Conde Nast is not a majority shareholder in the site, so this point is moot. It was simply a professional disagreement on where in the bay area the office would be located.
I read those comments as: board+Wong agreed on centralizing to Bay Area, disagreed on exact new HQ location/lease, board seems to have insisted on SF city proper, Wong wanted elsewhere. (Turns out per ~sama: Wong wanted Daly City.)
From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.
...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.
> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.)
i'm skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too.
the only thing i felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable to move, and i think they have been.
To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.
This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...
So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office < 50 miles away? I'm very skeptical. My guess is that Yishan was being ousted so that Alexis could eventually be CEO again. Pure conjecture but that's my gut feeling.
I think "growing it 5x" is referring to headcount, not traffic. That's certainly been my impression given the site is still just as unreliable and poorly administrated.
Seems like someone is trying to revive "reddit the startup", with the VC cash infusion, dickhead move to the bay and Sam Altman asking Alexis to "finish the job" (what ridiculously embarrassing wording).
5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).
Reddit is a company with a huge user base and any investor willing to do his job (in spite of the moral or social implications) is going to want to squeeze that teat for every drop of ARPU he can get.
Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?
This is the kind of mentality more companies need. It is why craigslist is still running a site that looks like it is from 1999. The opposite thinking is why digg when down in flames.
Have you done a search on Craigslist lately? They're still going for a basic-HTML4-user-agent "theme" (since that's basically their brand now), but the implementation is actually quite dynamic/AJAXified and CSS-heavy. (Also, apparently they use Redis everywhere on the backend for Matryoshka cashing, among other modern practices.)
Also, Digg's failure had nothing to do with a visual refresh; it was that they changed the dynamics of the "social game" the site implemented to make previously "winning" users suddenly irrelevant in comparison to sponsored posts by companies. It'd be like Youtube doing DMCA takedowns on all the "celebrities" with million-subscriber channels.
My point was just that users want the same experience as they got when they started using the site for the most part. Too many changes and you risk driving away your user base. Changes being anything from visual components to mechanics of the site.
They have made a lot of user-facing changes though, verified phone number, map search and map views for listings, search by distance, and contact info masking are a few that come to mind.
I agree 100% that the correct course of action for Reddit is to remain the same so far as growth keeps moving forward and no alternative threats pop up. My point is that the growth credit should go to those who built the machine that is still being used almost exactly as they left it.
What I can say is that Yishan was successful leading the reddit team in keeping up with reddit's growth from an infrastructure standpoint. No small task, especially since Reddit was crashing and burning all the time before he came on board but you don't see reddit go down due to load nearly as much these days (even at 5x usage). Bottom line, praise him for that -- keeping up with the growth, not driving growth that probably would have occurred regardless of who was in the captain's chair.
It's now an also ran in everyone of those categories. They lost every single major market they were the dominant player in. This isn't Craiglist winning, it's Craiglist losing.
By that logic, Craigslist was probably never the largest in those categories. Newspaper classifieds and old job sites like Monster and etc. got the revenue. CL's strategy was always to get the rest of it.
"In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal"
Office locations are a huge deal for me as it directly relates to how much of my time per day I'm expected to waste (twice) performing a mind-numbing activity while not even being paid for it (not to mention cost of fuel, etc).
I don't know the specific distance they were talking about in this case, Daly City isn't very far from SF proper, but as someone who lives in "San Diego" an office in "San Diego" could be across the street from me or it could be 45 miles away... and there's no way I'm driving 90 miles a day for work.
> In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal.
Location is a make-or-break proposition for a lot of people. If you have employees with lives outside of the company, location will matter quite a bit.
From the top, it might be easy to rationalize a decision that adds 20 minutes to an employee's commute time, but (hopefully) your employees aren't stupid. Time is money, and what they see is that you've just added several hours to their work week -- hours they could be spending with friends and family, or spending on hobbies or relaxing. If the change is seen as arbitrary or for selfish purposes (eg. making the lives of one or a few executives easier at the expense of everyone else), that location change can seriously sap morale.
I hear what you're saying. As an employee location does matter to me a lot.
As the CEO of a company that doesn't get my way w/r to where I want the office? Is the appropriate reaction to rage quit?
It's just weird, CEOs need a calm hand on the tiller, even if they're directing the ship towards bold maneuvers.
After this and the public employee debacle, I would not picture him as C-level executive material of a small company, let alone one the size and potential of reddit.
I think it was a humorous factoid rather than a dig; I don't think Sam Altman is attacking HN, nor do I think he thinks, or expects anyone reading his post to think, that HN / reddit scale comparisons are meaningful given their very different intended audiences.
Fair enough! I was thinking that theres not much of a comparison to draw as the hacker news crowd are quite different to the reddit crowd. I'd come here for an informed discussion and expertise... and assume I'd get mildly humorous trolling, lolcats and memes on reddit!
It's an odd comment given the fact that HN has never really tried to grow. There's a certain audience for HN, and it seems to be understood that growth for growth's sake can sometimes put that at risk. (anybody remember back when PG would ask everybody to post really obscure stuff for a few days when HN was seeing an influx?)
I'll go check it out, are there any other similar subreddits the community could suggest I should check out? I already am a follower of /r/bitcoin and /r/bitcoinmarkets for reasons you can probably guess!
Seeing as how Sam Altman is president of Y Combinator, and there's a reason Hacker News' URL is news.ycombinator.com... yes, yes Sam Altman was definitely intending to insult Hacker News and everyone involved with it.
I don't know if it was intended as a dig, but even as a casual and mostly-lurking HN user I perceived it that way, and was mildly offended on HN's behalf.
That was a thoroughly classless move on his part. The reddit or HN community might eat that kind of thing up, but it's recruiting poison. Anyone contemplating taking a job at reddit would have to think twice about working for someone who would permanently and capriciously destroy the SEO of a former employee like that.
Companies have to act and usually act quickly, handling a public issue privately, no matter how successfully, would leave a lingering impression of "Yahoo hires just about anyone with a fake diploma" or "Uber drivers beat up passengers with hammers as often as they please".
Practically any other way. Responding as he did shows an incredible lack of judgement that shouldn't be tolerated in any employee, let alone the CEO.
The response lacks all proportionality. A former employee is saying mildly critical things about you in a public forum? Ok, I don't think anyone is really going to mistake that kind of rumormongering for gospel. Destroying that person's future employment prospects from on high is not only unnecessarily cruel, it also creates a story where there wasn't one before. We never would have heard about the thread if he hadn't done this. It certainly never would have made the mainstream news.
He could have said nothing. He could have sent the employee a private legal warning. Or he could have posted a nice non-response to indicate that they saw the thread, but as a company staffed by adults Reddit is above that kind of name-calling. He did the opposite and looked like a child.
In addition to being really poor form, his response very likely opens the company up to a lawsuit. If I were the besmirched fired employee, god forbid, I would immediately be contacting an employment attorney.
Agreed. I don't think Reddit could afford to pay me the kind of money that I'd require to work there. What an awful place. Hopefully it'll be better now that Yishan Wong is leaving.
The context, is a spill-the-beans IAMA from a disgruntled ex-employee provocatively made on reddit itself.
The CEO has a right-of-reply and a duty to protect the reputation of the company against accusations, and he fairly exercised that right.
There was no slanging match, and the response consisted of a single post amongst hundreds in that thread.
I don't see a problem with having both positions made public after the ex-employee initiated the public confrontation. As always The truth is probably going to lie somewhere in the middle.
> Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun
Sounds like he didn't give any notice at all, and they had to scramble for a new CEO? Is resigning (or being fired?) with no notice typical for CEO positions?
This is very confusing to me. I'd say that maybe that's typical for other situations, but resigning effective immediately because the offices wouldn't be moved sounds very, very odd.
I would be really disappointed if a CEO left day-of rather than at least allow a transition period where a lead investor didn't have to step in. (Unless it was the board that wanted him gone asap?)
I could absolutely believe that, and if it's the case that's what should have been said, not some technically-correct-but-obviously-downplayed pablum that insults the intelligence of every reader.
The disagreement about "location and amount of money to spend on a lease" sounds like code for "disagreement on whether we need an SF office big enough to consolidate all our remote workers or not."
Earlier in this _exact same thread_, literally 100 pixels above your comment, someone called the PR-speak "pablum that insults the intelligence of every reader." Shift your eyes down a bit, and Yishan should have let the PR drone respond.
Nobody agrees on this sort of stuff. It shouldn't be anything anyone gets fired over.
I can say firsthand that company location is a much bigger deal than you'd imagine. Some people don't care, but others are extremely opinionated about it.
A CEO. Anything to be discussed though has most likely already been said in the multiple thousand comment threads that spawned as a result of this incident.
Understandably there's very little details here, but I'm curious to know if Alexis is moving to SF, he's played a big role in the NYC tech start-up world recently.
Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.
I don't think it's fair to conflate a progressive political ideology with website layout. The two aren't remotely related.
You can subscribe to a progressive ideology and abhor a dramatic redesign of a website. Just because someone is "progressive" doesn't mean they need to accept all change.
Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011.
We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed.
I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.
This. I've been back multiple times over the years to run some small campaigns for some big startups there and can't believe how bad and rough around edges their tools and processes are.
If I didn't love reddit so much there is no way I would've put up with them to run a small campaign.
New PM on ads here. Completely agree and it's one of my top priorities to fix. Feel free to ping me directly if you ever want to give me more detailed feedback - ryan@reddit.com
Not being able to use redirects = non-starter. The first thing you learn when you work in the advertising industry is not to trust other people's metrics.
My previous company came to reddit with an ad buy with a floor of ~5k/mo and a budgetary ceiling nearing $10k/mo if we saw better then expected numbers. The strategy was to target city specific sub-reddits with contextual ads. I went ahead and utilized PRAW and US Census data and brought that together with our internal data to target the top 300 cities for us. After doing all the legwork and presenting the reddit advertising execs with resources I put together we were told they couldn't scale to that level, and to instead look at targeting 3/4 cities with the same ad. This is probably the biggest road block I see for reddit trying to monetize at a level that Conde Nast was thinking when they "acquired" the company.
And as long as we're being subjective: It's got my favorite comment UI of any given news site - built in comment collapsing, ability to link to specific comments with parent context, flexibility in URLs, etc.
HN could stand to borrow some of these improvements.
Being able to link to a specific comment, with a context history. Right now, I can link to a comment, but you have to keep clicking "parent" to understand the full conversation.
As an occasional Reddit user, I find that particular feature rather confusing. If anyone wants to suggest a "native" way to do it on HN, i.e. that would fit with the existing design and be simple and intuitive, please email hn@ycombinator.com and we can talk about it offline.
I personally find it annoying when I follow a comment parent by parent only to have to find the original comment somewhere inside what turns out to be a really large thread. Something as simple as having a link to the original post in each comment might help navigation a bit too.
Being able to link to a specific comment, with a context history. Right now, I can link to a comment, but you have to keep clicking "parent" to understand the full conversation.
I wish reddit would remember my folds / unfolds per comment thread. Always stinks to read the comments, collapse some of the discussion for readability, click a link and then return to find the entire thread expanded again.
Wow, I hope not. I have most of the things they added turned off in settings, and the UI of the site as it is seems very difficult to improve upon, as long as all the images and such are off.
I would much rather they focus on making it fast and stable (I quickly tire of "we took too long to make this page for you"), and leave the UI alone.
Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.
1) Personally responded to feedback emails.
2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!
There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly.
Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.
Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.
Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons.
Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.
"then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons."
To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment.
"first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF"
I can see his point. I've worked remotely and not remotely more than a few times. When you work remotely, you really don't feel connected to the rest of the time and communication and overall progress does suffer over time. No matter how much you try to stay connected, it's just not the same.
Yes, the context is that it used to be a somewhat remote team and when the latest round of funding was raised everyone outside of SF was essentially forced to move to San Francisco.
Okay, thanks. (I'm not really sure why someone's downvoted me for asking the question; it's not like I said "ha ha, OP is stupid for saying this." I was, in fact, missing context.)
This is a serious red flag for the future of the site. If anyone wants to catch the great Reddit exodus of 2016, start building your competitor right now.
Ellen Pao is a former VC, true. She also was involved in a nasty situation with her former VC firm.
She's also one of the best consumer-product operations people I've ever met, and generally brilliant, honest, and helpful. While I know a lot of YC founders, partners, etc., Ellen is the person I'd go to for advice about whether a product/company direction is a good idea or not.
Bringing a founder back is great, but Ellen is amazing in her own right.
I think that makes up for her being a former VC :)
I'm saying her claims of harassment are dubious and are compounded by the equally dubious discrimination lawsuit her husband is filing against the Dakota. I'll eat my words if she wins her case.
Pao has been acting as the COO of Reddit for a while now. While running operations she also did the Alien Blue deal, built a mobile team, and oversaw the AMA app. Everything new that has happened product wise at Reddit in the last year has had her hand on it. You should judge her by that.
Maybe Wong wanted to move HQ to the Valley proper, rather than SF itself?
Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.
But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley.
Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.
It was already folklore back when I was first part of a company discussing new office locations, in the 90s. (My father may have even mentioned it when I was child.) Since then, I've observed it often – though in fairness that may be confirmation bias.
The ~cschmidt sibling reply highlights a Joel-on-Software post about the phenomenon from 2003, attributed to a 20th-century urbanist/organizational-analyst, William Whyte, perhaps as coined in a 1958 book.
Here's a critique of a Connecticut tax incentive from earlier this year that notes all 5 resulting corporate relocations reduced their CEO's commute:
I logged out of reddit about a month ago. I changed my password to something incomprehensible. To me, reddit has become a link aggregator over being a social place. I still visit about a half dozen subreddits daily, but only insomuch as to get my news.
I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.
I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.
The trend that finally sent me out was when good subreddits focused on specific topics started turning into show and tell for adults - and usually just amounted to, "Hey I bought that expensive thing that all of the group says is THE one to get, here is a picture of it in my house, it probably looks similar to the one you have". I suppose in a way, the recent investment might match that consumerist focus.
Each subreddit needs a good set of mods, especially when there are thousands of subscribers.
Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it".
Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people actually started talking again. r/twoxchromosomes has a no-images-unless-it's-Friday rule.
The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.
Absolutely. And the popular subreddits are already sort of pre-disposed to fluffy content due to their intended subject matter. I'm not saying the mods of r/funny should do anything, except maybe remove duplicate posts on the same day/week that content was posted.
But there are some subreddits that used to be good conversation hubs, that simply got overrun with trash because the moderators weren't paying attention, or were too scared to set up and enforce rules.
>The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.
Which is fine, but you have to make some attempt and consolidating that type of content as much as possible. An example being to let /r/gaming run wild with the image macros and meme posts, but then rule those out on the subreddits for specific games. If you don't, you just end up with each game's subreddit becoming basically a filtered version of /r/gaming.
I totally disagree on the "link aggregator" assessment. I've been a redditor since late 2007 / early 2008. It originally appealed to me because it was a link aggregator. The links I am interested in seeing are, for example, thoughtful articles or important news stories. I liked having links and a place to talk about the links.
I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.
I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.
Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.
I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.
>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.
>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.
Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.
Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.
I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)
Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.
2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminating in his resignation. He likely already knew his days as the CEO of reddit were numbered.
This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.
Just playing devil's advocate here, and please know I mean this with all due respect, but you are a Product Manager who has been there 4 months according to LinkedIn.
I do not claim to know the inner workings of Reddit, but can you really be 100% certain that you were privy to all of the meetings, etc. where such signs may have been observed?
Again--zero disrespect intended here, but it strikes me as uncommon that a recent PM hire would be involved in all of the board meetings, hallway conversations, etc. where some of this power struggle may have occurred.
The culture at reddit is one of openness. We're also a super small team (about 30 in SF), so any kind of issues/arguments are easily recognized. Through the relocation announcement, the ex-employee issue on reddit, handling of the #celebgate, all employees and the board were supportive of Yishan for the most part. If there was any animosity, it certainly wasn't enough to call for his resignation.
What Sam is saying is truth. Yishan wanted the new HQ closer to the peninsula because he believed it was the best thing for the company (cost savings, south bay commuters, etc), and probably less so, for his family. The board disagreed, and there were a number of employees who disagreed. Yishan may have felt that he wasn't given enough trust and reins he needed to execute the company the way he thought it should be if he was CEO. This was the sole reason for Yishan's resignation, as I know it.
This is a hopelessly naive position to hold, and it's also a one likely to be dangerous to your career — believing in openness so blindly is how you're going to be blind-sided.
An "open" culture is open unless the folks who actually are in charge have a good reason for it not to be. As someone who has been behind the closed doors, I guarantee that you have no idea what occurred behind them.
Openness isn't the only reason. I'm also pretty close with Yishan (pre-reddit) and Ellen is my direct supervisor and sits across from me. Sure there might have been other small issues, but office location was a large point of contention internally. So this being the underlying part of Yishan's resignation makes sense.
Reading what Sam wrote, the board didn't tell Yishan no. They just wanted him to add up the effects it would have. Which isn't just reasonable, it's a requirement if you're any kind of responsible corporate steward. You don't move on a whim, you have the pluses and minuses all figured out.
And no offense, but I find it hard to believe anyone other than Yishan and the board (and maybe some other investors) is privy to all the conversations they had.
It wouldn't be at all surprising if board members are 'nicer' to a ceo in front of employees than they are in private. It'd be kind of surprising if they weren't.
I never said I was privy to the board conversations. My reasonings had to do with the PR events that some believe may have contributed to the board's feelings for Yishan as a competent CEO.
"This was the sole reason for Yishan's resignation, as I know it."
Thanks for the response. I think the above quote is the salient point here though. Everything you said may be accurate, but without actually hearing Yishan's side, I don't think it is realistic to expect everyone to take this at face value, despite Sam and Reddit's reputations.
Even if Yishan were to make a statement, I think there would still be skepticism as to whether people were getting the full story, vs. the "I still hold equity, am seeking new employment, and don't want to agitate the situation" version.
Not sure on whether he still holds equity or how that works, but would you agree that it is reasonable for people to be skeptical given the circumstances and recent events? The more I think about it--I'm actually not sure what could be done to prove beyond a doubt what actually happened. This seems like a black eye for Reddit regardless, and I and many other Redditors have valid concerns about Reddit's future as a result.
Thanks for sharing that. I actually follow Yishan on Quora and hadn't seen that pop up.
Definitely helpful to get some context. I'd like to believe that everyone is being truthful here, but I guess there will always be a nagging doubt that we are not getting the full story due to the nature of the situation. I guess that brings up the more philosophical question of what duty a company has to make its dirty laundry public to its users.
Rare for an investor to put money into a company with the expectation of replacing the CEO. The speculation you propose is extra unjustified given that there was no change in control with this investment.
I know it's popular for HN to take the side of a persecuted CEO but in this case there's no evidence, or even pattern matching, to support this perspective.
Was he being completely honest? It was really a case of his words against another's words, and we don't know which parts were true or half-true or plain lies, from either party.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadSome speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?
From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.
...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.
> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.) i'm skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too. the only thing i felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable to move, and i think they have been.
To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.
This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...
So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office < 50 miles away? I'm very skeptical. My guess is that Yishan was being ousted so that Alexis could eventually be CEO again. Pure conjecture but that's my gut feeling.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127
Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal.
But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?
Seems like someone is trying to revive "reddit the startup", with the VC cash infusion, dickhead move to the bay and Sam Altman asking Alexis to "finish the job" (what ridiculously embarrassing wording).
Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?
Become a partner today!
This is the kind of mentality more companies need. It is why craigslist is still running a site that looks like it is from 1999. The opposite thinking is why digg when down in flames.
Also, Digg's failure had nothing to do with a visual refresh; it was that they changed the dynamics of the "social game" the site implemented to make previously "winning" users suddenly irrelevant in comparison to sponsored posts by companies. It'd be like Youtube doing DMCA takedowns on all the "celebrities" with million-subscriber channels.
What I can say is that Yishan was successful leading the reddit team in keeping up with reddit's growth from an infrastructure standpoint. No small task, especially since Reddit was crashing and burning all the time before he came on board but you don't see reddit go down due to load nearly as much these days (even at 5x usage). Bottom line, praise him for that -- keeping up with the growth, not driving growth that probably would have occurred regardless of who was in the captain's chair.
...the largest real estate site in the world.
...the largest dating site in the world.
...one of the largest job sites in the world.
It's now an also ran in everyone of those categories. They lost every single major market they were the dominant player in. This isn't Craiglist winning, it's Craiglist losing.
It can easily be a deal breaker if you have a family to consider.
(Not that I know anything about this case.)
Office locations are a huge deal for me as it directly relates to how much of my time per day I'm expected to waste (twice) performing a mind-numbing activity while not even being paid for it (not to mention cost of fuel, etc).
I don't know the specific distance they were talking about in this case, Daly City isn't very far from SF proper, but as someone who lives in "San Diego" an office in "San Diego" could be across the street from me or it could be 45 miles away... and there's no way I'm driving 90 miles a day for work.
Location is a make-or-break proposition for a lot of people. If you have employees with lives outside of the company, location will matter quite a bit.
From the top, it might be easy to rationalize a decision that adds 20 minutes to an employee's commute time, but (hopefully) your employees aren't stupid. Time is money, and what they see is that you've just added several hours to their work week -- hours they could be spending with friends and family, or spending on hobbies or relaxing. If the change is seen as arbitrary or for selfish purposes (eg. making the lives of one or a few executives easier at the expense of everyone else), that location change can seriously sap morale.
As the CEO of a company that doesn't get my way w/r to where I want the office? Is the appropriate reaction to rage quit?
It's just weird, CEOs need a calm hand on the tiller, even if they're directing the ship towards bold maneuvers.
After this and the public employee debacle, I would not picture him as C-level executive material of a small company, let alone one the size and potential of reddit.
Presumably Yishan was heavily involved in the logistics of that.
Was that a dig at Hacker News?
HN is targeted at a specific audience and is more like a subreddit for a particular topic. It wouldn't make sense to compare them directly.
I'm exaggerating of course, but there are still a ton of novelty/alt accounts that people create on reddit.
Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. " (http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit)
From the NYT: "That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."
Companies have to act and usually act quickly, handling a public issue privately, no matter how successfully, would leave a lingering impression of "Yahoo hires just about anyone with a fake diploma" or "Uber drivers beat up passengers with hammers as often as they please".
The response lacks all proportionality. A former employee is saying mildly critical things about you in a public forum? Ok, I don't think anyone is really going to mistake that kind of rumormongering for gospel. Destroying that person's future employment prospects from on high is not only unnecessarily cruel, it also creates a story where there wasn't one before. We never would have heard about the thread if he hadn't done this. It certainly never would have made the mainstream news.
He could have said nothing. He could have sent the employee a private legal warning. Or he could have posted a nice non-response to indicate that they saw the thread, but as a company staffed by adults Reddit is above that kind of name-calling. He did the opposite and looked like a child.
In addition to being really poor form, his response very likely opens the company up to a lawsuit. If I were the besmirched fired employee, god forbid, I would immediately be contacting an employment attorney.
The CEO has a right-of-reply and a duty to protect the reputation of the company against accusations, and he fairly exercised that right.
There was no slanging match, and the response consisted of a single post amongst hundreds in that thread.
I don't see a problem with having both positions made public after the ex-employee initiated the public confrontation. As always The truth is probably going to lie somewhere in the middle.
Sounds like he didn't give any notice at all, and they had to scramble for a new CEO? Is resigning (or being fired?) with no notice typical for CEO positions?
I would be really disappointed if a CEO left day-of rather than at least allow a transition period where a lead investor didn't have to step in. (Unless it was the board that wanted him gone asap?)
Nobody agrees on this sort of stuff. It shouldn't be anything anyone gets fired over.
I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.
You can subscribe to a progressive ideology and abhor a dramatic redesign of a website. Just because someone is "progressive" doesn't mean they need to accept all change.
We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed.
I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.
If I didn't love reddit so much there is no way I would've put up with them to run a small campaign.
An ad spend ($5)
My Target subreddit
When it runs
And then a few days later my ad was live.
For $5 it was ridiculously simple and easy.
Can you elaborate on what you were looking for?
I didn't see your comment before I posted, but definitely take a gander at my previous comment for a good place to start.
Good luck!
Isn't that kind of subjective?
And as long as we're being subjective: It's got my favorite comment UI of any given news site - built in comment collapsing, ability to link to specific comments with parent context, flexibility in URLs, etc.
HN could stand to borrow some of these improvements.
Which ones, besides comment collapsing (which we definitely intend to do)?
[1] http://redditenhancementsuite.com/
I would much rather they focus on making it fast and stable (I quickly tire of "we took too long to make this page for you"), and leave the UI alone.
UX changes are the reason Digg died.
1) Personally responded to feedback emails.
2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!
3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare.
Hoping for great things!
Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?
Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.
Here is a terrible overview from a quick google search: http://www.themarysue.com/reddit-bans-quickmeme/
https://frontapp.com/
Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.
To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment.
"first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF"
I can see his point. I've worked remotely and not remotely more than a few times. When you work remotely, you really don't feel connected to the rest of the time and communication and overall progress does suffer over time. No matter how much you try to stay connected, it's just not the same.
This is a serious red flag for the future of the site. If anyone wants to catch the great Reddit exodus of 2016, start building your competitor right now.
She's also one of the best consumer-product operations people I've ever met, and generally brilliant, honest, and helpful. While I know a lot of YC founders, partners, etc., Ellen is the person I'd go to for advice about whether a product/company direction is a good idea or not.
Bringing a founder back is great, but Ellen is amazing in her own right.
I think that makes up for her being a former VC :)
Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.
But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley.
Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.
Is there any evidence of that? Seems quite interesting..
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/OfficeNewYork.html
The ~cschmidt sibling reply highlights a Joel-on-Software post about the phenomenon from 2003, attributed to a 20th-century urbanist/organizational-analyst, William Whyte, perhaps as coined in a 1958 book.
Here's a critique of a Connecticut tax incentive from earlier this year that notes all 5 resulting corporate relocations reduced their CEO's commute:
http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/07/16/connecticut-taxpayers-...
Sam himself obliges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604199
I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.
I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.
Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it".
Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people actually started talking again. r/twoxchromosomes has a no-images-unless-it's-Friday rule.
But there are some subreddits that used to be good conversation hubs, that simply got overrun with trash because the moderators weren't paying attention, or were too scared to set up and enforce rules.
Which is fine, but you have to make some attempt and consolidating that type of content as much as possible. An example being to let /r/gaming run wild with the image macros and meme posts, but then rule those out on the subreddits for specific games. If you don't, you just end up with each game's subreddit becoming basically a filtered version of /r/gaming.
I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.
I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.
Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.
I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1she85/how_reddi...
>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.
>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.
Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.
Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.
I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)
Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.
This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.
I do not claim to know the inner workings of Reddit, but can you really be 100% certain that you were privy to all of the meetings, etc. where such signs may have been observed?
Again--zero disrespect intended here, but it strikes me as uncommon that a recent PM hire would be involved in all of the board meetings, hallway conversations, etc. where some of this power struggle may have occurred.
What Sam is saying is truth. Yishan wanted the new HQ closer to the peninsula because he believed it was the best thing for the company (cost savings, south bay commuters, etc), and probably less so, for his family. The board disagreed, and there were a number of employees who disagreed. Yishan may have felt that he wasn't given enough trust and reins he needed to execute the company the way he thought it should be if he was CEO. This was the sole reason for Yishan's resignation, as I know it.
An "open" culture is open unless the folks who actually are in charge have a good reason for it not to be. As someone who has been behind the closed doors, I guarantee that you have no idea what occurred behind them.
And no offense, but I find it hard to believe anyone other than Yishan and the board (and maybe some other investors) is privy to all the conversations they had.
It wouldn't be at all surprising if board members are 'nicer' to a ceo in front of employees than they are in private. It'd be kind of surprising if they weren't.
Thanks for the response. I think the above quote is the salient point here though. Everything you said may be accurate, but without actually hearing Yishan's side, I don't think it is realistic to expect everyone to take this at face value, despite Sam and Reddit's reputations.
Even if Yishan were to make a statement, I think there would still be skepticism as to whether people were getting the full story, vs. the "I still hold equity, am seeking new employment, and don't want to agitate the situation" version.
Not sure on whether he still holds equity or how that works, but would you agree that it is reasonable for people to be skeptical given the circumstances and recent events? The more I think about it--I'm actually not sure what could be done to prove beyond a doubt what actually happened. This seems like a black eye for Reddit regardless, and I and many other Redditors have valid concerns about Reddit's future as a result.
Definitely helpful to get some context. I'd like to believe that everyone is being truthful here, but I guess there will always be a nagging doubt that we are not getting the full story due to the nature of the situation. I guess that brings up the more philosophical question of what duty a company has to make its dirty laundry public to its users.
I know it's popular for HN to take the side of a persecuted CEO but in this case there's no evidence, or even pattern matching, to support this perspective.