Reddit AMA
McAfee conducts a Reddit AMA, where he talks about society:
Here’s what I’ve learned. People will be people, you can trust no one. It’s not a bad thing/cynical. I trust people to be people, to act in their own self-interests. If you understand that, you can use that! People will be disloyal, I’ve heard there are wives that sleep around, etc. We are disloyal, but loving, kind, gracious. We are a contradiction, the negatives are not bad if you see them for what they are. You cannot trust people, big deal, you CAN trust them to be self-interested, and I use that all the f-cking time.
About Belize:
The most beautiful in the world. It has a barrier reef, 2nd in the world. I had 5 boats on the beach on the ocean, you try that anywhere else. It has jungles and ruins that haven’t even been explored. The problem is that it has people there, people descended from pirates. There is nothing illegal that the government there is not into. The government is smart if you just go there as an American you will not be bothered. I lived in the jungles where I was the only white person, and they were on to me. They asked me for $2M, weeks later 40+ armed men stormed my house, shot my favorite dog, and held me in the sun with my hands tied. The next day the congressman came and apologized asked for the $2M again. I should have done that rather than tell him to get the f-ck off my property.
And life:
Money corrupts. Once you have enough money, you have no friends, none, even the most dedicated friend you had cannot stop thinking about his mortgage, or new car, or new wife, and friendship ends. Second, your life becomes a nightmare. I was getting 1000/day asking for help, or asking for me to invest (the best was rocket-power roller skates, I almost invested). Money now has become information, how does Google live? They gather information on smartphones and their services. This is far worse than paper. Paper doesn’t try to get into your head, to find out who you’re f-cking, etc. We are all jealous, hopeful and ambitious, and as long as that exists we’ll all have chaos.
Bans subbreddits
Reddit bans several offensive communities that focus on racist content, such as Coontown, WatchNiggersDie and CoonTownMeta. Subreddits that feature animated” child pornography are also banned. The company also introduces an updated Content Policy that prohibits any posts that are illegal, incites violence, harasses or threatens users or includes sexually explicit content taken without the person’s permission. Offensive communities that don’t necessarily break these rules but are nonetheless considered profane or “upsetting” may now be “quarantined,” meaning users have to opt in to see the content. Some may also have NSFW tag. CEO Huffman’s official statement:
Our most important policy over the last ten years has been to allow just about anything so long as it does not prevent others from enjoying Reddit for what it is: the best place online to have truly authentic conversations. I believe these policies strike the right balance.
Huffman’s later comment:
We didn’t ban them because we disagree with them. We banned them because this exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else.
AMA
Huffman participates in a Reddit AMA (link). On bringing back controversial subreddits:
Unlikely. Creating a clear content policy is another of my immediate priorities. We will make it very clear what is and is not acceptable behavior on reddit. This is still a work in progress, but our thinking is along these lines: Nothing illegal. Nothing that undermines the integrity of reddit. Nothing that causes other individuals harm or to fear for their well-being. Banning content will be a last resort…I don’t want to ever ban content. Sometimes, however, I feel we have no choice because we want to protect reddit itself.
On growth:
Of course the board wants to see growth. I want to see growth, too. We’re not going to see much growth without serious product efforts, and we’re not going to get serious product efforts without more resources. Fortunately, I have the ability to get those resources, so that’s what I’ll do.
Thanks supporters
In her first statement since she was fired from the site, Taylor thanks her supporters (full text):
I’ve had some time to think about how to respond to the extraordinary kindness and support you’ve shown me. And here it is: I’ll never forget my time at reddit. You allowed me to be a part of some of the greatest conversations of our time, and it was an honor to be your ambassador. I just want to take a moment to say thank you to all of you who have reached out.
Thank you for everything you’ve given me. From your messages to your artwork, I am deeply moved and grateful beyond words, and your encouragement has meant more than you’ll ever know. I’ve been incredibly humbled and honored to serve this community, and I truly believe all voices matter. Your voices matter. You proved that this weekend. And really, this weekend wasn’t about me. It was about you. And if I know one thing about this community, it’s that you’ll continue making your voices heard. And that’s an inspiration.
Pao apologizes
Pao makes an announcement as to how she plans on fixing her mistakes on Reddit.
We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we haven’t always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.
Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me …
I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us. I don’t have all the answers, and it will take time for us to deliver concrete results. I mean it when I say we screwed up, and we want to have a meaningful ongoing discussion. I know we’ve drifted out of touch with the community as we’ve grown and added more people, and we want to connect more. I and the team are committed to talking more often with the community, starting now.
Thank you for listening. Please share feedback here. Our team is ready to respond to comments.
Will ‘triage’ AMA requests
Ohanian makes an announcement in regards to Taylor’s removal.
We don’t talk about specific employees, but I do want you to know that I’m here to triage AMA requests in the interim. All AMA inquiries go to AMA@reddit.com where we have a team in place…I posted this on [a mod sub] but I’m reposting here:
We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community. I’d really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after…We’re prepared to help coordinate and schedule AMAs. I’ve got the inbound coming through my inbox right now and many of the people who come on to do AMAs are excited to do them without assistance (most recently, the noteworthy Channing Tatum AMA).
This is met with harsh criticism and has a total comment score of under -2500.
10th birthday
The site celebrates its 10th birthday in a blog post that contains statistics about the site’s growth over the years.
Wow. Here we are, ten years later.
- 190,227,552 posts
- 1,715,454,785 comments
- 16,063,942,290 upvotes
- 36,136,190 user accounts
Together we’ve donated over $1.8 million to Extra Life, Haiti, teachers, and Nepal. We donated another $827,659.49—10% of our 2014 ad revenue—to the top 10 charities of your choice. You’ve also donated a huge amount that we can’t begin to track through individual subreddit campaigns and spontaneous events like this.
You guys really are amazing. Thank you for making the last 10 years of Reddit amazing too. Here’s to the next 10 years.
Deletes subreddits
Pao enrages the users of Reddit by deleting /r/fatpeoplehate, a major subreddit with over one hundred and fifty thousand users, as well as four smaller subreddits. Pao says the act is to stop harassment:
We want as little involvement as possible in managing these interactions but will be involved when needed to protect privacy and free expression, and to prevent harassment…It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
Users accuse Pao for censorship, even those that don’t like the subreddit.
Removes wage negotiations
In an attempt to reduce the possibility of a wage gap existing within Reddit, Interim CEO Pao removes the ability of employees to negotiate for their wages at reddit. Instead employees are offered a salary on a take it or leave it basis. This is due to findings that men are better at negotiating their salaries and as such usually end up with a slightly better salary than their female counterparts. Pao urges other companies to do the same, claiming that it is an important step in gender equality.
When somebody comes in we figure out what role they’re applying for, what band they’re in and we give them what we think is a fair salary in that band. It takes a lot of tension out of the process, we’ve had people apply to Reddit just because of that policy.
Giving back Reddit shares
Altman announces in an AMA that he and other investors in the latest round are giving part of their shares to users of the site:
We’re working on a way to give 10% of our shares from this round to the reddit community. I hope we can increase community ownership over time–I’ve always thought communities like reddit should mostly own themselves, and that it’s time for some innovation around corporate structure here. I’m giving the company a voting proxy on my shares.
Inc. interview
Ohanian tells the magazine about his conversation with Graham after Y Combinator rejected his initial pitch:
The next morning, on the train back to Virginia, hung over, somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I get a call from Paul. He says, “I’m sorry, we made a mistake. We don’t like your idea, but we like you guys.” We got off the train, and I was able to sweet-talk the Amtrak lady into not charging us to turn around. In our conversation, Paul said, “You guys need to build the front page of the Internet.” That was all Paul, and that became Reddit. We built Reddit in three weeks.
The buyout also happened partly by chance:
The acquisition by Condé Nast basically started with a Halloween party, where we met a reporter who introduced me to a freelancer for Wired who told her boss about us. That editor’s husband was the biz-dev guy at Condé Nast. He worked on a licensing deal with us, and everything worked great. So we started talking money. Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can’t help being interested.
YC Founders at Work: Reddit
Livingston interviews Ohanian about the early days of Reddit. Livingston asks about the “Chicken and egg” problem of building a community with no initial users:
This is one that I have no hesitation in saying, but it always stirs up a lot of controversy. Steve [Huffman] built a really simple system for admins, that is Steve and me, so that when we submitted a link also let us type in a user name. It let us easily and efficiently create lots of fake users. And we were able to browbeat a few of our friends to build up comments. But the rest of our friends and family could not be begged or bribed enough to do it really consistently. The only option we had to resort to was to fake it. But we didn’t have to do it for too long because Paul [Graham] did us a big favor by [profiling us] us in an early essay.
It was at some point about three or four weeks into it that neither Steve or I had to submit or vote on anything, and the site just worked…We could spend the day just lurking on Reddit, that is just using it like the vast majority of people do and not actually generate content. That was huge. That was when we realized, maybe we haven’t wasted this summer and we had a legitimate community.
Mixergy interview
Ohanian talks about how Y Combinator helped shape the idea for Reddit in the early stages:
We approached Y Combinator … with an idea that would transform the way you order food, specifically using a cell phone to do so. They didn’t really like the idea. They liked us, but they hated the idea.
They still didn’t have a firm idea, but sat down with Graham and talked about a site that would filter the most interesting web content.
…it was in that conversation with Paul where we developed this idea for creating a way to find out what’s new online.
The idea morphed into the final product:
All the actual mechanics of how that would work, basically happened in the next few weeks, while Steve [Huffman] and I were in a crap apartment, in Bedford, Massachusetts, playing a lot of Warcraft.