Reddit-apocalpyse

It is a sad lonely time to be Ellen Pao. The lawsuit loss from a few months ago and then over to the “revolt” at reddit. In all honesty, she seemingly hasn’t made any glaring missteps — as outsiders, you can never really judge that since the culture and the internal going-ons at Reddit are secretive. As much as the sidebars are coated in rediquette, the actual culture/etiquette of Reddit is not really well understood. That obfuscation causes problems, those problems get compounded when something bad happens. Something bad happened with the firing of the comms director at Reddit — mods revolted and the people knew about it. This is a problem at 2 levels —

1. An unpopular internal decision got out and
2. People protested the decision in ways that hurt the end users

Not an ideal scenario that either of these things happen but the perception is of a lack of control. It is not helped by the fact that there is a real chance she might be let go because of all the backlash — Change.Org petitions have never been representative of actual decisions but it is a pretty long list of signatures and a loud chorus of dissenters.

There are opinions on her not being in sync with the realities of Reddit — in fact, most condemnations are getting censored on Reddit and the only meaningful forum for discussion is HN. This thread had a few interesting nuggets on what the situation is devolving into . Basically — she was parachuted in by the board, and is trying to run a company that is doing north of 8 Million a year in ad revenue last year. Reddit is trying to become a part of the mainstream media. Consequently, the cyberbullying associated with the shaming and hate subreddits needed to be stopped. This is good for a media business but bad for the people who actually generate content on Reddit. Basically — what got you here won’t get you there — but in a twisted way that seems to not have any easy answers. The board would obviously agree and the large majority of users too, but how many of your key content generating users are you alienating with this move? There are no easy formulas here and the line being towed is tenuous. It is not an envious position to be in. My guess is that Reddit is trying to make foundational changes to how they function as an organization with an eye on becoming fully mainstream to attract more ads. This would obviously require cleanup and help with the sites existing wasteland of questionable content. Here is what would work —

1. Internal consensus — What does this even mean? Have at least your mods understand what you are trying to do. Do not alienate the people on the ground. Help them understand what it is that Reddit wants to do in the next 2 years.
2. Don’t do a holocracy ultimatum — Didnt work well at Zappos, won’t work at Reddit. Cajole the culture into the people who already work there, don’t forcefeed them the whiff of corporate.
3. Optimize for retention — Mass resignations will make the entire site suffer — probably not a good thing to do given how much control and influence each mod has on the subreddit
4. Optimize for the popular Subreddits — Moderate aggressively on popular subreddits like r/news and r/ama. These are easily monetizable as well. Let the bowels of fat shaming reddit continue as is. If you did not guess it already, Reddit also has a porn problem (Or Opportunity) — that is not going away anytime soon, makes sense for the remaining problems to continue.
5. Infrastructure redesign — Dont let the site go down. The fail whale equivalent of Reddit was fairly common, let that not be the case
6. Moderator tools — People will swear and add questionable information on the comments section — that is why people go to the cesspool of comments. The comments make for some of the most interesting tidbits of unprovable information. Besides peer commenting, there is a good case to be made for moderator tools that screen for links and put them on a sidebar — increases engagement and allows for overrides that make certain comments more prominent
7. Discussion forums — Nested comments suck. You should be able to join a live chatroom and debate with a carryover of your Reddit alias. You are still within the Reddit walls, its just a little bit more useful to chat and comment.
8. Timing and Reposts — Karma decay makes a good case study for this. A ton of traffic on Reddit is reposted information. A good way to earn karma is to post on hot and rising topics — both of these are easy enough to optimize for when you are looking to sell ads. Some form of evergreen content system is definitely needed.

All in all, this is a hard problem — and one with no clear answers. After about 6 months, we might find out that Reddit only had influence in subcultures and was not going to ever be a breakout. Or that this venture was not a scalable business monetarily. A variety of outcomes are still possible and as a redditor, i will be watching this place closely.