A new team at Reddit • Hacker News Board

Re: A new team at Reddit

#61

Post by gojomo » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:09 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #50

onewaystreet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wong didn't want to move the company to SF. The board did. That's no small thing to disagree on.

Maybe I'm missing the context here, but Reddit is in San Francisco. They're in the same SoMa office building Wired is in.

Maybe Wong wanted to move HQ to the Valley proper, rather than SF itself?

Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.

But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley.

Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#62

Post by benmathes » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:10 PM UTC

thrillgore wrote: post #19

This came out of the blue and unannounced on reddit.com. I have a feeling there's more to this than announced. I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.

though, it seems, that employee was incorreclty shitting all over reddit. The situation appears far grayer than "CEO shits on employee"

Re: A new team at Reddit

#63

Post by jtbigwoo » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:11 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #52

UweSchmidt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

regarding 2), sounds interesting. Got any more information on that? Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?

There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly. Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.

Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#64

Post by apetresc » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:12 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #40

zorpner wrote: post #12

Heh. I love the conceit that anyone would believe Wong resigned only over "location and amount of money to spend on a lease". Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. " ( http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit )

[deleted]

Earlier in this _exact same thread_, literally 100 pixels above your comment, someone called the PR-speak "pablum that insults the intelligence of every reader." Shift your eyes down a bit, and Yishan should have let the PR drone respond.

Nobody agrees on this sort of stuff. It shouldn't be anything anyone gets fired over.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#65

Post by smackfu » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:12 PM UTC

brianpgordon wrote: post #26

Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.

"Stagnating" with huge user / traffic growth is bad thing?

Re: A new team at Reddit

#66

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #52

UweSchmidt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

regarding 2), sounds interesting. Got any more information on that? Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?

There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly. Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.

[deleted]

Re: A new team at Reddit

#67

Post by SandB0x » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #4

Nice words, growing it 5x is great. Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal. But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?

> Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing.

It can easily be a deal breaker if you have a family to consider.

(Not that I know anything about this case.)

Re: A new team at Reddit

#68

Post by derefr » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #59

billmalarky wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).

> if it isn't broke don't fix it This is the kind of mentality more companies need. It is why craigslist is still running a site that looks like it is from 1999. The opposite thinking is why digg when down in flames.

Have you done a search on Craigslist lately? They're still going for a basic-HTML4-user-agent "theme" (since that's basically their brand now), but the implementation is actually quite dynamic/AJAXified and CSS-heavy. (Also, apparently they use Redis everywhere on the backend for Matryoshka cashing, among other modern practices.)

Also, Digg's failure had nothing to do with a visual refresh; it was that they changed the dynamics of the "social game" the site implemented to make previously "winning" users suddenly irrelevant in comparison to sponsored posts by companies. It'd be like Youtube doing DMCA takedowns on all the "celebrities" with million-subscriber channels.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#69

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:14 PM UTC

tehwebguy wrote: post #56

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing the context here, but Reddit is in San Francisco. They're in the same SoMa office building Wired is in.

Yes, the context is that it used to be a somewhat remote team and when the latest round of funding was raised everyone outside of SF was essentially forced to move to San Francisco.

Okay, thanks. (I'm not really sure why someone's downvoted me for asking the question; it's not like I said "ha ha, OP is stupid for saying this." I was, in fact, missing context.)

Re: A new team at Reddit

#70

Post by debacle » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:14 PM UTC

I logged out of reddit about a month ago. I changed my password to something incomprehensible. To me, reddit has become a link aggregator over being a social place. I still visit about a half dozen subreddits daily, but only insomuch as to get my news.

I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.

I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.