Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new team at Reddit

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 379 posts

Re: A new team at Reddit

#151

Post by raulinus »

ryanmerket wrote: post #127
hiou wrote: post #71

2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminatin…

reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.

You are mixing the point here, the speculation is true.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#152

Post by sillysaurus3 »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #108
sama wrote: post #85

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…

Thanks for the clarification as, at least for me, it did not sound true but the additional details help. That's pretty interesting. Yishan seems like a pretty reactive person especially considering the drama of him ousting a former employee on their performance publicly.

I was curious what you were talking about, so I found it: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

It's not nearly as clear-cut as you made it seem. He was going around telling people Reddit fired him for no reason even though he was doing good work, which wasn't the case. Then he speculated he was fired because he raised concerns about revenue.

The only question is whether Reddit told him why he was fired when they fired him. If they didn't, well, whatever. But to go onto a public forum and speculate like that probably isn't the smartest decision.

If Yishan hadn't stepped in with a correction, then it would harm their future prospects as a hot place to work. Employees go where they think isn't lame. I'd have second thoughts about trying to join Reddit if I'd read "Yeah, Reddit seems to fire people for no apparent reason and has problems with employees communicating concerns to management."

On the other hand, I feel terrible for David, even if he got himself into this. Now people will unfairly prejudge him to be a slacker, bashed on Yishan's comment, no matter how hard he works in the future. The only way he can hope to change that is by working hard to get stuff done, combined with the extremely annoying process of making a portfolio demonstrating that he continuously gets stuff done.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#153

Post by ryanmerket »

rsync wrote: post #43
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.

Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011. We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed. I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the…

New PM on ads here. Completely agree and it's one of my top priorities to fix. Feel free to ping me directly if you ever want to give me more detailed feedback - ryan@reddit.com

Re: A new team at Reddit

#154

Post by sillysaurus3 »

raulinus wrote: post #151
ryanmerket wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.

You are mixing the point here, the speculation is true.

Actually, maybe we should listen to someone with an inside perspective, rather than speculate?

Re: A new team at Reddit

#155

Post by calbear81 »

There's a few things that I'm guessing could have contributed to this final straw that broke the camel's back moment:

- Yishan's response to the ex-employee publicly calling him out and revealing their work performance in a non-professional manner. (not undeserved, but not professional for a CEO)

- The response or non-response to the Fappening.

- Not a lot of movement on making the site work great for mobile leading to the rise of Alien Blue and other clients gaining popularity.

I don't know if there was a lot of pressure to improve revenues since generally the audience is pretty allergic to blatant advertising but we shouldn't forget that Reddit is a business.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#156

Post by kenrikm »

calimac wrote: post #115
minimaxir wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

October 1: Yishan wants all employees to move to San Francisco. Early November: "jk, we're moving to Daly City." Even though Daly City is a BART away, the fact that this decision happened in 1 month is absurd.

Moving an office like this scenario and timeline can and in most cases, does cause tectonic shift in the company's dynamic. There's a ripple effect through far reaching aspects of the employees lives that effect there work. On another note- Office location can be the most personal aspect of business to an exec processing the decision. A territorial undercurrent is in play.

In my experience you always loose employees when moving offices. It's a really weird feeling just after the move and takes a while to get back into the grove.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#158

Post by serve_yay »

minimaxir wrote: post #28
eco wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can believe it. Yishan always seemed very dramatic and reactionary. I could see him resigning in anger after not getting his way.

Relevant context: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r... From the NYT: "That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."

Yikes!!

Re: A new team at Reddit

#159

Post by serve_yay »

reduce wrote: post #75
paulhauggis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was being honest and I actually respect him more for putting a former employee that obviously was trying to get sympathy from the Reddit community, in his place.

Reddit is a magnet for people who have an unhealthy appetite for over dramatic "justice porn." That's all I'm going to say about your feelings.

No kidding.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#160

Post by tootie »

rdl wrote: post #84
tootie wrote: post #60

Ellen Pao is former VC and has a bizarre sordid past: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ell... This is a serious red flag for the future of the site. If anyone wants to catch the great Reddit exodus of 2016, start building your competitor right now.

Ellen Pao is a former VC, true. She also was involved in a nasty situation with her former VC firm. She's also one of the best consumer-product operations people I've ever met, and generally brilliant, honest, and helpful. While I know a lot of YC founders, partners, etc., Ellen is the person I'd go to for advice about whether a product/company direction is a good idea or not. Bringing a founder back is great, but El…

My other main concern is that she evidently doesn't have a reddit account. At least not a public one.
Post reply on HN