
Divorce, Reddit-Style - robg
http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/0s-1s-and-s/2009/11/18/divorce-reddit-style?page=full
======
pg
Actually as acquisitions go this was a pretty good one. Much better than
Yahoo's acquisition of Delicious, which basically destroyed it. Reddit
continued to grow after the acquisition. Steve and Alexis worked for CN for
several years, and as far as I know there was no bad blood when they left.
Maybe CN could be making more money from it (I have no idea how much they do
make), but I think they've learned a lot about how "social media" works, and
it always seemed that was their main goal.

If you boil this article down to the actual facts reported in it, it's nothing
more than: The founders of a startup bought by a big company eventually quit.
But that's the norm with acquisitions. It's ridiculous (or more precisely,
linkbait) to call it a "divorce."

~~~
robg
Linkbait? That seems overly harsh. Sure, it's a story of what happens. The
facts may be simple but the particulars are illustrative.

"Founders leave, Reddit style" - really, that's different in kind and not
degree?

~~~
qeorge
Linkbait is accurate. Your article's title and introduction imply drama which
by all accounts is non-existent. Reducing to the more accurate title you've
suggested above reveals this to be what it is: a non-story.

However, I had never heard about the Google offer. That's pretty cool.

~~~
robg
Either you learned nothing and so it's a non-story. Or you learning something
and so it's a story. Which is it?

I found enough interesting details (including the acquisition price which I
hadn't seen elsewhere) to make it a linkable story. Seems like a few folks
agree. And I simply don't get this meta-complaining, especially since:

 _Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to
its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there
is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that
you did._

Editors could have also changed the title here. Why have votes, flags, and
even editorial control if you're just going to clutter the comments with meta-
complaints?

~~~
pwmanagerdied
They're not saying it's just uninformative, they're saying is misleading.

------
icey
It's too bad that it turned out that way for Alexis and Steve. I love reddit,
and I think they did a great job building a great community. Sure, it's got
it's quirks, but I think that's half the fun of the site.

Years after it was created, it still has most of the original feel that it
used to - there's a little more 4chan these days, but proggit stays pretty
decent; and there's some interesting communities like IamA.

Either way, it will be interesting to see what those guys get up to next.

~~~
nearestneighbor
"Too bad"? If I had $10M+ I don't think I'd want to keep a regular job either.

~~~
icey
Certainly the acquisition was great for them, but I think it would have been a
different story if they'd gotten better support from Conde Nast.

------
nir
It was a great deal for Reddit, but what did Conde Nast get out of it?
Basically they get to foot the server bills for a community whose current #1
story is this:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild...](http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild..).

They certainly aren't making any income on Reddit, and I doubt comments like
this one:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild...](http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mildly_nsfw_of_the_day_award_goes_to/c0g132e)
help their brand much.

------
nailer
Sure, Reddit is successful at being Reddit, but not at what Conde wanted to
use it for: using social media to expand into other fields (as the article
says).

Look at Reddit, Digg, and HN. Then look at Cool Hunter, Perez Hilton, and
Sartorialist.

The minimalist style doesn't suit mainstream media who are highly visual folk.
Lipstick.com, created by Reddit for Conde, took advantage of the social
aspects of Reddit but was designed with a minimalist geek aesthetic. There was
no chance this would ever be successful.

Sugar Networks (who do PopSugar) would have been a much better acquisition for
Conde.

------
mkull
So can the cat come out of the bag yet? What was the real acquisition price of
reddit?

------
matthias
I thought this would play out this way:

1\. create white label styleable brandable badgeable reddit 2\. give it to the
web team of every conde nast publication to integrate with their site &
strategy 3\. vogue, gq, vanity fair and the like now have better websites with
their own reddit-like implementations on their own domains. reddit itself is
unscarred and gets traffic feeding back from these sites by cross populating
stories.

Not sure why they didn't do more of this as it was surely along the lines of
what they were initially talking about. On the plus side, they haven't made a
mess of reddit itself.

------
forkqueue
Interesting to note that the major motivation for them switching to the Amazon
'cloud' was to avoid procurement rather than the technical merits.

------
pwmanagerdied
If the author can't stand Reddit's interface...

 _Which is why it’s shocking that Reddit has hung on to its similarly retro
design, something that repeatedly stopped me from using it. It was only by
overcoming the interface that I grasped Reddit’s great user base and
functionality. (Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,”
which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable,
intuitive interfaces.)_

...I wonder what he'd think of Hacker News. I guess some people just _need_
clutter.

~~~
adw
Many people'd disagree with you about what clutter is, I suspect.

Take a site like <http://informationarchitects.jp/>. They're a firm who
specialise in news design: unsurprisingly, their site uses rigid typographic
hierarchy underpinned by a grid. It feels really uncluttered to me, but it's
clearly taken a lot of work to achieve that.

Then take Craigslist, which is the other extreme. There's no graphics at all,
but it's an _amazingly_ cluttered layout.

Both Reddit and Hacker News are nearer the Craigslist end of things than the
iA one. None are the acme of good web typography. That's fair enough - Reddit,
HN and Craigslist are all huge successes in their niches. However, the design
decisions (or choice not to make any design decisions) do affect the tone of a
place.

~~~
pwmanagerdied
Perhaps "clutter" wasn't the right word; maybe "crap" would have been a better
choice.

~~~
adw
Yeah, I get where you're coming from.

I think this is rooted in a false dichotomy (edit: in the original author's
post more than anywhere else), though. You could tidy up the typography of
Reddit and it'd look nicer, be easier to read, and be less visually noisy
without adding a single "Web 2.0" gewgaw. But it'd change the feel of the
place.

Incidentally, The Elements of Typographic Style
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style))
is an amazing book; I reckon a bunch of people here would love it.

