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> when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was in for a surprise. > If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, wh
by rideontime 3y ago
> when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was in for a surprise.
> If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.
Does anybody know what "ideas" he's talking about? When I think back to recent developments at Reddit, all that comes to mind is the 3rd-party app fiasco and the "collectible avatars" and "Moons"/"community points" nobody but crypto speculators wanted anything to do with (and are now dead). Oh, and the death of celebrity AMAs after they fired Victoria.
- relaunched 3y agoI think he's talking about Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao. BTW, true or not, that's a hell of a way to refer to them, respectively.
- rideontime 3y agoI guess it was unclear, I meant what's improved at Reddit since spez's return?
- iends 3y agoAs far as I can tell it's gotten worse from a user perspective.
- Macha 3y agoHonestly neglect sounds more like the pre-Yishan era where Reddit was effectively a few people in the metaphorical corner of a conde nast office.
- jtriangle 3y agoNot to mention Steve editing users' posts, Ellen Pao being in the same social circle as Epstein, Maxwellhill conspicuously going silent when Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, promising and then failing to deliver on direct user funding and adrev sharing, and flatly ignoring user feedback for the better part of a decade.
- segasaturn 3y agoWhat is this "Maxwellhill" thing refer to? I vaguely recognize the username as an old reddit powermod, is the implication that reddit power users are involved in human trafficking?
- rideontime 3y agoThere's a theory that account belong to Ghislaine herself. I'm personally uninterested.
- jtriangle 3y agoI'm uninterested inasfar as her having a reddit profile and posting things. I'm much more interested as to why reddit inc refuses to answer the simple quandary that many people have as to if she was behind the account in question or not. They more or less Streisand'd the conspiracy into plausibility by doing so, which is generally a bad idea. That's the reason I included it.
- enimodas 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_the_evidence_that_reddit_user_maxwellhill/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...
- koofdoof 3y agoI think the connection between u/maxwellhill and Ghislaine Maxwell is dubious. The account is named after the town Maxwell Hill in Malaysia, and they had posted in Malaysian subreddits years before any of these theories came out. It seems more likely to me that the similar names are a coincidence and that the account owner quite reasonably stopped using the account when they became suspected of being involved in a major international conspiracy.
- WatchDog 3y agoDidn’t they only become suspect, because they stopped posting at the exact time Ghislaine was arrested?
- yellow_lead 3y agoNo idea either. They haven't changed much in years.
- stevekemp 3y agoThey added a chat application, so you can get daily spam from onlyfans promoters, or cryptocurrency schills, before you get so annoyed you disable it.
- darkhorse222 3y agoThat's the issue. The thing that made them worthwhile was a very basic set of functionality. Every single other feature they've tried to add was poorly implemented and not picked up by users. It just doesn't make sense as a business. You don't need a million devs to run a forum site, you need them to add more and more bloat to convince investors you're growing. All they have done is pushed ads harder. That is all they really have to offer.
- cactusplant7374 3y agoThey are growing every year. https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-worldwide https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-worldw...
- queuebert 3y agoAnd they still have one of the worst apps (and website) in the game. Seems like that would be some low-hanging fruit.
- tempsy 3y agoi still use the old version on web and it works great i agree the new version is very busy and buggy on mobile web
- __rito__ 3y agoYeah, I have Old Reddit redirect on all of my devices, and I won't touch the official app with a ten foot pole.
- dmix 3y agoNever got the complaints with the official app. What's the issue? Last time I asked someone this question they mentioned some power user stuff that didn't really apply to regular Reddit content consumers / casual posters.
- RIMR 3y agoThose are the ideas that he's talking about. Paul Graham is a dinosaur. He thinks that spez's rampant monetization is a great idea, despite the fact that it has outraged the community that gives Reddit any power at all.
- clhodapp 3y agoPerhaps that's the meaning of "almost unkillable": Look at how much room there is to enshitify without losing all the users!
- nvy 3y agopg is just trying to use his audience to drum up interest in the reddit IPO. Reddit has nothing to offer investors but Paul needs a return so he's trying to make sure someone else ends up holding the bags.
- epolanski 3y agoAstonished people don't see the link with the timing.
- stefantalpalaru 3y ago[dead]
- bevekspldnw 3y agoGetting drunk and editing production database to delete mean comments is certainly innovative CEO behavior.
- grepfru_it 3y agoAnd people want to invest in this IPO? Seems like two trains moving towards each other but can’t tell if they are on the same track yet
- marcosdumay 3y agoThere is only one set of tracks. But everything is fine, you can just go swap places with any passenger if you want.
- bevekspldnw 3y agoYou’d have to be a total moron, but if there’s one thing I learned from Reddit it’s that there are far more morons out there than I realized.
- WatchDog 3y ago* Editing people’s comments critical of him.
- bevekspldnw 3y agoWhich is actually worse.
- WatchDog 3y agoIndeed
- brobinson 3y agoHah, I saw this: Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without editors. and remembered him getting prod database access to censor comments criticizing him. I guess it's true what they say about power corrupting you.
- readyplayernull 3y agoReddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
- Rinzler89 3y agoBasically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-W0CBOGnnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-W0CBOGnnI
- grepfru_it 3y agoI always wondered if they continued this behavior while GPT and ML started picking up. I saw a lot of suspicious posts especially around bitcoin and crypto related subreddits start around 2013. This massively increased with the_donald and trump running for office. Covid and the disinformation policies seemed like a way to cause divisiveness and attract viewers to the site while providing a reason to cull some bots (whether internal or external). The API change and the resulting moderator backlash seemed manufactured to provide management a reason to purge moderators and more accounts. Now they have plausible deniability when people claim Reddit is the dead internet, full of AI bots. Because now their user count isn’t heavily tilted towards fake profiles (which would need to be disclosed in an IPo) Just my conspiracy theory of the day
- Lammy 3y agoRelevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf …a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
- PheonixPharts 3y agoReddit IPO'd today and the purpose of this piece is to add whatever hype can be added to that IPO so that PG and other early investors can maximize their return, and then likely, slowly and carefully unload their positions into the public and other investors who will be the bag holders when the price inevitably declines over time. The "idea" is "make PG even more money", and that's a great idea if you're PG.
- samtheprogram 3y agoDidn’t they already unload when they sold to Condé Nast? Or did PG partake in the re-acquisition?
- ignoramous 3y ago> Reddit IPO'd today and the purpose of this piece is to add whatever hype can be added to that IPO To PG's credit, he has an uncanny ability to pluck out relentlessly resourceful founders (self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, notwithstanding) who have greater chances of outsized success. And he's been more right about startups than almost anyone else. When he praises those founders, it often comes off as an exaggeration, but I am convinced he is being thoroughly honest. "As someone who went through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it, I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about this and say something about doubling down on his best investments, etc. But during our batch many of those companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so down the road." -u/aerosimle, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893
- WheatMillington 3y ago>He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. There's a causal relationship here, but it's not obvious what direction it points.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoI’d be fascinated to know if he uses old.reddit in private
- BashiBazouk 3y agoUnfortunately, yes. A throw away quote at the bottom of one of the many articles during the API protest that was ignored by most: “I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” Huffman said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.” Edit: here is the story. I changed "he" to "Huffman" since I took the quote out of context of the full story. It's way down almost at the end. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
- rideontime 3y agoOh. Oh, no.
- nmz 3y agoI wouldn't blame much the firing of victoria, Woody Harrelson became a mock point when he did not confront some allegations made to him on the site. Which, sure, bad, but also, why would you risk going to a website to answer serious allegations? seems a huge risk to even go there.
- rideontime 3y agoDidn’t Rampart predate Victoria?
- nmz 3y ago- victoria sacked 2015 - ama was 2012 So, It did, either way, victoria being there would not prevent a PR disaster. because that would require censoring.