Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevan…
I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…
I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.