Anomander's recent activity
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Comment on Thoughts on link aggregators vs communities, and other musings in ~tech
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Comment on Thoughts on link aggregators vs communities, and other musings in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentI think the biggest pitfall for the "image posts" problem is that submissions require a mod/admin judgement call on each post, and can't be readily addressed with a blanket rule. Defining...I think the biggest pitfall for the "image posts" problem is that submissions require a mod/admin judgement call on each post, and can't be readily addressed with a blanket rule. Defining "content" or "substance" for an image post is nearly impossible and the OP will overwhelmingly overestimate the content in their post as opposed to any standard that a third party may feel it falls short of.
The easiest rule is a blanket ban, and requesting that the OPs link to the image(s) from within a text post; however - like you're noting that will kill some excellent content when the image or album are worthwhile content in their own right.
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Comment on I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position? in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentSo Yishan's time at Reddit felt like the shortest - or at least had the fewest things being actively on fire during his tenure - and wasn't a very loud administration. He was the first leader of...So Yishan's time at Reddit felt like the shortest - or at least had the fewest things being actively on fire during his tenure - and wasn't a very loud administration.
He was the first leader of the company to walk the company meaningfully backwards from the free speech ethos that early founding had instilled, and he was seen as responsible for the first massive erosion of the pseudo-libertarian ideals that Reddit (community) had previously assumed the site operated under.
Personally speaking, I supported (still do) those changes, as things like Creepshots were a huge and growing problem to Reddit culturally, and a greater risk to Reddit Inc as a source of liability as well. It was under his management era that Reddit reached 'critical mass' as far as platform growth and accessibility, and he did have to deal with several hateful or otherwise problematic communities during his tenure. The site was faced with a hard fork in it's potential future - it could go the 4chan path route, or the Facebook route. Filthy or sanitized.
As an aside, I think Pao gets 'credit' for much of the campaign against Hate Speech on reddit, but in actual fact I think she was more responsible for making it more explicit policy that Reddit would take action against those communities, formalizing a precedent that Yishan set when taking single-case actions against precursor communities. I believe that the tactic under his watch was attempting to nip the really hateful ones before they reached "outrage" sizes, and then permitting the borderline ones as "less-awful" pressure-release communities.
Yishan ran a lot of the site informally and without overt policy changes, and I think that was both his biggest success as a leader and his biggest weakness as a CEO. He ran things in a case-by-case manner that vibed really well with the community of reddit at the time, but he did seem to struggle to make systemic alterations that would have staying power or set the company up for the future. I think a bunch of what he had to say in that specific comment is from a lens of being safely out the door and able to tell a slightly slippery version of things. My impression at the time was that he'd been replaced by a board seeking someone who would push Reddit to write rules that would accomplish and 'canonize' the calls that he was making on a one-off basis during his tenure.
I think his statement about Pao wanting to avoid mass-banning and defending grey area at least checks out - that is supported by the under-the-hood whispers I was hearing in that era. Not that she supported them or was secretly "our" friend, defending free speech - but that Pao understood how contentious the policy change around hate speech and communities would be, and wanted to limit the scope of the targeted communities to those that weren't easily defensible. I think she was well aware that if Reddit turned its focus too wide, the community risked revolt in a time where Reddit was not yet firmly entrenched online and there was risk of harm beyond what Reddit could weather.
But there's also been a shockingly repetitive narrative that appears in reddit dustups: "The CEO you're mad at right now is secretly the person that's been on your side the whole time!!!" Yishan said that about Pao, and today spez went back to that well himself:
You're not wrong. I think we run into a space where Reddit tends to excessively villainize one specific target and often the truth is a lot more nuanced than that. I also think that there tends to be an attempt from leadership and peripherals to try and intervene on behalf of the target with some outright obfuscation, which often involves versions of "but they're on yoouuuuur side!!!" like you note.
That said, I don't really see Spez putting his influence to work in protecting T_D was really on 'my' side or the side of Reddit - unfortunately that community was hyper-toxic to the rest of Reddit and the lack of useful consequences for them left them emboldened as far as their excesses. I certainly didn't intend to bring that up as if it was marks in his favour: TD was a problem and Spez protected them. Like, when I have a coffee community getting brigaded for weeks by TD, for merest rumour that we banned a specific conservative-aligned coffee company - I think it's a case where the community is obviously in a state of excessive harm to the rest of the platform. No matter how much you or I might support the existence of a conservative space to host those views, in abstract.
I wouldn't go as far as "false" dichotomy so much as 'exaggerated' - I think it was safe to assume neither of us is taking those as the sole options present.
I am remarking that the amount of blame heaped on Spez at the moment is bordering on one pole of that example, and to my perception that framing is effectively as absurd as both poles of my example. I do think that Spez is setting himself up as scapegoat for the board, and will be following the Pao playbook down the road. He's an asshole, but he's gone so far towards antagonizing the community and drawing heat onto himself personally that even taking polite credulity into account - it challenges suspension of disbelief that Spez isn't aware of how awful his approach is from a PR perspective. At this point, I think it's safe to assume some portion is intentional.
My expectation is that closer to the IPO, he'll step down 'humbled' and Reddit Inc can turn to the community and make out like they've fired the Bad Man and we should all be happy now. Their PR department can make an absolute festival out of selling the narrative to public press that "Reddit's embattled and unpopular CEO pushed out" as a way of convincing potential public investors that the site's relationship with it's userbase is on the mend and trending positive, so it's a far stronger investment going forward.
But of course a different CEO wouldn't be the only difference! Yes, I think Sam Altman, Paul Graham, et al are escaping a great deal of heat here. But the idea that the current state is largely unavoidable doesn't follow unless you're all-in on the "YC demands a patsy CEO" angle. Which... might be true? I don't know enough about how YC operates to really comment.
It's not really that they're seeking a spineless patsy, per se - but that they're looking for someone who is willing to be steered. YC and a lot of VC firms place a large amount of value in getting informal control of firms. They want strong capable leaders with vision, but as incubators and investors they also firmly believe they know better than most of the CEO's 'under' them and they also expect to get a certain amount of influence over the direction of the company. I've never been in a room with YC, but during school I did cross over with a lot of smaller tech/startup incubator investor groups.
What they're actually looking for in leadership does seem to hover within contradiction: they are looking for a strong bold leader that doesn't need much oversight and support, but who would make decisions the same way and for same outcomes as they themselves would, who is also open to being steered when the board seeks to intervene. There's this underlying understanding that many companies passing through VC spaces will eventually hit a point where what is best for users, or best for the company itself, is not necessarily best for the investment group - and they do very much expect that when you reach that point, you will think of your investors and make good on your commitments to them.
Part of my crossover with that space was a series of working group and similar consultations regarding how to assess feedback from leadership of client firms when their concerns about users/company health were necessary and expert advice, and when the VC should be pushing to overrule them in favour of getting their proverbial pound of flesh. I was, to be fair, very junior in that room and just grinding out resume credits with a communications consulting firm ran by one of my profs - but it was a very neat window inside how they see their relationships with the companies they invest in.
If you think adding chat made sense then I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you work for Google.
lmao no, I wish my payroll came in with google-sized numbers.
It's more that I can absolutely understand where the business case for adding chat came from and why the various stakeholders on Reddit's side thought it was a great idea. Even if I personally can say from my time on reddit and my background that it's not a good fit for the culture of the site - I think there's a niche corner where a great execution of a chat client was super valuable. Look at Discord, where it started off as a voice tool, but their network of interconnected and subdivided live chatrooms is their biggest and most successful niche at the moment.
At the time Reddit was launching first iteration of chat features and trying to figure out how to do subreddit-wide chat and similar, Discord was not yet overwhelmingly occupying that space, and there was a clear demand for exactly that sort of platform/service. If Reddit's execution wasn't terrible and chat V1 had been successful, they could be occupying that space instead of Discord.
Having to kill third party apps since you're not turning a profit after pissing away money on terribly-implemented crap instead of investing in fixing your own apps because you could get away with not doing so due to always relying on third party developers to build that ever more imporant mobile acess point for you -- including the now first party apps you bought and ran into the ground -- despite never including your ads in the API you gave them might be the most incompetent path a CEO has trod since Yahoo gave Mark Cuban $5.7b.
This is one of those things where I think what is good for the company or it's users and what is good for VC really start gapping from each other.
There's definitely an underlying lack of imagination and fundamentally poor execution on a lot of products and changes coming from the very top - but I also think that VC and potential investors like to hear that Reddit is acting to better take control of it's publishing environment. From a user perspective, we can see that they're somewhat taking a knife to the golden goose - but VC knows if they can show the market three golden eggs in advance of the IPO, it doesn't matter if the goose dies a while after the sale takes place. I don't think it was well-executed or handled, but I do think that from the boardroom perspective it's not as wildly stupid as it seems from our level, and a better handled version of the same choice was very likely in Reddit's future effectively no matter what happened.
Like, from where I sit, expansion of API, some manner of ad-serve, and a revenue-sharing model would have been the best thing as far as continued growth and engagement for the site. But that's with a far more detailed understanding of the site and it's culture than I think the board or even upper-level staff necessarily have. Getting those users into Your Own app, getting them into the optimized app environment that prioritizes the metrics investors want to see ... those are things that boards of struggling companies like to hear, that investors want to hear about.
The only way his continued presence makes sense is in light of Yishan's legendary tongue-in-cheek conspiracy:
Just remember how much that playbook puts Spez under Altman's thumb as far as favours owed and influence over the long-term direction of the company, and how much direct and indirect meddling was involved from YC-aligned investors and staff in order to make that come to pass.
It's the same reason that dictators often promote wildly underqualified people into key governance positions - it leaves the promotee highly indebted to the boss, and keenly aware that their ability to retain their position and their paycheque is contingent on continued fealty and the ongoing success of their boss. This is quite close to the sort of relationship between VC and Company that I described above - you want a "strong leader" for the company, but who is also biddable when the VC comes calling. Playing Altman/YC's games with them are the main way for Spez to get back into the money if the Reddit IPO pays out.
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Comment on Bosses are fed up with remote work for four main reasons. Some of them are undeniable. in ~life
Anomander Link ParentFor context, I work in an office, but my team and supervision are remote. A large portion of my organization does work from home though. I think that overall a lot of contemporary bosses' issues...For context, I work in an office, but my team and supervision are remote. A large portion of my organization does work from home though.
I think that overall a lot of contemporary bosses' issues with WFH are related to a failure to adapt on the part of upper management, and a fundamental distrust of, and disrespect for, their subordinates.
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Remote work is only bad for new hires and junior employees if the organization is still treating onboarding like they're in-office. If the workplace is still trying to conduct training like it's in-person, just via Zoom, they're going to give new hires a bad time and they're going to fail to integrate in the way they would have in-person. Remote training needs to come with remote socialization and teambuilding, like scheduled 'water cooler' moments with team members and management at an informal and non-professional tone. It is best formatted in much shorter blocks of content interspersed with demonstration and practice; remote trainees tend to be harder to hold attention for and trainer doesn't have in-person cueing to recognize it's break time or similar. It really works for some personalities and really doesn't for some others - similar to in-person, except that we're used to it in the latter. I was trained completely remotely and it was the absolute best onboarding experience I've had.
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I love how point two really boils down to "when you do it badly, it feels like you're doing it badly" which I can assure the room is definitely the case for in-office work as well. I think it requires a certain measure of ignorance to pretend that issues like workplace hostility, harassment, or other work-culture issues are somehow minimized in offices - instead, I'd be inclined to suggest a combination of two things: people who were not traditionally targets have found themselves on the receiving end, and staff are more likely to report issues when it leaves a paper trail (ie slack messages) and when they're likely to be confronted in-person by the individual they reported. It's absolutely a thing that text over slack, or even bodies over zoom, are not as expressive and can lead to missed cues and miscommunications - but I do find that's easy to recover from and account for if you're accustomed to, or trained for, the issue. The remarks about bosses would "fire the remote workers first" in the event of cutbacks really is old-world quiet thoughts, said out loud - they're going to set their firing hierarchy on the basis of their relationship with the workers, and haven't invested in building relationships with their remote staff. Staff level already knew management often played favourites, rather than performance, when cutbacks came rolling around - but we all know they're not supposed to admit that like this.
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I think there's a whole lot of jumping to conclusions here - I think that the survey they're based on and the conclusions they've drawn from are both not factoring in time "wasted" in an office - but are factoring it out from WFH. I'd guess that's happening on a self-reporting level as well, that instead of burning half an hour a day reading the news, scrolling the net, and watching youtube, WFH are getting laundry done - and are reporting that time to the survey. Measuring "time worked" for salaried workers is already missing the point, though, and it's rather telling that this article wasn't able to point data at a loss of productivity - because we all know they would if they could've. Hourly are either showing up for the time they're contracted, or they're not - time worked shows on the clock. Hourly can still slack on the clock, and have been doing so in-office or on-site for generations now.
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A purely anecdotal loss of productivity from, effectively, a single firm - using an already-nebulous data point. I'm sure there are firms that have seen a loss in productivity, especially in cases where work is collaboration-heavy and the firm hasn't done a great job of adjusting to remote. I've seen it happen. But I think that's like the (very old now) argument that having internet on employees computers causes a reduction in productivity - sure, it's a thing. It also doesn't need to be in a work environment that holds staff adequately accountable while providing tools to succeed. The productivity issues need to be examined more closely than just "number down. bad!" because when you have that consistent a trend at one firm and we're not seeing consistent and controlled data showing that's the case across the board and universal to WFH conditions, it's really important for the firm to look inwards: what about their work, or their team environment, is failing to support WFH? Are team members working from home on different days, so one or two staff members are getting left out while they're home? Is the sales team competitive-motivated and don't have a clear way to compete while they're not in-person? Does the company employ a bunch of slackers who'd also have poor sales numbers on days that supervision was out of office all day.
Work from home is not perfect and cannot be perfect, no more than in-office is. But it's also absolutely fantastic for some folks, allows others to participate in the workforce in ways not previously available to them, and can be done as well, and as poorly, as in-office has been prior. I think that much of the handwringing around it right now is rooted in it being different in ways that require adaptation - and much of the adaptation required is social skills and not business practices.
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Comment on I made a thing to make Tildes look better! in ~tildes
Anomander Link ParentI don't get my text extending all the way across the available space in original layout - the comment boxes go full R-L, minus the sidebar, but the text stops about 80% of the way there.I don't get my text extending all the way across the available space in original layout - the comment boxes go full R-L, minus the sidebar, but the text stops about 80% of the way there.
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Comment on I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position? in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentIt's less that I'm being too kind to him, and more that I'm wanting to make a point of not leaving him as Next Pao. I think the problems Reddit faces go a lot deeper than just Spez and I think...That hasn't happened, so I think you're being far too kind to spez here.
It's less that I'm being too kind to him, and more that I'm wanting to make a point of not leaving him as Next Pao.
I think the problems Reddit faces go a lot deeper than just Spez and I think that repeating the Pao/Yishan cycle with Spez is going to result in them getting back to the same place again. Putting the whole state of the site onto the CEO is also giving a free pass to all of board, investors, and staff working groups that contribute to its' current state. Far more than I'm faintly interested in excuses for Spez, I'm much more committed to not letting everyone else off the hook for the sake of shitting on Spez.
I guess where I'm going with all of that is that Spez was chosen because he was the best person to sell the community on what was happening. He deserves full responsibility for taking that bargain and stepping into that role. However, if Spez didn't take up the role, someone else would have, and the site would probably have made a nearly identical list of missteps and errors.
Yishan was at least in line with what Aaron Swartz had said. And I think Alexis, though no longer involved with the site, was still talking about reddit being a platform of free speech.
It really depends where you personally are wanting to draw a line for "free speech" as a concept. kn0thing (Alexis) has been super clear that he supports the site's current stances around preventing hate-speech, misinformation, and harassment. I very genuinely believe that Swartz would not have remained a free-speech absolutist when faced by the current state, and scale, of Reddit. Spez was almost the loudest of the three as far as free speech and libertarian dreams, to my experience with his early days on the site; his changes in stance more recently I think were largely reflective of the new information and new context that Reddit's growth had forced him to face.
So like, where is your line, why do you draw it there, what counterpoints might exist ...
I think it's always been acknowledged and has been genuinely true that Reddit aspires to be a free-speech platform, within reason - and that there have been a number of times where 'reason' did strongly dictate that absolute free speech is not in the platform's or the community's interests. The site was not better for hosting Jailbait, or for allowing Pizzagate / Q to organize and stage harassment campaigns or real-world attacks on their perceived enemies. It's widely acknowledged, if not necessarily provable, that Spez protected TheDonald for several years before they eventually went too far too often and the community was banned.
Obviously the board is a player here. But when CEOs are in fundamental disagreement with a board then they quit or push back until they're fired. That hasn't happened, so I think you're being far too kind to spez here.
I think it's important to differentiate between him being a patsy - and him being personally responsible for directly dictating each and every change that we don't approve of. I'm happy to criticize him for the former, but I think going all the way to the latter is excessive and is manufacturing excuses for other people who don't deserve that kind of protection. I don't live in a fantasy world where he's somehow blameless and everything that sucks is totally coming in over his head and from below him - I just don't subscribe to the opposite, either, where he Is The Problem and if he gets replaced then everything will be better.
Ultimately his job is to put the people in place to make the right decisions. Did chat 1.0 get built despite him saying it was a dumb waste of money? Chat 2.0? The incessant "reddit is better in our shitty app" somehow got shipped without his permission and the entire dev team has been on strike since to ensure it remains up? The mobile apps they bought somehow got much worse and no one noticed because spez used Apollo too?
If someone else was running the company, would chat 1.0 have been built anyways? Would they have tried to "fix" 1.0 by building Chat 2.0? Would they still have continued trying to push app usage on mobile, and continued the development of New Reddit in ways that help ad visibility but suck for the community? Would leadership & board have still prioritized site engagement (Chat projects), increasing ad visibility (Chat, New Reddit, App), boosting App metrics (App, API)? Is there a world where a CEO could oppose things that are supposed to make the company profitable - and keep their job?
If someone else was running the company and objected to the goals underlying any of those things, do you imagine they'd still be running the company?
I don't. I think those things are part of the enshittification that comes with large platforms seeing growth and chasing metrics, and that the board would have rotated leadership until they found someone willing to take those sort of steps with regards to developing Reddit. Each feature might not be quite the same as today, they might make a few different mistakes, or miss some of the ones that actually happened ... but I also don't think that there's an alternate reality where reddit is wildly popular and profitable, but who's sitting in the CEO chair is the only difference.
A huge part of their problem is IMO the poor execution of perfectly reasonable ideas. IE: the app sucks. That doesn't mean having an app is bad. It sucks for a hundred different reasons that all make sense on the surface, that aren't bad ideas when engaged with individually and assuming execution is good. Reddit fucks it up by flubbing the execution and bundling all hundred things that suck into one app. Chat isn't necessarily a terrible idea, Reddit just did an ass job of building it, and an even worse job of launching and supporting it. It lacks a clear need-case prior to launch, but so did the comment section and that became Reddit's main claim to relevance once it was added.
A lot of the most annoying shit they've done has been the low-hanging fruit, the obvious option, as far as getting a platform on that scale to be profitable. It's not that the ideas are bad, but the execution. It's the uncreative and context-blind shit that faceless suits and corporate ghouls come up with to monetize an online community when they have no meaningful connection to the community and no understanding of its culture.
Spez is happy to take their cheques, and deserves full blame for choosing to be figurehead, for knowing better and still signing off on changes - but I don't think he's fully the sole person responsible for the app being shit or for the aggressive push towards New Reddit. Reddit is likely to continue being shit with or without Spez' leadership, unless the post-IPO board decides to prioritize very-long-term site viability ahead of immediate ROI.
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Comment on Google risks forced breakup of ad business as EU alleges shocking misconduct in ~tech
Anomander LinkSummary of what misconduct is being alleged here - Google is using their control of multiple firms in the advertising space to favour their own businesses and disadvantage competitor services....Google operates an ad exchange, AdX, as well as ad tech services for advertisers—Google Ads and Google Display & Video 360 (DV 360)—and services for publishers, DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP).
Vestager said there's potential for misconduct because "Google may hold a dominant position on both ends of the ad tech supply chain" and "appears to have abused its market position" by ensuring that both advertising and publisher services allegedly favored AdX over other ad exchanges when matching advertisers and publishers.
By allegedly favoring AdX, Vestager said that Google was able to charge "a high fee for its 'exchange' services."
Summary of what misconduct is being alleged here - Google is using their control of multiple firms in the advertising space to favour their own businesses and disadvantage competitor services. Google the Ad Platform is not supposed to give different service to Google the Ad Retailer versus Other Ad Retailer.
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Comment on What Reddit got wrong in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentI know that there's a ton of opportunity, if you're in a community that faces the correct subject matter. We're not big enough that we get very many offers, but I can also readily see that I could...I know that there's a ton of opportunity, if you're in a community that faces the correct subject matter.
We're not big enough that we get very many offers, but I can also readily see that I could make a decent side-profit by soliciting conflicts of interest. I know that we'd probably get more direct offers if it was more public that our time and attention were available to purchase.
Which I think cuts two ways - if I and all the other people I work with have all managed to resist the temptations, it's fair to say that other people outside my sphere probably do the same. At the same time, knowing what's been offered my way, I can absolutely see the flip side of that coin - where the temptation is present, has a number on it, and everyone does ultimately have their price. I can acknowledge that deep down, if someone offered me a big enough number, I'd absolutely trade my integrity on the internet for life-changing real-world money. After the cheque cleared.
On the other side of things, the news reddit, doesn't have a lot of news, which is weird. Maybe a couple dozen articles a day, which seems like there is a lot more news in a day. Worldnews is the same.
I feel like some of what's hit them is that community members like to demand that this or that thing be banned, and over time too much accession to those demands can result in banning the bulk of possible content. The pace of content there has been on slow decline over the years and as a result of years and years of small tightenings to content - banning blog farms, banning content-farm 'news' sites, banning 'misinformation' news, banning duplicate coverage ... etc. Each change being wholly reasonable in isolation, but also net turning off the majority of possible submissions.
I also mod a smaller, academic, community and there's very low content there day-to-day and I already have a decent list of what I'm supposed to remove, and we also have meta discussions from time to time where the community really wants "more content" and also for me to remove most of what remains. In their case, no one submits the stuff they want to see, but they want one of the two types of discussion post still allowed to be removed in addition to all the other stuff - as if having next to no content will make other people post the stuff they want to see.
What happens IMO is that as content locks down, what remains can get more and more repetitive, until people ask to have that boring content removed as well. IE: once you've banned news from blog rings and content farms, then the multiple news sites' stories all about the same big story from that day get more and more annoying - because there's no other content to pad out the feed.
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Comment on I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position? in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentThank you for that! - it's certainly been a minute, so I'd forgotten. I just vaguely recall that there was something specific done to, or inside, how his account with regards to username mentions,...Thank you for that! - it's certainly been a minute, so I'd forgotten.
I just vaguely recall that there was something specific done to, or inside, how his account with regards to username mentions, that was above and beyond what the rest of us had access to.
And I'd been on the Gold train already, so I wouldn't have seen preference panel turning off of mentions in that same way I don't think.
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Comment on I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position? in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentAnd like I can vaguely relate - at least, I know that one of my most irritating personality traits is believing that I'm funny. I'd like to think I'd have recognized that was a time to step...Kan calls Huffman the most talented programmer he’s known as well as the Reddit community personified. “Steve is the Ur-Redditor, the alpha Redditor. He’s very socially liberal. He has a strong libertarian streak. And he’s a total troll on the internet. He’s the reason all of our friends have lock screens on our iPhones. Because if you left your iPhone out, he’d find your girlfriend or someone else important and figure out something to text them that would cause you a lot of grief. When I use Reddit, I see Steve in it.”
Stealth editing a comment makes a lot more sense in the context of that quote.
And like I can vaguely relate - at least, I know that one of my most irritating personality traits is believing that I'm funny.
I'd like to think I'd have recognized that was a time to step backwards, but I can also relate to the "heh eh eh they think they're funny, I'm funny too" response there. It took a lot of learning to successfully internalize that generally - reasonable or not - other people expect you to behave better than they expect of themselves, and many times even better than they're willing to treat you. Doubly so if you're occupying some position of trust or responsibility.
It's been quite a few years since I'd describe spez as being present, available, and interacting with the community.
For sure - but that's still how Spez and how Reddit like to present him in relation to the community. They've worked hard to present him as someone who is relatable, who is part of the community, who listens to and understands the users of the site. As "the alpha redditor" as it was said above - both Spez and reddit corporate have played off of his ties to the community hard in selling his leadership to the site.
One of the things that I'd point out though, is that spez returned as a savior, freeing reddit from "Chairman Pao" and returning us to its roots. With the exception of the intractable free speech vs hate camps you rightly point out, much of what he gets dogpiled for seems to be trading on his trust as a founder in order to implement changes to the detriment of the community. 2015 reddit would have burnt the site down if it knew the changes to be instituted on spez's watch.
I think Reddit culture, fundamentally, has this issue related to it's OG's and towards "community membership" where they can over-value originalism and in-grouping. The site has never really gotten past the culture where it was a small niche aggregator community competing with the big corporate sites, so "Our People" were the best and we'd support our own community members as a goal unto itself. Being an original founder absolutely counted for Spez - in large part because we'd framed the problems with Yishan or Pao as because they were "outsiders" and that was why they made changes to the site that people didn't like.
We see the same thing with free-speech communities cramming words and opinions in Swartz's mouth posthumously about how he would have opposed this or that change or how he would have defended Nazi communities or Jailbait on reddit, because Swartz is the OG Founder who "really gets it" because he stood for free speech elsewhere. Spez got the same heroes' welcome treatment when he returned to displace Pao, because at the time most of Reddit did not understand that Pao was hired as a scapegoat, or the changes she was hated for were both ultimately necessary - and coming from above her head.
He's not really responsible for most of the changes since 2015 - any more than any other figurehead would have been, at least. Changes are coming from the policy department, from legal, from the stakeholders or the board, as advice from marketing ... there's absolutely been some massive unforced errors in the past decade, and I think this API issue is a solid example - but even that isn't wholly Spez making a shit decision. That's something that's probably rooted across multiple different departments and teams, and also coming from 'above' Spez as well. His instructions from the board are likely to tune up the business towards a successful IPO, the VCs want to offload their unprofitable investment while other people still think it's going to turn into a moneymaker down the road.
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Comment on Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentThis comes down to very similar debates like we see when a CEO or company owner does something shitty and people want to boycott their company. At some point in time, someone shows up and argues...This comes down to very similar debates like we see when a CEO or company owner does something shitty and people want to boycott their company. At some point in time, someone shows up and argues that people shouldn't boycott the company because that will hurt their employees. Indirectly, that the CEO or owner should be immune to consequence, because other people are potentially caught in the crossfire.
And to be sure, those employees have more to lose and less to pay the losses with. Poor vulnerable people are always hit harder by change than rich successful ones, even when the rich guy was the intended target.
Say an app you use keeps crashing with an error message that just says "Error 5001". The error is only encountered by about a dozen people per month. So there's not a lot of good information online, except for a comment on Reddit with instructions on how to fix it. That information is a lot more valuable to you and those 11 other people than what Reddit stands to lose from 12 fewer page views per month if it's deleted.
So yeah. The one person that month that had that hyper-specific problem is far more directly harmed than Reddit was. But for all that Reddit doesn't meaningfully benefit from that one person's traffic - they do benefit from the aggregate traffic of everyone like them. They benefit to such a degree that adding "reddit" to the end of search parameters is common, as reddit often has the best answer if one exists. Each one of those people contributes to both site prominence in google, and to current cultural understanding that Reddit is a place for real answers. Each one adds value to Reddit's brand identity, and so - each one removed deflates that impression.
My main community over there has seen a flood of join requests while dark, coming in large part from people getting sent our way via google and finding that the post of response they were looking for is behind a privacy wall.
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Comment on What Reddit got wrong in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentIt's a little too early to make calls about right or wrong in the long-term sense of things, but I don't think that was 100% the perspective this article as framed around. No one expected that the...It's a little too early to make calls about right or wrong in the long-term sense of things, but I don't think that was 100% the perspective this article as framed around.
No one expected that the blackout would kill reddit, or be so catastrophic and permanent that the site never recovers - that wasn't the goal. I don't think any but the wild crazies expected that we'd all black out and force Reddit to capitulate on the spot, completely and totally. That the effort might put pressure and attention on the issue and contribute to a change in stance was I think the most ambitious, realistic, goal.
I wouldn't say that "a two-day blackout" ending after two days means the strike somehow failed. Many communities are engaged in ongoing dialogues regarding next steps and what the community supports or wants from the long-term plan.
The repercussions of the changes to API are going to take months or years to become clear, because the majority of impact is not the protests themselves but the hypothetical consequences that the protests were opposed to. It could well be that everyone got mad, nothing happens, and there's no negative impact on the site due to the changes. It also could be that the ways that the site change provide just enough added barrier that site usage enters a decline over time.
I don't think there's going to be any massive, sweeping, changes that will totally decisively shift things - but I think that there's going to be lots of very small changes that may add up to something significant all the same. I'm not saying that optimistically, like I'm hoping Reddit gets hurt, but just that without third-party apps, I personally will see reddit far less on mobile. That's a decrease in traffic, and a decrease in my participation - and my participation contributes to making other folks' participation something positive and valuable, to keep them coming back. No delusion, I don't suffer from some feat of ego where my witty commentary singlehanded keeps people on the site, but that the site's main source of relevance is the conversations and the community - there's only so much of community you can lose before it stops being self-sustaining.
Part of the problem with their own app is how actively it attempts to keep people away from that part of the site and drive them back to feed scrolling - where the ads are - which will double down on stunting the community. People who relied on apps to access the site may drop off instead of changing, and the userbase still accessing via mobile will be architecturally driven away from the community as well. Worse, I think that the people who are most likely to leave are predominately from the demographics that are most important to the site - the highly-engaged and participating people, the folks who are posting the comments and the stories that all the other people show up to scroll through and consume as content.
I think that if we constrain the assessment to a goal of inflating metrics towards an IPO, Reddit has probably made the correct decision. However, coverage that's pointing out that the decisions there are trading the long-term health of the site for short-term gains are somewhat sabotaging the effort - investors may not 'fall for' high app-use numbers in light of how those numbers were obtained.
so if burnout becomes faster or subs get slightly worse moderation it'll have a minimal big picture impact.
Both of these are indeed relatively minor on their own, but the site isn't starting from zero and they are adding to the total. Burnout is already an issue for user retention, moderation is already a huge issue for user retention ... making those factors worse is going to be net-negative for the long-term health of the site. Even if their impact is invisible next month or next year, they're eating into an already-slim margin of error that Reddit may need to use more of later.
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Comment on What Reddit got wrong in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentI don't even really like being a mod, I just care about the communities I've taken 'responsibility' for and either don't trust someone else to do it, or think that my help is needed. Being...I don't even really like being a mod, I just care about the communities I've taken 'responsibility' for and either don't trust someone else to do it, or think that my help is needed.
Being everyone's Bad Guy fucking blows and there's no way to moderate without being the bad guy because ultimately the majority of the role is one of either taking people's posts/comments down, or telling them off for breaking the rules. No one likes having their post taken down, no one likes being told off - even when it's deserved.
As far as "trust" I think it's worth clarifying;
One community I mod(ded) on Reddit is very prone to commercial attempts at manipulation, and for a very diffuse industry with a lot of little ties and connections - we've already had issues with people seeking modship so they can favour a company they're connected to, and we've definitely had issues where companies offer money to receive priority treatment.
Another is a subject that has a lot of contention around it and some politics strongly adjacent - the folks most motivated to mod are also prone to wanting to shift tone & content towards the politics side of things and away from the topic at the core, while the community as a whole has asked repeatedly that the community not become a political circlejerk.
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Comment on Starfield system requirements are out on Steam in ~games
Anomander Link ParentI use both. I have a SSD for stuff I definitely want to boot quickly, but I have a huge HDD for general storage and low-resource games.I use both. I have a SSD for stuff I definitely want to boot quickly, but I have a huge HDD for general storage and low-resource games.
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Comment on Starfield system requirements are out on Steam in ~games
Anomander Link ParentCities Skylines 1 is already a massive resource hog. I appreciate there's complaints about optimization there, but it's also rendering an absolutely massive number of things and tracking millions...Cities Skylines 1 is already a massive resource hog. I appreciate there's complaints about optimization there, but it's also rendering an absolutely massive number of things and tracking millions of little data points - from CS2 videos, it looks like it's a much bigger and much more complicated product.
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Comment on Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentI kind of feel like if it was that simple it'd be done already - if there's an algorithm, there's a way to optimize your site for it. Currently the alg rewards verbose sites with heavy keywording,...I kind of feel like if it was that simple it'd be done already - if there's an algorithm, there's a way to optimize your site for it.
Currently the alg rewards verbose sites with heavy keywording, so that's currently the style showing up at the top. Back when the alg rewarded interlinking, you'd get blogrings and a million and one interlinks seeded into the text, before that it was tags and keyword spam blocks in the article footer. If they changed the rules to punish excessive wordy sites, then the SEO'd sites would learn how much text is too much, how much is not enough, and hover exactly within the golden range.
I think part of the problem is that they're not rotating rules rapidly enough, and trying to stabilize sites across rules changes. Like, assuming here, I think that a site too-heavily optimized for a specific google pagerank algorithm would absolutely plummet in rankings if assessed by a different metric, where a "normal" site would probably hold a much more static ranking position.
The other thing I think holds 'normal' sites down is that once a site is absolutely great, people stop using google to reach it - they use the site and go directly. If it weren't a privacy nightmare and engines were able to see how much direct traffic occurred, that should be a strong factor in page rank. I'm not going to return multiple times to a site that's SEO'd bullshit, but if it's a good resource to something I need, I'll be back several times and just go directly after the first one or two.
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Comment on Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentIt is! It was my reddit handle as well, I snagged it in like ... first year Uni. I was glad to grab it here as well. Whenever someone says anything I always feel like I need explain myself~! - I...It is! It was my reddit handle as well, I snagged it in like ... first year Uni. I was glad to grab it here as well.
Whenever someone says anything I always feel like I need explain myself~! - I picked it after like book two in MBotF, after the character had like thirty pages of appearance, while the series was still niche and nearly unheard of. My motivation was that he wasn't a total dickbag and his name sounded dope when said out loud. I was almost "Kallor" except that dude is a knob.
In hindsight to the full series now, "Anomander" feels about as original as if I picked "Superman" for my username.
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Comment on I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position? in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentEh. Disabling mentions was something the community had been requesting for months prior to that change - I'm mixed. I'm glad it got made because mentions were a phenomenal harassment tool - but...Eh. Disabling mentions was something the community had been requesting for months prior to that change - I'm mixed. I'm glad it got made because mentions were a phenomenal harassment tool - but it's grating that it took bullying the guy who founded the site to make it, and even more so that they kludged it together as a DIY solve to keep him out of trouble, then realized that it's something useful to users.
It's like the story about the guy who finds unpleasantness everywhere he goes: if everyone wants to tell you that you suck, you probably do. Gaming your own system to avoid that feedback only insulates you and leads to compounded problems.
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that honestly. Sometimes that sort of wisdom of crowds is wrong, and that's more and more likely for 'celebrity' figures - the aphorism is remarkably apt for normal blokes like you or I, but for more famous people it starts breaking down.
Sure, there's some element where all people suck - and if we tunnel-vision on the parts that suck we can construct defensible arguments why this or that specific person definitely sucks. At the same time, I think it's worth keeping in mind that there are some people that the public, or groups within the public, are absolutely determined to hate, and just as determined to justify their hatred of.
I think that part of the problem with Spez is that the community is so determined to shit on him, and has been for so long, that he's gotten so inured to the constant criticism that he's unable to distinguish the irrational hate from the completely justified criticism. He's the guy at the head of reddit, a site so big that it cannot possibly make it's entire userbase happy with their choices, and so no matter what the site chooses to do - it's Spez's fault and he's clearly a terrible person for it.
One example is the site's controls on content and discourse. Half the site wants Reddit to take "hate-speech" more seriously and has a very credible case that the site fails to control racism and homophobia in a way that allows them to recruit adherents, cultivate hate movements, and harass their 'enemies' from the platform. The other half the site wants Reddit to provide more of a "free-speech" platform and has a very credible case that the site's policies around 'hate' are inconsistent, biased in their implementation, and serve to stifle reasonable and healthy dialogues. They both have very credible points, if looked at from their own perspective - each side's vision for the site is mutually exclusive and they're going to blame Spez if Reddit moves in the "wrong" direction.
I also see this when modding on reddit - people are going to be upset that their submission was removed. Consistently. Doesn't matter if we have a rule against it, if we've provided an alternative venue for that content or dialogue, if the community damn near lynched mods for not removing that content prior ... we personally are the terrible people who are clearly powertripping and are mad about our teeny wieners for daring to remove their post. Even if all of them would, separately, agree that the other guys' posts should be removed and theirs was just special and different, they'll all get together and agree we're shit because they all had a bad experience. Comes a point where being "an authority figure" - using the term extremely loosely - is all it takes to get people to hate you.
Spez is kind of an asshole from everything I've seen and he's definitely a "reddit" personality to the core ... but I also think that he gets dogpiled so damn much, under unreasonable conditions, that in order to cope with that experience, he's modeled his relationship with the site where he's ignoring community feedback by default. Like, that's not excuses for him - I think that deciding to interact with the community and be so present and available is his decision and that means he's on the hook for the consequences of it.
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Comment on Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentChicken and Egg, though. Good niche sites died because the Google algo allowed hyper-SEO'd trash sites to supersede them in the rankings, so now there's nearly no good authentic sites centered...Chicken and Egg, though.
Good niche sites died because the Google algo allowed hyper-SEO'd trash sites to supersede them in the rankings, so now there's nearly no good authentic sites centered around niche topics other than Reddit - which had the benefit of a self-sustaining community & content stream regardless of access to google traffic.
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Comment on I kind of feel bad for spez.. what would you do if you were in that position? in ~tech
Anomander Link ParentIt wasn't quite this. He's never edited the comment of someone he was actively arguing with - that I've ever heard of. The edit-gate thing was when TheDonald got pissed about Reddit banning the...Also, there's the whole thing where he was getting into arguments on reddit and then editing other users' comments. That's not super cool either.
It wasn't quite this. He's never edited the comment of someone he was actively arguing with - that I've ever heard of.
The edit-gate thing was when TheDonald got pissed about Reddit banning the Pizzagate sub, and a thread there was full of people posting 'fuck /u/spez' which was still pinging him at the time. He went in and edited people posting "fuck /u/spez" to change the "spez" to usernames of mods of TD. In the aftermath, Admin manually disabled username-mention notifications on his account.
Still wildly petty and the worst possible optics, but there's value in accuracy of the story.
Sorry to come back so late;
I think this is not a great way to set a baseline rule. It's an excellent standard for looking at grey-area stuff that's not clearly on either side of some other, different, rule.
As a baseline rule, there are two big problems with that standard.
The first is that it means moderation only happens [time] after being posted. Users generally expect that content they feel should clearly be outside of rules is addressed by moderation, and the concepts around the 'fluff' principle that's object to the discussion here mean that those posts would already have managed to impact other "better" content by the time it's clear how the conversation is shaping up.
The second is that it takes the responsibility for the rule adherence of posts away from the person clicking "submit" and makes it the community's problem. It's up to other people to say substantial and interesting things so your post doesn't break rules, and if no one with anything interesting to say shows up that day, your post was bad. This IMO also results in a lot of user/mod drama because then "mods didn't give it a chance" or "it's not my fault, why are you punishing me" and similar.
Starting point rules for content should focus on the content directly and not on the possible behavior of third parties.