Yea the CEO's response was tone deaf and not tactful at all.
However, it seems insane that people are complaining about this for the following reason:
1. Reddit is not profitable, it is literally bleeding money.
2. No Reddit = No 3P apps to access Reddit.
3. The discussion that should be had is whether it is sustainable for Reddit to keep running it's servers and whether the recent decisions are made in favor of additional growth or survival.
"Hiya.
It was a harsh response, I agree (there's actually more, but we're pulling our punches, if you can believe it), and in fact all day yesterday I didn't want to post a reply, hoping his AMA wouldn't get too much traction or he wouldn't spout too many misconceptions and we could all just continue going our separate ways.
Problem is, this was starting to really irritate a number of employees who'd worked with him, and he's the kind of guy who enjoys the attention he can get by saying "I used to be a reddit admin" even though he'll just post spurious stuff he doesn't know about, and left unchecked the positive attention encourages him to do it more.
In running reddit, there's an interesting balance between the normal standards of professionalism (which we try very hard to uphold even when someone is being unreasonable) and the fact that we're a huge internet forum where a higher degree of openness is expected. I'm actually really focused on building competent, professional management precisely because the spotlight is always on us - and also because I've been at other Silicon Valley companies where that hasn't always been the case - but it also means that because of that spotlight, any tiny deviation can be hugely magnified."
You’re asking why do CEOs speak out? Do q&as? Fireside chats? Of course they all speak corporate speak
Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked)
After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do
In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible
> This was a very public, major lapse in leadership judgment from the CEO.
And there may have been others. What bugs me about this whole discussion is that Reddit is not exactly a publicly traded company. If the CEO decides to quit and/or is fired then that's a company internal affair and their obligation to explain it to the world stops at 'nothing'. If both the CEO and a major investor take time out to give an explanation that apparently dove-tails why on earth would we not just believe them and move on. There is absolutely nothing to gain by trying to prove that he left because of some other reason because all the parties involved appear to be in agreement. If they weren't then that would be another matter (but it still would not be a productive discussion).
> whether Pao actually had anything (or everything) to do with it?
Reddit only has around 70 employees, I would find it extremely unlikely a CEO at a company of that size wouldn't have been aware or involved in the decision (if only to rubber stamp it).
There's criticism, and there's not knowing what you're talking about. Unless one has run an online community like Reddit before, it's more than likely that that individual is playing armchair CEO.
Assuming you're serious, I'm curious why you think Reddit's CEO shouldn't be chastised under that same category. Selling ads next to user-generated content, rent seeking with demands of extortionate API fees to serve that content, relying on unpaid volunteers to operate the site, proudly shipping terrible first-party UX, all while providing zero additional value sure doesn’t sound like a sustainable business. But maybe it’s the `hard hitting memo` obstinacy of a CEO that seems the biggest feature here?
The and the only reason the CEO is talking about this now is because it is the mods who are resisting his and Reddit management's awful behaviour.
The CEO et al I would say have no concern about this issue as such - or it would have come over years ago - they are concerned, and concerned now, only because it is getting in their way.
Reddit management to my eye has lost sight of the fact the Reddit exists because a very large number of people decided of their own free will to be there. The content generators do not belong to Reddit, nor is the content generated by Reddit. When large site owners come to imagine they own their site and can do what they like with it, as if the users belong to them, they can break their sites, because users leave - mySpace is the case in point.
It’s justified outrage. I’m assuming you think because reddit is a “silly” website that it’s okay for this kind of behavior. But it’s really not, because there’s a lot of serious discussion that takes place and the CEO doing something like calls into question the integrity of the content.
With reddit gold most of Reddit has no problem with Reddit making money if they do it the right way. But if it means censoring content and speech and changing the community interaction that is totally unacceptable.
I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.
I'm assuming the conditions currently occurring at Reddit would make any investor dissatisfied. Stemming from a mix of seemingly negative public opinion, seemingly rushed or short-sighted monetization strategies, and technical challenges.
Articles like this [1] seem to indicate tension between the board and leadership. I assume when any such tensions become public that they are larger in reality then they first appear, because normally such tensions remain private. Though in this case it may just be Wong's and Reddit's board's personality to be more open about such things.
It's pretty liberal for me to make these assumptions, granted. And I've made like a dozen comments on this thread mostly because:
A) my procrastination is terrible today and
B) I'm a rabid Reddit user and usually speak up whenever it comes up on Hacker News, I'm not be trying to gun down the company's throat I promise, just trying to engage in a critical discussion.
I would change extremely dissatisfied to dissatisfied though, but the edit option isn't appearing to me right now (time limit or "tree-weight" I guess).
That said, Reddit does look to be in a bad way. They're experiencing chronic and severe downtime, mainly as a result of technical debt - AWS can only take so much blame when firms like Netflix got through the outage fine. Even when AWS isn't undergoing major outages, "emergency read-only mode" has become rather too common.
When two members of a three-man developer team quit at roughly the same time, that's a warning sign.
Reddit looks to me to be in a similar situation to 4chan - a huge, highly influential user base that is actively hostile to monetisation. It looks to me like the best case scenario is that Nast is deliberately smothering Reddit - all the other explanations for their current problems bode much worse.
I don't know. When the employee publicly disparages the business, I feel like a swift and decisive rebuttal might be a good idea.
I'm not saying I definitely disagree with you, but I can't really see why what reddit's CEO did was bad. Risky, sure, but it strikes me as a justified and effective response.
I tried to contact Reddit administration once - no response. They probably either ignore uninteresting emails (read: any email except where people want to give them money) - or it was labeled as spam and went into the bitbucket.
After the latest reddit drama - this isn't surprising. When you fire someone who handles major publicity without telling anyone (I'm sure people knew and knew why - but didn't want to say anything) - there is definitely a communication problem in your company. And this is not a "sorry we will work for better communication in the future" issue - it's a problem where they need to identify the problem and fix it immediately.
Same, while it's blatantly clear that Reddit is trying to kill 3rd party apps, I don't get the sentiment that this is being misrepresented at all. The audio gives me a very strong "would be a shame if someone would stir up trouble, $10M can make it all disappear" vibe, just as how the CEO interpreted it.
The CEO is explicitly saying this change has to do with the ChatGPT's and such.
>But with artificial intelligence-powered large language models like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google's Bard, a massive corpus of conversations is being hoovered up. And in return, Reddit receives very little, he said.
However, it seems insane that people are complaining about this for the following reason:
1. Reddit is not profitable, it is literally bleeding money. 2. No Reddit = No 3P apps to access Reddit. 3. The discussion that should be had is whether it is sustainable for Reddit to keep running it's servers and whether the recent decisions are made in favor of additional growth or survival.
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