Redditapocalypse — Part 2
Whelp. So that happened
There has been no shortage of articles, opinions and coverage for the current affairs at Reddit. The long con, easily my favorite piece of this entire situation. There have been departures aside from Ellen Pao. Exes have stoked flames. It has the makings of a story that will last a few news cycles. And thank God for that — because it still beats the egregious Trump campaign. Kudos to HuffPo for taking a seemingly obvious stance.
So where to from here for Reddit?
As a typical moderate user (not to be confused with moderator), I like Reddit. Not much has changed for me. I like the self referential value out of the reddit communities. The standard faire at r/soccer and r/news has largely been the same. The r/AskReddit forum has had some interesting discussions, they have also reached 9 million plus users. And the r/TIL as well as r/ELI5 have been rock solid. As a user, I have experienced none of the problems potentially touted around. But then that is also because I am
- Not an activist for hate
- Primarily a consumer of content
- Lastly and most importantly, not a power user
Its the 3rd category that is the problem. Since I am not a power user who doesn’t generate content, whatever I say is going to sound like a commentary on modern art in a Slayer mosh pit. To keep the engines going, Reddit would do well to move to a completely curated model. There is all this discussion on W2 workers and how that model is not particularly scalable even though with the advent of Uber, Lyft and the rise of sharing (call it contract) economy, the evidence points otherwise. Maintaining a community is part science, part tact and part tenure. The science of it is easily distilled into an algorithm — Look at Karma-decay and the busting of voting rings; reddit has had considerable success in throttling them. Its the tact (Slap on the wrist versus nuking an account) that is inherently human. The tenure breeds familiarity. You could totally swap out one human for another as a moderator username with 80% of the population in blissful ignorance. So u/moderator could be someone relatively trained and shadowing a current mod and the alias gets passed around. Totally valid way of keeping continuity although the mechanics of it are a tad shady. What else can they do?
Curation by a good editor will trump most algorithms. It also builds the case for Reddit to move to a model where there are more eyes on content, particularly egregious content will get removed faster. So, hire all the good/experienced mods, put the rest in training and lets run this like the heavily trafficked website that it is — with solid infrastructure and curated content. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the actual power user does it? What will the mods curate if there is no content?
Introducing curated and promoted content — The ad boxes are really good at doing a few things — you are resigned to the fact that you will see ads and it allocates space on the page for ads. Advertising has been programmatic and at scale for most sites — sadly, it blows pretty badly. Introducing human powered creatives (Creatives are the actual advertisements that you see on a site). The quality of the creative determines the effectiveness (Impression/Click Through) of an ad — no surprise there. And in the haste to serve as many ads as we can in a mass produced programmatic manner, the quality of the creative has gone down. Kind of the difference between drip coffee and a Philz (The coffee industry is an old favorite of mine, its also slightly bonkers). Human powered creatives will be amazing, they won’t be blase, they won’t be obvious and pithy — they will have the wink and the nod to the community of reddit. At scale — this is what can take Reddit from an 8 Million Revenue rate to an order of magnitude more than that.
In all of these discussions, moderator tooling is a red herring. You don’t need better tech to solve a problem that does not help you. You need stable infrastructure that doesn’t always crash under load. You need a people powered company and you should start paying them. After all, the front page of the internet needs an editor.
