61–70 of 153 posts
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So move the dates. These things aren't set in stone and part of her job is to convince the board and everyone else what is realistic and what isn't, convince them that X requires Y budget and Z time and what the risks are and that the investment is worth it and so on.
It's possible that she resigned after she tried that and they blew her off.
Apparently reddit has 71 employees. I would really like to know why reddit needs that many employees. It looks to me like an operation of maybe 20 people at most. That includes devops, engineering, social stuff and ads.
I'm guessing the old Reddit guys aren't touching this comment section with a 10 ft pole, but they tell it better than what I just wrote. I wish I could find the comment...
Just before her departure Pao set up a process to figure out with the mods what features to build.[1] Did something go terribly wrong with that process? Was engineering approval not required?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
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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…
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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.
Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where.
All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).
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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.
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I think they've turned over something like a third of their workforce in the last nine months. It isn't just these people leaving, though they've certainly been the most public.
The media seems to like the gender war angle - the cynic in me wonders how many news stories have been written about the male employees who have left.
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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.
I would guess it's more like "I will be building out the product we needed all along, but now with intense board scrutiny, half the budget I wanted, a quarter the timeline we need, and a new CEO (who I may not like). I'm rich enough that I don't have to put up with this shit. See you guys."
Spez isn't just a "New CEO" he's the original programmer, CEO and co-founder of Reddit. He understands the community more than anyone could fathom someone could. Of all choices I think he's the best choice.
He's focusing on bringing better mod tools, so being the technical lead, I'd be excited for these bumps coming up, not running away with my tail between my legs.
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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.
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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.