Hopefully it's just a negotiation tactic to get Google to buy them for more than their first offer.
128 karma · joined May 11, 2018
And for perfectly rational reasons, I would add.
If anyone from the UK who does understand that difference would chime in, that would be helpful.
That random site happens to agree with my kind of thinking, so I copied that content in here:
"Fire on Mondays. This lets dismissed workers start looking for a job right away.
Make job offers on Thursdays. If candidates need time to think, you can give them one extra day. If you give them the whole weekend, they may find another offer.
Give good job reviews on Fridays. It sets the mood for a good weekend, which can be a reward in itself. It also prevents satisfied workers from "kicking back" for the rest of the week.
Give poor job reviews on Mondays. This provides employees time to work out improvements during the week, instead of stewing about them all weekend."
Something like reddit2 should be run by a minimalist apolitical company.
They should work on building some kind of democracy in each sub-reddit, based on some factors (where "participation quality" is one important factor). If the users are unhappy, they should be able to call for an election, etc.
The reddit2 company should focus primarily on keeping the platform alive and on fighting bots. And on tuning the scoring model.
They should be financed in some way that doesn't depend on the content. Be it individual contributments, random, anomymized advertisments etc.
The company should try to hire apolitical engineers and managers. People who just care about solving an engineering problem.
At the end of the 90s they had spent like 15+ years diverging from each other. Some more gracefully than others.
In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.)
This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized in either left or right directions - the moderators are not paid to deal with things fairly, they are there spending their time working free - the only benefit they get is that they get to enforce their particular political choice onto others in their subreddit.
Look at e.g. r/politics and r/the_donald as extreme examples of what I'm talking about.
Just googled quickly and found a figure of 250 employees from last year.
The new design will drive the users who liked that away. They will either eventually scatter away to hundreds of different places, or one or two new companies will take Reddit's current place.