know it.

This is a hopelessly naive position to hold, and it's also a one likely to be dangerous to your career — believing in openness so blindly is how you're going to be blind-sided.

An "open" culture is open unless the folks who actually are in charge have a good reason for it not to be. As someone who has been behind the closed doors, I guarantee that you have no idea what occurred behind them.

Openness isn't the only reason. I'm also pretty close with Yishan (pre-reddit) and Ellen is my direct supervisor and sits across from me. Sure there might have been other small issues, but office location was a large point of contention internally. So this being the underlying part of Yishan's resignation makes sense.

Nobody (sane) resigns solely over office location planning. They would, however, resign over the politics that drove their proposal being dismissed.

Reading what Sam wrote, the board didn't tell Yishan no. They just wanted him to add up the effects it would have. Which isn't just reasonable, it's a requirement if you're any kind of responsible corporate steward. You don't move on a whim, you have the pluses and minuses all figured out.

And no offense, but I find it hard to believe anyone other than Yishan and the board (and maybe some other investors) is privy to all the conversations they had.

It wouldn't be at all surprising if board members are 'nicer' to a ceo in front of employees than they are in private. It'd be kind of surprising if they weren't.

I never said I was privy to the board conversations. My reasonings had to do with the PR events that some believe may have contributed to the board's feelings for Yishan as a competent CEO.

"This was the sole reason for Yishan's resignation, as I know it."

Thanks for the response. I think the above quote is the salient point here though. Everything you said may be accurate, but without actually hearing Yishan's side, I don't think it is realistic to expect everyone to take this at face value, despite Sam and Reddit's reputations.

Even if Yishan were to make a statement, I think there would still be skepticism as to whether people were getting the full story, vs. the "I still hold equity, am seeking new employment, and don't want to agitate the situation" version.

Not sure on whether he still holds equity or how that works, but would you agree that it is reasonable for people to be skeptical given the circumstances and recent events? The more I think about it--I'm actually not sure what could be done to prove beyond a doubt what actually happened. This seems like a black eye for Reddit regardless, and I and many other Redditors have valid concerns about Reddit's future as a result.

Said statement: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CE...

Thanks for sharing that. I actually follow Yishan on Quora and hadn't seen that pop up.

Definitely helpful to get some context. I'd like to believe that everyone is being truthful here, but I guess there will always be a nagging doubt that we are not getting the full story due to the nature of the situation. I guess that brings up the more philosophical question of what duty a company has to make its dirty laundry public to its users.

I can't imagine anyone walking away from the position of CEO of Reddit over something like that.

Rare for an investor to put money into a company with the expectation of replacing the CEO. The speculation you propose is extra unjustified given that there was no change in control with this investment.

I know it's popular for HN to take the side of a persecuted CEO but in this case there's no evidence, or even pattern matching, to support this perspective.

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