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, etc.--all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).
This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we'll make the best of it.
Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit?
I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringing will be the one who figures out how to retain the spirit, activity, and engagement of Reddit, while satisfying that 10x, $500mm valuation.
This ain't sexist, this is anti-elitist.Cutting and pasting monetization templates from other media properties, and building projected revenue models off of traffic numbers just can't work here. It's not Buzzfeed or Business Insider.
I was suspect when Erik Martin left (had the pleasure of meeting him in NYC, he lived and breathed what makes Reddit wonderful), and this really seems to solidify what I guess should've been pretty obvious.
I genuinely hope Ms. Pao holds things together, and the return of Alexis helps things out. The more I've learned, it seems Alexis was already gone by the time Reddit really took off and has been writing and speaking ever since. Curious how his operational prowess shows through the new chairmanship role.
I don't want it to sound like you are being dishonest about this, and it's possible there were things going on in Yishan's head that you were not aware of, but "a new team at reddit" in 8 days makes it a bit hard to believe this came completely out of nowhere.
I am reminded of a HBR study showing headquarters of major firms all tended to move closer to the home of the CEO even if that impacted retention - will have to find the reference.
As a side note, how is reddit on "asynchronous working" (if that's what remote working is called these days). How would the board have felt about the move if Reddit was more ready for being location-agnostic?
Edit: it seems I misunderstood your comment (and probably the geography of SF.) So if I understand it Reddit already was remote-friendly but both CEO and board wanted to have everyone in same office (which office being the point of contention). May I ask why you were going the "unusual" route of from remote to centralised - is Melissa Mayer right?
Edit: William Whyte in collected articles (Exoding Metropolis). Noted downthread as in a Joel Spolsky article. I am always late to the party :-)
Were there other decisions by Yishan that you pushed back on? How many? Possible he felt that he did not have enough influence as CEO, not enough confidence from the board and couldn't run the company as he desired.
I see a lot of negativity on this topic, but I for one am extremely excited about Alexis returning to Reddit in a more substantial way. I've been on Hacker New for a while (with different accounts) but have only recently started to use Reddit. Alexis is one of the most inspiring guys I've met ... lets just say I am a big fan. So, I'm really happy about this.
Daly City is 9.7 miles from the reddit office, for all practical purposes it sounds like Yishan wanted to just move offices in the same city; the Daly City part doesn't seem like it's important. Or am I missing something?
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.
Re: "he had the original product vision for the company"
I thought Alexis et. al. originally started a company doing something else at the beginning of their application and acceptance to YCombinator, and Paul Graham had the idea for reddit and convinced them to do it instead of their original plan.
When Aaron Swartz was fired (edit: used to read quit) and the other founders of reddit tried to remove his founder status I remember being convinced by their arguments and being disappointed in Swartz.
When I later read the thing about it being Graham's idea it really changed my mind--the other founders' original idea was their own sort of Infogami (Swartz's original startup), and while they switched to developing reddit a little before Swartz, they ended up holding a much weaker exclusivity claim.
This seems like a big governance challenge. This is a big challenge for boards and CEOs. CEOs like to have full authority, and be held accountable. Boards like to be able to ask questions. In the end, the board's only true recourse is to fire the CEO.
Here it sounds like the CEO wanted a freer hand, and left when the event signaled a change in governance. (You can't take $50mm and not expect questions)
It's super interesting anyways. I wonder if it has anything to do with trust? Maybe Yishan felt like this was a decision that was up to the CEO, and got annoyed when the Board asked Yishan to do due diligence. Did Yishan see this as the last straw in a string of challenges by the board -- or maybe that it was indicative of how the Board would challenge his decisions going forward?
From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.
...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.
> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.)
i'm skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too.
the only thing i felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable to move, and i think they have been.
To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.
This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...
So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office < 50 miles away? I'm very skeptical. My guess is that Yishan was being ousted so that Alexis could eventually be CEO again. Pure conjecture but that's my gut feeling.
> In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal.
Location is a make-or-break proposition for a lot of people. If you have employees with lives outside of the company, location will matter quite a bit.
From the top, it might be easy to rationalize a decision that adds 20 minutes to an employee's commute time, but (hopefully) your employees aren't stupid. Time is money, and what they see is that you've just added several hours to their work week -- hours they could be spending with friends and family, or spending on hobbies or relaxing. If the change is seen as arbitrary or for selfish purposes (eg. making the lives of one or a few executives easier at the expense of everyone else), that location change can seriously sap morale.
"In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal"
Office locations are a huge deal for me as it directly relates to how much of my time per day I'm expected to waste (twice) performing a mind-numbing activity while not even being paid for it (not to mention cost of fuel, etc).
I don't know the specific distance they were talking about in this case, Daly City isn't very far from SF proper, but as someone who lives in "San Diego" an office in "San Diego" could be across the street from me or it could be 45 miles away... and there's no way I'm driving 90 miles a day for work.
5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).
I think "growing it 5x" is referring to headcount, not traffic. That's certainly been my impression given the site is still just as unreliable and poorly administrated.
Seems like someone is trying to revive "reddit the startup", with the VC cash infusion, dickhead move to the bay and Sam Altman asking Alexis to "finish the job" (what ridiculously embarrassing wording).
I logged out of reddit about a month ago. I changed my password to something incomprehensible. To me, reddit has become a link aggregator over being a social place. I still visit about a half dozen subreddits daily, but only insomuch as to get my news.
I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.
I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.
I totally disagree on the "link aggregator" assessment. I've been a redditor since late 2007 / early 2008. It originally appealed to me because it was a link aggregator. The links I am interested in seeing are, for example, thoughtful articles or important news stories. I liked having links and a place to talk about the links.
I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.
I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.
Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.
I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.
>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.
>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.
Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.
Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.
I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)
Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.
The trend that finally sent me out was when good subreddits focused on specific topics started turning into show and tell for adults - and usually just amounted to, "Hey I bought that expensive thing that all of the group says is THE one to get, here is a picture of it in my house, it probably looks similar to the one you have". I suppose in a way, the recent investment might match that consumerist focus.
Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun, I am happy they are coming to a close and I am sure the new team will do a far better job and take reddit to great heights.
Heh.."sort of". But seriously - good moves @sama. This part of your post seems to be getting less attention but it should be highlighted. It's tough as hell to jump into the middle of a fire when a top executive resigns, and it's commendable that you rolled up your sleeves and did it. At some point, if ever possible, a post about the past week would be hugely interesting.
Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.
1) Personally responded to feedback emails.
2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!
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.
Could the new team please review and censor some of the unquestionably evil subreddits? (ie: brutalizing women, dead babies, animal sex, etc). There's just no reason whatsoever such places ought to exist.
Out of conscience, I chose to stop reading Reddit for allowing such subs to exist. I am not asking others to do the same or to adopt my beliefs, but I say this because I really enjoyed being a redditor. I'd like to return, but not if pure evil is allowed to continue there.
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.
> It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total.
I'm sure McDonalds sold more hamburgers in the last 8 days than my local butcher sold steaks too. If HN would ever reach that degree of attrition it would be reddit.
At the risk of being elitist, let's hope that never happens.
The big guys invest in Reddit -> weeks later a wedge issue is found, CEO is isolated and out -> blog post to convince the masses that this is still the good old Reddit: 'Look! Ohanian is coming back!'.
The way this announcement desperately tries to water down the significance of the event, speaks chapters, IMO.
This is such a strange thing to resign over. For cooler companies like Reddit and more name brand places like Google and Apple, location is not incredibly important for hiring, but it's HUGE for retention.
When you're excited to start a new job it's easy to overlook the commute. Things come into perspective 6 months later when you're wasting up to 1/12 of your life on a bus/train.
I've personally made this mistake and have noticed when interviewing candidates that one of the top reasons they give for wanting to leave their current position is that it's too long of a commute.
[+] [-] sama|11 years ago|reply
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, etc.--all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).
This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we'll make the best of it.
[+] [-] asaramis|11 years ago|reply
I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringing will be the one who figures out how to retain the spirit, activity, and engagement of Reddit, while satisfying that 10x, $500mm valuation.
This ain't sexist, this is anti-elitist.Cutting and pasting monetization templates from other media properties, and building projected revenue models off of traffic numbers just can't work here. It's not Buzzfeed or Business Insider.
I was suspect when Erik Martin left (had the pleasure of meeting him in NYC, he lived and breathed what makes Reddit wonderful), and this really seems to solidify what I guess should've been pretty obvious.
I genuinely hope Ms. Pao holds things together, and the return of Alexis helps things out. The more I've learned, it seems Alexis was already gone by the time Reddit really took off and has been writing and speaking ever since. Curious how his operational prowess shows through the new chairmanship role.
Rant done. We're praying for you Reddit.
[+] [-] hiou|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|11 years ago|reply
As a side note, how is reddit on "asynchronous working" (if that's what remote working is called these days). How would the board have felt about the move if Reddit was more ready for being location-agnostic?
Edit: it seems I misunderstood your comment (and probably the geography of SF.) So if I understand it Reddit already was remote-friendly but both CEO and board wanted to have everyone in same office (which office being the point of contention). May I ask why you were going the "unusual" route of from remote to centralised - is Melissa Mayer right?
Edit: William Whyte in collected articles (Exoding Metropolis). Noted downthread as in a Joel Spolsky article. I am always late to the party :-)
Cf http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EsvEFIamv3oC&pg=PA38&lpg=...
[+] [-] schoolixer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MysticFear|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turnip1979|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon808|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cma|11 years ago|reply
I thought Alexis et. al. originally started a company doing something else at the beginning of their application and acceptance to YCombinator, and Paul Graham had the idea for reddit and convinced them to do it instead of their original plan.
When Aaron Swartz was fired (edit: used to read quit) and the other founders of reddit tried to remove his founder status I remember being convinced by their arguments and being disappointed in Swartz.
When I later read the thing about it being Graham's idea it really changed my mind--the other founders' original idea was their own sort of Infogami (Swartz's original startup), and while they switched to developing reddit a little before Swartz, they ended up holding a much weaker exclusivity claim.
[+] [-] zzleeper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
Here it sounds like the CEO wanted a freer hand, and left when the event signaled a change in governance. (You can't take $50mm and not expect questions)
[+] [-] chentsen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zorpner|11 years ago|reply
Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. " (http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit)
[+] [-] onewaystreet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?
[+] [-] ryanSrich|11 years ago|reply
From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.
...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.
> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.) i'm skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too. the only thing i felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable to move, and i think they have been.
To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.
This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...
So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office < 50 miles away? I'm very skeptical. My guess is that Yishan was being ousted so that Alexis could eventually be CEO again. Pure conjecture but that's my gut feeling.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127
[+] [-] masklinn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryanmerket|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal.
But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?
[+] [-] scelerat|11 years ago|reply
Location is a make-or-break proposition for a lot of people. If you have employees with lives outside of the company, location will matter quite a bit.
From the top, it might be easy to rationalize a decision that adds 20 minutes to an employee's commute time, but (hopefully) your employees aren't stupid. Time is money, and what they see is that you've just added several hours to their work week -- hours they could be spending with friends and family, or spending on hobbies or relaxing. If the change is seen as arbitrary or for selfish purposes (eg. making the lives of one or a few executives easier at the expense of everyone else), that location change can seriously sap morale.
[+] [-] georgemcbay|11 years ago|reply
Office locations are a huge deal for me as it directly relates to how much of my time per day I'm expected to waste (twice) performing a mind-numbing activity while not even being paid for it (not to mention cost of fuel, etc).
I don't know the specific distance they were talking about in this case, Daly City isn't very far from SF proper, but as someone who lives in "San Diego" an office in "San Diego" could be across the street from me or it could be 45 miles away... and there's no way I'm driving 90 miles a day for work.
[+] [-] billmalarky|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandB0x|11 years ago|reply
It can easily be a deal breaker if you have a family to consider.
(Not that I know anything about this case.)
[+] [-] revelation|11 years ago|reply
Seems like someone is trying to revive "reddit the startup", with the VC cash infusion, dickhead move to the bay and Sam Altman asking Alexis to "finish the job" (what ridiculously embarrassing wording).
[+] [-] debacle|11 years ago|reply
I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.
I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.
[+] [-] doom|11 years ago|reply
I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.
I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.
Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.
I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1she85/how_reddi...
>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.
>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.
Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.
Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.
I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)
Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.
[+] [-] optimusclimb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlh|11 years ago|reply
Heh.."sort of". But seriously - good moves @sama. This part of your post seems to be getting less attention but it should be highlighted. It's tough as hell to jump into the middle of a fire when a top executive resigns, and it's commendable that you rolled up your sleeves and did it. At some point, if ever possible, a post about the past week would be hugely interesting.
[+] [-] reduce|11 years ago|reply
1) Personally responded to feedback emails.
2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!
3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare.
Hoping for great things!
[+] [-] kn0thing|11 years ago|reply
https://frontapp.com/
[+] [-] UweSchmidt|11 years ago|reply
Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?
[+] [-] callumprentice|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blatherard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calbear81|11 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] milesf|11 years ago|reply
Out of conscience, I chose to stop reading Reddit for allowing such subs to exist. I am not asking others to do the same or to adopt my beliefs, but I say this because I really enjoyed being a redditor. I'd like to return, but not if pure evil is allowed to continue there.
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-sant...
[+] [-] brianpgordon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] william_hc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
I'm sure McDonalds sold more hamburgers in the last 8 days than my local butcher sold steaks too. If HN would ever reach that degree of attrition it would be reddit.
At the risk of being elitist, let's hope that never happens.
[+] [-] udev|11 years ago|reply
The big guys invest in Reddit -> weeks later a wedge issue is found, CEO is isolated and out -> blog post to convince the masses that this is still the good old Reddit: 'Look! Ohanian is coming back!'.
The way this announcement desperately tries to water down the significance of the event, speaks chapters, IMO.
[+] [-] Sealy|11 years ago|reply
Was that a dig at Hacker News?
[+] [-] Jsarokin|11 years ago|reply
Presumably Yishan was heavily involved in the logistics of that.
[+] [-] rdl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpitzo|11 years ago|reply
When you're excited to start a new job it's easy to overlook the commute. Things come into perspective 6 months later when you're wasting up to 1/12 of your life on a bus/train.
I've personally made this mistake and have noticed when interviewing candidates that one of the top reasons they give for wanting to leave their current position is that it's too long of a commute.