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

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

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 153 posts

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

#71

Post by vdnkh »

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…

>People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too.

Actually, I think of it as the opposite. I go to Reddit to get the bulk, and other, more anonymous message boards to get away from it. Reddit is hardly anonymous (or private) - it's not attached to your real being, but you're definitely a well-documented member of their society.

>Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it.

I honestly do not want to be a part of a "massive-growth" or monetized Reddit. Growth is organic; attempts to inject artificial hormones into the site comes with a sacrifice. I believe that sacrifice is diversity and uniqueness, since knowing how to grow requires you to know what exactly your're growing, and it's hard to understand complex objects. So the leadership creates more rules, more restrictions on freedom in order to get a grasp on it. As a result, content becomes stale, groupthink rules, and the site looses its appeal.

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

#72

Post by malandrew » 

    "The company is growing, and we have the opportunity to 
    improve in many areas — including the number of women in leadership 
    positions. I am confident in our ability to recruit women at the executive 
    level, as we have made a point to do so at Hipmunk, where more than half of 
    the executives are women."
I don't know about anyone else, but comments like that make a company less desirable as a place to work because factors like skill, talent, productivity and effectiveness become de-emphasized in recruiting and promotion relative to issues surrounding identity politics.

I don't see how permitting (or worse yet fostering) an environment where office politics or identity politics can flourish is a good thing. I am seeing identity politics issues creeping into decision making more and more often and find it positively toxic.

When you "make a point" to recruit/promote one group over any other on the basis of a demographic box they fit into, you are implicitly discriminating against people who don't fit into that box. Furthermore, when "making a point" goes so far that you've exceeded the 50% mark ("more than half are [insert identifier for someone that belongs to a particular group]") then that certainly qualifies as active discrimination.

I'm 100% in favor of equal opportunity, but ham-fisted hypocritical approaches like this are as bad as what they are trying to fix. Politicking in any form is toxic.

If someone created a petition to now remove Steve Huffman, I'd sign it.

I highly recommend this recent peer-reviewed academic study demonstrating discrimination in Academia:

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

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

#73

Post by VLM »

Balgair wrote: post #40
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,…

I know, right!? I'll posit Occam's Razor here and say that it is likely just children being children. From what I have seen on the /r/subredditdrama board they really are just sniping each other. It's like Mean Girls and these people really need to get out more. I have not seen this level of immaturity in a long time. However, my BS klaxon is screaming. These are major players in a top 25 website. They should be more…

"These are major players in a top 25 website."

This may indicate the business model is dead. top 25 but no ability to monetize because the business model died while no one was looking.

Think about it.. Consider a much more lofty position, like US News and World Report in the newsweekly market, they were top 3 at one point, out of business today.

Have to face the facts, the reason for lack of execution in the marketplace might be because the biz model is dead. Close up now, give the money back to the investors.

The general public liking something doesn't mean its a guaranteed success or a rational business model.

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

#74

Post by tvon »

cgearhart wrote: post #34
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…

From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Vi…

Not that I disagree, but it's worth mentioning (for anyone who doesn't frequent reddit) that firing Victoria was apparently Alexis Ohanian's decision, and not Pao's[1][2], which suggests that the pressure is coming from the board and not an endeavor specific to Pao.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3d6asv/former_r...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

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

#75

Post by HannibalLecter »

IBM wrote: post #38
Vexs wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HannibalLecter your comment is dead

They deleted my comment because they don't want you to know.

http://i.imgur.com/f15zbNO.png

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

#76

Post by fakeslimshady »

yokohama11 wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Racism doesn't need a legit reason

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

#77

Post by eco »

Keyframe wrote: post #57

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.

Alexa ranks reddit at 24. The other user content focused stuff high on the list are:

2. Facebook (10,082 employees)

3. YouTube (a lot of employees)

6. Wikipedia (~250 employees)

8. Twitter (3,900 employees)

13. LinkedIn (7,600 employees)

15. Sina Weibo (unknown employees)

24. reddit (71 employees)

30. Tumblr (306 employees)

32. Imgur (Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too).

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

#78

Post by jbob2000 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #64
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…

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews

Wow, I might start reading this instead. I can actually comment there (and also submit multiple comments within a reasonable time frame!)

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

#79

Post by dimino »

tstrimple wrote: post #70
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.

The belief is that if people are paying to have an AMA, then Reddit is more likely to censor questions and / or do things to make the guest look better. Instead of it actually being an Ask Me Anything where some guests get torn up with difficult questions, it becomes PR fluff. Based on what I've read, Victoria was strongly against requiring people to pay to have an AMA.

I don't think Victoria got fired for saying she wouldn't do the AMAs anymore if they tried to monetize them. That's something you can say publicly without much issue, and it's not something you'd probably fire someone over.

It's almost certainly something interpersonal/HR related that caused Victoria to actually be fired.

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

#80

Post by dimino »

steveklabnik wrote: post #64
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…

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews

jbob2000 you're shadowbanned and your comments don't show up for most users.
Post reply on HN