
Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin - wasd
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/
======
blhack
It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now.

"The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now
(one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no
idea how to interface with it.

It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management
marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why
the users keep getting pissed off at them.

I know there are still people like kn0thing over there, but...what else is
going on? Is there anybody over there without a business degree? Because it
really doesn't feel like it.

~~~
forgottenpass
_It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management
marketing types or something, and now they just can 't seem to figure out why
the users keep getting pissed off at them._

I can't agree more, back in the jedberg/HueyPreist days the staff felt like
reddit users, now you get the feeling the office just looks at the community
as a magic box of unpaid labor. Anyone putting in real effort is better served
doing things under their own brand, the handful of people who put in effort
under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.

This has moved beyond a reaction to the firing, this is a huge vote of "no
confidence" towards the admins in general (see some of the more specific
gripes in the reddit threads covering it).

~~~
vonklaus
> basically everything you said

It isn't about the firing. It is about subverting posts, subverting
ideologies, deleting subs, limiting free speech in general and having an
ambiguous morality/decision making process that is impossible to trust. Hiring
Pao was so stupid. Leaving aside whether she was qualified, you can't lead a
team that doesn't respect or relate to you.

> this is a huge vote of "no confidence" towards the admins in general

I couldn't agree more

~~~
geofft
The same goes for Yishan Wong, who personally hired Ellen Pao, supports the
recent moderation actions[1], thought he wasn't qualified for the job[2], and
censored creepshots, right? The whole thing's been going downhill since 2012,
I guess?

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-
an...](http://www.quora.com/Reddit-Strengthens-Moderation-Spring-and-
Summer-2015/What-does-Yishan-Wong-think-of-Reddits-new-anti-harassment-
policy?share=1)

[2] [http://www.redditblog.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-
reporting-f...](http://www.redditblog.com/2012/03/new-reddit-ceo-reporting-
for-duty.html)

~~~
Malician
I think you're trying to make a sarcastic point here (unless I'm mistaken,)
but that's probably quite true as written.

Even /r/askscience supports this move [1]. It is one of the most heavily
moderated subreddits on the site, with professional staff. These aren't
rabblerousers, they are very hard-working volunteers who are fed up with the
administration.

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_messag...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3by2nk/a_message_to_our_users/)

~~~
geofft
The comment I replied to was trying to say that this _isn 't_ about the
firing, and is about the process of limiting free speech and restricting subs
in a non-transparent manner. I see none of that in the /r/askscience post.

It seems to me that there are two major, unrelated tensions in Reddit at the
moment:

1\. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including speech
that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and past) don't
think that's what Reddit should be.

2\. The Reddit admins have a poorly structured relationship with the volunteer
mods of their largest subreddits. IAmA's full-time paid staff member was the
biggest evidence of this poor structure, but it has never worked well. [Even
if AskScience's mods are professional _scientists_ , they're still volunteer
_AskScience mods_.]

The first tension is between the Reddit admins and a few non-default, somewhat
small subreddits (some of which have been banned in the last few years); the
second is between the Reddit admins and the large, mostly default subreddits.
In both cases, people are fed up with the admins, and in both cases, this may
have been going on for years, but they are fundamentally unrelated complaints.
You can believe that the admins are doing fine on one while believing they're
doing an awful job on the other.

By and large, the people who complain about Ellen Pao's leadership are
complaining about tension 1. Tension 2 is organizational debt that Ellen Pao
clearly inherited, and while the buck now stops with her to fix it, nobody
thinks it's a problem of her making. People unhappy about tension 1
(including, potentially, mods of smaller non-default questionable subreddits)
may use today's tension-2 event to vent anger at the admins, but that doesn't
mean there's only a single complaint about the admins.

I'd also argue that if tension 1 were really a _problem_ (i.e., Reddit staff
were wrong), Reddit would be obviously going downhill, while tension 2 can
fester as organizational debt for years before exploding, if everyone is well-
intentioned.

(My personal view, if it didn't come through, is that the admins are in the
right on tension 1 and if anything aren't aggressive enough, but have been
doing a bad job of resolving tension 2 for years.)

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> 1\. Certain people want Reddit to be a haven for free speech, including
> speech that coordinates abusive actions. The Reddit admins (current and
> past) don't think that's what Reddit should be.

That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I
suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's
so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the
site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same
exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They
said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH
had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I
think both sections of the site are vile, but I _vastly_ prefer a uniform
standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the
moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about
____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.

I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty,
and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's
removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the
way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make
Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched
in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).

Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao
has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer-
term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes
make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after
six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say,
the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right
about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread
and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice
about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a _huge_
surprise to a lot of people.

Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden
firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers
of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those
whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to
the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an
administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for
moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit,
Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the
site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient
and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to
put that, and I'm stealing it.

~~~
DanBC
People keep saying that FPH was not engaged in harassment and abuse that
spread outside that group, and outside reddit.

But it clearly was. Reddit should just release some of the brigading details -
and that has always been something that can cause your sub to be closed and
your account to be shaddow-banned.

I do not understand how you can use the existance of vile groups as evidence
of Reddit squashing free speech - doesn't the fact that those vile groups
didn't get closed (unless they brigaded) evidence that Reddit allows free
speech as far as possible.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> But it clearly was.

That's the problem. It's not clear. There's a lot of unanswered questions
there: how does off-site activity on Tumblr and other sites get linked back to
specific people and the overall thrust of a subreddit? How do you even _solve_
that problem in general?

I have personally observed chan (not 4chan) threads involving skimming certain
subreddits and finding targets to harass without even having Reddit accounts.
We've long observed 4chan/goon "Redditors" in YouTube comment threads. I'm
with you on releasing how they got there, and I think it would provide a lot
of clarity.

One last thing, I have to correct you: I never said Reddit was squashing free
speech. I wish they'd pick a consistent value on it, that's all, and I pointed
out specific things said in the press about free speech. I'm less concerned
about FPH than I am about something like /r/jailbait, which got removed
because it became the squeaky wheel due to CNN attention. There are worse
subreddits regarding sexualization of children, and Reddit fails to uphold its
own standard there, which negates the standard itself. _That 's_ my problem.

~~~
DanBC
Reddit does have a consistant position:

1) don't brigade.

2) don't dox

3) mods can mod what they like; the commonly agreed best subs use extensive
vigorous modding

4) admins aren't going to get involved unless you break the tiny number of
rules.

Reddit should release the graphs that subs have of visitors. A FPH brigade
causes 10,000 extra visitors, thousands of extra votes, and hundreds of
comments. In smaller subs this is very destructive. That is very clearly
reddit activity that can be tied to FPH posts and FPH subscribers.

And if Reddit did apply their rules consistantly it would result in a lot more
subs being closed - the pro-self harm subs, the pro eating disorder subs, and
the pro suicide groups are clear contenders for banning. (To be fair the
suicide groups do get banned. I think they've worked out an equilibrium of
being as pro suicide as they can without getting banned).

(I didn't downvote your posts. I don't think they deserve the downvotes.)

~~~
lagadu
Brigading is not against reddit's rules[0], despite semi-popular belief. Some
big subs actually encourage it by not allowing np (non-participation) links to
be posted on their sub[1].

[0][https://www.reddit.com/rules/](https://www.reddit.com/rules/)
[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/39nwjh/meta_submitting_np_links_to_srs_is_now_banned/)

~~~
DanBC
Brigading, on the scale FPH did it, falls under vote manipulation and don't
break the site.

EDIT: Subs encourage use of non-participation links because for ages Reddit
has banned subs that brigade.

~~~
Tomte
Excuse me, but what is "brigading", actually?

Until now I assumed it was gathering lots of users to harass people IRL or on
other web sites, but I guess I'm mistaken?

~~~
DanBC
In Reddit context:

/r/ThisSubReddit exists. There's a post in /r/ThisSubReddit that someone
doesn't like. They post a link to that post to /r/OtherSubReddit, sometimes
with commentary (eg, "look at this idiot!")

That causes a bunch of people from /r/OtherSubReddit to visit
/r/ThisSubReddit. That's okay, unless they start voting; or insulting; or
harassing users.

The voting is not okay because often the brigading sub is much larger than the
sub being brigaded. (FPH had 150,000 subscribed users) People generally agree
that the heavily modded subs are better. Brigading makes it really hard for
mods to do any modding. (If just 1% of FPH subs decide to vote that's 1,500
people. If your sub is only 800 subscribers you're going to get crushed by
FPH.)

The harassment is not okay because, well, fuck those people who think it's
okay to visit a self-harm support sub and tell people to kill themselves.

That kind of brigading has been risky for subs for a while now; plenty of subs
got warned, temp banned, or permanently banned for this.

fatpeoplehate was warned multiple times about brigading. But the problem with
FPH was not just on-Reddit brigading. They took it to facebook, youtube, a
bunch of other websites. They also, if the admins are to be believed, took it
AFK to people's IRL work / school / homes.

------
Smerity
One of the most telling points is from /u/imakuram, moderator for /r/books:

"This seems to be a seriously stupid decision. We have several AMAs upcoming
in /r/books and have no idea how to contact the authors."[1]

They really shot the communities in the foot by not giving them any notice or
support. Given that the key feature in ensuring the quality of Reddit is the
moderation "donated" by the community, this is a deeply dangerous move,
especially as many of the moderators are already irritated.

If Reddit forcibly take control of the subreddits, I'd be surprised if we
didn't see a Reddit civil war.

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csq5v3u)

~~~
minimaxir
Alexis is not helping matters either:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d?context=3)

~~~
officialjunk
i see people talking about alexis, but don't see a user named alexis posting
in this thread. i assume alexis uses a handle other than his/her name?

~~~
mikeyouse
Alexis Ohanian is one of the cofounders of Reddit who had left and has since
returned as Executive Chair, he's also a current partner at YC, and goes by
the username kn0thing on Reddit & HN.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexis-
ohanian](https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexis-ohanian)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kn0thing](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kn0thing)

~~~
go1dfish
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBk4jMLZ5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPBk4jMLZ5o)

kn0thing is a play on Alexis' favorite Metallica song....

"King Nothing"

------
chernevik
Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most
upvoted questions were simply disrespectful. The Reverend's answers were
mostly boilerplate and often unresponsive to the question. The AMA seems to
have been part of some PR rollout -- Mother Jones had an article three days
ago about Jackson taking on Silicon Valley. The event seems to have failed the
rollout's objectives.

Not a great moment for anyone: The AMA didn't always feature the Reddit
community at its best, but the Reverend didn't show at all well under the
spotlight of Radical Transparency.

Given all that, the timing and speed of the admin's firing hardly seems
coincidental. Reddit seems to have blown up a number of ongoing events, and
upset an important chunk of its community, which hardly suggests that her
firing relates to some long-term issue.

I can see why Reddit might feel the event wasn't handled well.

But it is also very plausible that Jackson and his camp were deeply
embarrassed, and insisted that someone be punished for that. So plausible, in
fact, that I think Reddit really should give some account that demonstrates
that this is _not_ what happened -- or admit that it did.

It is very surprising that this whole thing hasn't gotten more coverage in the
tech press.

~~~
nadams
> Jesse Jackson had an AMA that did not go very well. Several of the most
> upvoted questions were simply disrespectful.

I think anyone could have seen that coming. Anonymous accounts with community
voting and an API to boot? This is only asking for trouble - especially if the
AMA was done by an individual who wasn't familiar with the personality of the
community or internet etiquette in general. Assuming every other AMA was
respectful/successful - they were just playing a game of russian roulette.

I'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit - don't get wrong I
love the idea of an exchange of comments between the common person and famous
people but I certainly wouldn't want to do it on an anonymous posting site.

Edit: To the downvoters - I should point out that assuming that reddit has
automated systems in place to detect fraudulent voting - someone with a botnet
could easily defeat it. It's easy to detect when the same guy is upvotting
posts from the same IP or same block of IPs - how do you detect that when the
voting are coming from all over the world? It doesn't even have to be a botnet
- how do you know that the android/ios game you just downloaded isn't making
web service calls in the background to a site like reddit? If I was a bad guy
- I would definitely outsource development of some useful app or game and
embed my upvoting code into that once it becomes popular.

~~~
bentcorner
> _I 'm surprised that celebrities even want to go on reddit_

Some celebrities seem to be thriving on reddit. I've seen Arnold Schwarzneggar
engage users on /r/fitness, and he has posted several videos (that tank one
was one I saw recently) along with doing PR for his Terminator movie.

Whoever is helping him along seems to be doing a great job.

~~~
cowsandmilk
I would link to his reply a few days ago on /r/movies to someone seeing
Terminator Genisys with their father, but the subreddit has gone dark.

He got reddit gold, had a perfect response, and added a handwritten note (an
effective way of showing that he was involved, not just his publicist).

He has the team in place to be notified of these things and hit it out of the
park.

------
btown
The admin in question, Victoria (/u/chooter), is still posting, and gives
every indication that it was not an expected nor voluntary departure:
[https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter](https://www.reddit.com/user/chooter)

/u/karmanaut, one of the most prolific moderators, gave some insight into why
this is such a big deal:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has_riama_been_set_to_private/csq204d)

> We had a number of AMAs scheduled for today that Victoria was supposed to
> help with, and they are all left absolutely high and dry (hence taking IAMA
> private to figure out the situation) She was still willing to help them
> today (before the sub was shut down, of course) even without being paid or
> required to do so. Just a sign of how much she is committed to what she
> does.

> The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof,
> of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to
> the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where
> agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut
> that [...] down immediately. We can't do that anymore. Part of it is also
> that Victoria is an essential lifeline of communication. When something goes
> wrong in an AMA, we can call and get it fixed immediately. Otherwise, we
> have to resort to desperately try messaging the person via Reddit (and they
> may not know to check their messages or even to look for these
> notifications).

In fact, it seems that they actually _cut off_ active IAmAs in progress.
[https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745](https://twitter.com/edfrenkel/status/616653911835807745)

If there's anything to be learned here for the larger technology crowd, it's
this: There are human single-points-of-failure just like there are in
hardware. And if you can't avoid having a SPOF, _don 't kick it in the face
out of nowhere and expect the world to continue chugging along like nothing
happened._

~~~
wonderthrowaway
> Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting
> right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had
> situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client,
> and Victoria shut that [...] down immediately.

Righteous firing or not, a lot of this is a lesson in avoiding a SPOF.

~~~
mtdono
From a systems dynamics point-of-view, single points of failure are
problematic.

However, in human dynamics and the foundation of all leadership (and thus
creating genuine followership), it requires a single point of accountability.

Leaders of any community are accountable to their followers. Leaders have to
realize that the community and the purpose are always more important than
them.

I think the reason why u/chooter was considered a leader (or top-notch liason
between admins and mods) was because of her commitment to the quality of the
AMA.

I think the reason why u/chooter is adored by readers was for the same reason,
though typically expressed by her inate ability to capture the AMA guests
voices, mannerisms, etc. She was being 100% accountable to the community and
the purpose that she was serving.

This is a thing to be admired, encouraged, and emulated. Not scorned or spoken
of in terms of an acronym.

I'm not picking a thread fight, as I think your perspective is very important
within hardware networks and/or very relevant in process management, it's
quite inaccurate when describing the human dynamics involved with building a
community.

~~~
Crito
Given the bizarre nature of Jackson's comments in that AMA, I somewhat suspect
that Victoria fucked up by writing down what Jackson was saying over the phone
_verbatim_.

Doing that is _usually_ a good way to make somebody seem rather illiterate.
For example, people are much looser with the way they structure sentences and
organize thoughts when speaking in an unprepared manner.

When you listen to audio of them talking, everything seems normal because we
have different expectations for written English and spoken English. When you
don't get to listen to the audio but only read a transcript, then you start to
get problems because then you have written English that only meets a spoken
English standard.

~~~
mtdono
The JJ angle has already been removed as the reason for dismissal. (Besides,
Victoria is known, adored for actually being able to type down what the person
doing the AMA sounds like --see Jeff Glodblum AMA).

See here:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png)

I suspect that this had much more to do with the one thing that a management
team is more interested in: money.

\- AMAs are (or were?) probably one of the most visited subs on Reddit \- AMAs
readers are often on pages for hours \- AMAs are on reddit-domained pages, so
the "real estate" is valuable and "in-house"

If there was a management idea to "tweak" the AMAs to monetize it and Victoria
thought it would not be true to the community, and spoke up, it would be easy
to see why they would sack her.

This is much more likely to be the cause than capturing the typing down an AMA
guest comments in the cadence they have been provided.

~~~
Crito
Pao _seems to_ directly refute Marc's claims:
[https://i.imgur.com/0LZWrFp.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0LZWrFp.jpg)

It's not impossible that she is lying, but I think it is quite plausible that
Marc's contact is not as authoritative as Marc seems to think. He is probably
just repeating that person's speculation.

I'd also like to point out that if they fired Victoria for embarrassing
Jackson, admitting that this was the case would be counterproductive because
it would make a mob of angry redditors [even more] angry at Jackson.

------
unfunco
I'm really not trying to troll here.

Reddit started going badly downhill (where it was a visible and _public_
departure from what it was previously) from around the time that Sam Altman
personally invested in the company nine months ago, an announcement that
almost ruptured my cringe-pipes. I laughed internally at the notion that he
thinks he's altruistic by giving 10% back to the users, whilst in the same
announcement he mentions reddit reaching a billion users.

So, Sam was boasting that of his shares he owns 90%, whilst each of the
"shareholders" (a reddit user) has 0.0000000001% – and that's exactly what I
expect from investors.

Then Yishan Wong resigns, it felt more like a pushing, one month after Sam
invests, and is replaced by Pao; who has a history of going after previous
employers because she's angry that she's a woman. Nobody has the nerve to fire
Pao because they're afraid of being called sexist.

This is Silicon Valley at it's most entertaining.

~~~
revelation
It's like Reddit is this persistent YC nightmare that he feels he needs to
"right the history" on it and somehow make it successful.

And they're just massively failing at every step. Out of touch, out of clue.
Reddit the company is at this point completely removed from the actual site.
They went back into startup mode but you would never know it looking at the
site. No new features, same old shitty reliability, nothing.

~~~
beedogs
If anything, the site has gotten markedly _worse_ from a reliability
standpoint in recent months.

------
HappyTypist
Marc Bodnick commented on why Victoria was fired:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png)

I consider him to be a reputable source and the claims are very plausible. Out
of touch management never know _how_ out of touch they are.

~~~
bgilroy26
This s the best information we have so far, but it's confusing. There have
been a bunch of video IAMAs before

~~~
celticninja
Video AMAs are easier to sanitise. They ask for questions then give the 10
most upvoted to the guys to provide a video response. Of course the 10 most
upvoted may not be easy softball questions so they can remove these and the
guest never knows about them. Right now the guest knows the questions but can
refuse to answer them but then it is apparent they are ignoring difficult
questions. With a video AMA they get to distance themselves considerably from
anything out of their comfort zone.

------
minimaxir
More Context into the events that possibly led to the layoff:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/)

Alexis Ohanian's response:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bw39q/why_has_riama_been_set_to_private/csq6ekp)

List of subreddits suddenly going private:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bxjyu/list_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bxjyu/list_of_subreddits_suddenly_going_private/)

~~~
stefantalpalaru
> Due to an unexpected Reddit administrative personnel change /r/science is
> temporarily private so that we can resolve the situation, our apologizes for
> any disruption this may cause.

The doublespeak is weird. If it's a protest, say so. There's no direct
relation between the employee getting fired and a subreddit that is not
focused on celebrity PR going dark.

~~~
delroth
You've picked the wrong example here though. /r/science has hosted many AMAs
in the past, so they are directly impacted.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Did I? Can't /r/science keep on functioning without AMAs through an
intermediary in New York that's supposed to read questions and type answers
for the supposedly smart scientists doing those Q&A sessions?

~~~
jasonlotito
> Can't /r/science keep on functioning

Clearly the people best suited to answer this question do not think they will
be able to do what they have been doing.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Clearly that can't be true. That subreddit is still valuable without AMAs. The
people in charge just can't bring themselves to be honest with their users.
Look at the re-opening announcement and spot the blatant lies and half-truths:

> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency
> we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following
> consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity
> of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been
> crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent
> changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several
> AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to
> enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on
> resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing,
> we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the
> inconvenience to the community.

> The comments in this thread will be locked.

They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked
the comments. Father knows best.

~~~
unprepare
dealing with rescheduling all future AMAs can suck up a lot of volunteer
moderator time. Time that would otherwise have to be spent moderating the sub.

So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a
reason to shut down the sub temporarily

------
bobbles
People don't give a shit about 'reddit' as a thing, what they care about is
the content people submit and the subreddits that foster the communities.

They seem to be going through their own Digg v4 moment here, completely
disregarding users because they think they're big enough to survive without
them.

~~~
emdi81
Felt I should share this. There are a number of really good _established_
alternatives with great mods and admins for those who wish to branch out and
check out something new:

www.snapzu.com - Excellent content and friendly community. Has a unique
XP/Leveling system and ability to post content into multiple subs.

www.empeopled.com - Gives you more influence based on the amount of up-votes
you've received. Use influence to steer future of the site.

www.theneeds.com - Good content but a lot of it looks automated, possibly
using bots. No discussion so you lose a lot of that community feel.

www.hubski.com - Classic alternative, been kicking it around for 4-5 years,
but still little activity. Community is small but nice.

www.spreadit.it - A dark themed reddit alternative that is similar to reddit
and easy to use. Content and community is lacking however.

Note: I didn't mention the voat boat because I felt they have a little too
much hate/racism on there.

~~~
coolnow
Reddit still has those subs about beating women and lynching black people,
right? Get over yourself, voat is better than every single example you listed.

~~~
omni
I have yet to even see what Voat looks like because every time there's a
Reddit event and someone mentions it, Voat is completely unresponsive.

~~~
pests
Voat runs a modified version of the reddit open source code.

~~~
thaw12
Wait, I thought it ran on a completely different codebase? It's hung from an
ASP.NET framework running on an IIS server.

[https://github.com/voat/voat](https://github.com/voat/voat)

~~~
pixl97
Trying to grow a site to Reddits size on IIS? That won't end well.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I think stackexchange are still running on IIS so it's probably close to
doable - although I imagine they have some seriously smart people and
resources way beyond what Voat will in the near future.

That said, does Azure play nicely with IIS? I bet it's expensive but can you
scale that way maybe?

~~~
davidgerard
It's possible to scale, but you have to think about scaling ahead of time.
Voat actually didn't and are now scrambling.

------
pdkl95
"You'll get over it"

Many HN readers should recognize that as the words a certain admin of
fark.com.

For those that don't recognize it, the short version of the story was the
admins had developed a new front-end to Fark, but they didn't make a general
announcement an update was going to happen. The just deployed it one
morning... and left for a convention. When the change was discovered a little
while later... well... lets just say it was not a popular change[1]. More
importantly, nobody know what was going on, making emotions run even higher
due to the lack of communication from the admins.

So after being left to stew for 4+ hours - and over 10k posts from confused
and angry users - an admin does the absolutly worst thing possible, and made a
single post with those four words: "You'll get over it". There were three main
reactions to this. Many of us closed the browser and went back to work or
otherwise avoided the drama. Maybe 10-15% of users spent the next day flaming
the admins at about 10k posts/hour. Finally, about 1/3 close their accounts
and left, permanently.

I suspect reddit is in the middle of a similar situation right now.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that the Fark story doesn't really end
there. Years later, Fark admin Joe Peacock gave one of the more important
talks[3] (at NOTACON 8) I've ever seen, about what exactly went wrong, and the
bad decisions that made a catastrophe inevitable. Joe discusses what may be
the most important lesson for anyone managing a place where users choose to
spend their free time: if you don't _involve_ your user in the decisions and
changes that affect them, they wil simply find another place to hang out.

[1] which some of us still[2] partially-revert:
[https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme-
un-v3-0-relea...](https://userstyles.org/styles/60176/fark-theme-
un-v3-0-release)

[2] when I remember; apparently haven't posted last year's fixes _sigh_

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI)
(in typical fark style, a few of the talk's slides may be borderline NSFW)

TL;DR - just watch [3], where a fark.com admin gives some *very good advice on
how to interact with your users.

~~~
HappyTypist
This is a great talk for anyone managing communities. Reddit's current
situation does bear many resemblances, especially with kn0thing's "Thank you
for the feedback. I hope you change your mind about reddit, but if not, you're
entitled to your opinion." response.

~~~
simonswords82
That statement from kn0thing made me think "pride does indeed come before a
fall". Let's see!

------
Uhhrrr
This is just amazingly tone-deaf on Reddit's part. I don't even read IAMA
regularly and I knew Victoria was well-liked. What is Ellen Pao paying
attention to if not their highest-profile subreddit? Did she have no
transitional plan?

~~~
vonklaus
> This is just amazingly tone-deaf on Reddit's part.

They do not think like a business. They are a storage mechanism for other
peoples content which their users generously provide for them to index. They
don't make content, they don't generate revenue, they are stuck in a web2.0
model being valued on a per user basis. Reddit probably can't recover as
community, but almost certainly not as a business.

> What is Ellen Pao paying attention to

Ideally the calls for her resignation, but it is to little to late probably.

~~~
codezero
I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as
evaluators and filters for others' content. The thing is, almost anyone can
evaluate content for basic human emotional or intellectual value. The
community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to replicate
in a way that achieves critical mass.

~~~
vonklaus
> I'd go further and say their users don't provide content, but instead act as
> evaluators and filters for others' content.

my post was a bit unclear, i meant they literally provide it to the site by
finding it and posting it. They act as the first tier of the filtering
mechanism(votes being secondary).

> The community built up around shared interest and that is itself hard to
> replicate in a way that achieves critical mass.

reddit itself, and many other companies/communities are caught in the trap of
placating a vocal minority and exercising to broad of a control on the
culture. The Y-Combinator ethos is basically this. Make something that enough
people love, rather than a lot of people really like.

This revolt is backlash against changing a well-ingrained culture to try an
please discrete sub-groups. Whether these sub-groups are "right" or "wrong"
was largely a question of the communities sentiment expressed in posts and
votes. When reddit altered the culture here they lost critical mass.

It is happening on 4chan right now as well with people moving to various
cloned image boards. Reddit needs it's users a lot more than users need
reddit, so we will see what will happen. I am short on reddit and bullish on
community choice though.

~~~
codezero
I basically agree with everything you've said here, so when I pose this
question, just consider it food for thought:

Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority? Indeed, they are the ones
exercising a great deal of control over reddit and its community.

Critical mass is pretty ambiguous. Is it defined by people who run subreddits,
people who visit them, people who vote on them, people who buy reddit gold?

I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with
basically a small handful of moderators. It was possible because it was very
hands off.

Even though reddit has a very open philosophy, moderators of subreddits are
anything but hands off.

~~~
vonklaus
> Aren't reddit moderators the vocal minority?

sort of, they def have power within their own space and can bargain
collectively. People hate Pao for many reasons. She is changing the culture
(not single handedly) but with special interests. There are social
justice/politically correct views being handed down from the company thus
removing certain subreddits and restricting topics. Various other interests
like moderators and users oppose these changes. That is what I meant about
special interest. Many communities within reddit are hostile to one another
and have sort of been playing a proxy war. Although, gun to my head, i think
many of the people that would happily trade insults with one another, have
slowed for now to unite against Pao/Corporate Reddit.

> critical mass is pretty ambiguous.

yeah i was qouting another poster. I think it is just enough people to
generate quality content and discussion and cycle through enough depth to not
let everything go stale.

> I am still amazed that 4chan, with its insane volume, went so long with
> basically a small handful of moderators.

4chan had a coup d'état of sorts recently where many moderators and janitors
were purged from the board. Moderation became much more strict and many were
part of the social justice movement. They banned threads such as #gamegate
briefly and some of the culture of the boards changed.

Also people are spreading to 8chan, wizchan, krautchan and irc further
sharding out the culture that created many of the things that we regard as
"internet culture"

------
kzhahou
Ellen Pao has zero trust from the community.

A lot of people said this was because Pao is a woman and reddit is sexist. But
then explain this reaction to Victoria.

Here's a thought: the reddit community despises Pao because Pao is in _no way
part of the community_. She's a bizdev-turned-investor corporate suit who
seemingly came out of nowhere to now run the site.

She's posted very few times since becoming interim CEO. In fact, only 56
posts.

* 3 short messages when her interim-CEO position was announced.

* 9 when she posted the new privacy policy.

* 8 for Nepal earthquake relief.

* 9 posts for the reddit 10-year anniversary. This, to me, is lame. This is a classic senior executive move where they hide in their office all year round and no one has a clue what the fuck they do, if anything, but they emerge just during the victory celebrations.

Since becoming interim CEO, she has an average ONE post every five days. One
posted message -- not even one _submission_ every five days, which would be
meatier. By contrast, Jack Dorsey has an average 5 tweets a day since twitter
started. Is there any doubt Dorsey uses his own product? Well, we can see that
Ellen does not use the product that she is running (unless she has some
anonymous accounts). She made a gaffe recently where she posted a message
publicly to a user that was meant to be private -- fair or not, that
solidified the narrative that she is not a Reddit user.

~~~
Mahn
I have no inside information on Reddit management, but as an outsider who's
watched reddit grow over the years, I get the impression the core problem with
Reddit right now is not Ellen Pao per se. Ellen Pao was brought in as a person
to run Reddit as a business and make money and that's exactly what I presume
she is trying to do, the issue here is the _vision_ of the company as a whole,
the people (investors, shareholders?) who thought Ellen Pao was a necessary
and good candidate to be the CEO.

Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of
turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it
this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It
doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision
stays that way.

Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in
my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would
be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.

~~~
hga
It might be useful to distinguish between the vision, the plan to implement
that vision, and the execution of that plan.

I think what you're saying is that you cannot conceive of a plan that will
successfully implement the vision to make money.

I'd add that execution seems to be sorely lacking, whatever the vision or
plan, assuming a real plan even exists (which I suppose it part of execution
as well, "have a plan").

------
forgottenpass
I get that reddit is trying to run a successful business, but I don't think
the staff is well served by assuming that the users will be happy little
community-created-content worker bees no matter what they do. Users DGAF about
the business.

All of the admins that were any good at interacting with the community are on
the "reddit alum" section of the admin list (read: former employes). And more
often than not, the staff doing the high-quality and visible community
management was strangely the sysadmins and programmers.

Edit: not strange at all, I just realized that they were probably the only
admins that were legit users too. Which would explain why I'd lump pre-sale
spez and kn0thing in with people who actually interacted, they posted with
their real usernames while also running all the sockpuppets making the site
look alive.

------
mhomde
What a circus reddit has become. There's probably/hopefully more to this story
but still. It will be interesting to see if reddit forces the hands of the
biggest subreddits to open again.

Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the
subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like
reddit to have "public facing" administrators

Many of the biggest subreddits are revolting against the "governing" and gone
private in protest, for example:

/r/Iama

/r/science

/r/movies

/r/gaming

/r/history

/r/art

/r/AskReddit

/r/law

~~~
seanalltogether
I'm actually surprised that reddit allows default subreddits to go private or
disable themselves in any way. Each community should absolutely be able to
moderate themselves, but at the same time being a default subreddit carries
extra responsibilities.

~~~
27182818284
> a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior
consultation or a continuity plan.

I'm blown away by what Reddit has been doing in the last few months. I thought
it was just me being a get-off-my-lawn old user (since I've been on Reddit
like 7-8 years or something) but then I had a young copyrighter (early
twenties) talking to me about leaving Reddit for "other places" and that blew
me away. I hadn't realized it was starting to trickle down for lack of better
words.

~~~
rtpg
>Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior
consultation or a continuity plan.

Let's think about the fact that this is possible for a company to do this to a
full-time employee with several years experience next time an election comes
up.

Unfortunately, not all of us get the luxury of advance notice on
firings/layoffs

~~~
deciplex
You seem to be making a statement about the law - I don't think anyone is
suggesting that what Reddit has done here is against the law. Instead, what
Reddit has done here strikes many people as rather stupid.

~~~
rtpg
I don't think what Reddit did is illegal, I'm lamenting that it isn't.
Independent of skillsets, people should get treated with a minimum of respect.

------
Nexxxeh
Pao actually tried submitting a PM to a subreddit. Not a screenshot, the
actual URL for the PM.

If she has an area of expertise other than "diversity", she seems to be
flubbing it.

~~~
mintplant
Please don't lump this in with the anti-Pao brigade. Like her or not, the
issue of admin-moderator relations goes back long before her tenure. I say
this as a (currently inactive) moderator of a default subreddit.

~~~
mtrpcic
Whichever side of the Pao debate you fall on, you have to admit that the CEO
of a site that is of the size, scale, and simplicity of Reddit should
understand the core functionality of the site.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Shouldn't this be a criticism towards Sam et al, not Ellen? She was offered a
good job and took it. Good on her. The failure lies with how completely out of
touch the ownership is.

They became good at money and bad at people, which usually happens.
Unfortunately for them, reddit is little more than the people.

------
dageshi
/r/videos just went dark

Seems likely to me that the problem is now too big for the admins to fix even
if they wanted too. They couldn't moderate that many large subs, they don't
have the manpower. There's going to be an impressive amount of bad publicity
hitting reddit tomorrow, I hope to hell they have a good explanation lined up
cause they're going to need it.

------
sergiotapia
Good riddance to Reddit. Let it burn and go the way of Digg V4. Time to move
over to something more grassroots.

Reddit has too many shills, too many paid-for content and way to much thought
policing. Time to go!

------
zzleeper
Something related I saw posted today is the news that the guy in charge of
community at Digg ( /u/LordVinyl ) when the fallout occurred was hired to be
in charge of _shadowbans_ , something that has seemingly increased a lot
(maybe due to the Ellen Pao issue). The /r/videos post is down obviously, but
a mirror is here:

[https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/192235](https://voat.co/v/MeanwhileOnReddit/comments/192235)

The problem is that the poster and everyone else was subsequently banned,
which created a bit of a backslash.

------
sudioStudio64
The intense vitriol about Ellen Pao makes me very suspicious of most
complaints from vocal redditors.

I'm not even really sure why the anti-fem crowd hates her so much. But
man...wow.

If some of the things that I've read today are to be believed, the firing of
this admin was a stupid act. Reddit and several other "web 2.0" companies made
it big on "user generated content" which always seemed like it had the
potential to turn into a gross corporate overlord milking their user-cow for
all it's worth.

It seems like there are a lot of valley companies that just want to slap a
sticker on your culture and hand it back to you. Or they want to say that the
rules don't apply to them because they are so new and communicate with their
employees through an app or some other horse shit.

In the end, it sounds like this young woman (the admin they fired) did her job
well and it sucks when people aren't rewarded for that.

~~~
orbitur
A large subset of vocal redditors hated Pao the moment she walked through the
door. Now everything that happens on her watch is considered evidence of her
awfulness.

Goes to show you just how powerful the MRA subreddits are. I used to be
staunchly "free speech above all", but seeing how blind hatred can fester and
spread has filled me with a lot of doubts about us, as a group of humans.

~~~
sudioStudio64
I'm with you there.

A couple of years ago a group of people that I was attracted to due to their
professed reliance on reason and scientific method turned out to be virulently
anti-female.

And then this fringe hatefulness just seems to have pervaded everything...even
computing forums that are dedicated to what I thought were relatively
dispassionate topics that are quite arcane have had death threats lobbed at
people who just have a different opinion. It's fucking weird.

------
bashinator
Top comment from that gizmodo article: "Reddit is legitimately full of the
most self important toxic people ever. It’s also home to a huge variety of all
manners of genius and hilarity."

I will miss it. As an Old Person™, reddit was the closest the modern Internet
has come to replicating the heyday of Usenet in the 80s/90s. But because it's
controlled by a single corporation instead of federating among all internet
service providers, it succumbed to the corruption of the pursuit of captial.
RIP.

~~~
im3w1l
Why did usenet decline?

~~~
DanBC
Eternal september; lack of moderation combined with massive trolling / spam /
sporge / hipcrime flooding, etc; ISPs stopped offering Usenet access as part
of their packages; to most users it's baffling in comparison to something like
Imgur or Reddit.

An nntp2 / nntp3 could be brilliant.

------
imgabe
Well, I'm sure glad I don't have to work tomorrow. I don't know how Reddit is
going to fix this. Unless they have photographic evidence that Victoria was
literally eating puppies alive, I don't think they're going to win the
community back to their side.

I understand that if you're going to fire someone, you can't very well go
around telling a bunch of people that you're about to do that. They still
should have had a better plan in place to pick up the slack first.

~~~
jpgvm
Inevitably when you fire a competent person you are going to piss people off,
even if you can adequately replace them.

People just don't like to see people that are clearly competent be fired. The
reasons really don't matter to them. (and maybe they shouldn't?)

------
nickfromseattle
For those with PR, marketing and community management experience - if you
we're in a position to try and solve this, what would you do to minimize the
damage and move the community on as quickly as possible?

~~~
adventured
There are only three action approaches.

1) Distraction. Good luck with that, but you can try to redirect the
attention. Start a fire somewhere else, make a big announcement, etc. One
problem with this, is there's a lot more animosity in the air at Reddit than
just what relates to this specific situation.

2) Negotiate and directly engage with the community. Some variation of giving
in to their demands. Console them. Either give them what they want, or make
them feel like you're doing so. The users power everything of value on Reddit
- there is nothing without them.

3) Stonewall them. Refuse to bend. Let the community know that this is how it
is; much like what Pao did when talking about how Reddit was no longer going
to be a platform for completely free speech. This approach rarely turns out
well, especially given how little leverage the Reddit company has, and how
easy it is to replace Reddit (relatively speaking).

#2 is the only workable option. Reddit will only follow that option if they
decide the viability of the service is at risk, and they may realize that too
late.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Are you actually a PR/marketing professional, or are you just volunteering
your personal speculation?

~~~
adventured
The third part of the parent's conditional: experience with running or dealing
with online communities (from building and operating sites that have them,
since the 1990s).

------
chatmasta
So who's going to capitalize on this? Lots of users are pissed off and want to
leave. People are pushing "voat.co" really hard, but it looks like a weak
clone of reddit that will ultimately suffer from the same problems.

This would be a good time for someone to figure out a decentralized solution
to the links+comments app. There is lots of research into decentralized
reputation and recommendation algorithms. Combined with cryptocurrency there
could be some real potential.

------
personjerry
This seems like an abuse of power to me.

The people who have closed the subreddits are the moderators. These moderators
should represent the desires of the _users_. In this case, they are instead
caring for their own personal feelings/ease of moderation through
communication with the Victoria.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of redditors are cut off from their friends
and fellow subredditors. Even the AMAs are cut off. I think this is wrong.

Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found
an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods
would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins,
etc.) of power.

While I don't know Victoria so I cannot sympathize, I can at least understand
the moderators' cause. However, the method which these moderators have chosen
to demonstrate with hinders the community, and for that reason goes against
what moderators represent, and so should not be supported.

~~~
shock-value
I would imagine that users by-and-large support the shut-downs (I do, as a
user). Moreover, I don't think Reddit is the sort of site that fosters
_friendships_. A sense of community, yes, but not individual friendships. And
anyway, PMs and such are unaffected so you could contact an individual without
issue anyway.

> Consider this: What if the redditors, while this protest was going on, found
> an alternate site and all started posting there instead? Then the mods
> would've just effectively stripped themselves (and Reddit, Reddit admins,
> etc.) of power.

Why is that a problem? If the mods are actually acting in the best interests
of their communities (which, in your scenario, are able to re-form on another
site) then that's a positive result for them (in an altruistic sense).

------
arprocter
Here's the live thread -
[https://www.reddit.com/live/v6d0vi6c8veb](https://www.reddit.com/live/v6d0vi6c8veb)

------
27182818284
I hate to do what is an essentially a "me too" post of sorts, but as an old,
old Reddit user, I'm really confused by the moves made in the last few months.

I can't think of another time I've been immediately like, "Why?!" in reaction
to Reddit's actions. Usually when I see a new feature, direction, policy, etc,
my thoughts are, "Huh. Makes sense"

~~~
goldman60
My only why moment I can think of was removing the vote counts on comments,
(?|?)gate. But that was a minor little blip on the radar and I wasn't super
bothered by it.

------
rawnlq
For people comparing this with Digg v4 you should remember digg was already on
a steady decline long before it completely imploded with the redesign:
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reddit+digg#q=digg%2C...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reddit+digg#q=digg%2C%20reddit&date=6%2F2006%2061m&cmpt=q&tz=)

But reddit on the other hand still seems to be growing and haven't hit an
inflection point:
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit)

Even the recent fph drama barely caused a noticeable blip in traffic and was
easily recovered from a few days later.

This event might be the start of the inflection point but reddit isn't going
to die overnight anytime soon.

------
ChuckMcM
This does feel a bit like "Internet" culture meets Sarbanes Oxley (which comes
into play when you are publicly traded).

There was a story about how unprofitable Reddit is [1] and given that one
would expect it to start running out of cash. And when that happens it has to
either get more VC funding or go to the public for additional funding. But if
you're going to file an S-1 you really have to get your SOX compliance in
order, and generally that has things like executives swearing that there isn't
any illegal stuff going on, with jail time penalties if there is. And lawyers
tend to be really conservative when it comes to "illegal" (advising against
anything even nominally bad).

I, of course, have no inside information, but I'm not the only one wondering
about this. An inability to raise funds would kill Reddit, and this "strike"
action would seem to just accelerate that (fewer page views, fewer ad clicks).

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-once-
bowed-1...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-ceo-admits-once-
bowed-130338011.html)

~~~
chillingeffect
> illegal stuff going on

All of the conditions of SOX seem to be about financial disclosure, with the
most general "crime-like" thing having to do with financial fraud. I don't SOX
has much to do with e.g. online harrassment or pornography. It was enacted in
response to financial and accounting scandals around 2000. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act)

------
AndrewKemendo
One thing I find amusing about the whole history of social networks is that by
far, 4chan has been the longest running consistent platform and with the least
governance.

There is something to be learned there, not sure what it is though.

edit: Actually metafilter is older, but way less popular/influential.

~~~
NoahTheDuke
I would guess it's less popular because it costs money to post.

On the other hand, so does Something Awful, and that site's significantly more
popular than Metafilter.

------
idointernet
This isn't another Digg V4. It's a riot - [http://gizmodo.com/256982/breaking-
digg-riot-in-full-effect-...](http://gizmodo.com/256982/breaking-digg-riot-in-
full-effect-over-pulled-hd-dvd-key-story)

~~~
karlshea
The best part of that story is realizing I haven't seen the term "Web 2.0"
recently.

~~~
kaoD
My girlfriend is doing a master's degree in archival science on digital
preservation. I hadn't heard so many "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0" thrown around in
a while :(

------
tptacek
Alex Ohanian's comments about this ridiculous tire fire, and the Reddit
community's unhinged responses. _Priceless_.

[https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing](https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing)

~~~
dandanisaur
I've seen some of 'Alexis' comments and it really seems like he doesn't give a
shit. 'Make something people want' amirite? what a joke.

~~~
tptacek
Sorry, Alexis. A little buzzed last night.

------
golergka
I have a question that will sounds like a rhetorical just for the sake of
mindless bashing, but actually I want to ask it honestly, and I don't pretend
that I know the answer.

Have Pao done anything good for Reddit since she's been appointed CEO?

------
throwaway538779
Hacker News is behaving weirdly with respect to this story:

It's been up for 9 hours and has 714 points but is lower on the front page
than "What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online
servers?" which has been up for 18 hours and has less than half (307) the
points.

What's going on here?

~~~
sentenza
This thread reads more like reddit than it does like HN. So probably somebody
behind the scenes sent it on its path downwards.

Might even be the right thing to do, since the whole situation is far from
known and opinions boil over.

Who knows.

~~~
DanBC
"behind the scenes" also includes users who flag. There's a small karma
threshold for flagging, so many people are able to do it.

------
exelius
Aaand this is how Reddit does. Because this is basically how Digg died and
created Reddit.

Who out there has a reddit clone ready to take up the torch? Communities are
fickle, and if you fuck with them they will abandon you quickly and en masse.

~~~
philtar
[http://voat.co](http://voat.co)

~~~
Crito
Wake me when they're not hosted on a pocket calculator.

~~~
elchief
Best I can do is an EC2 micro instance

------
cyboris
Generally its symptomatic of a business not understanding how it works any
more.

In any business, employees will be fired, employees will leave.

The weakness here was that Reddit seems to have no business continuity plan
for the one subreddit that gets the best publicity. Anything that attracts
presidents, and A-list stars should have been able to lose an admin with
minimal chaos.

Misunderstanding the role of a critical employee lead to this and now they
have to struggle to catch up and figure out what the heck Victoria really did.

------
httpagent
I'm going to offer a wild suggestion - What if reddit is being purposefully
dismantled to break up the social hive it represents? Is it possible that
current events are he fruition of a purposeful strategy?

~~~
stormbeta
Honestly, I wouldn't even be mad if that was actually intentional. Reddit's
community in the larger subs has been getting really awful of late.

~~~
MBCook
Here here.

The whole dust up over /r/fph and the few other little subs kinda horrified
me. I think reddit has often veered too far into laxness (the LONG existence
of /r/jailbait) and there is still an amazing ton of blatant rule violations
going on.

The only problem I had with the /r/fph thing was how inconsistently enforced
it was. It seemed like a ban against a relatively small group so they wouldn't
have to deal with pissing off one of the bigger problem subs. It ended up
looking like a fake token gesture.

------
ForHackernews
Reddit admins have consistently shown themselves to be clueless in the past.
They're only ever reactive to some scandal or PR disaster. I've never seen
them try to get out in front and actually lead their community.

------
akhilcacharya
This implosion has got me thinking - what would an alternative site to better?
How could this be improved?

If we do see another Digg-esque migration, where will those people move?

~~~
shmerl
It should be something decentralized and open.

~~~
HamSession
Agreed fully, this and machine curation of news stories.

------
oh_sigh
To complete the blindness trifecta, now all they need is for an admin to
"seize" control of a subreddit(maybe /r/iama, since they apparently have
devoted an entire department to it)

------
antjanus
I'd love to hear some people's opinions: what's the next reddit? Where will
people go?

I've been looking at alternatives ever since all the stupid crap with mods
came out (mods messing with submissions, resubmitting under their name, and
deleting stuff they didn't agree with) and some of my favorite subreddits
started to rot. And now, it feels like Reddit is really falling apart.

Any suggestions?

~~~
keithwhor
Within the next two weeks we're going to see just about every Reddit clone
and/or variation that exists spring into action.

One of them will be lucky enough to gain enough traction to replace Reddit,
though it will take a couple of years for the transition to complete.

I have next to no doubt that these are the death throes of Reddit. I'm not
personally invested in these politics (though it is fascinating to watch
unfold), but what I can say is that I'll gladly move away should the
opportunity present itself. What I care about at this point is _I would like
to consume content_ and for some reason _I can 't_. So now I'm sitting here
writing a comment on Hacker News to publicly showcase my discontent when I
could have been enjoying cat pictures.

 __Edit: __Reminds me of HipChat. It went down on a workday for a long period
of time and I knew about Slack, our engineering team was swapped over by end
of day. I don 't particularly care _why_ your service is down, whether it's a
service outage or a coup, I just care about how long it will be down for and
whether or not I can expect this to be a pattern.

~~~
antjanus
I'm sure there will be a hundred clones. I do hope someone will just try a
brand new way of doing content and people will be like "Oh yeah! That works
really well!"

I've been disillusioned with reddit when I saw that the niche subreddits no
longer get updated :/ and the bigger subreddits are ruled by an iron fist of
mods. The content doesn't refresh as often as I'd like either (in the 2nd tier
subreddits, the ones that aren't default but are still really popular).

Anyways, all good points. I used HC and Slack both and have to say that they
seem almost identical to me.

~~~
meesterdude
> I do hope someone will just try a brand new way of doing content

I am with mine, and I encourage others to follow suite and try different
tactics. Reddit is hardly the gold standard; but it is not without it's merits
either.

------
grecy
I wonder if Reddit is big enough to survive these kinds of recent outcries
[1], or if it's destined to go the way of digg, etc.

[1] Only a week or so ago there was a huge outcry about censorship, which
resulted in a lot of negative personal information being posted about the
current Reddit CEO. Now we have this.

~~~
anonymousab
>or if it's destined to go the way of digg, etc.

Does Reddit's competition of today have as much reach/popularity as Digg's did
when that exodus occurred?

~~~
adventured
Won't matter. There's no real lock-in among text / link content communities.
They're trivial to build, there will never be a lack of new variations. Reddit
doesn't even have possession of the vast media (youtube, imgur) that gets
posted to its service, making it that much easier to replace.

Imgur will probably see among the greatest benefit as Reddit erodes.

~~~
Kodix
That's true about Imgur. It has already gained a sizable community not
directly related to reddit before this fiasco, I wouldn't be surprised if it
grew more quickly now. It has the infrastructure as well as the most popular
form of content from reddit - unlike something like voat.

~~~
adventured
Right, the critical difference between Reddit and Imgur - Imgur contains the
content. They're the host, rather than sending traffic off-platform. Just like
eg YouTube. Those types of platforms end up being vastly more valuable; if you
don't own or control anything on your own site, it'll always come back to bite
you. Imagine Facebook hosting all of its photos on another site like Imgur.

With Reddit's approach, you end up creating lots of competitors; given the
right context, or given enough time, those competitors will bleed you out.
Twitter figured that out with TwitPic et al.

------
elchief
[http://www.randalolson.com/apps/default_subreddit_status.htm...](http://www.randalolson.com/apps/default_subreddit_status.html)

If you want to see which default subreddits are running or down

/r/netsec and /r/programming are down.

------
arprocter
Original HN discussion here -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9821281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9821281)

------
thought_alarm
Quickly! Everybody back to Usenet!

~~~
nutate
If people could invent better moderation over nntp... it looks like people
were looking at it even in 2010:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6048](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6048)

------
socrates1998
I get that Reddit is a business, but I don't get how they are handling their
business right now.

They are pissing off the user base while not making any money.

Did they think a "lose/lose" solution was the direction to go in?

Regardless, they are just really fucking things up.

They can't seem to figure out what they are doing.

Do they even have a plan?

------
ljk
sad that reddit turned out this way, completely opposite of what Aaron
Swartz's vision

documentary about him -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ)

------
quantisan
From the post:

"As much as Victoria is loved, this reaction is not all a result of her
departure: there is a feeling among many of the moderators of reddit that the
admins do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid
volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits, which
they feel is expressed by, among other things, the lack of communication
between them and the admins, and their disregard of the thousands of mods who
keep reddit's communities going. /u/nallen's response above is an example of
one of the many responses to these issues."

------
chippy
Ultimately this is about large companies needing to make more money using
internet communities. To do this they have to change the community to make it
mass market.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter)
may help for the following.

We in Hacker News are a small percentage of the "Innovators" set. We are not
who reddit is wanting to appeal to now.

Reddit started with Innovators like ourselves as a small site and grew to
encompass "Early Adopters" from the other Internet communities, it has been
growing out and nearly full of "Early Adopters" \- it needs to get more
people, and to do this it changes the demographic. It needs people like our
relatives and co workers who just use Facebook. It needs to grow because more
people equal more money. They can and do accept the loss of the original
Innovators and some of the Early Adopters as part of the cost to draw in much
more revenue.

Thus, removing hateful subreddits, cleaning up the place is part of that.
Another is increasing mass market interests - adding celebs and politicians.
Another is increasing revenue through sponsored posts, like what Twitter is
doing.

Allegedly the reason why this admin was fired was because she was against
increasing the amount of corporate sponsored/promoted AMAs, and she was more
in favour of community friendly content.

------
sudioStudio64
The people claiming that Reddit needs to be more consistent keep saying that
they only censor something when it bubbles up to the top. That's pretty much
the only content moderation model that has EVER worked. No one likes it, and
it seems hypocritical, but its what the entire internet does.

Look at Google. France complains about Nazi related material. They block Nazi
material in France. They index massive amounts of porn, and take down
individual images that offend people. It's sub-optimal, but it largely works.

Now, the thing that has changed is that normal people have started getting a
dose of the kind of speech that they consider "hate speech" IRL from sites
like Reddit. What they are demanding is that fringe positions remain fringe
positions.

Something as mainstream as Reddit will not be allowed to serve up red
pill/racist/homophobe/far-right content. They will keep doing this stuff until
that content goes somewhere else. Maybe that's a good thing...I don't know,
but at least having it in one place made it easy to see what crazy people are
up to these days. Know your enemy, etc.

As for the corporate thing...that's always going to seem
schizophrenic...corporations aren't rational people. They make snap decisions
that seem reasonable in the moment because they lack functional memories. Fuck
em.

Want something different? Find a way to spread the cost of running something
like Reddit over a larger group of people in a decentralized model. And then
get ready for the us vs them to move to "inner circle" vs "outer circle"...

------
hga
Some comments on why from the mod:
[http://www.reddit.com/user/nallen](http://www.reddit.com/user/nallen)

------
ivanb
From the outside view it looks like people of Reddit are unsatisfied with
their government and so they destroy their own motherland in an attempt to
overthrow said government. Looks very much alike any coup d'etat. Human nature
is in play again. It will lead to civil war and huge damage to the community.
In the end there will be no winner.

------
trcollinson
I have heard a lot of people here and in reddit say, "well we should just make
something better and leave!" Maybe a lot of that talk is just anger or
discontent coming out right now. The community is up in arms. The moderators
are frustrated at both corporate reddit and the website/tools available to
them. Users are mortified. But in all seriousness, I want to explore the
question, why don't we? What is stopping us from replacing it?

\-- Technical challenges? No that doesn't seem right. Many of us build and
scale applications far larger than this. The tools and technology are there.

\-- Building a community is hard? This seems more in line with reality.
Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?

\-- Sites like this aren't the solution any more? This could be it. But if
this isn't the solution, what is?

I haven't thought of all possibilities. But really, why not just replace it?

*edit: fixed typos, typing on phones is hard.

~~~
rodgerd
> But really, why not just replace it?

It costs money to run. Serious money if you're going to have employees. And,
as voat have discovered, if you're going to become the favoured destination of
the assorted gators, racists, pedo^h^h^h^hebeophiles, woman-haters, frozen
peachers, and assorted bottom-of-the-barrel types that have been looking for
reddit alternatives in the last few months, you may find it quite difficult to
keep your hosting arrangements even if you can pay for them.

~~~
Niten
Right, anyone who disagrees with Reddit's management decisions is deserving of
hyperbolic abuse.

~~~
rodgerd
It's refreshing to see someone agree that calling a person part of voat's core
constituency would constitute hyperbolic abuse.

------
mcintyre1994
I'd probably call /r/IAMA reddit's strongest content asset in terms of
publicity, I seriously can't believe there's such a disconnect there. When I
found out about Victoria helping them out and all the work she was doing - and
then the IAmA app, it seemed the admins got that, but I guess not.

------
thrillgore
I can't wait for sama to make a statement about this.

------
rayalez
A time like this is an excellent opportunity to create a reddit competitor.
Current alternatives(like voat.co) are focused on completely avoiding
censorship and moderation, thus attracting the worst of reddit.

I am curious, what are your thoughts on how one could go about attracting the
best of reddit?

I am working on a personal project that is very similar, but I wouldn't try to
compete with reddit to attract all the haters and celebrity-gossip kind of
people. Do you have some ideas about what kind of startup could attract the
most intelligent and creative parts of the community?

(right now my project is focused on writers, "reddit meets fictionpress", but
it would be very easy to pivot into something broader, if I can come up with a
smart way to do that)

------
whizzkid
I am not sure if this the truth (sounds like it to me) but in that case, I am
100% on Victoria's side.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png:medium](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CI9iYW7VAAAzzJN.png:medium)

------
vezzy-fnord
/r/netsec went down too, quite surprisingly.

------
istvan__
Pretty sad that the free speech is disappearing from the internet with the
speed of light and it gets replaced with propaganda. Victoria was a well known
character of the reddit community and she did a lot for them. Sad to see her
gone.

------
torgoguys
819 points, 421 comments, 12 hours old and still this is close to the bottom
of the front page. Clearly HN users are finding this interesting. I guess I
don't understand the HN ranking methodology at all...

------
astrowilliam
This is the exact reason why we started PushdUp. As a long time reddit user I
was getting sick of the drama that was happening and decided to take it upon
myself to create something different. We are still in VERY early alpha so
there are bound to be some bugs. Come join the revolution.
[http://www.pushdup.com](http://www.pushdup.com) , feedback is welcome and
encouraged.

~~~
wingerlang
Loading animation in the beginning, I'm bored already. After loading, it just
looks like some clickbait buzzfeed or auto-generated "read these 5 articles
more, please" because of the big pictures set in a grid.

~~~
astrowilliam
Thanks for the feedback. We are playing around with different layouts to see
what people like more, so far the big picture layout isn't exactly what we are
looking for but we are still working on it. I'm wondering if you actually read
the article titles or if you just closed it down before noticing any of them?

~~~
ljk
hopefully your site takes off! i felt like he was a little too harsh, the site
does look a little too simple maybe that could put some people off

~~~
astrowilliam
Thanks, man. I want to keep it super simple, no distractions. I'm sure it's
not for everyone, but I have a vision and I'm working towards it. Glad you
stopped by.

------
ljk
wow what's crazy to me is that I was on reddit today, but didn't know about
this till I saw this thread.

And even after going back to reddit I couldn't see any information on this
until I cilcked /r/all.. looks like reddit censorship scandal is going out of
hand :/

------
jaguarmagenta
The side effects of a subreddit not going dark are amazing. I'm waiting for
the admin response.

------
python490
Reddit got "corporate" a long time ago. The lashing back was bound to happen.

------
kuyfiuyg
This is why they should have kept the lisp codebase

------
totalcookie
This feels so much like the AOL volunteer revolts from 20years ago. Unpaid
people vs. management.

------
MrBlue
Go to: [https://voat.co](https://voat.co)

~~~
stormbeta
Too bad most of the community there is made up of the worst of reddit. Maybe
if enough normal users moved there it'd be worth it, and maybe that will
actually happen if reddit doesn't figure out how to salvage this, but until
then, there's nothing on voat worth wading through the sewage.

~~~
Kodix
If I recall correctly (it's down right now, not a big surprise) about half of
the users are subscribers to voat's fatpeoplehate.

Those excellent people are the grassroots of the community you'd be joining.

~~~
pixl97
You may be forgetting that Reddit was built on the same 'shit'. A huge portion
of the real content of Reddit was porn and other repugnant topics. The admins
of the time faked a huge portion of their posts to form communities around
them.

------
SixSigma
Oh the schadenfreude

"I was subscriber to fatpeoplehate hate, so I did nothing; in fact I applauded
it."

------
PavlovsCat
I didn't take the FPH drama very seriously, but this looks kinda bad to me, so
far.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3byzzp/admins...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3byzzp/admins_have_seized_control_of_rpics_mods_are/)

for extreme irony, compare this
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama_set_to_private_over_mod_firing/csqg24d?context=3)
with this
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3bz8jp/right_now_admi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3bz8jp/right_now_admin_ukn0thing_aka_alexis_ohanian/)

I still don't know what to think of it, and I can't keep up with it either..
but I just hope it gets thoroughly archived and documented on sites other than
reddit and imgur. Because while I won't condemn reddit on a whim and call it a
bad actor, I also don't find any of this trustworthy at all. I'd even say,
unless the /r/pics "takeover" was the "root mod" (or whatever it's called, I
never made a subreddit) locking out all other mods, if this was actually
admins protecting "their" assets, made by the community, that'd surely be
crossing the line for me.

As would be paying lip service to mods as to how swell everything will be to
get mods to get subs back up, while people with scheduled AMA still don't know
how to get in touch with the people Victoria had the contact info for. I don't
have a link for the last bit, and it was just a claim by someone anyway
(didn't check if they actually were involved with AMA stuff), so don't take my
word for it - but that mod mail really does read so fluffy while making no
real commitments to anything, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Anyway, I would rather see blacked out subs in support of something I agree
with, than active subs that are testament to a shameful episode and state of
things. They have my support to black out all the things, for days, weeks and
months. For how ever long is necessary. If reddit becomes a place putting
effort into again, I'll enjoy it like nothing was ever gone. Otherwise, might
as well go out with a bang and some pride. There is infinitely more where
reddit came from, and maybe a better site will be born because of all this
somewhere down the road. Maybe reddit can reform, but it clearly needs some
boundaries, so this blackout has my full support. Enough already, users and
communities are not dough to be shaped however one wishes, to be disrespected
like helpless dependents. It's a bit like that Fight Club bathroom scene: _"
We cook your meals, we take care of you when you're sick, and we also make the
sites that pay your salary worth visiting. Do not fuck with us."_

Yeah I know I'm being a bit dramatic, please take this with a grain of salt.
It makes me sad rather than angry or indignated. Still, I don't think this is
cool, at all. It's just not on.

------
andyl
The blacked-out subreddits have _millions_ of users. Wow.

AMAgeddon.

------
voltagex_
mhomde, your comment is dead.

~~~
mhomde
why? I don't think i said anything untowards...

~~~
dageshi
No, seems a one off, your past comments are fine, so is this one, I think you
may have tripped a spam filter.

~~~
mhomde
weird, maybe too many subreddit links looks like spam :)

~~~
dageshi
it's undead, I'm guessing someone fixed it :)

------
jacky_chan
Who gives a shit!

------
paulgayham
So much fucking drama. Can they not keep their site clean of this shit?

------
alfiedotwtf
#RedditRevolt

    
    
        sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 http://reddit.com " >> /etc/hosts'

------
TeMPOraL
A tangential point, but I really abhor this style of writing:

"/r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/science, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos,
/r/gadgets, and /r/movies have all made themselves private in response to the
removal of an administrator key to the AMA process (... lots of other text
...) Major subreddits, including /r/4chan, /r/circlejerk and
/r/ImGoingToHellForThis, have also expressed solidarity through going
private."

So you read the fist part, building a mental model of what's going on ("ok, so
these subs went private, which means others listed did something different"),
only to have to update it because someone decided to split the list in two,
probably going for style.

I see this happening particularly in news reports and it's really, really
annoying. You may actually fail to connect those two separate parts together
if you're skimming.

~~~
detaro
The first list references the title (although "default" subreddits would be
the better term), the second one are additional ones that are not in the
default list.

