14 ms·

A new team at Reddit

368 points by gatsby 12y ago

minimaxir 12y ago
Relevant context: Wong wanted everyone who worked at Reddit to move to San Francisco in an attempt to increase cohesion. http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-forces-remote-workers-to-relocate-to-sf-or-get-fired/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-f... Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - heathwblack 12y ago
    Conde Nast is not a majority shareholder in the site, so this point is moot. It was simply a professional disagreement on where in the bay area the office would be located.
- ryanmerket 12y ago
  The disagreement was on where the HQ will be located.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Odd, onewaystreet claims Yishan didn't want the company moved to SF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603996
  - eco 12y ago
    kickme444 refutes onewaystreet. kickme444 is a reddit employee.
    - gojomo 12y ago
      I read those comments as: board+Wong agreed on centralizing to Bay Area, disagreed on exact new HQ location/lease, board seems to have insisted on SF city proper, Wong wanted elsewhere. (Turns out per ~sama: Wong wanted Daly City.)
    - unclesaamm 12y ago
      Not sure whether to trust employees more or less ;)
      - kickme444 12y ago
        Valid concern
- ryanSrich 12y ago
  From the previous thread here[1]... 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Please delete some of your dashes, they are breaking layout.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bane 12y ago
Nice words, growing it 5x is great. 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?
- revelation 12y ago
  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).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - dhulser 12y ago
    No, it's traffic. 35MM to 175MM.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  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).
  - debacle 12y ago
    Reddit is a company with a huge user base and any investor willing to do his job (in spite of the moral or social implications) is going to want to squeeze that teat for every drop of ARPU he can get. Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- heathwblack 12y ago
  no.
Jsarokin 12y ago
Will this affect Reddits offer to sell 10% of their last round to the community? Presumably Yishan was heavily involved in the logistics of that.
- kickme444 12y ago
  No, it will not.
- raulinus 12y ago
  I don't think so.
blatherard 12y ago
Here's the announcement on the reddit official blog: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html
- RobPfeifer 12y ago
  I find it rather ridiculous and unprofessional that his personal site is the version of this that's up here.
  - raldi 12y ago
    Huh? Where do you see his personal site?
Sealy 12y ago
Why did he write: "It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Was that a dig at Hacker News?
- naiyt 12y ago
  No, I think it was just to emphasize how much Reddit is growing. HN is targeted at a specific audience and is more like a subreddit for a particular topic. It wouldn't make sense to compare them directly.
  - fletchowns 12y ago
    Not to mention half of the user accounts at reddit are just stupid novelty accounts... I'm exaggerating of course, but there are still a ton of novelty/alt accounts that people create on reddit.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  No, why would he do that?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  I think it was a humorous factoid rather than a dig; I don't think Sam Altman is attacking HN, nor do I think he thinks, or expects anyone reading his post to think, that HN / reddit scale comparisons are meaningful given their very different intended audiences.
  - Sealy 12y ago
    Fair enough! I was thinking that theres not much of a comparison to draw as the hacker news crowd are quite different to the reddit crowd. I'd come here for an informed discussion and expertise... and assume I'd get mildly humorous trolling, lolcats and memes on reddit!
    - alttab 12y ago
      I felt like it was a joke. "I'm the shit - look what I did with Reddit in only 8 days, grew it 5x more than Reddit."
tdicola 12y ago
So do reddit employees still have to move to San Francisco in a month?
- heathwblack 12y ago
  we are asked to move to the Bay Area still, but timing is flexible per employee. That's been the case since before Yishan stepped down.
  - smackfu 12y ago
    Of course, once everyone is on site, it's very dangerous to be the one employee left offsite.
    - bobsil1 12y ago
      Redshirt.
- dageshi 12y ago
  I think the answer to that question will probably explain a lot about these events.
zorpner 12y ago
Heh. I love the conceit that anyone would believe Wong resigned only over "location and amount of money to spend on a lease". 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 http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit)
- eco 12y ago
  I can believe it. Yishan always seemed very dramatic and reactionary. I could see him resigning in anger after not getting his way.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Relevant context: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_reddit_employee_ama/cl1ygat?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r... From the NYT: "That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."
    - paulhauggis 12y ago
      He was being honest and I actually respect him more for putting a former employee that obviously was trying to get sympathy from the Reddit community, in his place.
      - Cookingboy 12y ago
        Was he being completely honest? It was really a case of his words against another's words, and we don't know which parts were true or half-true or plain lies, from either party.
      - reduce 12y ago
        Reddit is a magnet for people who have an unhealthy appetite for over dramatic "justice porn." That's all I'm going to say about your feelings.
thrillgore 12y ago
This came out of the blue and unannounced on reddit.com. I have a feeling there's more to this than announced. I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.
- benmathes 12y ago
  though, it seems, that employee was incorreclty shitting all over reddit. The situation appears far grayer than "CEO shits on employee"
  - thrillgore 12y ago
    Agreed, but it is very very uncharacteristic to show up and just respond in kind.
    - jrochkind1 12y ago
      uncharacteristic of what?
      - skeletonjelly 12y ago
        A CEO. Anything to be discussed though has most likely already been said in the multiple thousand comment threads that spawned as a result of this incident.
jc4p 12y ago
Understandably there's very little details here, but I'm curious to know if Alexis is moving to SF, he's played a big role in the NYC tech start-up world recently.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Alexis is stepping in as Executive Chairman not C-level, I don't think that would require him to move to SF, just take regular trips there.
- bibinou 12y ago
  He replied on reddit : Splitting time! There's a small reddit office in NY. edit: The team is moving to SF and I'll get a cot in the office. http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1oqws?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1...
brianpgordon 12y ago
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.
- ryanmerket 12y ago
  This had little to do with Yishan, and more to do with having a user base that abhors changes.
  - coke12 12y ago
    Yep, the "digg exodus" is almost mythical in reddit-history.
    - basch 12y ago
      eurpoeans colonizing america is almost mythical in western-history.
  - paulhauggis 12y ago
    Which is funny, considering most on Reddit are all about being progressive..
    - mahranch 12y ago
      I don't think it's fair to conflate a progressive political ideology with website layout. The two aren't remotely related. You can subscribe to a progressive ideology and abhor a dramatic redesign of a website. Just because someone is "progressive" doesn't mean they need to accept all change.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- rsync 12y ago
  Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011. We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed. I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
reduce 12y ago
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! 3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare. Hoping for great things!
- UweSchmidt 12y ago
  regarding 2), sounds interesting. Got any more information on that? Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly. Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.
    - jtbigwoo 12y ago
      Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - forgottenpass 12y ago
    He could be talking about Quickmeme? Here is a terrible overview from a quick google search: http://www.themarysue.com/reddit-bans-quickmeme/ http://www.themarysue.com/reddit-bans-quickmeme/
gordon_freeman 12y ago
Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons. Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.
- paulhauggis 12y ago
  "then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons." To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment. "first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF" I can see his point. I've worked remotely and not remotely more than a few times. When you work remotely, you really don't feel connected to the rest of the time and communication and overall progress does suffer over time. No matter how much you try to stay connected, it's just not the same.
  - unclesaamm 12y ago
    Well, Mozilla's CEO had actually donated money to anti-gay causes.... as opposed to reddit, where what the ex employee was saying was false
codezero 12y ago
Yishan, I'd like to buy you a beer.
ahunt09 12y ago
"It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Zing! =P
- darkstar999 12y ago
  8 days.
tootie 12y ago
Ellen Pao is former VC and has a bizarre sordid past: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ellen-pao http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ell... This is a serious red flag for the future of the site. If anyone wants to catch the great Reddit exodus of 2016, start building your competitor right now.
- rdl 12y ago
  Ellen Pao is a former VC, true. She also was involved in a nasty situation with her former VC firm. She's also one of the best consumer-product operations people I've ever met, and generally brilliant, honest, and helpful. While I know a lot of YC founders, partners, etc., Ellen is the person I'd go to for advice about whether a product/company direction is a good idea or not. Bringing a founder back is great, but Ellen is amazing in her own right. I think that makes up for her being a former VC :)
  - tootie 12y ago
    My other main concern is that she evidently doesn't have a reddit account. At least not a public one.
    - werid 12y ago
      I believe it's this: https://www.reddit.com/user/ekjp https://www.reddit.com/user/ekjp
      - leoc 12y ago
        Confirmed, it seems: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1rz0r https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm...
- x0x0 12y ago
  saying someone has a sordid past because they've been sexually harassed makes you, well, a victim-blaming prick
debacle 12y ago
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.
- optimusclimb 12y ago
  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.
  - orbitur 12y ago
    Each subreddit needs a good set of mods, especially when there are thousands of subscribers. Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it". Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people actually started talking again. r/twoxchromosomes has a no-images-unless-it's-Friday rule.
    - dublinben 12y ago
hiou 12y ago
2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminating in his resignation. He likely already knew his days as the CEO of reddit were numbered. This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.
- ryanmerket 12y ago
  reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.
  - raulinus 12y ago
    You are mixing the point here, the speculation is true.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Actually, maybe we should listen to someone with an inside perspective, rather than speculate?
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      and you created an account to say this?
  - shostack 12y ago
    Just playing devil's advocate here, and please know I mean this with all due respect, but you are a Product Manager who has been there 4 months according to LinkedIn. I do not claim to know the inner workings of Reddit, but can you really be 100% certain that you were privy to all of the meetings, etc. where such signs may have been observed? Again--zero disrespect intended here, but it strikes me as uncommon that a recent PM hire would be involved in all of the board meetings, hallway conversations, etc. where some of this power struggle may have occurred.
nlh 12y ago
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.
sama 12y ago
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.
- anon808 12y ago
  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?
  - karissa 12y ago
    with a highly competitive job market, especially where many of the people in a city with poor public transit do not have cars, 9.7 miles is annoying enough to cause people to choose somewhere else to work.
    - pchristensen 12y ago
      When I lived in the East Bay, it would be really hard to accept a move to Daly City (from downtown SF), because it's another 20 min each way. And East Bay BART riders wouldn't even have to change trains! For CalTrain riders, it's a doubling of the commute or more.
    - jarek 12y ago
      Maybe a part of the solution to the highly competitive job market could have been not annoying your current employees by forcing them to move to a city with poor public transit? Was that board's decision, or Wong's?
  - SamReidHughes 12y ago
rdl 12y ago
I really liked the "move to Daly City" idea. Millbrae also seems like it would make sense.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  What's the benefit of moving to Daly City vs SF proper? I'm not from the bay area, so I'm not familiar with why this would be a problem.
  - rdl 12y ago
    * Rents less extortionate. ($2? vs. $4-5?) * Big floor plates available. * Better accessibility (280 and BART) vs. a lot of SF. * Less dysfunctional city government. * No city-specific taxes. I don't know the specifics of the deal. Reddit's current office space is rather...compact. So, I'll accept that "Reddit must move" is a must. Where they move, and how it's done, seems like a fun challenge for whoever comes in as CEO and for the COO. Very glad this isn't my problem -- immigration is the #1 problem, housing and housing costs #2 problem, office space maybe tied as #3 with general cost inflation, transit, and traffic.
  - calbear81 12y ago
    Because the whole point of being in SF is that you can attract talent that wants to live in the heart of the city. To put this in perspective, it's like a company moving out of SoHo and going to New Jersey. It's technically not that far away but once you're out there, you're not within walking distance to everything the city has to offer (food, culture, etc.).
  - chipotle_coyote 12y ago
    While I'm speculating, I'd imagine the advantage is simply that you can get more space for less money. Daly City is (in a very relative sense) inexpensive, especially given its proximity to SF. The downside is that Daly City doesn't really have anything to offer but cheaper rents; I suspect it'd be a terrible place to be stuck in for lunchtime and after-work options, nor from what I've seen would it be a terribly pleasant place to live. (That's subjective, of course.) Being in SoMa is a job perk in and of itself, given how many interesting things are within walking distance. If you're going to move out of SF there are considerably more interesting places to target that would still be within relatively quick BART or Caltrain commuting distance.
william_hc 12y ago
This seems petty; you really didn't need to post the details of the resignation. Sorry Sam.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
smackfu 12y ago
Amazing the the new SVP of Product is a guy who one day said "It would be cool if reddit had a secret santa." While not working there. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-santa-the-creator-of-reddits-gift-exchange-the-worlds-biggest.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-sant...
- kickme444 12y ago
  It is very surreal.
alexobenauer 12y ago
> It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure [8 days], reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total. Interesting, indeed.
calbear81 12y ago
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.
quant 12y ago
This post has an interview with Pao and Alexis: http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-interim-for-long/ http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-int...
jfker8 12y ago
So removed one ching-chong and bringing another. What's the difference ? Also, are people stupid enough to believe that he is quitting over location dispute. Its bigger , way bigger. Women in tech. My ass ! Welcome to preparation of 2016 !!
uierw7 12y ago
Sam , yes we believe you. YC and Reddit are only good heart people in entire tech community. Reddit is most hatred spreading website on internet. I wish they run it to the ground.
- judehart 12y ago
  I know where you're coming from and commiserate.
uierw7 12y ago
Welcome to preparation of 2016 ! Started with propaganda of Women in tech. My ass !
jacquesm 12y ago
> 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.
killface 12y ago
Oh, good. Put a SJW at the top of Reddit's chain of command. The drain circling is making sucking sounds now... http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint
- girvo 12y ago
  I'm not going to lie: I dislike a lot of what's called "social justice" (there's no justice in a lynch mob) -- but that complaint is a pretty straightforward sexual harassment case?
- woof 12y ago
  So standing up against sexual harassment makes you a Social Justice Warrior?
udev 12y ago
Man, the whole thing reeks! 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.
muyuu 12y ago
Knowing nothing more about the issue, I honestly believe he's right in wanting to move the office out of the most expensive area in the Bay. It's a strain down the line. Unless something fundamental changes in city planning I'd expect a certain degree of crowding out of that area.
jpitzo 12y ago
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.
panjaro 12y ago
I've always had a gut feeling that Sam Altman is not what he acts like. Just because Paul Graham says he is great doesn't mean he is. It's just his personal belief and could be just a propoganda.... Nothing can be believed in this world anymore, news are not actually news, People don't mean what they say, they say what they don't mean, they act different that the reality and internet world is going crazy, unethical, greedy and more... Start ups are just made to make money, People are easy to fool, one guy comes up and make millions, says start up is great and all the people like Donkeys and Yaks start a 'Start-up'. Why? To make money.... doesn't matter what their action's effects are, they are just crazy to make money. They are dishonest, greedy but they call themselves successful...why, because they earned money... Bring on the Artificially intelligent machines, get rid of the humanity... sooner than later...
callumprentice 12y ago
Straight from the horses mouth - answer here from Yishan on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CEO/answer/Yishan-Wong?srid=X&share=1 http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CE...
milesf 12y ago
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.
- yazaddaruvala 12y ago
  Not trying to be rude or anything, but I feel like you should also have a problem with the internet. There are many different websites, I'm sure, a lot for things that are pure evil. I'm actually very curious, why you only choose to boycott Reddit? What's your justification for still using the internet?
  - milesf 12y ago
    Roads connect me to the entire world, just like the Internet. When I arrive at a destination, it is a separate dwelling than all the other dwellings. Make sense?
    - yazaddaruvala 12y ago
      I suppose a little. Actually, I modified the analogy to "arrive at a city". I feel like Reddit is more like a city than a single dwelling. And I can understand continuing to use roads while avoiding certain cities. I still don't agree with your original point, and maybe the analogy is biased in your favor (it is your justification after all, so I cant really counter), but yeah, fair enough, I like your justification. Thanks for entertaining my curiosity.
- rimantas 12y ago
  Yep, you ar not asking the others to do the same, you wanto to implement censorship and deny others that possibility without even asking. Some ideas: get off the internet, a lot of very very evil things are going on there. Also, start fighting movie companies and TV: a lot of evil evil things happen in movies.

368 points by gatsby 12y ago

Relevant context: Wong wanted everyone who worked at Reddit to move to San Francisco in an attempt to increase cohesion. http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-forces-remote-workers-to-relocate-to-sf-or-get-fired/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-f... Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- heathwblack 12y ago
  Conde Nast is not a majority shareholder in the site, so this point is moot. It was simply a professional disagreement on where in the bay area the office would be located.
ryanmerket 12y ago
The disagreement was on where the HQ will be located.
masklinn 12y ago
Odd, onewaystreet claims Yishan didn't want the company moved to SF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603996
- eco 12y ago
  kickme444 refutes onewaystreet. kickme444 is a reddit employee.
  - gojomo 12y ago
    I read those comments as: board+Wong agreed on centralizing to Bay Area, disagreed on exact new HQ location/lease, board seems to have insisted on SF city proper, Wong wanted elsewhere. (Turns out per ~sama: Wong wanted Daly City.)
  - unclesaamm 12y ago
    Not sure whether to trust employees more or less ;)
    - kickme444 12y ago
      Valid concern
ryanSrich 12y ago
From the previous thread here[1]... 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Please delete some of your dashes, they are breaking layout.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bane 12y ago

Nice words, growing it 5x is great. 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?

revelation 12y ago
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).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dhulser 12y ago
  No, it's traffic. 35MM to 175MM.
billmalarky 12y ago
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).
- debacle 12y ago
  Reddit is a company with a huge user base and any investor willing to do his job (in spite of the moral or social implications) is going to want to squeeze that teat for every drop of ARPU he can get. Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

heathwblack 12y ago
no.

Jsarokin 12y ago

Will this affect Reddits offer to sell 10% of their last round to the community? Presumably Yishan was heavily involved in the logistics of that.

kickme444 12y ago
No, it will not.
raulinus 12y ago
I don't think so.

blatherard 12y ago

Here's the announcement on the reddit official blog: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html

RobPfeifer 12y ago
I find it rather ridiculous and unprofessional that his personal site is the version of this that's up here.
- raldi 12y ago
  Huh? Where do you see his personal site?

Sealy 12y ago

Why did he write: "It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Was that a dig at Hacker News?

naiyt 12y ago
No, I think it was just to emphasize how much Reddit is growing. HN is targeted at a specific audience and is more like a subreddit for a particular topic. It wouldn't make sense to compare them directly.
- fletchowns 12y ago
  Not to mention half of the user accounts at reddit are just stupid novelty accounts... I'm exaggerating of course, but there are still a ton of novelty/alt accounts that people create on reddit.
serve_yay 12y ago
No, why would he do that?
dragonwriter 12y ago
I think it was a humorous factoid rather than a dig; I don't think Sam Altman is attacking HN, nor do I think he thinks, or expects anyone reading his post to think, that HN / reddit scale comparisons are meaningful given their very different intended audiences.
- Sealy 12y ago
  Fair enough! I was thinking that theres not much of a comparison to draw as the hacker news crowd are quite different to the reddit crowd. I'd come here for an informed discussion and expertise... and assume I'd get mildly humorous trolling, lolcats and memes on reddit!
  - alttab 12y ago
    I felt like it was a joke. "I'm the shit - look what I did with Reddit in only 8 days, grew it 5x more than Reddit."

tdicola 12y ago

So do reddit employees still have to move to San Francisco in a month?

heathwblack 12y ago
we are asked to move to the Bay Area still, but timing is flexible per employee. That's been the case since before Yishan stepped down.
- smackfu 12y ago
  Of course, once everyone is on site, it's very dangerous to be the one employee left offsite.
  - bobsil1 12y ago
    Redshirt.
dageshi 12y ago
I think the answer to that question will probably explain a lot about these events.

zorpner 12y ago

Heh. I love the conceit that anyone would believe Wong resigned only over "location and amount of money to spend on a lease". 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 http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit)

eco 12y ago
I can believe it. Yishan always seemed very dramatic and reactionary. I could see him resigning in anger after not getting his way.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Relevant context: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_reddit_employee_ama/cl1ygat?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r... From the NYT: "That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."
  - paulhauggis 12y ago
    He was being honest and I actually respect him more for putting a former employee that obviously was trying to get sympathy from the Reddit community, in his place.
    - Cookingboy 12y ago
      Was he being completely honest? It was really a case of his words against another's words, and we don't know which parts were true or half-true or plain lies, from either party.
    - reduce 12y ago
      Reddit is a magnet for people who have an unhealthy appetite for over dramatic "justice porn." That's all I'm going to say about your feelings.

thrillgore 12y ago

This came out of the blue and unannounced on reddit.com. I have a feeling there's more to this than announced. I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.

benmathes 12y ago
though, it seems, that employee was incorreclty shitting all over reddit. The situation appears far grayer than "CEO shits on employee"
- thrillgore 12y ago
  Agreed, but it is very very uncharacteristic to show up and just respond in kind.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    uncharacteristic of what?
    - skeletonjelly 12y ago
      A CEO. Anything to be discussed though has most likely already been said in the multiple thousand comment threads that spawned as a result of this incident.

jc4p 12y ago

Understandably there's very little details here, but I'm curious to know if Alexis is moving to SF, he's played a big role in the NYC tech start-up world recently.

masklinn 12y ago
Alexis is stepping in as Executive Chairman not C-level, I don't think that would require him to move to SF, just take regular trips there.
bibinou 12y ago
He replied on reddit : Splitting time! There's a small reddit office in NY. edit: The team is moving to SF and I'll get a cot in the office. http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1oqws?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1...

brianpgordon 12y ago

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.

ryanmerket 12y ago
This had little to do with Yishan, and more to do with having a user base that abhors changes.
- coke12 12y ago
  Yep, the "digg exodus" is almost mythical in reddit-history.
  - basch 12y ago
    eurpoeans colonizing america is almost mythical in western-history.
- paulhauggis 12y ago
  Which is funny, considering most on Reddit are all about being progressive..
  - mahranch 12y ago
    I don't think it's fair to conflate a progressive political ideology with website layout. The two aren't remotely related. You can subscribe to a progressive ideology and abhor a dramatic redesign of a website. Just because someone is "progressive" doesn't mean they need to accept all change.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
rsync 12y ago
Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011. We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed. I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

reduce 12y ago

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! 3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare. Hoping for great things!

UweSchmidt 12y ago
regarding 2), sounds interesting. Got any more information on that? Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly. Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.
  - jtbigwoo 12y ago
    Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  He could be talking about Quickmeme? Here is a terrible overview from a quick google search: http://www.themarysue.com/reddit-bans-quickmeme/ http://www.themarysue.com/reddit-bans-quickmeme/

gordon_freeman 12y ago

Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons. Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.

paulhauggis 12y ago
"then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons." To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment. "first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF" I can see his point. I've worked remotely and not remotely more than a few times. When you work remotely, you really don't feel connected to the rest of the time and communication and overall progress does suffer over time. No matter how much you try to stay connected, it's just not the same.
- unclesaamm 12y ago
  Well, Mozilla's CEO had actually donated money to anti-gay causes.... as opposed to reddit, where what the ex employee was saying was false

codezero 12y ago

Yishan, I'd like to buy you a beer.

ahunt09 12y ago

"It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Zing! =P

darkstar999 12y ago
8 days.

tootie 12y ago

Ellen Pao is former VC and has a bizarre sordid past: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ellen-pao http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ell... This is a serious red flag for the future of the site. If anyone wants to catch the great Reddit exodus of 2016, start building your competitor right now.

rdl 12y ago
Ellen Pao is a former VC, true. She also was involved in a nasty situation with her former VC firm. She's also one of the best consumer-product operations people I've ever met, and generally brilliant, honest, and helpful. While I know a lot of YC founders, partners, etc., Ellen is the person I'd go to for advice about whether a product/company direction is a good idea or not. Bringing a founder back is great, but Ellen is amazing in her own right. I think that makes up for her being a former VC :)
- tootie 12y ago
  My other main concern is that she evidently doesn't have a reddit account. At least not a public one.
  - werid 12y ago
    I believe it's this: https://www.reddit.com/user/ekjp https://www.reddit.com/user/ekjp
    - leoc 12y ago
      Confirmed, it seems: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1rz0r https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm...
x0x0 12y ago
saying someone has a sordid past because they've been sexually harassed makes you, well, a victim-blaming prick

debacle 12y ago

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.

optimusclimb 12y ago
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.
- orbitur 12y ago
  Each subreddit needs a good set of mods, especially when there are thousands of subscribers. Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it". Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people actually started talking again. r/twoxchromosomes has a no-images-unless-it's-Friday rule.
  - dublinben 12y ago

hiou 12y ago

2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminating in his resignation. He likely already knew his days as the CEO of reddit were numbered. This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.

ryanmerket 12y ago
reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.
- raulinus 12y ago
  You are mixing the point here, the speculation is true.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Actually, maybe we should listen to someone with an inside perspective, rather than speculate?
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    and you created an account to say this?
- shostack 12y ago
  Just playing devil's advocate here, and please know I mean this with all due respect, but you are a Product Manager who has been there 4 months according to LinkedIn. I do not claim to know the inner workings of Reddit, but can you really be 100% certain that you were privy to all of the meetings, etc. where such signs may have been observed? Again--zero disrespect intended here, but it strikes me as uncommon that a recent PM hire would be involved in all of the board meetings, hallway conversations, etc. where some of this power struggle may have occurred.

nlh 12y ago

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.

sama 12y ago

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.

anon808 12y ago
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?
- karissa 12y ago
  with a highly competitive job market, especially where many of the people in a city with poor public transit do not have cars, 9.7 miles is annoying enough to cause people to choose somewhere else to work.
  - pchristensen 12y ago
    When I lived in the East Bay, it would be really hard to accept a move to Daly City (from downtown SF), because it's another 20 min each way. And East Bay BART riders wouldn't even have to change trains! For CalTrain riders, it's a doubling of the commute or more.
  - jarek 12y ago
    Maybe a part of the solution to the highly competitive job market could have been not annoying your current employees by forcing them to move to a city with poor public transit? Was that board's decision, or Wong's?
- SamReidHughes 12y ago

rdl 12y ago

I really liked the "move to Daly City" idea. Millbrae also seems like it would make sense.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
What's the benefit of moving to Daly City vs SF proper? I'm not from the bay area, so I'm not familiar with why this would be a problem.
- rdl 12y ago
  * Rents less extortionate. ($2? vs. $4-5?) * Big floor plates available. * Better accessibility (280 and BART) vs. a lot of SF. * Less dysfunctional city government. * No city-specific taxes. I don't know the specifics of the deal. Reddit's current office space is rather...compact. So, I'll accept that "Reddit must move" is a must. Where they move, and how it's done, seems like a fun challenge for whoever comes in as CEO and for the COO. Very glad this isn't my problem -- immigration is the #1 problem, housing and housing costs #2 problem, office space maybe tied as #3 with general cost inflation, transit, and traffic.
- calbear81 12y ago
  Because the whole point of being in SF is that you can attract talent that wants to live in the heart of the city. To put this in perspective, it's like a company moving out of SoHo and going to New Jersey. It's technically not that far away but once you're out there, you're not within walking distance to everything the city has to offer (food, culture, etc.).
- chipotle_coyote 12y ago
  While I'm speculating, I'd imagine the advantage is simply that you can get more space for less money. Daly City is (in a very relative sense) inexpensive, especially given its proximity to SF. The downside is that Daly City doesn't really have anything to offer but cheaper rents; I suspect it'd be a terrible place to be stuck in for lunchtime and after-work options, nor from what I've seen would it be a terribly pleasant place to live. (That's subjective, of course.) Being in SoMa is a job perk in and of itself, given how many interesting things are within walking distance. If you're going to move out of SF there are considerably more interesting places to target that would still be within relatively quick BART or Caltrain commuting distance.

william_hc 12y ago

This seems petty; you really didn't need to post the details of the resignation. Sorry Sam.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

smackfu 12y ago

Amazing the the new SVP of Product is a guy who one day said "It would be cool if reddit had a secret santa." While not working there. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-santa-the-creator-of-reddits-gift-exchange-the-worlds-biggest.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-sant...

kickme444 12y ago
It is very surreal.

alexobenauer 12y ago

> It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure [8 days], reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total. Interesting, indeed.

calbear81 12y ago

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.

quant 12y ago

This post has an interview with Pao and Alexis: http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-interim-for-long/ http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-int...

jfker8 12y ago

So removed one ching-chong and bringing another. What's the difference ? Also, are people stupid enough to believe that he is quitting over location dispute. Its bigger , way bigger. Women in tech. My ass ! Welcome to preparation of 2016 !!

uierw7 12y ago

Sam , yes we believe you. YC and Reddit are only good heart people in entire tech community. Reddit is most hatred spreading website on internet. I wish they run it to the ground.

judehart 12y ago
I know where you're coming from and commiserate.

uierw7 12y ago

Welcome to preparation of 2016 ! Started with propaganda of Women in tech. My ass !

jacquesm 12y ago

> 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.

killface 12y ago

Oh, good. Put a SJW at the top of Reddit's chain of command. The drain circling is making sucking sounds now... http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint

girvo 12y ago
I'm not going to lie: I dislike a lot of what's called "social justice" (there's no justice in a lynch mob) -- but that complaint is a pretty straightforward sexual harassment case?
woof 12y ago
So standing up against sexual harassment makes you a Social Justice Warrior?

udev 12y ago

Man, the whole thing reeks! 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.

muyuu 12y ago

Knowing nothing more about the issue, I honestly believe he's right in wanting to move the office out of the most expensive area in the Bay. It's a strain down the line. Unless something fundamental changes in city planning I'd expect a certain degree of crowding out of that area.

jpitzo 12y ago

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.

panjaro 12y ago

I've always had a gut feeling that Sam Altman is not what he acts like. Just because Paul Graham says he is great doesn't mean he is. It's just his personal belief and could be just a propoganda.... Nothing can be believed in this world anymore, news are not actually news, People don't mean what they say, they say what they don't mean, they act different that the reality and internet world is going crazy, unethical, greedy and more... Start ups are just made to make money, People are easy to fool, one guy comes up and make millions, says start up is great and all the people like Donkeys and Yaks start a 'Start-up'. Why? To make money.... doesn't matter what their action's effects are, they are just crazy to make money. They are dishonest, greedy but they call themselves successful...why, because they earned money... Bring on the Artificially intelligent machines, get rid of the humanity... sooner than later...

callumprentice 12y ago

Straight from the horses mouth - answer here from Yishan on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CEO/answer/Yishan-Wong?srid=X&share=1 http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CE...

milesf 12y ago

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.

yazaddaruvala 12y ago
Not trying to be rude or anything, but I feel like you should also have a problem with the internet. There are many different websites, I'm sure, a lot for things that are pure evil. I'm actually very curious, why you only choose to boycott Reddit? What's your justification for still using the internet?
- milesf 12y ago
  Roads connect me to the entire world, just like the Internet. When I arrive at a destination, it is a separate dwelling than all the other dwellings. Make sense?
  - yazaddaruvala 12y ago
    I suppose a little. Actually, I modified the analogy to "arrive at a city". I feel like Reddit is more like a city than a single dwelling. And I can understand continuing to use roads while avoiding certain cities. I still don't agree with your original point, and maybe the analogy is biased in your favor (it is your justification after all, so I cant really counter), but yeah, fair enough, I like your justification. Thanks for entertaining my curiosity.
rimantas 12y ago
Yep, you ar not asking the others to do the same, you wanto to implement censorship and deny others that possibility without even asking. Some ideas: get off the internet, a lot of very very evil things are going on there. Also, start fighting movie companies and TV: a lot of evil evil things happen in movies.