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Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

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Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#451

Post by chippy »

Ultimately this is about large companies needing to make more money using internet communities. To do this they have to change the community to make it mass market.

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.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#452

Post by Tomte »

DanBC wrote: post #448
lagadu wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brigading is not against reddit's rules[0], despite semi-popular belief. Some big subs actually encourage it by not allowing np (non-participation) links to be posted on their sub[1]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/rules/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta...

Brigading, on the scale FPH did it, falls under vote manipulation and don't break the site. EDIT: Subs encourage use of non-participation links because for ages Reddit has banned subs that brigade.

Excuse me, but what is "brigading", actually?

Until now I assumed it was gathering lots of users to harass people IRL or on other web sites, but I guess I'm mistaken?

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#453

Post by celticninja »

bgilroy26 wrote: post #355
HappyTypist wrote: post #289

Marc Bodnick commented on why Victoria was fired: 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.

This s the best information we have so far, but it's confusing. There have been a bunch of video IAMAs before

Video AMAs are easier to sanitise. They ask for questions then give the 10 most upvoted to the guys to provide a video response. Of course the 10 most upvoted may not be easy softball questions so they can remove these and the guest never knows about them. Right now the guest knows the questions but can refuse to answer them but then it is apparent they are ignoring difficult questions. With a video AMA they get to distance themselves considerably from anything out of their comfort zone.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#454

Post by throwaway538779 »

Hacker News is behaving weirdly with respect to this story:

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?

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#455

Post by lagadu »

nadams wrote: post #35
chernevik wrote: post #8

Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most upvoted questions were simply disrespectful. The Reverend's answers were mostly boilerplate and often unresponsive to the question. The AMA seems to have been part of some PR rollout -- Mother Jones had an article three days ago about Jackson taking on Silicon Valley. The event seems to have failed the rollout's objectives. Not a great moment for…

> Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most upvoted questions were simply disrespectful. 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 A…

> I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit

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.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#456

Post by cJ0th »

datasage wrote: post #364
x0x0 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a pretty terrible business. Discussion boards in general are a terrible business. Redditors can migrate anywhere they want, but the question is where are they welcome, particularly in volume? voat is begging for money, fighting with paypal, and being forced to kill wannabe kiddy porn / jailbait. I'm sure reddit would be super tore up if the fat haters, racists, and jailbait traders left :rolleyes:

This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind. The company wants to grow and become more profitable, the community wants to preserve what it has. I don't know if a site like this can really be run as a for profit company, at least not a growth oriented one. The obvious monetization schemes will be met with resistance. Even though its attracted…

> This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind.

And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?

By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.

How is this going to help increasing their profit?

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#457

Post by sentenza »

pyre wrote: post #149
fredkbloggs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a public figure, it is your (really, your manager's or agent's) responsibility to manage your image. An important part of that is deciding which engagements are good opportunities for you and which are not. It is also your own responsibility to be prepared for an engagement to go poorly -- unexpected/negative questions, hecklers, etc -- and have a plan in place for how to respond to that. If you're not wil…

Despite your own image / plans being your own responsibility, it's not like there aren't people with public profiles (celebs, politicians, etc) out there who are vindictive over failed PR events.

I think I have a plausible explanation (please beware, this is 100% conjecture).

Hypothesis 1: Jackson's AMA went badly, he/his team was specifically pissed at Victoria and demanded consequences, threatening a public campaign against reddit.

Hypothesis 2: Conde Nast is not happy about the public perception of reddit as the biggest blob of hate on the Internet. So they might have given them a "one more headline news scandal" ultimatum.

In that situation, there are no winners, only losers, there is nothing to gain and there isn't even a 100% guilty party.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#458

Post by jpgvm »

imgabe wrote: post #68

Well, I'm sure glad I don't have to work tomorrow. I don't know how Reddit is going to fix this. Unless they have photographic evidence that Victoria was literally eating puppies alive, I don't think they're going to win the community back to their side. 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…

Inevitably when you fire a competent person you are going to piss people off, even if you can adequately replace them.

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?)

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#460

Post by thomasrossi »

blhack wrote: post #33

It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "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 ke…

"Is there anybody over there without a business degree?" Amen.
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