

Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit - pulakm
http://mashable.com/2014/12/03/history-of-reddit/

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jedberg
I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit
folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about
reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth
and accuracy.

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raldi
Yeah, my only gripe is his implication that Chris failed to pull off the punk
look.

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jedberg
My only gripe was that he didn't use any quotes from the two hours I spent on
the phone with him. :)

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throwaway444
Reading this, I'm struck by a few things that I believe are telling about the
tech sector's culture.

The paternalistic/maternalistic attitude of Paul and Jessica is more than a
little cloying. Frankly, it seems like they enjoyed the position of power
granted them by the cash in their wallets.

And second, the focus on dysfunctional behavior as an aberration instead of
the norm. See how the term 'dysfunction' is used to describe Yishan's
departure, Twitter's board, Reddit in general.

Things rarely go 'professionally' when humans are concerned; I'd argue, in
fact, that Yishan found a quite professional avenue to quit, in that it did
_not_ become a shouting match over a core issue.

I think it a mark of corporatism to adhere strongly to the facade of
professionalism and punish or otherwise shame those that prove it a lie.
Meanwhile, cultural leaders within the Valley pick favorites and call them
"Muffins" but are, presently, secure from social fallout.

There is an in crowd and an out crowd, in other words.

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omegaham
> The paternalistic/maternalistic attitude of Paul and Jessica is more than a
> little cloying. Frankly, it seems like they enjoyed the position of power
> granted them by the cash in their wallets.

In a setting where ideas change rapidly and companies start overnight, having
a hunch about people even through failure might be completely justified.
"You've produced garbage so far, but I'm confident that you'll make something
good" is much more reasonable in the startup world than it is in, say, large-
scale retail. The investment that PG makes in a prospect is really, really
low; if "Muffin" doesn't produce, it doesn't really matter to him.

If this paternalistic attitude didn't work, Y Combinator wouldn't be doing it.
To use a sports metaphor, they're drafting a football team rather than a
baseball team. Baseball players can be studied statistically because the
college game is similar enough to the professional game that you can study
prior data. In contrast, football is a crapshoot; the college game is so
different from the pro game that there's barely a correlation at all between
good college players and good pro players. So is choosing startups to fund.

If the Muffins end up making money, that's a great indication that PG &
Friends having an "in crowd" is producing results.

If they're incorrect, they're opening the door for a more rational company to
do the exact same job as them without Muffins and beat them.

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throwaway444
As far as I can tell your response is off topic.

I never said it didn't produce results, I said that it had cultural effects.

>If this paternalistic attitude didn't work, Y Combinator wouldn't be doing
it.

Your argument seems essentially "it exists, therefore it's fine." Minimal
competence also produces results. That doesn't mean the flaws of an approach
are mitigated or nonexistent.

My overall point has nothing whatsoever to do with results. What I'm saying is
something about ugliness and ugly people and how our culture treats them
despite the fact that we are _all_ ugly people.

Unfortunately for Paul and Jessica, they are in public view quite often; in
this article we get a glimpse of their ugliness. But they also consistently
accept the rewards given them because of this exposure. Good/bad for them,
depending on your viewpoint of that tradeoff.

I dwell on them because the disparity between how our culture punishes and
rewards 'professionalism' and lack thereof.

This is about the lie of professionalism. Perhaps you're saying
professionalism doesn't matter if, even during its absence, results can still
be had? I don't see how that counters anything I've said.

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par
I really enjoyed this in depth look at Reddit's history. I never realized what
an early member Aaron Swartz was, and found a lot of the Conde stuff pretty
revealing. The competition and eventual victory over Digg also has some nice
anecdotes to take away. And I'm impressed by this kind of journalism coming
from Mashable, it'd be nice to see more of this.

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joncp
I'm surprised that no mention was made of the big rewrite. A lot of us early
users were lisp/Graham followers and intrigued by the fact that the site was
written in lisp. I seem to recall the rewrite being a big deal.

~~~
keysersosa
I too remember it being pretty harrowing at the time (if only because it felt
like we were alienating [har] such a large chunk of our community), but in
fairness it happened barely 6 months in. It all happened in a couple of weeks
of quick work and I seem to recall we even recycled the db schema.

We did a post-acquisition python-to-python rewrite -- clean out the cobwebs,
switch frameworks, and redo the database schema -- which was _much_ harder,
longer, and more painful to deploy. Though in that case it was one of those
drastic changes whose primary side effect was that _no none notices a thing_.

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revscat
This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary
weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs. If
someone is able to do a Reddit-like site with a fair means for nominating and
electing moderators they will have a good chance at eclipsing Reddit's
success.

Reddit could also implement this themselves, and given the sometimes
questionable actions of some moderators (e.g. when all Tesla-related stories
were being banned from /r/technology ) this would help to legitimize the
nominal democratic nature of the site.

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billmalarky
Keep in mind giving mods power incentivises mods to build, grow, and.. well...
moderate their little corner of the internet on reddit's platform. You take
that power away and good luck keeping mods working hard for you for free.

~~~
revscat
That power would still be there, it would just be checked by the possibility
that they might one day lose it.

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kyledrake
This article really struck a chord with me. It reminds me of a lot of the
issues we've had running Neocities
([https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org)), which gives people free
space to make their own web sites.

When you operate an open platform on the modern web, the first thing you
quickly learn is that you will end up being embroiled in a lot of random
controversies you never expected to have a role in. We've had doxxing issues,
got caught in some "Gamergate-esque" drama, and even had a DDoS site (using
jQuery, pretty ingenious actually) put up that ended up taking down the
President of Mexico's web site (you can't make this stuff up). That little
stunt got me a few threatening emails from, literally, the Federales (Mexican
Federal Police). And of course, there's the usual litany list of pill spam
(arbitrage between other countries and US citizens who pay full price is,
somewhat hilariously, one of our biggest spam problems) and whatnot.

The biggest epiphany I've had over the course of the year is on the true
nature of "freedom of speech" on the internet. You start to learn very quickly
that not all speech is free or equal. It may be under the Constitution, but if
you're a startup and a multi-million dollar corporation or university (yes,
we've had issues with Universities too) shows up and has high-powered (and
bored) lawyers to waste your time and money harassing you, it doesn't matter
if their complaint is legally valid or not. Your last resort of defense
becomes public opinion. If you can't get public support for defending
someone's freedom of speech, it doesn't matter what the Constitution says. As
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "the boisterous sea of liberty is never without a
wave".

I'm not trying to sound dismal or depressed. Neocities has been exhausting at
times, but I'm having a lot of fun. I tend gravitate to stressful startups,
and (I blame this on my previous work in political activism) tend to prefer
them. Neocities overall has been going very strong, and it gives me a lot of
joy to check out the new sites every day and see people learning how to write
HTML. It's worth it. And I think, with knowledge and experience, the issues
are manageable.

Tying this back to Reddit: Controversies aside, I think Reddit has done a
great job over the last few years, and I want to congratulate them for the
growth, and salute them for weathering the "boisterous seas" of being a
tolerant, open platform. I don't know Yishan Wong personally and can't vouch
for him on a personal or operational level, but I feel that Reddit has done a
good job under his leadership, and I hope that people don't unfairly
pigeonhole him as a failed leader because of the difficult nature of their
work. In perfect honestly, having context for some of the issues they've had
to deal with, I may have done far worse in his position.

This article really makes me want to meet the Reddit team. I bet there's a lot
I could learn from them.

TLDR: Running an open platform is tough. Cut them some slack.

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comrh
I was hoping it would mention the growing problem of astroturfing and "viral"
marketing.

~~~
post_break
Post OC to reddit, get upvotes, create the OC and go to jail.

