I’ve worked in tech long enough to tell you that leadership being completely inept isn’t as far-fetched as you think.

Can confirm. The people at the top in tech are a) primarily driven by personal advancement, b) focus all their attention on getting a promotion (or higher share price), c) if user welfare and personal ambition are in conflict personal ambition comes first.

It’s just normal humanity stupidity and greed, and these aren’t like head of the class intellects, it’s just boring people who love money and status and get no satisfaction from helping others.

It is not just Tech, but similar in every other industry. Only those industries with cut throat competition would have better leadership ( Because they are forced to compete ).

The problem with Tech is that they are the primary beneficial of hyper growth with zero interest rate era and Smartphone revolution. In the space of 10+ years tech have grown from an unthinkable Trillion dollar market cap to now we have a single company with close to 3 trillion, two other company with close to 2 trillion and other rushing to trillion dollar club. And this is unlike previous bubble they have actual profits and cash backing for their market valuation.

People working in tech, especially within BigTech are not only partly dictating the world and media's attention, they are also so out of touch they became aristocracy in the old era.

They are also insulated from a) the impact of their decisions, and b) actively refuse to hear anything that goes against the narrative that their riches could have possibly come from unethical behavior.

I went from high prestige academic position to a high level at Big Tech where I was regularly interacting at the Director level and holy shit the step down in intelligence was jarring. Literally went from having coworkers with Turing awards to trying to convince incredibly wealthy, and incredibly stupid, people to not break the law on an industrial scale.

And likewise the degree to which these people think of their wealth is evidence is their moral judgment, intelligence, and work ethic is so out of whack with reality I was just floored. We’re talking some real fucking idiots pulling $1-2M year.

I wouldn’t say it’s so much “greed” as business models that don’t actually make money. Take investor money until you’ve gotten as big as you can with billions in valuation while making little to no profit, change business models to try to make yourself actually profitable, and in doing so “ruin” what was only possible while being supported by hopeful patient investors.

Thus begins your decline and the gamble for who gets stuck holding the bag.

I think that qualifies.

Yes, but you can flush billions down the drain and if you get a nice title along the way it doesn’t matter in Silicon Valley.

A VP who oversaw a billion being set on fire will still be hired as a VP at the next company as long as that money was burned on the tech trend of the moment.

I wouldn't want to say that "he's at the top in tech", I'd want to reserve that for good programmers, engineers and researchers

Maybe more: "he's trying to be at the top in business/value extraction/rent seeking"

top of org charts?

That’s what I was referring to. What I’d call “top talent” is rarely the same as “top of the org”.

Anecdotally, my experience is different. In my case this usually means that I am unaware of some other factors at play, usually business constraints that haven’t been made public.

I mean in the reddit case the business reason is "monetize the platform as much as possible", which clashes with a platform that's nothing without its users and the content they create. A good business strategy would be to build trust and have dialog and increase monetization in small steps that the majority of the userbase can tolerate (after all people understand that things cost money).

By taking a huge jump to early on and shitting on volunteers/3rd party app developers, they lost what little trust they had. Doubly sad that the same playbook played out with Digg and showed reddit exactly what not to do.

The topic has been analyzed quite extensively in my small bubble of very experienced people (mostly software developers, some with management experience, but also other people from various fields). We asked ourselves why so often such strange decisions are made out of management and our basic attitude was that we simply don't have the necessary information to be able to evaluate these decisions reasonably.

So we gathered a lot of information, as much of it as possible directly from management itself. We have indeed found information that explains some managerial decisions, but so far only of the variety that have benefited individual managers themselves, and always with negative consequences for the majority of others.

However, the overwhelming majority of what we consider peculiar (up to catastrophic) decisions are due to a combination of hubris, impostor syndrome and absolute incompetence. In one case where we could least explain the decisions at first, a manager under the influence of alcohol virtually admitted that they were not only aware of their own incompetence, but that they intentionally got rid of overly competent people so that they wouldn't make them look so bad. It's a mess.

> The Reddit CEO's negative karma (-111,199 at this time) during the recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) session indicates an overwhelmingly negative response from the community.

The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.

And it was really hard to see spez's comments without following them from his profile, because they were so downvoted.

So I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.

>I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.

By not going into the database and flipping the sign on that integer.

And before anyone says I'm memeing or otherwise attacking spez without cause: Remember, this is spez. He admitted to directly modifying the database to edit comments of people critical of him once upon a time. He called forth this level of distrust himself.

Some people were noticing, early in the thread, big steps up on the net vote a couple minutes after each comment, which triggered some suspicion of similar shenanigans.

I just realized all the threats of going private are a bit moot because guess who controls the database where this flag is set?

It'd be a massive fuck you to the community, but how would that be different to what's been going on the last few months?

I'm guessing the company will be like an abusive partner saying "we're in control, you can leave, but we know you won't."

Yes and no. They can force the the subs to go public again, but then the mods might quit. Losing a lot of mods is a bigger deal than losing the same number of users.

Trying to find a bunch of new mods will probably be an issue. Right now there isn't _too much_ complaining about mods. It's a very fine balance and replacing a bunch of existing ones with new ones might cause mayhem.

They've "organically" couped mods into subs to return them to normal operation in the past.

Perhaps ppl were using third party apps to have a better view of comments.

The Reddit team linked to all of spez's comments at the top of the thread. They were quite easy to find (in Apollo, at least)

On the site you have to click the "load more comments" link for anything negative to appear...

So if they look at their analytics later, they will probably discover the comforting fact that only people on 3rd party clients were downvoting the CEO.

Yes, eventually they did this. But even before they did that, the scores were approaching negative infinity.

That is actually something I find about the new web UI, they seem to try to stop you from going too far down a comment chain. The comments are what I come to Reddit for.

> The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.

I've been a Reddit user for a while, but I never knew this. I tried doing a quick search, but it dates back to 2015 when it seems they were actually disabled all together from the profile page [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2nzzhg/if_i_go_throug...

My guess is that they see themselves as potentially one of the companies which might not be able to attract sufficient investor money now that capital isn't essentially free.

When all evidence points to the contrary, yes you can assume that the leadership is inept.

Benefit of the doubt only stretches so far.

Steve Huffman has proven to be a huge liability for reddit time and time again, outdoing himself with his recent behavior. I don't understand how anyone could think about investing into this company at all.

What is the platform even worth if it is riddled with bots like Twitter? Who are companies even advertising towards? Hey backend server "207fef50-b354-4c85-8865-f56f8313cd2c" look at these new electric BBQ offers!

They’re sick of running Reddit and want a pay out. Then then bounce.

I am not convinced that community revolts have staying power. Reddit the community has fought management a few times and besides trading Pao for Huffman, which was not really a win for them in that case, when has anything ever changed?

So, does the heat matter?

Generally the revolts have achieved their ends. Mod revolts have lead to the banning of many subs in the past. The most recent one that comes to mind is the ban on COVID skepticism subs. I can't think of a result that has wholly flopped, really. But I'd say that this one is more likely to fail since it represents a direct attack on a monetization strategy.

Banning COVID skepticism is commercially pretty easy, so while yes the Reddit revolters did win in that case, it was also a small ask as it was not like advertisers liked the content anyway.

I was thinking more of Victoria Taylor, where sure, the community did get rid of Ellen Pao, but they didn't get back AMAs and got an even less considerate and professional CEO.

> Banning COVID skepticism is commercially pretty easy

That wasn’t “skepticism” - it was outright denial of high-school-level biology facts, and it all gets worse from there.

> commercially pretty easy

I doubt it’s that easy - considering Facebook’s inaction.

Huffman is a clear downgrade. Pao was fine.

Reddit was born of Digg's ashes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

"After a controversial 2010 redesign and the departure of co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, in July 2012 Digg was sold in three parts: the Digg brand, website, and technology were sold to Betaworks for an estimated $500,000;[9] 15 staff were transferred to The Washington Post Company's "SocialCode" for a reported $12 million; and a suite of patents was sold to LinkedIn for about $4 million."

There should be a corollary to Hanlon's Razor that states: Don't attribute to veiled motives what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

That is an old rule: Don't mistake malice for bungling.

That rule doesn't work in the modern age. The modern malicious clearly try to cloud there BS in incompetence.

It isn't necessary to emulate incompetence. Incompetence and bungling is the default state, and very hard to avoid.

Hanlon's handgun: don't attribute stupidity to what can be adequately explained with systemic incentives promoting malice. It applies here. Stupidity is extremely unlikely.

maybe it's just ego and reality will hit them in the face wework style lol.

His focus is on having a successful IPO, to enrich himself. Karma has no effect on the IPO, positive or negative.

They’ve reached their natural level of user base.

Now as they ramp up to an IPO, 3rd party clients are seen as a liability, not an asset.

They view anyone that complains as a vocal minority, the my don’t believe their MAU numbers will change in any meaningful way.

If anything, all the press around it just raises Reddits profile.

That’s my take on what’s going on, but I have no insider knowledge so I’m just guessing :-)

Indeed, how many of Reddit's 500 million users per month base actually use anything besides new Reddit and the official app? I'd say the vanishing minority.

Much of the complaints seem to come from moderators who rely on third-party apps for moderation. That seems reasonable and like a real problem. I wonder if Reddit could have bought one of the popular apps moderators use and make it official.

The latest news from Reddit is that they're allowing free API access for accessibility apps and moderator tools.

What's "moderator tools" in this context?? Mods use apps like Apollo and RIF to moderate their subreddits, and both of these apps are shutting down at the end of the month.

Kind of late now they are caught with their pants down before a black out. Pretty sure they are going to kill it again or put a barrier in there once they get the chance.

It doesn't really matter what they do. I guarantee by this time next week, Reddit will be back to normal.

And I think Reddit will be delighted to get rid of the "troublemakers".

the problem is that the "troublemakers" are the cool kids that make the site interesting, so it's a bit like gentrification kids out the cool folks that made the place interesting in a first bit

I don’t think the “troublemakers” are likely to be the people who make Reddit interesting. The troublemakers are the people who are complaining the loudest about Reddit, and the people who make the site interesting are the people who spend most of their time caring about other things besides Reddit.

In the PC world, the power users could graduate into developers and make apps to share with everyone. In the Reddit world, the power users are people who are interested in farming for karma, the people who stake out claims as moderators, the people who respond to tons of AITA / legaladvice / relationships posts.

When I hear someone ranting, pissed off, about the latest Windows or macOS update, or systemd, it’s often because they use computers to get work done, and having the tech stack change under your feet makes it hard to get work done. Broad sense of the word “work” here, when I say “get work done”.

Nobody’s getting work done on Reddit, it’s a time drain from other stuff we could be doing. (Like, not nobody nobody, just nobody.)

This is very short-sighted.

The best places on reddit are good dude to stringent moderation.

They are all going dark in response. This will remove all quality from Reddit and finally turn it fully into a meme and porn dump.

In recent years I have seen more and more people comment here that they search reddit rather than the web when they want to get decent results. I can absolutely imagine that this could end relatively soon, and whether a "meme and porn" version of reddit is really worth more than a "central platform of all niche forums for all topics" reddit remains to be seen.... The fact that there have been many "meme and porn" platforms that came and went in the past makes me question that...

The good places on Reddit, with tight moderation, are few and far between. I can think of r/AskHistorians, but there are not many like it (I can’t think of another, off the top of my head). Maybe you know of other examples?

askhistorians is an extreme example. They basically change the entire nature of the site through very visible moderation. But my understanding is that places like r/physics would be drowning in lazy memes as well. Take any subreddit you like and look at the posting guidelines. Chances are they are there in reaction to significant amounts of people acting contrary to them.

I see what you are talking about, but I don’t think it makes Reddit interesting. It’s kind of like having a bunch of different HOA boards, all fighting over how to mow the lawns or what colors to paint the houses in their respective communities.

The people who make Reddit interesting are, IMO, the content creators and the people who answer questions. The content creators are spending most of their time off-Reddit, working on projects. The people answering questions are browsing /new on a few subreddits, killing time, and watching a mostly unmoderated stream of posts.

The moderation rules for individual subreddits are usually annoying—things like karma minimums, minimum ages, and sometimes a bunch of weird rules about what you can post and how you can post it. Rules against self-promotion.

Additionally I'll point out that people who search reddit like that are some of the most valuable visitors on ads-based platform, as many of them are looking for shopping advice.

Reddit used to be interesting but ever since it became a TikTok / Instagram meme clone with r/all, there really is no need for these sorts of power users. Sure, some subs like r/AskHistorians will suffer but I doubt they'll entirely leave the site, there is no alternative.

Having less stringent and totalitarian moderation might bring different sort of userbase to more active. And not even affect the number of passive one. It's not like in general people care about quality on Internet...

if that's the case then why are they going after 3rd party apps? If they are a niche among the user base then the benefit of killing them is hardly worth losing moderators who've been doing work for free.

It's about controlling their user base in terms of how they use the service.

If those users weren't that important, Reddit wouldn't be needing to push through this change and capture the revenue from those users.

The issue with that is that by far most users are reading (coming from Google etc. - which is at threat by ChatGPT btw.) or just lurking. Only few comment, very few comment a lot. Those produce the content for the majority of users and are the ones using special apps.

Risk is that if they kick out the "creators" by making the apps unattractive they might lose a lot of content for the lurkers.

But they should have statistics to see how many are using apps and how many of the most hit posts are written by app users ... if they didn't run such an analysis: their bad.

I obviously have no data to back it up, but I too suspect that third party app users post, reply, vote, and otherwise interact a disproportionate amount. Not only are these users likely to have been big reddit users in the first place, but apps like Apollo are designed to put these interactions in the forefront of the experience and make them as smooth and frictionless as possible.

Contrast this to the official site/app, which are instead designed to keep you jumping from post to post without dwelling for too long, but are also designed to sell junk like NFT avatars.

Reddit might continue on with business as usual after the API rate change goes into effect, but I believe the average quality of content and comments (which was already trending lower) will fall through the floor. There's no incentive for invested users who put more thought and effort into their posts to stick around.

>They’ve reached their natural level of user base.

Perhaps in the US. There is another 96% of humanity left to go so a little bit of additional growth should be feasible

They've already reached that 96%. Reddit has, and always had, international audience. At this point, anyone who knows a bit of English and is the kind of person to use a site like that, is on it (+/- government blocks, of course). Whatever space for growth Reddit has left, it's not geographical.

Almost half of Reddit is American. It’s not nearly as international or globally representative as you think.

Measured as?

A simple google search will bring up dozens of sites & a variety methods so take your pick. They all say Reddit is 40-50% American

> You have to assume that the leadership team is not completely inept.

On the contrary, I really resonated with the top response to one of his replies:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...

> Did you not prepare any real answers ahead of time to obvious questions? You could just be copy/pasting detailed statements with actionable items in them right now instead of typing non-answers every 5-15 minutes. That would be a level of preparation appropriate for a potential billion-dollar company.

Elsewhere I've seen people complaining that one of his responses started with "A:" so he was obviously just copy-pasting rather than actually answering.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/146h9d6/reddits...

> during the recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) session

People keep talking about an AMA session, but there was none. Not every self post on reddit is an AMA session, and I don't think it's fair to call his post one and attack it on that basis.

That’s what their staff called it - https://reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ceo_to...

“ Reddit CEO, u/spez, will be here tomorrow to host an AMA about the latest API updates, including accessibility, mod bots, and third-party mod tools. “

Oof, okay. Weird.

Why would you possibly assume reddit's leadership team isn't completely inept? I would need extremely strong evidence to think anything but.

reddit got lucky - right place, right time, and locked in a strong enough network effect to stay alive despite the best efforts of their leadership. Look at their atrocious UI. The clumsy desperate attempts to drive users to an app. The boneheaded copycat features that never quite work, or are just downright baffling.

In an alternate world a smaller team would have focused on site reliability, mod tools, and a small set of features that made sense. Use third party ad tools until, or if, you get a better homegrown solution. With this route reddit would have been profitable and probably good. Instead...

I don’t get the “completely inept” or “valid, urgent reason” dilemma. The decisions Reddit leadership is making seem foreseeable / obvious, under the assumption that they own lots of Reddit stock and want an IPO.

They're relying on inertia and most people not caring about the changes. They know they can also force open a lot of the private sub-reddits whenever they want to. Sam Altman sits on their board so he's told them how much they can make by jacking the api prices up and selling the data to LLMs for training.

> The Reddit CEO's negative karma (-111,199 at this time)

Perhaps he's trying to pull a Nuclear Gandhi[1] and go 'deep' enough to underflow to being extremely positive?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

Money.

Is there a tool to see negative karma or did you add it all up manually?

Manually. It is not as if he answered many questions.