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Comment by Smerity | Hacker News Reader

One of the most telling points is from /u/imakuram, moderator for /r/books:

"This seems to be a seriously stupid decision. We have several AMAs upcoming in /r/books and have no idea how to contact the authors."[1]

They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support. Given that the key feature in ensuring the quality of Reddit is the moderation "donated" by the community, this is a deeply dangerous move, especially as many of the moderators are already irritated.

If Reddit forcibly take control of the subreddits, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a Reddit civil war.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...

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> They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or support.

Reddit's major liability (and yet, one of its strengths) is the devolvement of responsibility to moderators. Without their volunteer work, the site couldn't have grown as big as it has. But mods have the power to utterly trash the site through collective action.

The admins have spent years saying that moderators are responsible for the content and direction of a subreddit. I wonder whether they'll keep that line now that moderators of several key subreddits have effectively gone rogue.

This is actually a much bigger threat to Reddit than the recent revolt over the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits.

There's a flip side to that argument as well. If the moderators have such power, then why has reddit failed to court their favor?

I'm not active there, but it does seem to me like reddit owes possibly as much to the community as vice versa.

I feel like it was a situation where the few are in power because the huddled masses don't know that they can actually revolt. The admins have been neglecting tools and moderators for quite a while, and you can see a trend over the last ~3 months of more and more general unhappiness with the site. The admins didn't think the moderators would realize it, but they did. They found a peaceful protest that the reddit admins absolutely have to address, either by fixing things, or by abandoning all credibility and removing the mods from their subreddits.

Alexis is not helping matters either: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...

i see people talking about alexis, but don't see a user named alexis posting in this thread. i assume alexis uses a handle other than his/her name?

Alexis goes by kn0thing on reddit.

kn0thing

Alexis Ohanian is one of the cofounders of Reddit who had left and has since returned as Executive Chair, he's also a current partner at YC, and goes by the username kn0thing on Reddit & HN.

https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexis-ohanian

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kn0thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBk4jMLZ5o

kn0thing is a play on Alexis' favorite Metallica song....

"King Nothing"

Interesting fact w/r/t how pissed people are at him on Reddit: people have gone back and downvoted every single one of his comments now, to the point that several pages back his comments (typically which get upvoted like crazy) are in the negatives.

https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing?count=25&after=t1_cslum...

This seems over blown

I guess people take their pointless internet comments way too seriously.

Kind of funny. On the one hand the angry mobs want their freeze peach. On the other hand they seem awfully touchy about people, well, exercising their free speech.

Still, it is only symbolic. Not that internet points are really that important anyway but seeing as his last posts are already 4 days old, all this reactionary downvoting will do nothing to his overall "karma". After 2 days, a downvote will not reduce your karma. So yeah, all this does is show the rest that apparently there are a lot of upset people out there.

> All this does is show the rest that apparently there are a lot of upset people out there.

Which is actually important; if you run the site and your comments have a -2000 karma your users are telling you a very clear message that something isn't right.

can there be a site owner who treats his site users with respect? Same thing with zuckerberg calling fb users idiots....

Later on he says it was dumb of him, then goes on to plead:

"At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it’s time to get Reddit functioning again"

And downplays it as just a moderator-reddit communication issue. Right.

Peak Reddit was 2011-2014. The people running the 'business' just don't realize it yet. Three years from now, Reddit will be half as influential as it has been these past three years.

A community like Reddit is incredibly challenging to keep balanced long-term. Services like it just tend to blow-up eventually. The upside is, innovation will probably come out of its meltdown, new types of services will bloom, and wipe out what's left of Reddit's value proposition.

I agree. If you don't believe this, ask yourself where is SomethingAwful now?

Also Slashdot, digg, etc. These things have a limited shelf life.

... alive and well? Much like Metafilter, and for the same reason.

All in EVE Online, if the size of Goonswarm is any indication.

On the other hand, Reddit has tons of mostly-isolated subcommunities that will continue to thrive, because they aren't really dependent on the Reddit userbase; they're just the moral equivalent of hosted copies of the reddit codebase, like WordPress.com instances of WordPress.

I can imagine that people will stop thinking of "Reddit" as a website that everyone visits with "default subreddits" et al, but they will possibly continue to associate the name with the platform.

I agree, lots of communities that peak and decline, also continue forward perpetually - such as FARK, Digg or Metafilter - with smaller dedicated user bases. That's the most likely outcome for Reddit. It's so relatively inexpensive to operate, it's unlikely to fold. More likely it'll be swapped around in acquisitions, spin-offs, etc. as different parents try their hands at getting the mojo back (the MySpace / Digg scenario).

> Peak Reddit was 2011-2014.

No, bozarking deleted his account in January 2010.

Yeah cause what you want to do, as an employer, is go out to a community of people you have no control over and say, 'Hey we are about to fire one of your favorite admins, one of your friends maybe. But don't freak out it'll be ok. We can't talk about why we want to fire her, but trust us. Oh and can you not mention it to her before we fire her tomorrow.'

Yeah that will go over well.

At least then people could try to prepare.

It sound like this started the same way it would if someone was hit by a bus. All owns sudden they were just GONE.

Unless the firing was REALLY fast this hasn't been handled well. It's obvious she was important and did a lot of work. If Reddit knew even one day in advance they should have had some sort of plan on how to handle her workload l. Basic business continuity for others.

Instead it sounds like everything got dropped on the floor and Reddit is rushing to pick up the pieces and it's clearly not working.

They could have, and should have, simply stated that she will be gone in a month and laid out at the same time what the handover process would be, given her a generous severance conditional on not stating publicly that she was actually fired until x months or years have passed (by which time nobody will give a shit anymore), and carried on. If they had done this, none of this backlash would have happened at all.

I'm curious how this was communicated to the admins. Even in the case where, say, she punched kn0thing in the nose and was currently being carted off to jail, I imagine you could say "Hey mods, something came up, since it's a personnel matter there's unfortunate legal stuff involved, but we needed to terminate Victoria's employment a couple of minutes ago. For now, full responsibility for running AMAs is with so-and-so, who is not going to be as good at it but will try their best. This is what records we have, this is what we don't and we're working on getting them as soon as possible. This sucks and we're really sorry about the impact on AMAs, but so-and-so will try to make things as non-bad as possible, and they will be super easily reachable for you until we figure out what's happening long term."

It appears that there was no communication with the mods[0]. They only found out because someone who was supposed to do an AMA told them Victoria wasn't available to help them[1].

There was no transition or contingency plan announced to the mods[2]. At first, the admins responded dismissively[3][4], but afterwards they took the issue more receptively[5].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...

[5] http://imgur.com/XoL3pdJ

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