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?
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.
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.
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.
Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?
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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.
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.
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.
...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.
It can easily be a deal breaker if you have a family to consider.
(Not that I know anything about this case.)
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).