I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
I agree (and also spoke with Seth for a little while) -- this is a great telling of the personal and market forces behind the org.
However, I would say this is only half of the story. The other half comes from the community of users who in Erik's words did "the hard part". I hope that someday we'll see as thoughtful a telling of those stories.
Reading this, I'm struck by a few things that I believe are telling about the tech sector's culture.
The paternalistic/maternalistic attitude of Paul and Jessica is more than a little cloying. Frankly, it seems like they enjoyed the position of power granted them by the cash in their wallets.
And second, the focus on dysfunctional behavior as an aberration instead of the norm. See how the term 'dysfunction' is used to describe Yishan's departure, Twitter's board, Reddit in general.
Things rarely go 'professionally' when humans are concerned; I'd argue, in fact, that Yishan found a quite professional avenue to quit, in that it did not become a shouting match over a core issue.
I think it a mark of corporatism to adhere strongly to the facade of professionalism and punish or otherwise shame those that prove it a lie. Meanwhile, cultural leaders within the Valley pick favorites and call them "Muffins" but are, presently, secure from social fallout.
There is an in crowd and an out crowd, in other words.
> The paternalistic/maternalistic attitude of Paul and Jessica is more than a little cloying. Frankly, it seems like they enjoyed the position of power granted them by the cash in their wallets.
In a setting where ideas change rapidly and companies start overnight, having a hunch about people even through failure might be completely justified. "You've produced garbage so far, but I'm confident that you'll make something good" is much more reasonable in the startup world than it is in, say, large-scale retail. The investment that PG makes in a prospect is really, really low; if "Muffin" doesn't produce, it doesn't really matter to him.
If this paternalistic attitude didn't work, Y Combinator wouldn't be doing it. To use a sports metaphor, they're drafting a football team rather than a baseball team. Baseball players can be studied statistically because the college game is similar enough to the professional game that you can study prior data. In contrast, football is a crapshoot; the college game is so different from the pro game that there's barely a correlation at all between good college players and good pro players. So is choosing startups to fund.
If the Muffins end up making money, that's a great indication that PG & Friends having an "in crowd" is producing results.
If they're incorrect, they're opening the door for a more rational company to do the exact same job as them without Muffins and beat them.
I never said it didn't produce results, I said that it had cultural effects.
>If this paternalistic attitude didn't work, Y Combinator wouldn't be doing it.
Your argument seems essentially "it exists, therefore it's fine." Minimal competence also produces results. That doesn't mean the flaws of an approach are mitigated or nonexistent.
My overall point has nothing whatsoever to do with results. What I'm saying is something about ugliness and ugly people and how our culture treats them despite the fact that we are all ugly people.
Unfortunately for Paul and Jessica, they are in public view quite often; in this article we get a glimpse of their ugliness. But they also consistently accept the rewards given them because of this exposure. Good/bad for them, depending on your viewpoint of that tradeoff.
I dwell on them because the disparity between how our culture punishes and rewards 'professionalism' and lack thereof.
This is about the lie of professionalism. Perhaps you're saying professionalism doesn't matter if, even during its absence, results can still be had? I don't see how that counters anything I've said.
I really enjoyed this in depth look at Reddit's history. I never realized what an early member Aaron Swartz was, and found a lot of the Conde stuff pretty revealing. The competition and eventual victory over Digg also has some nice anecdotes to take away. And I'm impressed by this kind of journalism coming from Mashable, it'd be nice to see more of this.
I'm surprised that no mention was made of the big rewrite. A lot of us early users were lisp/Graham followers and intrigued by the fact that the site was written in lisp. I seem to recall the rewrite being a big deal.
I too remember it being pretty harrowing at the time (if only because it felt like we were alienating [har] such a large chunk of our community), but in fairness it happened barely 6 months in. It all happened in a couple of weeks of quick work and I seem to recall we even recycled the db schema.
We did a post-acquisition python-to-python rewrite -- clean out the cobwebs, switch frameworks, and redo the database schema -- which was much harder, longer, and more painful to deploy. Though in that case it was one of those drastic changes whose primary side effect was that no none notices a thing.
This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs. If someone is able to do a Reddit-like site with a fair means for nominating and electing moderators they will have a good chance at eclipsing Reddit's success.
Reddit could also implement this themselves, and given the sometimes questionable actions of some moderators (e.g. when all Tesla-related stories were being banned from /r/technology ) this would help to legitimize the nominal democratic nature of the site.
Reddit is a site with an incredible amount of diversity. You simultaneously have subreddits like /r/TwoXChromosomes/ and /r/pua (they hate each other) on the same website. Electing moderators plus entryism will kill this diversity - a large subreddit can direct it's members enter a smaller conflicting one and vote for moderators who will kill it.
This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs.
I hope you don't mean elected by the users, because I can't imagine a more miserable online community than one where moderators are chosen by user vote.
Keep in mind giving mods power incentivises mods to build, grow, and.. well... moderate their little corner of the internet on reddit's platform. You take that power away and good luck keeping mods working hard for you for free.
I couldn't agree more, the moderator problem is huge. I spend a lot of time on reddit, but it's still not clear to me how mods and mod policies are chosen, and more often than not I see the mods doing an absolutely terrible job.
For example, it's quite common to see a post on the front page that is based on a lie (e.g., the OP claims some content as his own). Everybody in the comments knows it. Why can't a mod step in and remove this garbage?
Another example, /r/pics is full of posts that break the community guidelines. Often the top comment will point this out, but the mods are either absent or they don't care, so the sub continues to get worse.
This article really struck a chord with me. It reminds me of a lot of the issues we've had running Neocities (https://neocities.org), which gives people free space to make their own web sites.
When you operate an open platform on the modern web, the first thing you quickly learn is that you will end up being embroiled in a lot of random controversies you never expected to have a role in. We've had doxxing issues, got caught in some "Gamergate-esque" drama, and even had a DDoS site (using jQuery, pretty ingenious actually) put up that ended up taking down the President of Mexico's web site (you can't make this stuff up). That little stunt got me a few threatening emails from, literally, the Federales (Mexican Federal Police). And of course, there's the usual litany list of pill spam (arbitrage between other countries and US citizens who pay full price is, somewhat hilariously, one of our biggest spam problems) and whatnot.
The biggest epiphany I've had over the course of the year is on the true nature of "freedom of speech" on the internet. You start to learn very quickly that not all speech is free or equal. It may be under the Constitution, but if you're a startup and a multi-million dollar corporation or university (yes, we've had issues with Universities too) shows up and has high-powered (and bored) lawyers to waste your time and money harassing you, it doesn't matter if their complaint is legally valid or not. Your last resort of defense becomes public opinion. If you can't get public support for defending someone's freedom of speech, it doesn't matter what the Constitution says. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "the boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave".
I'm not trying to sound dismal or depressed. Neocities has been exhausting at times, but I'm having a lot of fun. I tend gravitate to stressful startups, and (I blame this on my previous work in political activism) tend to prefer them. Neocities overall has been going very strong, and it gives me a lot of joy to check out the new sites every day and see people learning how to write HTML. It's worth it. And I think, with knowledge and experience, the issues are manageable.
Tying this back to Reddit: Controversies aside, I think Reddit has done a great job over the last few years, and I want to congratulate them for the growth, and salute them for weathering the "boisterous seas" of being a tolerant, open platform. I don't know Yishan Wong personally and can't vouch for him on a personal or operational level, but I feel that Reddit has done a good job under his leadership, and I hope that people don't unfairly pigeonhole him as a failed leader because of the difficult nature of their work. In perfect honestly, having context for some of the issues they've had to deal with, I may have done far worse in his position.
This article really makes me want to meet the Reddit team. I bet there's a lot I could learn from them.
TLDR: Running an open platform is tough. Cut them some slack.