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From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers.

Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Victoria didn't fit with that plan.

The return of Huffman signals a shift back to the Cult of Growth, in the hopes that investors won't worry as much about monetization so long as the site is growing. One thing the board won't settle for is neither growth nor profitability.

Not that I disagree, but it's worth mentioning (for anyone who doesn't frequent reddit) that firing Victoria was apparently Alexis Ohanian's decision, and not Pao's[1][2], which suggests that the pressure is coming from the board and not an endeavor specific to Pao.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3d6asv/former_r...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

I find it extremely rare that the board is not involved directly in every hiring/firing for startups under some sort of business duress.

Total tangent: I did not understand the outrage at reddit. The management clearly let her be thrown under the bus by the conspiracy wackos.

I don't know if reddit can still be called a startup. It's a decade old content aggregator business. That's like calling Facebook a startup in social media.

I thought they were still not profitable, which makes me use the term startup. I could be wrong though.

What I find intriguing is that fact that they have 160m unique visitors and over 7 billion page views each month, yet they generated less than $8.3m in ad revenue last year.

That just feels wrong, somehow...

People have been saying that about reddit for years. They overestimate "average" CPM by about 100x.

People don't pay a lot for ads, and when they do, it's only on a fraction of the page views.

Display advertising will not be reddit's "cash cow", it will be one pillar of many sources of revenue. The good news is, Steve and Alexis both know this.

Those figures always sounded surprising high to me.

The initial reddit page has one ad above the fold, but most detail pages have the ad placed way below the fold.

Whether or not everything you say is true, they should be generating more than $8.3m in ad revenue.

I should clarify that I worked at reddit and speak from experience and not conjecture. Selling ads on reddit is hard, I'm actually impressed that they made that much from display ads last year.

>In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers.

I see no problem with this. I purposely avoid recommending or even mentioning reddit to the people in my life because of all the horrible content on the site. I won't promote these subs, but there are many, many popular racist subs and subs that promote violence against women and, hell, one that is dedicated to showing photos of dead women who were attractive in life. There's a creeper sub that shows candid photos of women on the street that pathetically skirts the rules by pretending its about "fashion."

My god, reddit is a mess. I can't ever imagine recommending advertising there. I can imagine videos games, e-cigs, energy drinks, etc advertising there as these things already have a lousy reputation, but reddit is not on the path of being this broad forum with lots of members with disposable income. Growth isn't impressive when its just more of the same, largely unprofitable, "manboy" demographic.

This is why USENET lasted so long and was so prolific amongst techies. It never had to make a profit. You could trivially start new "communities", etc. Reddit is pretty much USENET as web, but the problem is, someone has to pay for all those servers and staff. No one is donating or proving access as part of your shell account like they did back in the USENET days. I find it questionable that such forums would ever be profitable. I suspect the next gen reddit will be something that has more in common with torrent-like tech than old school client-server web tech.

> I can imagine videos games, e-cigs, energy drinks, etc advertising there as these things already have a lousy reputation

Holy hell, you need to walk outside your bubble a bit.

I tried not to make any judgement about the changes, just to analyze the motive. It has always been a Sisyphean struggle to sell ads on Reddit -- in large part because the content is so unpredictable. Whatever access they can provide for a brand to connect with a target demographic has to be weighed against the cost of being embroiled in controversy for advertising alongside the content that shows up on Reddit.

Given the ongoing narrative of a push for growth, the sacking of Victoria Taylor seems like even more of a bungle to me.

Last I heard the AMA mods are going it alone without admin support. The mods themselves previously said that the subreddit couldn't continue as it was without this support. Even if it somehow does, that leaves probably THE biggest growth tool at their disposal in the hand of unaffiliated volunteers.

If it flounders or doesn't operate as smoothly as they need, whats the next step? Try and reintegrate into the mods workflow?

Or worst case scenario, take over the subreddit entirely, which would be a massive change for the community in some ways, to have a major subreddit being run by employees.

Both Ellen Pao and Bethanye Blount mentioned the demand of growth, I just can not see a way the fallout from Victoria can be managed from this point towards that goal. Seems like such a colossal mismanagement, unless AMA's aren't part of their strategy, or they're planning on really shaking up the user/mod/admin dynamic.

It feels like reddit management totally forgot AMA is not operated by them at all. That's worrying - They do not pay the content creators and moderators in any way (and that's fine as long as they can rule their communities), but if there is the possibility of profit, they just assume it belongs to them and not to anyone else. I cannot explain what happened (absolutely no communication with the AMA mods) but with that kind of attitude. They just screw themselves over with that IMHO.

Most likely they thought a community member would pick it up. Of course they are aware that AMA is where the money is coming from, Pao used it as a monetization lead iirc.

Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users.

That's nonsense!

Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everything here.

If you take a community site (and Reddit is a community site, not a society site) and add people not in the same community mindset, you end up with twitter trending topic nonsense of six million middle school girls yelling for attention at boy bands.

People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too.

Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it. At the core, it's just an online message board. Those have limited TAM based on topic+culture of the entire site. If you want a billion users, you don't have Reddit, you have ReddTwitBook+.

Source: used to work for a VC-funded niche online message board site that was unable to grow no matter what they tried. same pattern: promises of growth, no growth, management changes, promises of growth, no growth, etc.

Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities.

HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory).

In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily moderated by a vetted and trusted team put in place by PG himself, for example -- how do you emulate that level of quality in a moderator group, and then multiply it by the 10k or so subreddits? Maybe there's a way to get a slightly lower quality moderator that scales better, or something.

A Reddit user's "workflow" hasn't significantly changed in the past 8 or 9 years. Maybe that's the problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews

jbob2000 you're shadowbanned and your comments don't show up for most users.

where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities.

That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page.

If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant)

In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.

Well, functionally, that's the experience you get from Reddit via the "front page" -- all your little communities show up together, showing you what's "new".

Of course, the problem is now that those "little communities" have 3-4 million people in them, and are basically large cities.

The overall readership size isn't of great concern (the more the merrier), but it breaks down when people start interacting at scale. It breaks down when posts start getting thousands of upvotes or tens of thousands of comments. At that point, why bother?

Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where.

All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).

>People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too.

Actually, I think of it as the opposite. I go to Reddit to get the bulk, and other, more anonymous message boards to get away from it. Reddit is hardly anonymous (or private) - it's not attached to your real being, but you're definitely a well-documented member of their society.

>Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it.

I honestly do not want to be a part of a "massive-growth" or monetized Reddit. Growth is organic; attempts to inject artificial hormones into the site comes with a sacrifice. I believe that sacrifice is diversity and uniqueness, since knowing how to grow requires you to know what exactly your're growing, and it's hard to understand complex objects. So the leadership creates more rules, more restrictions on freedom in order to get a grasp on it. As a result, content becomes stale, groupthink rules, and the site looses its appeal.

I would venture a guess too that the AMA platform may start having sponsored content or there was some element in the shake up regarding that and people not wanting to take money for AMA's.

When you see celebs and other note worthy folks on there, they casually mention they have a new movie|book|thing coming out and they're there to AMA.

But as a PR tool, AMA can only go so far. How many rounds of anonymous internet questions can someone field before the audience exhausts anything interesting?

It's a free PR tool. Why shouldn't Reddit monetize it? Currently it costs the PR folks nothing to put them on Reddit, and gets them a decent chunk of exposure to a very-hard-to-advertise-to demographic.

That being said, I have no idea how you convince someone to pay for an AMA, or how to monetize it in general.

The belief is that if people are paying to have an AMA, then Reddit is more likely to censor questions and / or do things to make the guest look better. Instead of it actually being an Ask Me Anything where some guests get torn up with difficult questions, it becomes PR fluff. Based on what I've read, Victoria was strongly against requiring people to pay to have an AMA.

I don't think Victoria got fired for saying she wouldn't do the AMAs anymore if they tried to monetize them. That's something you can say publicly without much issue, and it's not something you'd probably fire someone over.

It's almost certainly something interpersonal/HR related that caused Victoria to actually be fired.

I don't disagree at all, but the AMA format is really a one and done for a single person. For example, there are some hilarious responses from Jose Canseco (US baseball player from 90's) - if he comes out with a new book or something - how will the community come up with questions to ask that will generate interest?

Also the fact that the demographic is hard to advertise to leads me to think they may have the PR firms promoting movies, books, etc. pay for the AMA rather than try to rely on ads and people clicking. This may have been the contentious thing about people leaving.

Right? That's where I landed, but then realized that there's no enforceable way to do that. Have the moderators/an admin ban all the posts on AMA by people who... what, can pay? Make AMA pay-only to submit there?

Nothing feels right for Reddit -- AMAs are such an offshoot of the platform anyway...

I do wonder if Victoria could do a website that is essentially all AmAs? Basically it would be another interview show with a bit of a twist.

Probably has a non-compete, among other things.

Most likely not. It's actually fairly difficult to enforce a non compete clause in California, to the point that most don't even bother trying. And besides anything useful in this case, would be way too broad to stand up in court anyway. It couldn't be anything preventing her from working at another internet, or media company and even, a clause about refraining from using the AMA format might not stand up either.

On the other hand, she was working out of their NYC office, SF is not a good location for PR work, they in fact relocated her from LA to NYC. These things can often turn into a race to the most favorable courthouse; then again what's a little more bad publicity for Reddit the corporation?

They aren't in that bad of a position. They already have $8.3 million. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4S... It's just a matter of growing the community and not pissing them off too much when they are able to successfully do so.