7 ms·

I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering tea

I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time. All of that is aside from the fact that the workforce acted like a bunch of teens that just arrived at college and are going crazy due to lack of supervision (Every project had to be tiptoed around because of complicated interpersonal relationships). Not to mention the CEO offering drugs to people in his cabin at camp Reddit (the yearly retreat they do) Oh, and the fact that the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. Apparently last year Steve (ceo) told everyone to enact a hiring freeze while he figures some stuff out, and then after a month or two, when managers informed him of all the candidates they passed up, Steve freaks out and tells them that they should have hired them. During the hiring freeze. That he enacted. The app also sucks. They try to make everything play embedded, so that if you want to share it, you pretty much have to share the reddit link, because the link to the actual content is hidden. That's bad enough but the embedded stuff also barely works. More often than not I have to go directly to the source for an embedded video or giphycat thing to play. Every story I've heard about reddit sounds like a nightmare. It really sucks that it's become the defacto repository for so many hobbies.

6cd6beb 8y ago
>the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.
- vkou 8y ago
  That's because at first appearances, the Reddit hive mind would make Karl Marx blush red. Dig a little past the front page, though, and all the problems of having those groups share the same space with everyone else become evident.
- vivekd 8y ago
  Yeah the bigger subreddits tend to be bad for meaningful discussion and have a lot of deplatforming and trolling. That said the smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a parituclar specialization tend to be better. I really got a lot our of r/ppc for internet marketing. I found that r/candlemaking was a great subreddit for the niche hobby. I think it's a bit like real life, things that are popular tend to attract trolls and megalomaniacs while small, niche and technical things tend to attract a better group of people. y. The only downside is that maybe these niche communities would have done better as individual forums existing on the open web rather than as a part of reddit's walled garden.
- hart_russell 8y ago
  the_donald subreddit is basically not allowed on the front page from what I understand
  - Bograff 8y ago
    They sort of earned that by gaming the front page algorithms. The mods would repeatedly sticky 2 minute old posts and encouraged all their users to upvote the stickies. This caused any post of their choosing to surge into the the front page. They would have 1/4th of the front page full of posts less than 2 hours old pre-election.
- this_user 8y ago
  > This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform. I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not. The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan). Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub). This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.
  - unityByFreedom 8y ago
    > I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not. Admins created automod which delegated shadowbanning to moderators. Who's to blame for that? The mods or the admins? It's an age-old question whether kings or peasants are to blame for humanity's imperfections. Some mods probably would have scripted something themselves, yet admins helped them and others along. You can go in circles trying to assign blame. I'm not sure there's an answer except to continue to try making it better.
    - xiongchiamiov 8y ago
      > Admins created automod They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.
wolco 8y ago
You had me believing that reddit was a bad place to work. When you complain that the CEO gave drugs to an employee in a cabin I started to question if your opinion matches my value system. When you were shocked they hosted other points of view then I completely changed my mind because reddit is a place for all viewpoints and thought reddit is starting to sound like a great place to work. Sounds like teams are implementing new features like crazy. The hiring freeze but reaction to losing some great candidates makes sense. Freeze hiring across the board but if great candidates are available grab them. Every rule should be reevaluated based on the situation. Sounds like he wants leaders and risk takers.. people willing to stick there neck out and ignore the boss if they feel it's the right call.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  To your point about viewpoints: Reddit is pretty demonstrably not a place for all viewpoints. Note that I'm not making a normative comment here, I'm just stating a fact: in most of the mainstream and default subreddits, there are a variety of opinions you really can't express without being downvoted. As for the thing with the CEO giving drugs to someone in a cabin...I think you should interpret this a little more holistically. For a variety of reasons (starting with illegality, and moving on to liability), that is generally not a thing you want your CEO doing in a well functioning organization of Reddit's size. It's not really about whether or not you're personally okay with recreational drug use. It's a bit of a dog whistle. Things that are generally okay can become very not okay in the context of the workplace and professionalism.
  - wolco 8y ago
    The comment around CEO and drugs was gossip pure and simple and should be ignored. I've seen many CEOs buy beer for employees it is part of many offices. Recreational drugs should be treated in the same manner. I will not judge him any differently. Each subreddit is a kingdom to itself but the fact that you can start your own kingdom allows free speech without forcing all speech on everyone.
  - maxencecornet 8y ago
    There is a huge difference between being downvoted and not being able to express your opinion because of censorship IMO you should be able to express any opinion, and of course you'll be downvoted if you are a bigot or a religious nutcase Right now Reddit is going full censorship, which I hate
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  Can you elaborate more about the part of being messy? Is it really like the open sourced of lobste.rs with messy code that just works? Also I am sorry for your job experience.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
    - korm 8y ago
      When Reddit rolled out their new mobile site I had strong suspicions the org must be a mess internally. Out of all the problems one stuck out to me. For many months the comment sorting dropdown took 15 seconds to open from a warm start. That is a billion dollar company making newbie mistakes with React as if it was an intern doing the rewrite. But the situation employees like you have been describing is surreal, I would never have imagined.
      - ryanmcbride 8y ago
        I think when it truly clicked for me was when they had a workable ecperience (old reddit) that was made pretty great by a plugin (reddit enhancement suite), and then when they did their redesign in an attempt to make RES obsolete, they managed to make something even worse. They had a perfect opportunity to just roll all of RES's functionality into reddit, and messed it up. Can't even collapse comment trees in the browser app, but you can on mobile.
    - rswail 8y ago
      No comment on the internal management issues, but why is drug use considered an issue unless it is in the work environment? I'm really sick of people thinking that "drugs" are bad, while alcohol/tobacco are not. If someone's substance use is affecting their work, then that's a legit issue. Otherwise it's as irrelevant as which (if any) football team they support.
zozbot123 8y ago
To their credit, they got rid of the "incel" stuff pretty quickly after it became basically-synonymous with "dangerously violent male-supremacist cult" (it used to just be "losers who can't relate with the opposite sex, and seem to be weirdly proud of this fact"). A similar story holds for the racist content.
- qgsrw3fd 8y ago
  I've been pretty close to the incel communities on reddit and I've never understood the bans they placed on them. There were a few posts asking for violence but, to me, they could have been false flags, and they were taken down fast by the mods. Closing down a forum with thousands of users just because of the attitudes of a handful of them is, well, retarded. For the record, this is the current incel sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/Braincels/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Braincels/
- m-ee 8y ago
  They just created new subs as they got shut down, they're all still there
- brynjolf 8y ago
  You mean the Donald? It is still there

6cd6beb 8y ago

>the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.

vkou 8y ago
That's because at first appearances, the Reddit hive mind would make Karl Marx blush red. Dig a little past the front page, though, and all the problems of having those groups share the same space with everyone else become evident.
vivekd 8y ago
Yeah the bigger subreddits tend to be bad for meaningful discussion and have a lot of deplatforming and trolling. That said the smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a parituclar specialization tend to be better. I really got a lot our of r/ppc for internet marketing. I found that r/candlemaking was a great subreddit for the niche hobby. I think it's a bit like real life, things that are popular tend to attract trolls and megalomaniacs while small, niche and technical things tend to attract a better group of people. y. The only downside is that maybe these niche communities would have done better as individual forums existing on the open web rather than as a part of reddit's walled garden.
hart_russell 8y ago
the_donald subreddit is basically not allowed on the front page from what I understand
- Bograff 8y ago
  They sort of earned that by gaming the front page algorithms. The mods would repeatedly sticky 2 minute old posts and encouraged all their users to upvote the stickies. This caused any post of their choosing to surge into the the front page. They would have 1/4th of the front page full of posts less than 2 hours old pre-election.
this_user 8y ago
> This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform. I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not. The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan). Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub). This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.
- unityByFreedom 8y ago
  > I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not. Admins created automod which delegated shadowbanning to moderators. Who's to blame for that? The mods or the admins? It's an age-old question whether kings or peasants are to blame for humanity's imperfections. Some mods probably would have scripted something themselves, yet admins helped them and others along. You can go in circles trying to assign blame. I'm not sure there's an answer except to continue to try making it better.
  - xiongchiamiov 8y ago
    > Admins created automod They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.

wolco 8y ago

You had me believing that reddit was a bad place to work. When you complain that the CEO gave drugs to an employee in a cabin I started to question if your opinion matches my value system. When you were shocked they hosted other points of view then I completely changed my mind because reddit is a place for all viewpoints and thought reddit is starting to sound like a great place to work. Sounds like teams are implementing new features like crazy. The hiring freeze but reaction to losing some great candidates makes sense. Freeze hiring across the board but if great candidates are available grab them. Every rule should be reevaluated based on the situation. Sounds like he wants leaders and risk takers.. people willing to stick there neck out and ignore the boss if they feel it's the right call.

throwawaymath 8y ago
To your point about viewpoints: Reddit is pretty demonstrably not a place for all viewpoints. Note that I'm not making a normative comment here, I'm just stating a fact: in most of the mainstream and default subreddits, there are a variety of opinions you really can't express without being downvoted. As for the thing with the CEO giving drugs to someone in a cabin...I think you should interpret this a little more holistically. For a variety of reasons (starting with illegality, and moving on to liability), that is generally not a thing you want your CEO doing in a well functioning organization of Reddit's size. It's not really about whether or not you're personally okay with recreational drug use. It's a bit of a dog whistle. Things that are generally okay can become very not okay in the context of the workplace and professionalism.
- wolco 8y ago
  The comment around CEO and drugs was gossip pure and simple and should be ignored. I've seen many CEOs buy beer for employees it is part of many offices. Recreational drugs should be treated in the same manner. I will not judge him any differently. Each subreddit is a kingdom to itself but the fact that you can start your own kingdom allows free speech without forcing all speech on everyone.
- maxencecornet 8y ago
  There is a huge difference between being downvoted and not being able to express your opinion because of censorship IMO you should be able to express any opinion, and of course you'll be downvoted if you are a bigot or a religious nutcase Right now Reddit is going full censorship, which I hate

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

HNLurker2 8y ago
Can you elaborate more about the part of being messy? Is it really like the open sourced of lobste.rs with messy code that just works? Also I am sorry for your job experience.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
  - korm 8y ago
    When Reddit rolled out their new mobile site I had strong suspicions the org must be a mess internally. Out of all the problems one stuck out to me. For many months the comment sorting dropdown took 15 seconds to open from a warm start. That is a billion dollar company making newbie mistakes with React as if it was an intern doing the rewrite. But the situation employees like you have been describing is surreal, I would never have imagined.
    - ryanmcbride 8y ago
      I think when it truly clicked for me was when they had a workable ecperience (old reddit) that was made pretty great by a plugin (reddit enhancement suite), and then when they did their redesign in an attempt to make RES obsolete, they managed to make something even worse. They had a perfect opportunity to just roll all of RES's functionality into reddit, and messed it up. Can't even collapse comment trees in the browser app, but you can on mobile.
  - rswail 8y ago
    No comment on the internal management issues, but why is drug use considered an issue unless it is in the work environment? I'm really sick of people thinking that "drugs" are bad, while alcohol/tobacco are not. If someone's substance use is affecting their work, then that's a legit issue. Otherwise it's as irrelevant as which (if any) football team they support.

zozbot123 8y ago

To their credit, they got rid of the "incel" stuff pretty quickly after it became basically-synonymous with "dangerously violent male-supremacist cult" (it used to just be "losers who can't relate with the opposite sex, and seem to be weirdly proud of this fact"). A similar story holds for the racist content.

qgsrw3fd 8y ago
I've been pretty close to the incel communities on reddit and I've never understood the bans they placed on them. There were a few posts asking for violence but, to me, they could have been false flags, and they were taken down fast by the mods. Closing down a forum with thousands of users just because of the attitudes of a handful of them is, well, retarded. For the record, this is the current incel sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/Braincels/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Braincels/
m-ee 8y ago
They just created new subs as they got shut down, they're all still there
brynjolf 8y ago
You mean the Donald? It is still there