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Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

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Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#51

Post by dimino »

seiji wrote: post #46
vessenes wrote: post #12

A recurring, and not-commented-on theme in each of these communications is that the board wants more growth. Reddit closed a $50MM round in fall of 2014, and has never had a strong monetization story. If the investors came in expecting major growth (since this is not a business with a great monetization story) it's not surprising that there's pressure and turnover right now, almost a year later. And, it may well be t…

Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users. That's nonsense! Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everything here. If you take a community site (and Reddit is a community site, not a society site) and add people not in the same community mindset, you end up with twitter trending topic nonsense of six million middle school girls yelling for attention at boy bands. Peop…

Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities.

HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory).

In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily moderated by a vetted and trusted team put in place by PG himself, for example -- how do you emulate that level of quality in a moderator group, and then multiply it by the 10k or so subreddits? Maybe there's a way to get a slightly lower quality moderator that scales better, or something.

A Reddit user's "workflow" hasn't significantly changed in the past 8 or 9 years. Maybe that's the problem.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#52

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

dimino wrote: post #44
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would venture a guess too that the AMA platform may start having sponsored content or there was some element in the shake up regarding that and people not wanting to take money for AMA's. When you see celebs and other note worthy folks on there, they casually mention they have a new movie|book|thing coming out and they're there to AMA. But as a PR tool, AMA can only go so far. How many rounds of anonymous internet…

It's a free PR tool. Why shouldn't Reddit monetize it? Currently it costs the PR folks nothing to put them on Reddit, and gets them a decent chunk of exposure to a very-hard-to-advertise-to demographic. That being said, I have no idea how you convince someone to pay for an AMA, or how to monetize it in general.

I don't disagree at all, but the AMA format is really a one and done for a single person. For example, there are some hilarious responses from Jose Canseco (US baseball player from 90's) - if he comes out with a new book or something - how will the community come up with questions to ask that will generate interest?

Also the fact that the demographic is hard to advertise to leads me to think they may have the PR firms promoting movies, books, etc. pay for the AMA rather than try to rely on ads and people clicking. This may have been the contentious thing about people leaving.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#53

Post by yokohama11 »

Vexs wrote: post #4
minimaxir wrote: post #2

To repost my comment from a previous submission: There's been a lot of meta discussion how Yishan Wong, Alexis Ohanian, and Ellen Pao have been talking trash to each other about Reddit and seemingly ignoring every NDA in the book. The comments made in the linked interview trashing a former employer seem to perpetuate this culture. It's weird . (although if you're planning on starting your own startup after a bad job,…

The whole recent controversy has been strange in general. There's this incredibly pervasive sense that the management in general is completely disconnected from the community, only stepping down from on high to dish out shadowbans. I don't know what to think honestly, but it seems like the reddit administration is walking close to the cliff currently. Maybe the newOld ceo can turn that around.

They are fortunate that at present the core users (the people doing the vast majority of the moderating, submitting, and commenting) are somewhat captive, there isn't a logical successor waiting in the wings to shine. Thus far Voat, Snapzu, etc are far too immature for anyone to really switch to.

As long as that continues to be the case, the core will probably keep coming back short of literally pulling a Digg V4 and outright breaking the site/removing everything about it that people liked.

------

It'll be a while still before any competitor gets their act together enough to start siphoning users in a noticeable manner. So I'd say they've got quite a bit more room to go....but they are getting closer to that cliff.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#54

Post by dimino »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #52
dimino wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a free PR tool. Why shouldn't Reddit monetize it? Currently it costs the PR folks nothing to put them on Reddit, and gets them a decent chunk of exposure to a very-hard-to-advertise-to demographic. That being said, I have no idea how you convince someone to pay for an AMA, or how to monetize it in general.

I don't disagree at all, but the AMA format is really a one and done for a single person. For example, there are some hilarious responses from Jose Canseco (US baseball player from 90's) - if he comes out with a new book or something - how will the community come up with questions to ask that will generate interest? Also the fact that the demographic is hard to advertise to leads me to think they may have the PR firm…

Right? That's where I landed, but then realized that there's no enforceable way to do that. Have the moderators/an admin ban all the posts on AMA by people who... what, can pay? Make AMA pay-only to submit there?

Nothing feels right for Reddit -- AMAs are such an offshoot of the platform anyway...

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#55

Post by davidgerard »

minimaxir wrote: post #22
Cacti wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of being a Chief Engineer if you can't even get some software (the mod tools) written? That seems like an awfully low bar for someone in that position, and to throw in the towel after she barely started seems to speak more to her character than any problems with Reddit. I mean... you hire someone for a top technical position and they quit when the first bump comes along? That's ridiculous.

> That seems like an awfully low bar for someone in that position Given that Reddit has repeatedly said "our infrastructure/codebase is super-complicated" every time users have complained about server stability and the lack of features, that might actually be the truth, and being Chief Engineer is a task that's doomed to fail.

The schema was written by Tony the Pony in collaboration with Zalgo. Everyone I've ever known to look at the codebase ran away screaming with bleeding eyeballs.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#56

Post by seiji »

dimino wrote: post #51
seiji wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users. That's nonsense! Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everything here. If you take a community site (and Reddit is a community site, not a society site) and add people not in the same community mindset, you end up with twitter trending topic nonsense of six million middle school girls yelling for attention at boy bands. Peop…

Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory). In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily…

where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities.

That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page.

If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant)

In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#58

Post by yokohama11 »

tptacek wrote: post #42
amyjess wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pao is the only one of the three who left for any reason that might be gender-related, though. And, yeah, the harassment of Pao was very misogynistic -- and racist to boot (people were calling her a "ching chong cunt") -- but there's nothing to indicate that the other two had any problems due to their gender.

I like the idea that the CEO can resign in a hailstorm of racist and misogynist vitriol but that subsequent departures won't have anything to do with gender.

It's kind of important to realize that those same users were angry at her for getting rid of a different woman. That was the trigger, being upset about a well-liked woman being fired with no warning.

That kind of destroys your premise, IMO.

The vitriol is terrible, but that's more a function of people being angry on the anonymous internet and saying whatever inflammatory things they can come up with to express that.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#59

Post by throw7 »

Cacti wrote: post #10
untog wrote: post #6

The way she describes it, it was a sensible choice. Various things are being promised that she, as Chief Engineer, does not think will happen. Given what happened with Ellen Pao it's not unreasonable for her to assume that responsibility for those failures could easily be put on her when the inevitable happens.

What's the point of being a Chief Engineer if you can't even get some software (the mod tools) written? That seems like an awfully low bar for someone in that position, and to throw in the towel after she barely started seems to speak more to her character than any problems with Reddit. I mean... you hire someone for a top technical position and they quit when the first bump comes along? That's ridiculous.

It's possible she liked what pao was doing and she did say outright pao was setup (glass cliff) and "indirect" gender discrimination at play.

So, just sayin' what she may be sayin', it's not the technical, but social problems at play.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#60

Post by dimino »

seiji wrote: post #56
dimino wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory). In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily…

where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page. If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent use…

Well, functionally, that's the experience you get from Reddit via the "front page" -- all your little communities show up together, showing you what's "new".

Of course, the problem is now that those "little communities" have 3-4 million people in them, and are basically large cities.

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