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A recurring, and not-commented-on theme in each of these communications is that the board wants more growth. Reddit closed a $50MM round in fall of 2014, and ha

A recurring, and not-commented-on theme in each of these communications is that the board wants more growth. Reddit closed a $50MM round in fall of 2014, and has never had a strong monetization story. If the investors came in expecting major growth (since this is not a business with a great monetization story) it's not surprising that there's pressure and turnover right now, almost a year later. And, it may well be that what's needed is a CEO with enough credibility to tell the board "you won't get that growth yet, we have some work to do." Saying that to the board is obviously going to be hard to do for Ellen, or anyone in Ellen's shoes if they brought her in to deliver growth, and she promised to deliver that growth. So, lots of drama, yadda yadda, but I would bet 100:1 that drama has, at it's fundamental source, intense pressure from the board, and I would also bet you that this kind of pressure is new for reddit as a company. To me, that's likely at least some of the context for the rumors that Ohanian intervened directly to get rid of Victoria, the former AMA lead at Reddit. AMAs are one of Reddit's most visible branding / marketing measures. If you need to deliver growth, and aren't seeing it, it is completely natural to be looking at your premier product lines and trying to get them to do more. And, I would be surprised if this kind of thinking weren't informing senior management as they're struggling to deliver on these promises.

jn1234 11y ago
They aren't in that bad of a position. They already have $8.3 million. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4SS http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4S... It's just a matter of growing the community and not pissing them off too much when they are able to successfully do so.
cgearhart 11y ago
From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Victoria didn't fit with that plan. The return of Huffman signals a shift back to the Cult of Growth, in the hopes that investors won't worry as much about monetization so long as the site is growing. One thing the board won't settle for is neither growth nor profitability.
- tvon 11y ago
  Not that I disagree, but it's worth mentioning (for anyone who doesn't frequent reddit) that firing Victoria was apparently Alexis Ohanian's decision, and not Pao's[1][2], which suggests that the pressure is coming from the board and not an endeavor specific to Pao. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3d6asv/former_reddit_ceo_alleges_cofounder_alexis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3d6asv/former_r... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0thing_says_he_was_responsible_for_the_change/ct1fsoi?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
  - smrtinsert 11y ago
    I find it extremely rare that the board is not involved directly in every hiring/firing for startups under some sort of business duress. Total tangent: I did not understand the outrage at reddit. The management clearly let her be thrown under the bus by the conspiracy wackos.
    - kedean 11y ago
      I don't know if reddit can still be called a startup. It's a decade old content aggregator business. That's like calling Facebook a startup in social media.
      - smrtinsert 11y ago
        I thought they were still not profitable, which makes me use the term startup. I could be wrong though.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. I see no problem with this. I purposely avoid recommending or even mentioning reddit to the people in my life because of all the horrible content on the site. I won't promote these subs, but there are many, many popular racist subs and subs that promote violence against women and, hell, one that is dedicated to showing photos of dead women who were attractive in life. There's a creeper sub that shows candid photos of women on the street that pathetically skirts the rules by pretending its about "fashion." My god, reddit is a mess. I can't ever imagine recommending advertising there. I can imagine videos games, e-cigs, energy drinks, etc advertising there as these things already have a lousy reputation, but reddit is not on the path of being this broad forum with lots of members with disposable income. Growth isn't impressive when its just more of the same, largely unprofitable, "manboy" demographic. This is why USENET lasted so long and was so prolific amongst techies. It never had to make a profit. You could trivially start new "communities", etc. Reddit is pretty much USENET as web, but the problem is, someone has to pay for all those servers and staff. No one is donating or proving access as part of your shell account like they did back in the USENET days. I find it questionable that such forums would ever be profitable. I suspect the next gen reddit will be something that has more in common with torrent-like tech than old school client-server web tech.
matt_s 11y ago
I would venture a guess too that the AMA platform may start having sponsored content or there was some element in the shake up regarding that and people not wanting to take money for AMA's. When you see celebs and other note worthy folks on there, they casually mention they have a new movie|book|thing coming out and they're there to AMA. But as a PR tool, AMA can only go so far. How many rounds of anonymous internet questions can someone field before the audience exhausts anything interesting?
- dimino 11y ago
  It's a free PR tool. Why shouldn't Reddit monetize it? Currently it costs the PR folks nothing to put them on Reddit, and gets them a decent chunk of exposure to a very-hard-to-advertise-to demographic. That being said, I have no idea how you convince someone to pay for an AMA, or how to monetize it in general.
  - matt_s 11y ago
    I don't disagree at all, but the AMA format is really a one and done for a single person. For example, there are some hilarious responses from Jose Canseco (US baseball player from 90's) - if he comes out with a new book or something - how will the community come up with questions to ask that will generate interest? Also the fact that the demographic is hard to advertise to leads me to think they may have the PR firms promoting movies, books, etc. pay for the AMA rather than try to rely on ads and people clicking. This may have been the contentious thing about people leaving.
    - dimino 11y ago
      Right? That's where I landed, but then realized that there's no enforceable way to do that. Have the moderators/an admin ban all the posts on AMA by people who... what, can pay? Make AMA pay-only to submit there? Nothing feels right for Reddit -- AMAs are such an offshoot of the platform anyway...
      - protomyth 11y ago
mwill 11y ago
Given the ongoing narrative of a push for growth, the sacking of Victoria Taylor seems like even more of a bungle to me. Last I heard the AMA mods are going it alone without admin support. The mods themselves previously said that the subreddit couldn't continue as it was without this support. Even if it somehow does, that leaves probably THE biggest growth tool at their disposal in the hand of unaffiliated volunteers. If it flounders or doesn't operate as smoothly as they need, whats the next step? Try and reintegrate into the mods workflow? Or worst case scenario, take over the subreddit entirely, which would be a massive change for the community in some ways, to have a major subreddit being run by employees. Both Ellen Pao and Bethanye Blount mentioned the demand of growth, I just can not see a way the fallout from Victoria can be managed from this point towards that goal. Seems like such a colossal mismanagement, unless AMA's aren't part of their strategy, or they're planning on really shaking up the user/mod/admin dynamic.
- embik 11y ago
  It feels like reddit management totally forgot AMA is not operated by them at all. That's worrying - They do not pay the content creators and moderators in any way (and that's fine as long as they can rule their communities), but if there is the possibility of profit, they just assume it belongs to them and not to anyone else. I cannot explain what happened (absolutely no communication with the AMA mods) but with that kind of attitude. They just screw themselves over with that IMHO.
  - smrtinsert 11y ago
    Most likely they thought a community member would pick it up. Of course they are aware that AMA is where the money is coming from, Pao used it as a monetization lead iirc.
seiji 11y ago
Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users. That's nonsense! Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everything here. If you take a community site (and Reddit is a community site, not a society site) and add people not in the same community mindset, you end up with twitter trending topic nonsense of six million middle school girls yelling for attention at boy bands. People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too. Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it. At the core, it's just an online message board. Those have limited TAM based on topic+culture of the entire site. If you want a billion users, you don't have Reddit, you have ReddTwitBook+. Source: used to work for a VC-funded niche online message board site that was unable to grow no matter what they tried. same pattern: promises of growth, no growth, management changes, promises of growth, no growth, etc.
- dimino 11y ago
  Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory). In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily moderated by a vetted and trusted team put in place by PG himself, for example -- how do you emulate that level of quality in a moderator group, and then multiply it by the 10k or so subreddits? Maybe there's a way to get a slightly lower quality moderator that scales better, or something. A Reddit user's "workflow" hasn't significantly changed in the past 8 or 9 years. Maybe that's the problem.
  - seiji 11y ago
    where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page. If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant) In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.

jn1234 11y ago

They aren't in that bad of a position. They already have $8.3 million. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4SS http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4S... It's just a matter of growing the community and not pissing them off too much when they are able to successfully do so.

cgearhart 11y ago

From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Victoria didn't fit with that plan. The return of Huffman signals a shift back to the Cult of Growth, in the hopes that investors won't worry as much about monetization so long as the site is growing. One thing the board won't settle for is neither growth nor profitability.

tvon 11y ago
Not that I disagree, but it's worth mentioning (for anyone who doesn't frequent reddit) that firing Victoria was apparently Alexis Ohanian's decision, and not Pao's[1][2], which suggests that the pressure is coming from the board and not an endeavor specific to Pao. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3d6asv/former_reddit_ceo_alleges_cofounder_alexis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3d6asv/former_r... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0thing_says_he_was_responsible_for_the_change/ct1fsoi?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  I find it extremely rare that the board is not involved directly in every hiring/firing for startups under some sort of business duress. Total tangent: I did not understand the outrage at reddit. The management clearly let her be thrown under the bus by the conspiracy wackos.
  - kedean 11y ago
    I don't know if reddit can still be called a startup. It's a decade old content aggregator business. That's like calling Facebook a startup in social media.
    - smrtinsert 11y ago
      I thought they were still not profitable, which makes me use the term startup. I could be wrong though.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. I see no problem with this. I purposely avoid recommending or even mentioning reddit to the people in my life because of all the horrible content on the site. I won't promote these subs, but there are many, many popular racist subs and subs that promote violence against women and, hell, one that is dedicated to showing photos of dead women who were attractive in life. There's a creeper sub that shows candid photos of women on the street that pathetically skirts the rules by pretending its about "fashion." My god, reddit is a mess. I can't ever imagine recommending advertising there. I can imagine videos games, e-cigs, energy drinks, etc advertising there as these things already have a lousy reputation, but reddit is not on the path of being this broad forum with lots of members with disposable income. Growth isn't impressive when its just more of the same, largely unprofitable, "manboy" demographic. This is why USENET lasted so long and was so prolific amongst techies. It never had to make a profit. You could trivially start new "communities", etc. Reddit is pretty much USENET as web, but the problem is, someone has to pay for all those servers and staff. No one is donating or proving access as part of your shell account like they did back in the USENET days. I find it questionable that such forums would ever be profitable. I suspect the next gen reddit will be something that has more in common with torrent-like tech than old school client-server web tech.

matt_s 11y ago

I would venture a guess too that the AMA platform may start having sponsored content or there was some element in the shake up regarding that and people not wanting to take money for AMA's. When you see celebs and other note worthy folks on there, they casually mention they have a new movie|book|thing coming out and they're there to AMA. But as a PR tool, AMA can only go so far. How many rounds of anonymous internet questions can someone field before the audience exhausts anything interesting?

dimino 11y ago
It's a free PR tool. Why shouldn't Reddit monetize it? Currently it costs the PR folks nothing to put them on Reddit, and gets them a decent chunk of exposure to a very-hard-to-advertise-to demographic. That being said, I have no idea how you convince someone to pay for an AMA, or how to monetize it in general.
- matt_s 11y ago
  I don't disagree at all, but the AMA format is really a one and done for a single person. For example, there are some hilarious responses from Jose Canseco (US baseball player from 90's) - if he comes out with a new book or something - how will the community come up with questions to ask that will generate interest? Also the fact that the demographic is hard to advertise to leads me to think they may have the PR firms promoting movies, books, etc. pay for the AMA rather than try to rely on ads and people clicking. This may have been the contentious thing about people leaving.
  - dimino 11y ago
    Right? That's where I landed, but then realized that there's no enforceable way to do that. Have the moderators/an admin ban all the posts on AMA by people who... what, can pay? Make AMA pay-only to submit there? Nothing feels right for Reddit -- AMAs are such an offshoot of the platform anyway...
    - protomyth 11y ago

mwill 11y ago

Given the ongoing narrative of a push for growth, the sacking of Victoria Taylor seems like even more of a bungle to me. Last I heard the AMA mods are going it alone without admin support. The mods themselves previously said that the subreddit couldn't continue as it was without this support. Even if it somehow does, that leaves probably THE biggest growth tool at their disposal in the hand of unaffiliated volunteers. If it flounders or doesn't operate as smoothly as they need, whats the next step? Try and reintegrate into the mods workflow? Or worst case scenario, take over the subreddit entirely, which would be a massive change for the community in some ways, to have a major subreddit being run by employees. Both Ellen Pao and Bethanye Blount mentioned the demand of growth, I just can not see a way the fallout from Victoria can be managed from this point towards that goal. Seems like such a colossal mismanagement, unless AMA's aren't part of their strategy, or they're planning on really shaking up the user/mod/admin dynamic.

embik 11y ago
It feels like reddit management totally forgot AMA is not operated by them at all. That's worrying - They do not pay the content creators and moderators in any way (and that's fine as long as they can rule their communities), but if there is the possibility of profit, they just assume it belongs to them and not to anyone else. I cannot explain what happened (absolutely no communication with the AMA mods) but with that kind of attitude. They just screw themselves over with that IMHO.
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  Most likely they thought a community member would pick it up. Of course they are aware that AMA is where the money is coming from, Pao used it as a monetization lead iirc.

seiji 11y ago

Someone said they want Reddit to have 1 billion users. That's nonsense! Just imagine if you wanted to drive HN into high-growth mode. It would kill everything here. If you take a community site (and Reddit is a community site, not a society site) and add people not in the same community mindset, you end up with twitter trending topic nonsense of six million middle school girls yelling for attention at boy bands. People use Reddit (and HN) to get away from the bulk of the world, not to have the bulk of the world join them on their private anonymous message boards too. Basically, Reddit can't massively grow without fundamentally changing it. At the core, it's just an online message board. Those have limited TAM based on topic+culture of the entire site. If you want a billion users, you don't have Reddit, you have ReddTwitBook+. Source: used to work for a VC-funded niche online message board site that was unable to grow no matter what they tried. same pattern: promises of growth, no growth, management changes, promises of growth, no growth, etc.

dimino 11y ago
Reddit is a community hosting site, according to some recent PR I read, so the idea is that, unlike HN or Twitter, you can create your own "Reddit", where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. HN could be on Reddit, for example (in theory). In fact, that might be a good exercise -- what tools would have to be added to Reddit to emulate the HN experience for any given subreddit? This place is fairly heavily moderated by a vetted and trusted team put in place by PG himself, for example -- how do you emulate that level of quality in a moderator group, and then multiply it by the 10k or so subreddits? Maybe there's a way to get a slightly lower quality moderator that scales better, or something. A Reddit user's "workflow" hasn't significantly changed in the past 8 or 9 years. Maybe that's the problem.
- seiji 11y ago
  where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page. If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant) In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.