
“No, I'm the ex-CEO of Reddit because eventually there was too much bullshit.” - minimaxir
https://reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_accuracy_of_voat_regarding_reddit_srs_admins/d95a7q2
======
pjc50
You get the users you tolerate.

> "The reddit admins (of the time; it's mostly a different group now) really
> did not like SRS. In attempting to force the admins to take their side, they
> would dox them, send bad shit to their family members, etc. It was really
> bad. Despite this, the admins never cracked but they really hated them."

And somehow weren't banned for this? Futher down they say that they just want
to make the site better, but 90% of that is just about building tools to stop
(in order of importance) harrasment of users by other subreddits, fighting
within a subreddit and (c) poor topic discipline.

Eventually they learn from this:

"11/ ... bans ALL the problematic subreddits. F __* your free speech, this is
why we can 't have nice things.

12/ They've had peace so far, so I guess that was probably the right policy"

I'm old enough to remember when people ran unmoderated newsgroups and open
mail relays for free speech reasons. They either drowned in spam or were
gradually blocked by so much of the rest of the internet that their position
became untenable.

If you build a system that doesn't deal with spam, it gets drowned in spam. If
you build a system that doesn't deal with abuse, abuse becomes commonplace. If
you don't secure your IoT devices you get journalists DDoSed by lightbulbs.
It's the same kind of social responsibility.

What makes this problem worse in the mid-20-teens is that there are hate
groups organising off-board to cause these problems.

See the discussion of VR harrasment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777340)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, yeah. Some people handle freedom responsibly. Most... don't.

If you really want freedom, 4chan, glorious 4chan! Enjoy your cesspit.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
It's worth noting that 4chan is knee-deep in marketing shills and state-
sponsored trolls these days. Any open community that attracts enough of a
following becomes an object of interest to for those who want to accumulate
money and power.

Ever been on /pol/ these days? It's so much an echo chamber of sponsored
trolls and shills I'm surprised any genuine conversation can happen there at
all.

~~~
apozem
> marketing shills and state-sponsored trolls

Gonna need some hard evidence of that. 4chan can barely sell ads on the site,
not sure why anyone would bother marketing to them.

Frankly, 4chan is kind of irrelavant. A couple million weebs, racists and neo-
Nazis spread across the world is pretty irrelevant to state actors. No offense
to 4chan users, but no one cares what you think.

~~~
totony
I think you underestimate the demographics of 4chan

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Very much so: a surprising number of respectable people use 4chan: many HNers
show up there from time to time, IIRC, and it really was an intersection of
American and Japanese net cultures, with people taking code and ideas from
2chan, but the culture coming from the site's roots amongst the goons of SA,
and also from migrants coming from the usenet.

It's a pretty interesting site, in general, and fairly neat in some ways.

Unfortunately, the best part of 4chan was axed. What was the best part of
4chan? the text boards (aka world4ch): They were less crowded with awfulness,
and threads were immortal. It also played host to /prog/, the programmer's
chan, which is probably most famous for inventing the now-famous sleepsort
(the ancient HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277)).
Sadly, because threads were immortal, archives were rare, and sleepsort, along
with many other threads, has been lost to the mists of time.

------
Scirra_Tom
Sad how things went for Ellen Pao. The abuse she was subjected to was one of
the worst I've seen and I bet there was plenty bleeding off into other aspects
of her life other than her inbox.

I genuinely felt bad for her, I wouldn't of been able to handle it at all. It
was truly revolting and hateful.

~~~
BeetleB
The amount of witch-hunting that went on against her _with NO evidence
whatsoever_ really repulsed me.

This was probably one of the few times in my life where I defended the rights
on principle of someone who had no evidence against him/her, and actually
turned out to be right (sad reality, usually the accusations tend to be true).

While I can feel smug about it, that whole episode in Reddit's history pretty
much killed my respect for the Reddit community. Reddit used to be a place for
diverse opinions, and non-hivemindedness. Ellen Pao's skewering showed me that
those days are long in the past.

~~~
exstudent2
> actually turned out to be right

Ellen Pao not only lost her discrimination suit against KPCB but was deemed
liable by the court for KPCB's legal costs.

Reddit is laced with gender issues, someone filing a wrongful discrimination
suit isn't the correct leader for that site. The Reddit users weren't willing
to sweep that under the rug.

~~~
BeetleB
Ellen Pao had all those issues _prior_ to joining Reddit.

However, things only blew up when the moderator was fired, and it had _nothing
to do with gender issues_.

The fact is: Ellen did not fire the moderator, and all of Reddit went into
uproar insisting _with no evidence whatsoever_ that she was responsible.

I'm not saying Ellen was an angel, or even a good fit for the job. She had her
issues. However, all of that had _nothing_ to do with the criticism leveled
against her for firing the moderator.

The attack on her was a mob attack - no less.

~~~
exstudent2
> Ellen Pao had all those issues prior to joining Reddit.

Which made her a terrible choice for CEO of Reddit.

Things were blowing up before the firing of the mod. That was just the straw
that broke the camel's back.

There are a lot of communities on Reddit that focus on media coordination.
There was a _huge_ push from most tech media to be pro-Pao despite a total
lack of evidence to support her story. I see that as the main intersection
between her and the Reddit community. She was a Reddit story that became the
Reddit CEO then went on to make questionable decisions (mod firing, banning
salary negotiation...).

~~~
BeetleB
>She was a Reddit story that became the Reddit CEO then went on to make
questionable decisions (mod firing, banning salary negotiation...).

And here you repeat the false accusation against her.

As for salary negotiation, this was already in the works by her predecessor.
It wasn't her baby.

~~~
exstudent2
> It wasn't her baby.

The buck stops at the CEO for all decisions.

------
Goronmon
_People who are caught doing bad things tend to lie about it (they are already
people who are willing to break the rules, so lying isn 't such a stretch)._

Man, tell me about it. I was a moderator for the Vault Network message boards
back in the days when it was still around. It's hard to overstate how hard
some people will work to make people they disagree with look bad.

People would post super racists, hateful, gross comments and images to the
board, get a ban, and then try to go on an alt account and complain about the
moderator who banned them. The moderator would remove that post (discussing
mod actions was against the rules) and then that person (and others) would use
that as a reason that the mods were evil, biased people just trying to silence
disagreement. They would go so far as sending personal messages to individual
mods (both on and off the boards) who they assumed were responsible. The worst
attacks somehow usually made it to a mod that wasn't involved, usually a
woman.

It really gave me an appreciation for how hateful and deplorable some people
can get when they can remain anonymous.

~~~
M_Grey
At the end of the day, broken, obsessive people with no jobs and no lives will
always be more committed to their activities than the functional people who
monitor them. The only true solution is that a vast majority of people learn
to recognize them online, and ignore/avoid them. Anything else will eventually
be subverted or overrun.

~~~
Bartweiss
This is the best argument I've ever seen for hellbans. Yes, they're capricious
and unfair and opaque, but troll-hours so outweigh mod-hours that it's worth
considering any tool that helps create leverage for moderators.

~~~
M_Grey
I couldn't agree more, and I'd just emphasize that _no one_ likes hellbans,
including the people who have to impose them. On and offline, we always seem
engaged in some form of distasteful, yet necessary asymmetric conflict.

------
bshimmin
I hardly know anything about Reddit and had no idea what "SRS" meant. I
googled and found this page
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/yxvu9/an_explanat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsucks/comments/yxvu9/an_explanation_of_what_srs_is_and_why_they_are/)
which left me feeling _very_ content to leave the Reddit people to it. For all
the complaints I see about the relative toxicity of HN and its comments, it
seems vastly less insane than Reddit.

~~~
unethical_ban
My #1 advice for non-internet-addicts is to create a reddit account (no email
address required!) and remove every subreddit from your defaults. Then, add
back subs based on your interests. Maybe a default or two is acceptable, as
some are better moderated than others. But non-defaults tend to have much
friendlier, less insulting users.

(adding entropy for my identity here) but the minecraft, sailing, and
networking subs are good examples of midsize communities that are fun to be
in.

politics and the_donald and worldnews are examples of garbage. /r/politics
really is in the pocket of Hillary Clinton. I say that as a non-Trump voter...
the overt bias and suppression of anti-Clinton discussion is staggering.

~~~
ythl
/r/politics used to be extremely anti-Clinton not too long ago... instead
strongly favoring Sanders.

But yeah, you'll never see a single pro-conservative story on /r/politics

~~~
Yhippa
How on earth did the polarity flip on that one? Amazing.

~~~
mordocai
It didn't really. Sanders lost the nomination and a large chunk of his
supporters are supporting Clinton now as the "less bad" option.

------
my_ghola
> You know how the mods are always saying "you promised us this feature a year
> ago, and it's still not here!" You know why? Because the team was constantly
> drawn into having to police drama and blow-ups

> when actually, the admins would just like y'all to shut up so they can write
> some features to make the site better

Why did they have admins coding or coders admin'ing? Those should be different
people.

~~~
minimaxir
Admins in this case is slang for Reddit employees.

~~~
timjver
The point still stands. Coders shouldn't have to deal with that.

------
blakecallens
Just because most of what yishan says is probably true, that doesn't mean he's
not tactically omitting details.

For instance, you can go to any of the right-leaning or conspiracy related
subreddits and find posts where they show collusion between SRS and CTR.
Evidence that is completely undeniable, like mods of SRS and r/politics also
modding pro-Hillary or anti-Trump subreddits.

When one side says CTR has totally taken over the site, and the other says
they're not involved at all, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

~~~
debacle
/r/undelete has traditionally been very much about free speech. Unfortunately
due to the nature of the censorship on reddit, anyone who is for free speech
also appears to be conservative, fringe, etc. There seems to be no concept of
being anti-censorship in and of itself, from the vocal proponents of what
reddit has become.

~~~
grzm
> due to the nature of the censorship on reddit ... there seems to be no
> concept of being anti-censorship in and of itself

I have spent very little time on reddit, so I'm unfamiliar with what form
censorship takes there. That said, viewing Twitter and HN, I wonder if this
doesn't have more to do with people pulling tangential topics into
discussions. It takes effort to pare down an idea, separating it from others
that may be logically related or associated with some bundled collection of
ideas.

Also, while two people may share a belief, they may not rank the belief
equally among all of the others they hold. Alice and Bob may both think free
speech is important, but it's _really_ important to Alice. It's more likely
that Alice will want to talk about it than Bob. So perhaps people who end up
discussing free speech/anti-censorship issues also tend to share similar
rankings of other shared values. That could explain why people discussing free
speech tend tend to share other beliefs as well. They hold similar beliefs
_and_ similar belief rankings.

I have _nothing_ to back that up :) But it sounds reasonable. Anyone need a
research topic?

What do you think? Is there something more going on in reddit's case?

------
teach
I thought the link with added context[0] was better. (As originally seen on
/r/bestof/)

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_accuracy_of_voat_regarding_reddit_srs_admins/d95a7q2/?context=3)

~~~
arprocter
Which is amusing, considering bestof is often accused of being an upvote
brigade

------
depr
The spin on this is just great.

As others have said, new features have nothing to do with moderating. Note how
the company did nothing wrong. It is not their fault they can't shield
developers from user shitstorms.

"Alexis was supposed to announce it [..] but somehow that did not happen".
This is just casually glossed over. Somehow that did not happen? again, it is
the communities' fault for assuming the CEO fired someone, when they could've
easily been informed about who actually did it.

"FUCK your free speech, this is why we can't have nice things." yeah, or this
is why we can't have advertisers. If you want to have advertisers, you have to
ban the subreddits that make the site look bad.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ll9tc/it_looks_li...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4ll9tc/it_looks_like_reddit_wants_to_become_a_profitable/)

Isn't it convenient how they could (in a series of moves)

1\. Fire Victoria (for whatever reason)

2\. Make the impopular CEO take the blame to get rid of her and

3\. Hire a former founder as the new CEO (embraced by the community)

4\. Who drops a "Reddit, we need to talk" and gets rid of the shittier
subreddits

------
TallGuyShort
This is actually also a decent commentary on US political society right now.
e.g. both sides accusing the same outlets of being biased, immediately going
to radical / extremist points of view and advocating immediate, border-line
violent action against them. Nothing that the overwhelming majority of
reasonable human beings can look at and say, "yes, I really think this
represents me right now, one or both of you make some valid points."

edit: LMAO at the immediate downvoting that proved my point about not being
able to have reasonable discussions in media anymore.

------
qwertyuiop924
Reddit is the new Usenet: It's good, it's bad, it's ugly. It all depends on
where you look, and there is no single community, there's a fractal-like set
of them.

~~~
digi_owl
Big diff is that usenet was to a large extent decentralized and non-profit.
Reddit on the other hand is very much centralized and for profit.

~~~
exolymph
> Reddit on the other hand is very much centralized and for profit.

Although in a mind-bogglingly incompetent way. Their self-serve ad product is
so far behind even Twitter's offering (which is inferior to Facebook and
Google) that it's not even funny.

------
ninkendo
Why are the SW devs who are supposed to write new features also in charge of
managing complaints from mods?

Wouldn't the solution here be to dedicate engineers to ship the features that
are intended to decrease your support load?

That's basic management 101: be an umbrella.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
I think the role we're talking about is "Community manager"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager)
This shouldn't fall to Software Engineers to do, it's an entirely different
and far more people-centric skillset.

Maybe you would have engineers providing support to community managers for
tools and ad-hoc fixes "intended to decrease the support load" as you say, but
as second-line assistance, not doing the main body of work. You would think
that if anyone has the specialisation that comes at scale and could do this,
reddit does.

~~~
ninkendo
Right, it seems very odd that he cited that as the #1 reason they couldn't
ship new features to decrease their support load: because their support load
was too high. Why are the same people doing both?

~~~
deadbunny
Because Reddit makes very little money so devs get to joy of moderation as
well as development would be my guess. I'm sure that worked back when reddit
was a much smaller tech orientated site, not the beast it is today.

------
Yhippa
> 11/ Sam Altman managed to convince Steve Huffman to come back, which was an
> amazing Hail Mary pass. The new administration is like, okay, FUCK ALL THIS
> and bans ALL the problematic subreddits. FUCK your free speech, this is why
> we can't have nice things.

This is probably the right thing to do if you have investors to report to and
you want a site that caters to the middle 50% of the population. I guess users
will complain about their free speech rights being trampled. I have noticed
that reddit seems to have less drama since Steve came back. I don't know if
it's just being masked by the new algos though.

~~~
Scirra_Tom
Socially irresponsible to allow Subreddits such as "Fat People Hate" in my
opinion.

People have these views and they are free to express them, but creating a
community dedicated to it normalises that behaviour and helps breed further
hatred.

Under 18 age group seems to be large on Reddit as well [1]. Allowing
subreddits such as FPH is really unhealthy amongst the more impressionable.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1agz1o/ever_wonder_ab...](https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1agz1o/ever_wonder_about_the_ages_of_redditors_some_data/)

~~~
DavidHm
To play the devils advocate, where does this stop?

Do you deny them any sort of public space where they can communicate with each
other?

~~~
corysama
I have great respect for moot's statement that he created 4chan partly because
he thought "people need a place to be wrong". As in, people need a place to
experiment with ideas that are controversial or even downright stupid with
being afraid.

4chan and Something Awful provided that. I think it's healthy for the world to
have a few places cordoned off to be primordial slimepools/cesspits. But, I
wouldn't given anyone a hard time for trying very hard to _not_ be one of
those places.

For example, I think a big part of the continuing high signal/noise ratio at
HN is it's tradition of downvoting sarcasm, memes, jokes, fluff, "nice post!"
and other low-signal comments. As HN has grown, this has been slipping. But,
it us already lasted much longer than I expected.

~~~
scruple
If you subscribe to the notion of "containment boards" (I personally do) then
places like /b/, /pol/, and parts of SA, etc..., are absolutely essential
places for the Internet at-large to operate unhindered by their presence.

------
syntheticnature
Having been involved in running various communities with an online component
at various points, there's nothing in the post that surprises me. The biggest
difference is just reddit's scale, which just makes things go worse faster.

------
Herodotus38
Every once in a while I like to think about the evolution of sites like
forums, slashdot, digg, Reddit, HN, etc... And what could be done to improve
them, mainly from a technical rather than social aspect (such as the way
voting works, how 'good' vs 'bad' comments are rewarded). Aside from
r/theoryofreddit (which seems mostly focused on Reddit drama), are there other
communities that discuss the creation and improvement of social networks?

~~~
grzm
> mainly from a technical rather than social aspect (such as the way voting
> works, how 'good' vs 'bad' comments are rewarded)

I'm interested in that as well, though I tend to think the tech needs to serve
the social aspect. What kind of community you want determines what kind of
features (technical aspect) you want. The features in turn influence the
behavior of the users.

Is that what you're getting at? Glancing at /r/theoryofreddit I think it is.
Or is there something else?

~~~
Herodotus38
To clarify, I think I want to find a place where people discuss the pros/cons
of implementing features, hopefully in an objective way. Here are some ideas
I'm sure others have had before, but which I think would be interesting:

Could one take the model of Reddit and make it real time? Basically a large
chat room. There are of course huge problems that would have to be overcome,
such as how to prevent spamming (so maybe a cool down period after each
comment?), how to 'rank' up voted comments, and others I haven't thought
about.

The next step would be live voice, but I don't see a benefit with video.

Now this next part is completely niaive and idealistic and I'm ignoring all
the problems that will need to be solved but what if there were such an online
anonymous community able to discuss and debate things in real time? In such a
system perhaps the best 'ranked' idea (based on democratic vote, which may not
be the best way...) is displayed in brighter it larger text, or lasts longer
before disappearing.

So, you see I would love to hear from people who may have tried this or could
tell me "no, X doesn't work because then you get people taking advantage of
Y".

~~~
grzm
Gotcha.

Offhand I don't know of any forums or mailing lists that focus on these types
topics. One place to look for references might be at the development of chat
room or forum software, looking at features that have been
released/tweaked/removed over the course of their development; discussions on
HN about features (how meta is that?); papers/research on social behavior and
community building, peace studies, other social interaction. There's bound to
be some graduate-level work on online communities, moderation, echo chambers,
that might be useful as well.

I had a possibly related conversation yesterday where nickpsecurity provided
some ideas as well

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12776446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12776446)

Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but hopefully you'll find
something useful.

------
bhaumik
> 6a/ Incidentally, as a result of my experiences running reddit, I have a lot
> more respect for police, governors, and presidents - anyone who has to
> uphold a fair system in the face of multiple opposing sides, all of whom
> want the system to favor them because they are convinced they are "right."

This was particularly interesting. Massive communities like Reddit are a great
testing ground for policies around free speech.

------
vit05
I liked his other answer.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_accuracy_of_voat_regarding_reddit_srs_admins/d95aoft/)

It makes me wonder how big reddit could be internationally without major
changes. Reddit has over 40% of their traffic from the USA, probably 99% of
what is written is in English. The concept and the laws of free speech in
America is different from other countries. I do not know if there is a long-
term plan, with clearer and universal rules that could be easiest to
moderated.

------
makecheck
I can certainly understand wanting to pull the plug on some of the most
egregious forums/users/behaviors and restore sanity as quickly as possible. On
the other hand, it’s a good bet that most bans wouldn’t come with a lengthy
letter explaining exactly what caused the ban so it might just reinforce the
feeling of being suppressed unfairly.

If the affected users actually _are_ children (seems many of them are) then
you’re not teaching anything by taking everything away with no explanation. As
sad as this may be, in the modern age Reddit might be as much of an influence
on a child as a teacher, day care or other major non-parent authority figure,
and therefore what Reddit does “matters”. If Reddit’s primary response is to
kill things, kids will feel unheard and disrespected and react strongly. If
Reddit has a wide array of punishments and a very clear way to explain what a
user did wrong, I think it would be a greater investment in the future of the
forums.

------
api
I ran a small community many years ago. As soon as the personal attacks,
threats, and other juvenile behavior started I took it down. Done.

Reddit is a for profit media property, but banning subs where this stuff goes
on is indeed the correct action. Nobody is ever under any obligation to
support or sanction this kind of behavior with their money or time.

------
qwertyuiop924
By the way, has anybody seen the rationalwiki page for Reddit? Some of it's
accurate, and some of it is hilariously wrong: For example, they claimed the
now infamous "Reddit Revolt" was due to /r/FPH being banned, which just goes
to show how utterly out of touch they are.

~~~
makomk
RationalWiki are part of the same social justice crowd as SRS, so that's not
entirely surprising.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Really? They seem to hate SRS just as much as we do...

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm a bit confused that I just responded to another post of yours in this same
discussion that seemed to indicate you didn't know what SRS was?

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I read up on it.

And I also read RationalWiki claiming that they hate SRS, which is enough
information for this post.

------
losteverything
I love reddit because I connect with other co-workers in my 4000+ store chain.
Get scoops on new stuff and share thoughts too. Very civil.

What other sites exist that could do the same????

------
nailer
> 4a/ As part of those culture wars, some people do things that step over the
> line. Like actual brigading. It's like when you have impassioned protests,
> and 1% of the protesters on both sides decide they are going to burn a store
> or car.

This is applicable to nearly every online argument. You can find the media
bias when sites chose to focus entirely on one side and ignore documented
evidence of their own side engaging in the same behavior.

------
clifanatic
I'm sort of shocked he was that aware of what was going on. As a regular
reddit user at that time, I wasn't even sure he knew what reddit's domain name
was.

------
jansenv
This is entirely bullshit. This guy is still on the payroll and will say
anything to calm the community down / discredit people who think something is
up.

~~~
debacle
Yishan has been surprisingly and refreshingly candid, all things considered.
Cut him some slack - he has given us way more than he had to. It should be
appreciated.

