Reddit boss apologises after staff sacking causes 'revolt'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This is an incredible simplification.
If we follow the 90-9-1 model: 1% of reddit's user base contributes new content, 9% interacts with that content, and 90% are lurkers and consumers. The 'vocal minority' are the content creators and contributors.
Reddit has hardly changed in its existence. Things like a search that works or reasonable moderator tools have been promised for years to no avail. Reddit has never had any decent product leadership, but their attempt to reign in control of content has been disastrous.
Moderating content outside of removing illegal content is a really slippery slope. It's incredibly difficult to get content standards right. Reddit, as it becomes more mainstream, seems like its trying to get content standards under control, but the cost is immense and might eventually end up alienating its userbase.
I think she is trying to paint the "blackout" as the same as the fatpeoplehate banning, which created similar, but different shitstrom. Some people even believe that.
But this is different - the fatpeoplehate incident was about hateful people no longer being able to feely practice their hate and harassment.
Blackout is about people realizing they are on the ship, and the captain has no idea what she's doing, and the ship has quite a few icebergs in the way.
Luckily there's many other ships you can jump off to if the iceberg gets too close.
People migrated from Digg to Reddit. People will migrate from Reddit to whatever will come next if the need should arise.
I wonder if they received an influx of traffic following the Great Reddit Blackout of 2015 and thought it was worth investigating if they could spin an immigration to match the emigration from Digg after their own past community mistrust issues.
I think we've all be on the internet long enough to see vibrant communities (usenet, forums, MUDs, myspace, etc.) bloom and wilt away. If Reddit cannot provide a high level of value to the people that generate content within the community they will migrate away to an environment that does.
Unlike Usenet, though, it provides simple editing, pictures, video, and some other things people want.
But search sucks.
There's a lot of other former Redditors making the migration there too.
That being said, if you like it, go for it.
Even though I admit reddit is a strange place, somewhat halfway between a company and a governing body with democracy-like structure. Still, given the sheer amount of userbase, it's unlikely that the activism of the mods and a chuck of active users (who are upvoting the boycott related posts) would seriously affect it (i.e., bring the website down in the long term). Probably such internal decisions would change the flavor/nature of the website.
To use a clear topical analogy, people weren't upset about Michael Brown per se to the point of rioting in the streets. His case was just a rallying point for frustrations over perceived systemic police abuse of power.
I agree with the main point, though, that you shouldn't fuck with the reddit community.
*Edit: I'm a redditor in the 9 year club.
I'm curious what you mean by "loyal", then.
> The 'vocal minority' are the content creators and contributors.
That term, content creator. That's a bit disingenuous in this case. It's rare for anyone to create content specifically for reddit, the vast majority of this content you're talking about is re-posted to reddit from other sources.
> Reddit, as it becomes more mainstream
Reddit is one of the largest sites on the internet, how much more mainstream does it need to get before you stop characterizing it as "becoming mainstream"?
The truth is, the company made a decision and the moderators got ansty and threw the users under the bus in an attempt to make a power play.
The most virulent detractors were a vocal minority, they were the mods of a few large subreddits.
r/AskScience also has a lot of AMAs, and so was directly affected by Victoria's firing in a way that most other subs were not.
It sounds like any well-moderated, decently large subreddit would have reason to be pissed.
That r/shitredditsays is celebrating shows that mistreatment has not been happening to them.
Worf, Buzz Aldrin, Obama, Bill Gates, Elon Musk ..
The people who "revolting" this time were the people who brought us these. I don't think it's fair to write them off as re-posters; they've put huge, huge amounts of time and effort into curating some of the most engaging original content reddit has ever seen.
It's a high-traffic site, sure, but I wouldn't call it mainstream. I would consider much lower trafficked sites like Expedia, Zappos and Huffington Post more "mainstream".
> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato...
I think MOST Reddit users would disagree with how things have been handled and she does indeed seem out of touch with the user base. I don't see this turning around and instead see it as an opportunity for up and coming players to steal the user base (just like Reddit did to Digg).
And that "snowballing" movement could be created easily with https://www.iWouldDo.it
In addition, those that are most vocal are some of the most important users on Reddit. They make the community what it is. If you loose them, then rest will leave soon after.
Some peole are doing what they can to make this incident appear as being the same as the fatpeoplehate banning outrage, but this is different.
So yes, I 100% see the shit collecting where the shit already is. I had literally no idea there was drama until I came to HN.
Most of these are the largest subs because new users are subscribed to them by default. Default subs are just faceless crowds that don't have much of a community. You're defining "value" in terms of the aggregated number of eyeballs looking at ads, which I suppose is one measure, but the value of a site to a user is what it shows to them. They get this value from the subs that they choose to subscribe to.
For example, the sub that was directly affected was IAmA, a default sub which in its current celebrity-focused incarnation is no more a community than the audience of The Tonight Show is a community.
That they're also unhappy and have the same list of complaints strongly suggests that reddit isn't doing a good job supporting their communities.
/r/askscience is comparatively poor quality. Wrong answers are often given with no repercussion. Answerers are often entirely unqualified to answer question. This is arguably worse than no answer at all. I would not consider it a quality subreddit.
What you see on reddit is: people blowing gossip out of proportion on the subreddits who allow it. Those that "went dark" are probably the reasonable ones to avoid to avoid poor content.
I'd hazard a guess and say that even a large portion of the users who are constantly commenting in all of the major posts with things like "down with Pao!" and "let's go to voat.co!" probably don't care a fraction as much as their virulent comments would indicate.
Without a "vocal minority" she's got no content. Does AOL have a "vocal minority?" Yahoo? They'd give their right arm for a "vocal minority."
This is what the vocal minority wanted to talk about: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/38q8ew/reddit_int...
He has since apologized, I'd hope he's sorry for being out of touch with the userbase. But everything Reddit has done makes it look like he's sorry he got caught.
A lot of the moderators I've heard from aren't satisfied at the statements released to them as well. There was a lot of talk about getting better moderation tools out, but Reddit doesn't seem to realize that the clown-car toolset available to mods is just a concrete and undeniable example the mods can point to about how the admins entirely ignore the "community" the entire business is built upon.
EDIT: Downvoting me as a way of saying "I disagree" is immature.
If not - i imagine it will be pretty visible to people on the fence, which will only snowball more. Just as with Digg, this can happen quite fast, and i think a snowball is the only true way this would happen.
With that said, i think the most important part of the equation will be another "player". If voat.co (or others) are not able to handle the immediate traffic, then i think it's much less likely to succeed. Reddit had a lot of troubles handling Diggs load, but they managed overall. Voat has been taken down multiple times due to Reddit's against-user actions - so it doesn't seem likely that Voat will be able to handle the traffic when Reddit users need/want it most.
Personally i'm hoping someone can find a way to distribute this whole social content idea - but in a UX friendly, web based way. I don't think Voat, or anyone else, will be able to handle taking in the Reddit userbase without falling into the same pitfalls as Digg and Reddit. Something decentralized seems like the only solution.
Content producers are a tiny minority of the site and mods are a tiny minority of that.
Paul Graham has said he thinks it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement[1]
Also, you may want to familiarize yourself with HN's guidelines, which state Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[2]
Very few people create content for reddit, they re-post shit the way they would on something like their facebook wall.
Thus, you are alienating exactly the class of users that you don't want to.
Remember just like mods have an issue with administrators, Many subreddit users have issues with moderators :). I am surprised this didn't come up.
Downvoting for disagreement is officially sanctioned on this site. It's annoying, but that's how it is.
I upvote everything greyed out that is well articulated or makes a point or expresses an opinion that is not well represented elsewhere in the thread.
I'm done fighting it. I just downvote anything I even slightly disagree with and move on. It's what the mods apparently want.
Downvotes work best with an emotionally mature community. Fortunately HN seems mature enough that discussion never really go off the rails, individuals with your attitude notwithstanding.
Apparently everyone is fine with that. So I see no reason not to be myself.
She should also not underestimate how quickly Reddit latches on to these kind of memes even when people might not personally care so much. That she's already widely known around Reddit as Chairman Pao is not exactly a good sign.
The whole thing is a failure of management, pure and simple. Reddit's board should be looking for blood.
I don't see a Digg like exodus happening yet. I recall leaving Digg and thinking with the new version that these guys were taking the piss and completely out of touch with users.
Reddit hasn't gone quite that far but it definitely used to pride itself being a free speech platform and thats changed now - locking sub reddits is restricting ideas and behaviour despite what the admins say. You're only even in favor of free speech so long as you tolerate things that are mean, awful and sometimes even hateful. The bans, firing and lack of communications weren't a good idea and didn't result in a "safer" reddit.
I don't think Ellen Pao is the right person to run Reddit. I think Reddit is facing the same dilemma the music industry faced when they realised that their best customers were also the ones to pirate the most music.
Long story short, EVERY user was affected by Digg's changes and bugs. The issues Reddit faces now affect only the moderators; users only feel the secondary and tertiary affects of these conflicts.
There is not yet any impetus for a mass exodus.
Similar things have happened at Slashdot, user disenfranchisement as the (new) owners try to screw out every last cent from the site forgetting it needs the community to be what it is. Hit with a second punch of not entirely well executed redesign and you've got problems.
But then I think HN perhaps goes the other way, the more I stay the more I hanker after some simple redesign to address the site's deficiencies (collapsing comments threads for example, spacing the up- and down-vote buttons). I'm a big believer in "if it ain't broke ..." but also consider that a design should move with browser/web developments to, in an evolving way. Mind you dang seems to do a great job with the moderating.
There is no viable community for redditors to flee to this time, but there are probably dozens of teams of people spending the long weekend attempting to cobble together replacements for Reddit.
I've said elsewhere that I'm confident that Reddit will muddle through this debacle because they're the only game in town. But a highly-active contingent of their user-base is now in play, competitors will appear on the horizon over the next few months to draw them away, and they may succeed.
We, the mods, have been asking for tools to properly manage our communities for upwards of 4-5 years now. Pretty much as soon as subreddits were created, we were needing tools. But back then, it was less of an issue because you only had 20,000 subscribers (if you were lucky). Now, subreddits have 9 million subscribers and the tools that were promised? Non existent. Instead, they roll out things like snoovatars and redditgifts. It's literally a slap in the face and just goes to show that management is so completely out of touch with their own site that you can't help but laugh at it all. They spend money hiring media coordinators, "creative director of video", "Head of round-up" (yes, those are real positions at reddit) and sales reps instead of talented software engineers and coders to support the people who keep their website chugging along. The people who do it for free.
The issue: They started focusing on profits too soon. Reddit, back when it was seeing a few million hits a month, was only a half finished product. Now it sees 170 million unique hits a month and nothing has changed. It's still an unfinished product. But after getting their $50 million investment, instead of putting some of that money back into the website to bring us the tools we've literally been begging for, they redoubled their efforts on finding ways to monetize the site.
How to fix: Fire their CEO or whoever is responsible for laying out the company's current goals. They were wrong. Anyone who actually knows and understands reddit knew those goals were going to fail. Which means (or proves) whoever was in charge was operating and making decisions out of ignorance. They were making decisions without understanding their product. It would be like me getting hired as the CEO of Walmart and I just start making business decisions without knowing anything about their corporate structure or needs. It's an obvious recipe for disaster.
The most surprising thing out of all of this was the realization that the management at reddit was truly and really out of touch. I didn't want to believe that to be the case because I like reddit. It's a sad thing to see something you love being run by people who just don't know their own product.
However, the consensus among the other mods I've talked to say that tools to deal with undesirable elements, vote manipulation and other related curation tools (possibly even the ability for mods to IP ban someone from their subreddit) would improve the quality of individual subreddits (and by extension, reddit itself) so much I can't really put it into words.
As far as I'm concerned this whole "revolt" seems like it's on some other planet
http://www.reddit.com/r/modclub/comments/3bypwq/rmodclub_ama...
Reddit really needs PR people. The administration's interactions with the community during events like these are almost comically bad.
Most of them are programmers, after all. ;P
This is a great display of distancing language.
1. The "I" becomes "we".
2. Use of "apologize" over "sorry".
3. Specifies the mistake as one of "handling".
4. Refers to abrupt firing as a "transition".
They are quite literally TRYING to build reddit v4
https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/352e9y/introducing...
I don't have the answers but I don't think monetizing the 31st most traffiked is impossible. They have to think harder and dig deeper.
I like Alexis, I've read his book and seen his TED talk and think he is overall a good guy. That said both this comment and the way he reacted on reddit was extremely poor. This "apology" for Pao is shit and completely empty. After years of ignoring the mods and the hard work they put in to make reddit possible they tell everyone "You've had your fun, now start making up money again". I'm not just ready to leave reddit for something like voat like I left digg for reddit but this is not the first thing reddit has done recently that rubs me wrong. Maybe this is just their Google-"Don't be evil" transformation where they do things that the community thinks are not in keeping with their stated mission but continues to use the platform because it's better than most everything else out there...
Note how the article shows them apologizing for how the transition was handled, not the firing, which there are still no clear details on.
I hope they realized how much power the community holds. Reddit is fickle with a long memory, and if the winds of favor start blowing the other way, there will ALWAYS be someone dredging up the past any time you try to do anything in the future.
Pao and any others involved in these decisions have done irreparable damage to their community and its trust in Reddit's leadership. Reddit's success is built on a notion of trust that few, if any social networks could ever achieve because Reddit has consistently made choices in favor of the community, not despite them. When that starts changing, so does the trust and the rest of the relationship.
But maybe that's the goal and they are trying to drive out the people who care about that while retaining the users who just want cat pictures and celeb AMA's who don't give a crap about the drama or increasingly intrusive advertising (I'm looking at you Alienblue feed ads that I can't downvote enough). I'd be shocked if they didn't start selling audience data to brokers like Axciom or Neustar at some point as well.
> "He said the team were also looking into ways to "improve being a moderator"."
Given how things went down, I wouldn't be surprised if that implied restricting the ability for mods to make certain subs dark in the future. If you are a content portal, you can't be letting your pesky users turn off the tap whenever they want...bad for business.
I always wondered why Reddit never introduced paid subscription-based subs. Let the community monetize and promote the platform, give them recurring revenue and take a cut. Suddenly you are helping your users and helping Reddit. Sure free alternative subs might be more popular for easily duplicated content, but certain content areas could do quite well.
Oh well, it was great while it lasted.
--EDIT--
Please don't interpret my statement about them not providing details of the firing as a presumption that they should have or that I expected them to expose themselves to liability--I'm not ignorant when it comes to how these things go down. My (perhaps not clear enough) point is that there is no real acknowledgement that she was good at executing on her job (from the standpoint of the community and our perception) and the entire way this has been handled has been in a cold corporate manner.
I get they are a business, but when you run a community like Reddit, the Reddit employees who actively engage are part of that community, so it becomes an inherently personal matter, like when you have to explain to a child why you are divorcing your spouse. Sure you could just not explain it, but you increase the likely hood of deep emotional scars that never heal if you handle it poorly. As much as they would like this to be an internal situation, the community is intrinsically intertwined in this so some deeper explanation that satisfies this curiosity is more or less necessary to bring them around. Not saying that is fair to Reddit or Victoria, just stating how the mob works from my experience after 8+ years.
It's standard practice for a company to not disclose why someone was fired, and this is often to the benefit of the former employee. Why do you think you're entitled to know the private details of Victoria's employment?
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_...
Also, Ellen Pao was not Reddit's CEO at that time and it seems unfair to hold her to the behavior of the CEO she replaced.
It's a good thing that Reddit does not reveal details of why people were fired.
The fact that Reddit refuses to take that path is a strong indication that the reasons would reflect badly on the company.
"In return, the polite expectation is that the employee will not go shooting their mouth off about the company especially (as in your case) through irresponsibly unfounded speculation. (...) Unfortunately, you have just forfeited this arrangement."
That is none of your business. That is none of -our- business. Anybody who thinks they deserve to know why Victoria / u/chooters was fired has either never worked a real job before, or has a vastly over-large opinion of themselves.
Is it really in anyones best interest to know? Firing of staff is a personal matter between two private entities.
I think it's obvious that there is a forced changing of the guard happening at reddit and given the people who were fired were some of the most popular with the users and moderators I can't imagine those changes will be well received by the users.
However, firing of staff is a personal matter and neither the company nor Ms. Taylor are going to say anything about it. So now we just have to wait for the other shoe to drop to find out what is really going on.
It will also make the site even more toxic as everybody takes sides and starts the same fights over and over again.
That _is_ Pao's responsibility, and she failed in having a plan, and the community called her on it.
Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
I bet most folks who don't frequent the site, and haven't used it over the holiday weekend will come back and not even know anything had transpired and don't feel any decline. I've used the site daily for a long time and it is fine by me. Maybe I just don't get upset that I can't say and do anything I want on the site because I know that is silly.
Shutting down creep subreddits like fatpeoplehate and others is totally fine and isn't stifling anyones free speech. No one has a right to be able to post whatever they want on a 3rd party website, fortunately to many and unfortunately to some the Internet is no longer the Wild Wild West.
I'm personally fine with those subreddits existing, free speech and all that, but I agreed with the decision to ban it. You step over the line when you start actively harassing people.
And I go on Reddit, like, every day.
> Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
I've also been around since nearly the beginning (coming up on tenth cakeday) and I feel very similarly.
I expressed as much in Alexis' modtalk thread, and I was glad to see many others doing the same. Site usability issues aside, frankly I couldn't care less about the admin-moderator and moderator-user dynamic of the default subs. The large-scale reddit community lost my interest years ago in typical Eternal September fashion.
But I feel, on the whole, betrayed by the new direction of the site. Not only does it not reflect the early days of reddit that drew me in -- it doesn't even seem to reflect a natural growth-driven evolution of the platform.
I find myself losing all remaining interest in reddit and suspect I'll delete my account in the coming weeks if there aren't major changes to
(a) the horrendous attitude of the [user-facing] admins,
(b) communication channels between reddit engineers and users who try to contribute to site development,
(c) the ancient moderation tools that can't handle subreddits over 50 thousand users.
It's been a great run. Really, what an amazing decade. But, at least for me, these recent events are just the final blow. They represent a turning point in reddit and a turning point in my own life. These discussion silos of the early 2000s all feel bloated and fairly useless now.
This sort of whiny bullshit has been on reddit forever, the truth is the mods went for a power play because they didn't like what the admin's did, and the users got thrown under the bus.
As a redditor of many years I just don't give 2 shits about it and I blame the mods more for the bullshit than reddit itself.
If each subreddit with 30,000 or more subscribers (all 1,000 of them) required just 5 hours of moderation per day, and that cost $8/hr, that's over $10 million/yr.
This is ignoring many mods are industry specialists who could charge $50-200/hr for the time they're donating to reddit.
Saying they would like their tools updated and to be taken seriously is a small "power play" considering the massive amount of labor they donate to the site each year.
There seems to be this disingenuous need for those who are anti-reddit in this case to try and inflate what these people actually do.
By and large, these mods are not content creators, they're mods. The people who post links on reddit are also not content creators, they're simply people who found something and posted a link on a site meant for linking stuff.
Moderating takes work, but this idea that these moderators are people who have specialized knowledge and work day and night on this is horseshit. You do yourself and your cause a disservice when you talk like that.
You seem to think you have a pretty strong grip on things so you tell me: ballpark, how many hours of work do you estimate have been donated to reddit by its moderators and what's the dollar value of that work?
Consider this - what do people who feel their work is undervalued do? They negotiate for higher pay, they look for a better job, they leave. In this particular tantrum, how many moderators of popular subredits can you point to that resigned in protest? I'm guessing that number is also zero.
There's no reason to get sidetracked with a debate about how value is defined, it's a simple question.
Additionally, these people don't want to go. They like whatever intangible benefits moderating brings them. If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
If you're dying of thirst and somebody offers you a glass of water some will argue the market value of that glass of water was zero. I get that. There's also the value of what that glass of water was worth to you and there are many ways to approximate that value. There's what you were willing and able to pay at the time, there's whatever water prices were at the time if you walked into a store, the size of a loan you would have taken out for it, etc. If for whatever reason this person gave you many life-saving glasses of water over the years, and you showed little appreciation, there may come a point where the two of you will debate the difference betwee market value and utility value.
I'm not trying to debate market vs utility value. I'm just saying if the mods have donated $100 of time over the years it's different from if they've donated $100 million of time over the years. It's an attempt to have a rational discussion about whether or not they're "throwing a temper tantrum." You're getting sidetracked because I'm using dollars to measure utility value instead of market value. If you'd like you can think of it this way: what would the cost of reddit's mods be if this was happening in a "perfect" market where other companies were competing for moderators.
> If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
This should be covered in the first semester of college economics: if a company has no close competitors you can not assert that its employees must be happy because they haven't left. People have been screaming for months for a similar place to leave to, it doesn't exist yet.
This is a very straightforward exchange - moderators spend time moderating in return for the endorphins and jollies this activity brings them. By 'leave' I mean 'stop moderating'. At any time, any moderator can stop moderating at the loss of nothing more than the endorphins and the gain of extra free time to devote to some other hobby. There is a glut of people who would take up their spot. For nothing. That's where the heavy competition is - lots and lots of people enjoy doing this sort of thing, for whatever reasons. It's not like there is a shortage of internet message boards and in most of them, calls for volunteer mod positions are flooded with applicants.
Reddit is not benefiting from the inexplicable altruism of some sort of rare and highly valuable specialists. And for all their talk, the mods know this too because they did not even threaten with a walk-out, let alone attempt one. Their only leverage was to force their users into this spat with the admins.
As you said, mods are being paid in intangibles. If you log in to a website several days a week to fulfill the responsibilites that come with your position, in exchange for compensation, for years at a time, that's called a job. you may not be an employee but at some point you are working.
I'm not saying we can assign a dollar value to this work, I'm saying we can ballpark an amount of value and we might as well communicate that in dollars. If you'd like we can measure it in millions of hours donated. The magnitude of these numbers alone should make this interesting.
Because reddit has no close competitors there is no market for mods, reddit has a monopoly. Since there is no market to tell us what the value of moddding is we have to guess. If there were a hundred reddits competing with each other for mods we could trust the level of compensation they receive. Glut of supply and only one buyer means compensation will be far under what it would be in a "fair market".
Very few people are going to buy that moderators are employee's of reddit, and therefore, the dynamic is completely different.
I never once said the mods are employees. I pointed out how much what they do would cost if you had to pay people to do what they do. The "debate" is over how value is measured. If you have something new to add please do.
The flaw has already been pointed out to you.
Nailed it.
As for your question, I reject it on the grounds that the assumption is faulty and therefore not worth discussing.
I'm not sure what you mean here; are you referring to the annual donation drive? I love this model, but I know a lot of Wikipedia users who absolutoly hate the (admittedly non-invasive and pretty respectful) banners requesting donations.
They are not lying when they say "if everyone gave $5 the appeal would be over today". It's much easier for them than for a local PBS affiliate because of the huge user base. As the internet grows up, I hope users will learn to value things appropriately and not expect them for free.
Sponsored AMAs are the first of many possible monetization strategies to take Reddit to $100M per year, which in turn increase the value of employee equity.
AMAs are ridiculously undervalued when looking at the quality of celebs and their monthly unique visitors.
If Reddit's own internal culture is indeed blocking the evolution of Reddit as a media property, then Ellen is simply making the tough, fiscally responsible decisions.
Snoop Dogg, a Reddit investor, didn't become a $135M franchise by undervaluing his content and services. Reddit shouldn't either.
"If Reddit's own internal culture is indeed blocking the evolution of Reddit as a media property, then Ellen is simply making the tough, fiscally responsible decisions." I call major BS, because reddit is NOTHING without its "internal culture". Anything that has a whiff of promotion or spam on reddit will kill it, at least if it's done in a way that doesn't respect its user base. For example, it was rumored that Victoria Taylor was against video AMAs for the reason that it would turn them into light puff pieces, instead of the insightful, humorous, and sometimes hard-hitting interactions that the best AMAs are.
If J.J. Abrams does an AMA to promote Star Wars this December, does anyone really care that Disney paid $200K to show an exclusive movie trailer to Reddit fans?
If even 1% of Reddit users take that video viral, it'd add millions to the opening weekend box office numbers.
[edit: nevermind measurable viral outcomes. The core question remains, can Reddit can maintain it's culture with native ads/sponsorship?].
What value does Reddit provide as a server by offering a forum where users volunteer to create, rank, and moderate their content for them? What about that value isn't dependent on the community that creates content? What about Reddit prevents voat or frizbee from acquiring its community?
The secret sauce to Reddit is a formula comprised of anonymous identity, freedom of speech, user generated content, witty humor, cat pictures, atheism, technologists, reward systems (gold, up vote) and transparent communication.... all baked in a social oven for 10 years.
In turns out, that all those social network qualities happen to represent a significant population of the real-world; and everyone, from politicians to celebrities, are acknowledging that fact.
Without knowing the specifics of voat or frizbee, I just don't see another community coming along that can replicate this formula in the short-term.
Reddit is actually in a good position to introduce healthy dialogues that involve brands, UGC producers, and consumers.
There are a thousand different ways marketing people can shove celebrities down peoples throats. If you turn AMAs into exactly that, you wont get $100M a year; you'll just ruin something kinda novel.
IMO it makes a lot of difference if they were planning the dismissal for a while and screwed it up or had to react to something like gross negligence or misconduct - as the BBC was required to when Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear) hit a member of the production team and the series was postponed mid-run.
Would be ever so interesting to see Reddit's stats and stats on exit pages and the URL's visited outside Reddit by browser put off by the blackout. Maybe the NSA will release an analysis at some point ;0)>.
> Reddit went into virtual lockdown, with many of the sections made private after Victoria Taylor was fired.
Sections? Private? Explain this to your users, or use better wording.
> About 100 chat sections, or sub-reddits, that together have millions of readers are believed to have been shut, although are many are now again public.
Just..what? "have been shut", "are many are now"
> There had been no explanation of why she was suddenly sacked, said the administrators.
This makes no sense. Administrators are the employees/company. So you're saying that the company just fired someone without knowing why? Maybe you meant moderators?
It is better to say she doesn't know why Victoria was fired, than give an actual reason that can be investigated. A CEO that doesn't know what their own organization is doing is a poor CEO, but better to be seen as a poor CEO than one that has a political agenda and fires people based on discrimination principles.
Pao needs to be vague so they can't use her words against her in a lawsuit. It is obvious she is trying to clean up Reddit to get better advertisers by banning subs and users and firing people whom she thinks allows certain behavior to go unpunished.
I heard that some users were posting links to her husband's Ponzi schemes, and they were getting deleted. http://nypost.com/2015/03/18/users-lash-out-at-reddit-boss-f...
That's implying the reader knows or wants to know how the website works.
Pao has so far shown herself to be deeply out of touch with core values of reddit, I could elaborate.
However, Pao or not - how can you make a community-based site like reddit profitable without betraying the fact your users are doing the heavy lifting? I could elaborate here too.
based on that, at least two good ways to make a community-based site profitable would be to use it as a platform for this party profit - allow others to embed profitable apps/games/... and take a percentage of their income, and sell ads based on people's interests.
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...
Pao's mistake (and one she continues to make) is forgetting that without contributors there is no reddit. I was around to see the center of gravity shift from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit. The one thing I'm certain of: it is overdue for another shift.
[1] http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio...
2) Who do you think is doing the heavy lifting at Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, any other social network?