Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin
reddit.com
reddit.com
"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it.
It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users keep getting pissed off at them.
I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it really doesn't feel like it.
I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific gripes in the reddit threads covering it).
It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a team that doesn't respect or relate to you.
> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general
I couldn't agree more
She meant to send someone a pm but did a selfpost instead and then hurriedly erased it and banned everyone that responded to the selfpost:
Reminds me of my grandmother sending me a picture by sending the c:/ link in the email.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
Best wishes to Taylor in all she does. She seemed like a very competent gal.
This. It doesn't matter if you're talking reddit, facebook or instagram. Building on a platform means you are benefitting the platform's owners rather than yourself. There is no excuse for being a creative talent who uses social media for anything beyond lead generation without building direct links to your own audience.
some would go back even further and talk about the Aaron Swartz days...
“We will not ban questionable subreddits,” Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote in the aftermath of that catastrophe. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere — not because we don’t care, but because we care that you make your choices between right and wrong.”
To the current CEO, Ellen Pao:
It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.
reddit's competitive advantage isn't their technology, it's their community. Ironically, technology is going to find a way to take that advantage away.
We want to be a profitable platform and some of you have to go for that to happen.
The timing of the iAMA admin's removal coincides all to well with the recent Jesse Jackson AMA that went exactly as AMAs do and not how politicians want things.
Most celebrities can handle abuse and such, but there are certain one's and definitely more politicians who will not tolerate it from the rabble. To them they are royalty and damn if they will suffer humiliation, rudeness, or the like, from anyone. So likely we will soon have amusement park reddit, where there is a hint of roughness but everything is policed, scripted, and shadowbans go out like candy on halloween. AMA will likely come back as service to "the important people" Ellen and her like want to associate with to the point all posts will be so filtered it should be renamed "Ask Me Approved Questions"
http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-an...
The thing is, the power doesn't rest on the CEO or the company, it rests on the user base. Redditors can migrate to any other website they choose to, just like Digg users migrated to reddit some years ago. The people have the power in the end.
I'm sure reddit would be super tore up if the fat haters, racists, and jailbait traders left :rolleyes:
But today's tone deafness astounds even me. They have no allies left.
They also immediately destroyed the narrative that reddit just hates Pao because she's a woman. Victoria was one of the most popular and well respected admins ever.
Even the tinfoil hats at /r/conspiracy trusted her not to manipulate.
Is there anyone left NOT mad at reddit now? Maybe SubredditDrama....
So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao.
Food for thought
On the other hand, this does remind me of all the pleas and hate that Facebook got about their permissive privacy policies. As much bad publicity that resulted, Facebook is still the king of social media.
To quote a reddit comment chain:
> Fuck Pao. I'm leaving Reddit.
> > No you aren't.
(and foursquare, etc.)
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
The current Reddit management doesn't seem to be handling this well.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...
Enjoy my special occasion popcorn /u/kn0thing
http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po
10 years of reddit. Funny that 10 years of reddit gold is equivalent to 1 hour of Pao's $600/hour rate. That was before she was CEO.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-ban...
It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for whom it isn't endogenous - at its best, it combines a commitment to free expression, a geeky pride in understanding how things work, a strong appreciation for authenticity, a pushback against attention seeking, and an embrace of a multitude of interests.
At its worse, well, it's really bad - you get the opinions of minorities dismissed, and you can have people doing all sorts of heinous stuff (revenge porn, etc) under the guise of free speech.
However, to horribly paraphrase Whitman.. it contains multitudes. Watching what used to be a beloved site being run by people who don't seem to even understand the ideals of their users is very grating.
As an analogy, imagine if the editor of the NYRB somehow ended up as the director of the organization that runs Nascar. Personally, I've never watched a Nascar race in my life and I doubt I ever will - but there are people that are fanatical about that culture, who would resent having a complete outsider who looks upon their hobby with contempt running the show.
The "solidarity" thing also makes my eyes roll because I don't fully get how a place like /r/AskReddit is affected by this, at all.
Reddit's admins have always taken a stance of not interfering with the community above an absolute minimum, a policy that caused them much trouble in the past when assholes of course abused this freedom by posting disturbing garbage. They stepped in and stomped out the biggest fires, people got mad about "censorship", now they're suddenly not involved enough?
It's a mess. It has this smell of "people on the internet getting excited because they can participate in something without leaving their chairs" to it. There's no substance to any of this.
This event basically exemplified the fact that reddit as a corporation doesn't care one bit about their volunteers/moderators and the subs going private is basically the one and only way that moderators have to express that enough is enough.
Firing Victoria on the spot for what seems to have been an AMA gone wrong (Jesse Jackson's) without warning and without considering what the consequences of this termination would be on the moderators was poor form.
They needed Victoria to function, without her they are scrambling to figure out how they will do any upcoming AMAs.
The current AMA schedule (20 AMAs) will be scrapped.
"a load bearing wall in the house of AMA has been removed"- Knothing.
R/science had a similar problem, based on what a mod said in the original out of the loop thread.
As for The other subs, they may be doing it in solidarity.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...
And a number of other subreddits, all fairly large, and all now without a way to fulfill promises made because of this. You don't get it, because if you did, you'd realize why it was more than just /r/IAMA.
So, you should do some reading until you do understand it, because right now, everything you just said screams ignorance.
The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.
If something really becomes a central medium of communication such that it's hard to avoid it, like the telephone system, internet infrastructure (backbones, DNS, etc.), and so on, then it starts to be a different issue imo. Then regulation as some kind of content-neutral common carrier might be in order. But does Reddit really play such a role? Twitter or Facebook seem closer to filling such a role, if we were going to pick one of those platforms.
http://live.fastcompany.com/Event/Chat_with_reddit_co-founde...
Some portions of the Internet have culture in much the same way that food you forget at the back of your fridge grows culture. And they should be treated much the same way.
Those who fail to study their Internet history are doomed to repeat it, it seems.
I've never been content with the centralized nature of Reddit as an Internet forum - for me this moment of truth has been bound to occur.
What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
1. https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t...
2. http://www.fastcompany.com/3036716/fast-feed/how-meta-reddit...
3. http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523434/violentacrez-mich...
P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organi...
Personally this was my cue to unsubscribe of most default subs that did the black out today.
"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...
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.
I'm not active there, but it does seem to me like reddit owes possibly as much to the community as vice versa.
https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing?count=25&after=t1_cslum...
This seems over blown
"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.
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 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.
No, bozarking deleted his account in January 2010.
Yeah that will go over well.
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.
Not a great moment for anyone: The AMA didn't always feature the Reddit community at its best, but the Reverend didn't show at all well under the spotlight of Radical Transparency.
Given all that, the timing and speed of the admin's firing hardly seems coincidental. Reddit seems to have blown up a number of ongoing events, and upset an important chunk of its community, which hardly suggests that her firing relates to some long-term issue.
I can see why Reddit might feel the event wasn't handled well.
But it is also very plausible that Jackson and his camp were deeply embarrassed, and insisted that someone be punished for that. So plausible, in fact, that I think Reddit really should give some account that demonstrates that this is _not_ what happened -- or admit that it did.
It is very surprising that this whole thing hasn't gotten more coverage in the tech press.
I think it's pretty forseeable that an AMA would likely result in a lot of uncomfortable questions for a highly controversial figure like Rev. Jackson. That can be an opportunity, or it can be a disaster. It does not seem that he was properly prepared for it either way. That's not Reddit's fault nor Chooter's; it's his.
All that said, it's clear that Reddit is not a well-managed company, and this appears to have gotten worse since they hired Ellen Pao. So it's certainly possible that the people calling the shots over there don't get it, or are trying to reimagine Reddit as something it is not. If that's so, then your theory is entirely plausible. But it still doesn't explain the lack of communication or any semblance of a backup plan. If you're employing someone who has no alternate, and you have no plan in place to transfer that person's duties, the only reason to fire that person on the spot is that they're committing felonies directly related to the company or its business. Anything else -- and I do mean anything else; I don't care if they took a giant shit right on your desk -- can wait 24 business hours while you get some kind of continuity plan in place. As a manager, if you can't control your own anger or impetuousness well enough to avoid torpedoing your own business out of spite, you don't belong in your role. Ellen Pao, we're looking at you.
That is the "best" question according to Reddit's sorting algorithm. I think that easily qualifies as "overly disrespectful".
It one thing to ask tough questions. It is another to call a man an immoral race baiter, say he set back his cause years, call him an extortionist, chastise him for an affair, and then insinuate he is worse than one of the most notorious criminals in US history all within a single paragraph. That isn't a question, it is a personal attack.
I sadly don't think it is surprising that a comment like that is posted. But it is a black eye on the Reddit community that it was upvoted more than any other question in the AMA.
'Have you felt regretful for rushing to judgement after condemning the "perpetrators" of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal during 2006-07?'
'No, the pattern is consistent. And we never want injustice to occur. But the pattern is fairly obvious, and a very obvious pattern that must be ended.'
The Reverend isn't interested in fairness to individuals, he's interested in "patterns". If he feels himself subjected to a pattern he feels unfair, well, fairness to any individual is less important than ending that pattern.
The Reverend is not the guy you'd want arguing with Yahweh to spare Sodom and Gomorrah lest He unjustly punish the innocent with the guilty.
I think anyone could have seen that coming. Anonymous accounts with community voting and an API to boot? This is only asking for trouble - especially if the AMA was done by an individual who wasn't familiar with the personality of the community or internet etiquette in general. Assuming every other AMA was respectful/successful - they were just playing a game of russian roulette.
I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit - don't get wrong I love the idea of an exchange of comments between the common person and famous people but I certainly wouldn't want to do it on an anonymous posting site.
Edit: To the downvoters - I should point out that assuming that reddit has automated systems in place to detect fraudulent voting - someone with a botnet could easily defeat it. It's easy to detect when the same guy is upvotting posts from the same IP or same block of IPs - how do you detect that when the voting are coming from all over the world? It doesn't even have to be a botnet - how do you know that the android/ios game you just downloaded isn't making web service calls in the background to a site like reddit? If I was a bad guy - I would definitely outsource development of some useful app or game and embed my upvoting code into that once it becomes popular.
Some celebrities seem to be thriving on reddit. I've seen Arnold Schwarzneggar engage users on /r/fitness, and he has posted several videos (that tank one was one I saw recently) along with doing PR for his Terminator movie.
Whoever is helping him along seems to be doing a great job.
Celebrity AMAs more often than not go really really well, even for controversial figures like Obama.
Reddit just has a tendency to lash out at a) people who are obviously just using the site for PR (the Rampart AMA) and b) terrible people (Jesse Jackson) tend to go bad because people simply don't like them in general.
Do not interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system. Don't talk about your score or your votes.
/u/karmanaut, one of the most prolific moderators, gave some insight into why this is such a big deal: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
> We had a number of AMAs scheduled for today that Victoria was supposed to help with, and they are all left absolutely high and dry (hence taking IAMA private to figure out the situation) She was still willing to help them today (before the sub was shut down, of course) even without being paid or required to do so. Just a sign of how much she is committed to what she does.
> The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that [...] down immediately. We can't do that anymore. Part of it is also that Victoria is an essential lifeline of communication. When something goes wrong in an AMA, we can call and get it fixed immediately. Otherwise, we have to resort to desperately try messaging the person via Reddit (and they may not know to check their messages or even to look for these notifications).
In fact, it seems that they actually cut off active IAmAs in progress. https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745
If there's anything to be learned here for the larger technology crowd, it's this: There are human single-points-of-failure just like there are in hardware. And if you can't avoid having a SPOF, don't kick it in the face out of nowhere and expect the world to continue chugging along like nothing happened.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
Righteous firing or not, a lot of this is a lesson in avoiding a SPOF.
However, in human dynamics and the foundation of all leadership (and thus creating genuine followership), it requires a single point of accountability.
Leaders of any community are accountable to their followers. Leaders have to realize that the community and the purpose are always more important than them.
I think the reason why u/chooter was considered a leader (or top-notch liason between admins and mods) was because of her commitment to the quality of the AMA.
I think the reason why u/chooter is adored by readers was for the same reason, though typically expressed by her inate ability to capture the AMA guests voices, mannerisms, etc. She was being 100% accountable to the community and the purpose that she was serving.
This is a thing to be admired, encouraged, and emulated. Not scorned or spoken of in terms of an acronym.
I'm not picking a thread fight, as I think your perspective is very important within hardware networks and/or very relevant in process management, it's quite inaccurate when describing the human dynamics involved with building a community.
> In fact, it seems that they actually cut off active IAmAs in progress. https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745
This seems to be due to the moderators setting /r/IAmA private, not Victoria being yanked away.
If you click on https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter now the most recent post is from 2 days ago.
However I visited this thread 2-3 hours ago and there were many comments from her from as little as 1-2 hours before that.
Reddit started going badly downhill (where it was a visible and public departure from what it was previously) from around the time that Sam Altman personally invested in the company nine months ago, an announcement that almost ruptured my cringe-pipes. I laughed internally at the notion that he thinks he's altruistic by giving 10% back to the users, whilst in the same announcement he mentions reddit reaching a billion users.
So, Sam was boasting that of his shares he owns 90%, whilst each of the "shareholders" (a reddit user) has 0.0000000001% – and that's exactly what I expect from investors.
Then Yishan Wong resigns, it felt more like a pushing, one month after Sam invests, and is replaced by Pao; who has a history of going after previous employers because she's angry that she's a woman. Nobody has the nerve to fire Pao because they're afraid of being called sexist.
This is Silicon Valley at it's most entertaining.
And they're just massively failing at every step. Out of touch, out of clue. Reddit the company is at this point completely removed from the actual site. They went back into startup mode but you would never know it looking at the site. No new features, same old shitty reliability, nothing.
Not that I have an opinion on the subject of what reddit should do.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png
I consider him to be a reputable source and the claims are very plausible. Out of touch management never know how out of touch they are.
Also, terrible management? "You disagree with me? You're fired."
I'm not saying I don't believe it, just that I'm keeping my mind open.
Alexis Ohanian's response: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...
List of subreddits suddenly going private: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bxjyu/list_...
[1] http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2015/06/update-on-plos-science-we...
The doublespeak is weird. If it's a protest, say so. There's no direct relation between the employee getting fired and a subreddit that is not focused on celebrity PR going dark.
They seem to be going through their own Digg v4 moment here, completely disregarding users because they think they're big enough to survive without them.
www.snapzu.com - Excellent content and friendly community. Has a unique XP/Leveling system and ability to post content into multiple subs.
www.empeopled.com - Gives you more influence based on the amount of up-votes you've received. Use influence to steer future of the site.
www.theneeds.com - Good content but a lot of it looks automated, possibly using bots. No discussion so you lose a lot of that community feel.
www.hubski.com - Classic alternative, been kicking it around for 4-5 years, but still little activity. Community is small but nice.
www.spreadit.it - A dark themed reddit alternative that is similar to reddit and easy to use. Content and community is lacking however.
Note: I didn't mention the voat boat because I felt they have a little too much hate/racism on there.
Snapzu gave me a db-error. Bad first impression...
spreadit address should be spreadit.io.
Hubski was the one I had the best impression of.
Many HN readers should recognize that as the words a certain admin of fark.com.
For those that don't recognize it, the short version of the story was the admins had developed a new front-end to Fark, but they didn't make a general announcement an update was going to happen. The just deployed it one morning... and left for a convention. When the change was discovered a little while later... well... lets just say it was not a popular change[1]. More importantly, nobody know what was going on, making emotions run even higher due to the lack of communication from the admins.
So after being left to stew for 4+ hours - and over 10k posts from confused and angry users - an admin does the absolutly worst thing possible, and made a single post with those four words: "You'll get over it". There were three main reactions to this. Many of us closed the browser and went back to work or otherwise avoided the drama. Maybe 10-15% of users spent the next day flaming the admins at about 10k posts/hour. Finally, about 1/3 close their accounts and left, permanently.
I suspect reddit is in the middle of a similar situation right now.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that the Fark story doesn't really end there. Years later, Fark admin Joe Peacock gave one of the more important talks[3] (at NOTACON 8) I've ever seen, about what exactly went wrong, and the bad decisions that made a catastrophe inevitable. Joe discusses what may be the most important lesson for anyone managing a place where users choose to spend their free time: if you don't involve your user in the decisions and changes that affect them, they wil simply find another place to hang out.
[1] which some of us still[2] partially-revert: https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme-un-v3-0-relea...
[2] when I remember; apparently haven't posted last year's fixes sigh
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI (in typical fark style, a few of the talk's slides may be borderline NSFW)
TL;DR - just watch [3], where a fark.com admin gives some *very good advice on how to interact with your users.
Yesterday, Ohanian appears to have made a similar comment, beginning to snowball in infamy:
Ohanian: "Popcorn tastes good."[1]
They do not think like a business. They are a storage mechanism for other peoples content which their users generously provide for them to index. They don't make content, they don't generate revenue, they are stuck in a web2.0 model being valued on a per user basis. Reddit probably can't recover as community, but almost certainly not as a business.
> What is Ellen Pao paying attention to
Ideally the calls for her resignation, but it is to little to late probably.
Something Victoria opposed, so getting rid of her is part of the plan.
A lot of people said this was because Pao is a woman and reddit is sexist. But then explain this reaction to Victoria.
Here's a thought: the reddit community despises Pao because Pao is in no way part of the community. She's a bizdev-turned-investor corporate suit who seemingly came out of nowhere to now run the site.
She's posted very few times since becoming interim CEO. In fact, only 56 posts.
* 3 short messages when her interim-CEO position was announced.
* 9 when she posted the new privacy policy.
* 8 for Nepal earthquake relief.
* 9 posts for the reddit 10-year anniversary. This, to me, is lame. This is a classic senior executive move where they hide in their office all year round and no one has a clue what the fuck they do, if anything, but they emerge just during the victory celebrations.
Since becoming interim CEO, she has an average ONE post every five days. One posted message -- not even one submission every five days, which would be meatier. By contrast, Jack Dorsey has an average 5 tweets a day since twitter started. Is there any doubt Dorsey uses his own product? Well, we can see that Ellen does not use the product that she is running (unless she has some anonymous accounts). She made a gaffe recently where she posted a message publicly to a user that was meant to be private -- fair or not, that solidified the narrative that she is not a Reddit user.
Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision stays that way.
Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.
I think what you're saying is that you cannot conceive of a plan that will successfully implement the vision to make money.
I'd add that execution seems to be sorely lacking, whatever the vision or plan, assuming a real plan even exists (which I suppose it part of execution as well, "have a plan").
All of the admins that were any good at interacting with the community are on the "reddit alum" section of the admin list (read: former employes). And more often than not, the staff doing the high-quality and visible community management was strangely the sysadmins and programmers.
Edit: not strange at all, I just realized that they were probably the only admins that were legit users too. Which would explain why I'd lump pre-sale spez and kn0thing in with people who actually interacted, they posted with their real usernames while also running all the sockpuppets making the site look alive.
Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like reddit to have "public facing" administrators
Many of the biggest subreddits are revolting against the "governing" and gone private in protest, for example:
/r/Iama
/r/science
/r/movies
/r/gaming
/r/history
/r/art
/r/AskReddit
/r/law
Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.
I'm blown away by what Reddit has been doing in the last few months. I thought it was just me being a get-off-my-lawn old user (since I've been on Reddit like 7-8 years or something) but then I had a young copyrighter (early twenties) talking to me about leaving Reddit for "other places" and that blew me away. I hadn't realized it was starting to trickle down for lack of better words.
Reddit is run by volunteers, remember...
Mostly filtering whichever collection of racists and woman-haters show up when they become defaults. So at least their moderators are getting a break from that.
If she has an area of expertise other than "diversity", she seems to be flubbing it.
Seems likely to me that the problem is now too big for the admins to fix even if they wanted too. They couldn't moderate that many large subs, they don't have the manpower. There's going to be an impressive amount of bad publicity hitting reddit tomorrow, I hope to hell they have a good explanation lined up cause they're going to need it.
Reddit has too many shills, too many paid-for content and way to much thought policing. Time to go!
https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/192235
The problem is that the poster and everyone else was subsequently banned, which created a bit of a backslash.
I'm not even really sure why the anti-fem crowd hates her so much. But man...wow.
If some of the things that I've read today are to be believed, the firing of this admin was a stupid act. Reddit and several other "web 2.0" companies made it big on "user generated content" which always seemed like it had the potential to turn into a gross corporate overlord milking their user-cow for all it's worth.
It seems like there are a lot of valley companies that just want to slap a sticker on your culture and hand it back to you. Or they want to say that the rules don't apply to them because they are so new and communicate with their employees through an app or some other horse shit.
In the end, it sounds like this young woman (the admin they fired) did her job well and it sucks when people aren't rewarded for that.
Within just a few months Pao made some major moves that directly impacted reddit staff and could be attributed to her presence - namely eliminating salary negotiations, which caused a big stir. The banning of specific hate-speech subreddits at her direction pushed large segments of the community against her for a variety of reasons - some cause they were just mad they lost a platform and other stating that it was anti-democratic censorship.
Her massive public lawsuit, which was panned as frivolous across the web, basically killed any remaining credibility she did have with the community. When she lost the suit it was like fuel to the fire.
Now pretty much anything she does is toxic.
Goes to show you just how powerful the MRA subreddits are. I used to be staunchly "free speech above all", but seeing how blind hatred can fester and spread has filled me with a lot of doubts about us, as a group of humans.
A couple of years ago a group of people that I was attracted to due to their professed reliance on reason and scientific method turned out to be virulently anti-female.
And then this fringe hatefulness just seems to have pervaded everything...even computing forums that are dedicated to what I thought were relatively dispassionate topics that are quite arcane have had death threats lobbed at people who just have a different opinion. It's fucking weird.
I will miss it. As an Old Person™, reddit was the closest the modern Internet has come to replicating the heyday of Usenet in the 80s/90s. But because it's controlled by a single corporation instead of federating among all internet service providers, it succumbed to the corruption of the pursuit of captial. RIP.
An nntp2 / nntp3 could be brilliant.
I understand that if you're going to fire someone, you can't very well go around telling a bunch of people that you're about to do that. They still should have had a better plan in place to pick up the slack first.
People just don't like to see people that are clearly competent be fired. The reasons really don't matter to them. (and maybe they shouldn't?)
1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than just what relates to this specific situation.
2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit - there is nothing without them.
3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).
#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too late.
2. Most of the mods are realizing their mistakes right now, if you can see the subs who are coming back online they are just getting insulted and downvoted over and over for giving up on the black out
3. Use that + give them better tools to moderate their subs = you have the mods on your side
4. They need a martyr story, Ellen Pao is getting harassed all over the place, people trying to doxx her, people photoshoping her pictures over and over, people making bad jokes about her (racists, sexist, etc...). They need to make it look like this is a bad thing, like she's suffering, like the reaction of these people who are a minority of reddit are causing to the people administrating reddit. I think that would be good if it came from some mods of subreddits or from some rumors in random subreddits.
Seriously, I see Ellen Pao as the new Britney Spears. In a few years people will love her (if she hasn't killed herself from all of this harassment).
5.? They could fire Ellen Pao and hire someone from the community. But I doubt this would change something in the long run.
6.? They could make the whole management process of reddit more "open" like buffer does.
Eventually, things like that are doomed to happen. A company needs to fire people, needs to take decision that their users will not like so they can monetize their website, etc... It's also good to notice that things like that often goes away pretty quickly, the last drama lasted a day, I don't think this one will last more than a day or two either... Most people didn't even realize. This is an interesting topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bz9pm/how_...
This would be a good time for someone to figure out a decentralized solution to the links+comments app. There is lots of research into decentralized reputation and recommendation algorithms. Combined with cryptocurrency there could be some real potential.
The people who have closed the subreddits are the moderators. These moderators should represent the desires of the users. In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors. Even the AMAs are cut off. I think this is wrong.
Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
While I don't know Victoria so I cannot sympathize, I can at least understand the moderators' cause. However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.
> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
Why is that a problem? If the mods are actually acting in the best interests of their communities (which, in your scenario, are able to re-form on another site) then that's a positive result for them (in an altruistic sense).
As I user, I fully support the shutdown. I wish every major sub would shutdown.
So Victora didn't want the quality hurt for monetization purposes and was fired. Now the mods stepped up and said they don't want it either. Immediately we got a really high quality IAMA from a Reddit employee fired by Pao for having cancer. Do you think we'd ever see real back and forth about topics like that if it was just pre-scripted money making IAMAs left?
Victoria and the mods seems to do the absolutely best things they could do for the quality. If I just wanted advertiser sponsored content I'd still be a digg user, which is what that site turned into.
You're thinking democracy. That's not how subreddits work. Some might respect the wishes of the community and try to work with it but they're not beholden at all.
> In this case, they are instead caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through communication with the Victoria.
Your portrayal is not right. While it might be in some cases, there's pretty good arguments about why people are doing what they're doing and the subscribers for different subreddits have given an impressive amount of support to the movements so you can't claim it's some sort of ego power play without consent of other people.
> As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends and fellow subredditors
I find it slightly funny that you're talking as if this was some sort of humanitarian crisis or natural disaster. They can still message their friends and discuss in many subs that are not private if they're so inclined.
> Even the AMAs are cut off.
Well, one of the arguments is that the reddit administration didn't care about the AMAs when they made their decision of removing Victoria without consulting with any moderator (specially those that depended heavily on her).
> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins, etc.) of power.
People can find alternate sites all the time. The "power loss" you claim is negligible and seems more like a scare tactic to force inaction. "Don't try protesting or showing anything is not in order because people might leave and you'll not be as important! Fall back in line!"
> However, the method which these moderators have chosen to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.
The way they chose is absolutely effective with only the cost of a slight inconvenience. What the moderators represent to you is clearly not the popular opinion and the fact that many users seem to be overwhelmingly in support of this measures seems to leave you in a minority position.
At the risk of sounding harsh one could argue that your stance seems motivated by reasons of personal convenience that go against the best for reddit and the community as a whole.
I can't think of another time I've been immediately like, "Why?!" in reaction to Reddit's actions. Usually when I see a new feature, direction, policy, etc, my thoughts are, "Huh. Makes sense"
But reddit on the other hand still seems to be growing and haven't hit an inflection point: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit
Even the recent fph drama barely caused a noticeable blip in traffic and was easily recovered from a few days later.
This event might be the start of the inflection point but reddit isn't going to die overnight anytime soon.
There was a story about how unprofitable Reddit is [1] and given that one would expect it to start running out of cash. And when that happens it has to either get more VC funding or go to the public for additional funding. But if you're going to file an S-1 you really have to get your SOX compliance in order, and generally that has things like executives swearing that there isn't any illegal stuff going on, with jail time penalties if there is. And lawyers tend to be really conservative when it comes to "illegal" (advising against anything even nominally bad).
I, of course, have no inside information, but I'm not the only one wondering about this. An inability to raise funds would kill Reddit, and this "strike" action would seem to just accelerate that (fewer page views, fewer ad clicks).
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-once-bowed-1...
All of the conditions of SOX seem to be about financial disclosure, with the most general "crime-like" thing having to do with financial fraud. I don't SOX has much to do with e.g. online harrassment or pornography. It was enacted in response to financial and accounting scandals around 2000. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
There is something to be learned there, not sure what it is though.
edit: Actually metafilter is older, but way less popular/influential.
On the other hand, so does Something Awful, and that site's significantly more popular than Metafilter.
4chan happens to be the least ambiguous community
Have Pao done anything good for Reddit since she's been appointed CEO?
It's been up for 9 hours and has 714 points but is lower on the front page than "What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?" which has been up for 18 hours and has less than half (307) the points.
What's going on here?
Might even be the right thing to do, since the whole situation is far from known and opinions boil over.
Who knows.
Who out there has a reddit clone ready to take up the torch? Communities are fickle, and if you fuck with them they will abandon you quickly and en masse.
Still, getting communities right is hard. Obviously. I have something in the works but, it's fairly different, and you know how these things can go south.
But i think this is good. it will spur innovation in the space, and thats good for everyone. Well, except reddit.
In any business, employees will be fired, employees will leave.
The weakness here was that Reddit seems to have no business continuity plan for the one subreddit that gets the best publicity. Anything that attracts presidents, and A-list stars should have been able to lose an admin with minimal chaos.
Misunderstanding the role of a critical employee lead to this and now they have to struggle to catch up and figure out what the heck Victoria really did.
I'm sure leadership is willing to gamble that they can disrupt the hive without killing it. But will the owners continue to go down that road?
"/r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/science, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos, /r/gadgets, and /r/movies have all made themselves private in response to the removal of an administrator key to the AMA process (... lots of other text ...) Major subreddits, including /r/4chan, /r/circlejerk and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, have also expressed solidarity through going private."
So you read the fist part, building a mental model of what's going on ("ok, so these subs went private, which means others listed did something different"), only to have to update it because someone decided to split the list in two, probably going for style.
I see this happening particularly in news reports and it's really, really annoying. You may actually fail to connect those two separate parts together if you're skimming.
If we do see another Digg-esque migration, where will those people move?
I've been looking at alternatives ever since all the stupid crap with mods came out (mods messing with submissions, resubmitting under their name, and deleting stuff they didn't agree with) and some of my favorite subreddits started to rot. And now, it feels like Reddit is really falling apart.
Any suggestions?
One of them will be lucky enough to gain enough traction to replace Reddit, though it will take a couple of years for the transition to complete.
I have next to no doubt that these are the death throes of Reddit. I'm not personally invested in these politics (though it is fascinating to watch unfold), but what I can say is that I'll gladly move away should the opportunity present itself. What I care about at this point is I would like to consume content and for some reason I can't. So now I'm sitting here writing a comment on Hacker News to publicly showcase my discontent when I could have been enjoying cat pictures.
Edit: Reminds me of HipChat. It went down on a workday for a long period of time and I knew about Slack, our engineering team was swapped over by end of day. I don't particularly care why your service is down, whether it's a service outage or a coup, I just care about how long it will be down for and whether or not I can expect this to be a pattern.
[1] Only a week or so ago there was a huge outcry about censorship, which resulted in a lot of negative personal information being posted about the current Reddit CEO. Now we have this.
When she is involved in a AMA it seems to go well. Better than well, actually. When I see that she is helping out I pay more attention due to the fact there is someone helping guide the person in responses.
The AMAs are a big reason I enjoy reddit.
Does Reddit's competition of today have as much reach/popularity as Digg's did when that exodus occurred?
If you want to see which default subreddits are running or down
/r/netsec and /r/programming are down.
I wonder it there's a market for a modern reboot of usenet.
They are pissing off the user base while not making any money.
Did they think a "lose/lose" solution was the direction to go in?
Regardless, they are just really fucking things up.
They can't seem to figure out what they are doing.
Do they even have a plan?
documentary about him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ
"As much as Victoria is loved, this reaction is not all a result of her departure: there is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits, which they feel is expressed by, among other things, the lack of communication between them and the admins, and their disregard of the thousands of mods who keep reddit's communities going. /u/nallen's response above is an example of one of the many responses to these issues."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter may help for the following.
We in Hacker News are a small percentage of the "Innovators" set. We are not who reddit is wanting to appeal to now.
Reddit started with Innovators like ourselves as a small site and grew to encompass "Early Adopters" from the other Internet communities, it has been growing out and nearly full of "Early Adopters" - it needs to get more people, and to do this it changes the demographic. It needs people like our relatives and co workers who just use Facebook. It needs to grow because more people equal more money. They can and do accept the loss of the original Innovators and some of the Early Adopters as part of the cost to draw in much more revenue.
Thus, removing hateful subreddits, cleaning up the place is part of that. Another is increasing mass market interests - adding celebs and politicians. Another is increasing revenue through sponsored posts, like what Twitter is doing.
Allegedly the reason why this admin was fired was because she was against increasing the amount of corporate sponsored/promoted AMAs, and she was more in favour of community friendly content.
Look at Google. France complains about Nazi related material. They block Nazi material in France. They index massive amounts of porn, and take down individual images that offend people. It's sub-optimal, but it largely works.
Now, the thing that has changed is that normal people have started getting a dose of the kind of speech that they consider "hate speech" IRL from sites like Reddit. What they are demanding is that fringe positions remain fringe positions.
Something as mainstream as Reddit will not be allowed to serve up red pill/racist/homophobe/far-right content. They will keep doing this stuff until that content goes somewhere else. Maybe that's a good thing...I don't know, but at least having it in one place made it easy to see what crazy people are up to these days. Know your enemy, etc.
As for the corporate thing...that's always going to seem schizophrenic...corporations aren't rational people. They make snap decisions that seem reasonable in the moment because they lack functional memories. Fuck em.
Want something different? Find a way to spread the cost of running something like Reddit over a larger group of people in a decentralized model. And then get ready for the us vs them to move to "inner circle" vs "outer circle"...
-- Technical challenges? No that doesn't seem right. Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this. The tools and technology are there.
-- Building a community is hard? This seems more in line with reality. Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?
-- Sites like this aren't the solution any more? This could be it. But if this isn't the solution, what is?
I haven't thought of all possibilities. But really, why not just replace it?
*edit: fixed typos, typing on phones is hard.
Does there exist good, empirical research on how different discussion models (linear vs. trees of comments, up/down-voting systems, etc.) affect quality of discourse, for some definition of quality?
In general you do so with a huge corporate budget.
>Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?
That's the answer.
You only have a few ways to monetize the product. Direct advertising; banner ads. The ad market is going to crap though, everyone has them, large numbers of users block them, and payments are very low. Direct payments for features. Reddit has 'Gold' as a means to get premium features and help pay for the site. The other way that has been bandied about, but with no direct evidence that it occurs is indirect advertising. For example a movie star paying for an AMA to advertize for their new film.
Even then those things only work if you can get the people to come to your site in the first place. It's highly likely a large number of social sites have a good deal of vice in their founding. People come to the site looking for porn or other somewhat socially unacceptable topics, but end up staying for the other parts of the community. As the site grows you run in to the inevitable 'great purge' which can cause serious issues.
It costs money to run. Serious money if you're going to have employees. And, as voat have discovered, if you're going to become the favoured destination of the assorted gators, racists, pedo^h^h^h^hebeophiles, woman-haters, frozen peachers, and assorted bottom-of-the-barrel types that have been looking for reddit alternatives in the last few months, you may find it quite difficult to keep your hosting arrangements even if you can pay for them.
I am curious, what are your thoughts on how one could go about attracting the best of reddit?
I am working on a personal project that is very similar, but I wouldn't try to compete with reddit to attract all the haters and celebrity-gossip kind of people. Do you have some ideas about what kind of startup could attract the most intelligent and creative parts of the community?
(right now my project is focused on writers, "reddit meets fictionpress", but it would be very easy to pivot into something broader, if I can come up with a smart way to do that)
You might say: well, but it's important to explain our culture on the about page; to explain what we're all about. To that I say: no it's not, your users are not going to partake in, or come to understand, your site's culture via an about page. That happens on the site itself.
And even after going back to reddit I couldn't see any information on this until I cilcked /r/all.. looks like reddit censorship scandal is going out of hand :/
"I was subscriber to fatpeoplehate hate, so I did nothing; in fact I applauded it."
AMAgeddon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3byzzp/admins...
for extreme irony, compare this https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam... with this https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3bz8jp/right_now_admi...
I still don't know what to think of it, and I can't keep up with it either.. but I just hope it gets thoroughly archived and documented on sites other than reddit and imgur. Because while I won't condemn reddit on a whim and call it a bad actor, I also don't find any of this trustworthy at all. I'd even say, unless the /r/pics "takeover" was the "root mod" (or whatever it's called, I never made a subreddit) locking out all other mods, if this was actually admins protecting "their" assets, made by the community, that'd surely be crossing the line for me.
As would be paying lip service to mods as to how swell everything will be to get mods to get subs back up, while people with scheduled AMA still don't know how to get in touch with the people Victoria had the contact info for. I don't have a link for the last bit, and it was just a claim by someone anyway (didn't check if they actually were involved with AMA stuff), so don't take my word for it - but that mod mail really does read so fluffy while making no real commitments to anything, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Anyway, I would rather see blacked out subs in support of something I agree with, than active subs that are testament to a shameful episode and state of things. They have my support to black out all the things, for days, weeks and months. For how ever long is necessary. If reddit becomes a place putting effort into again, I'll enjoy it like nothing was ever gone. Otherwise, might as well go out with a bang and some pride. There is infinitely more where reddit came from, and maybe a better site will be born because of all this somewhere down the road. Maybe reddit can reform, but it clearly needs some boundaries, so this blackout has my full support. Enough already, users and communities are not dough to be shaped however one wishes, to be disrespected like helpless dependents. It's a bit like that Fight Club bathroom scene: "We cook your meals, we take care of you when you're sick, and we also make the sites that pay your salary worth visiting. Do not fuck with us."
Yeah I know I'm being a bit dramatic, please take this with a grain of salt. It makes me sad rather than angry or indignated. Still, I don't think this is cool, at all. It's just not on.
sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 http://reddit.com " >> /etc/hosts'