119 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)
Glad you put this up, but this all blew up last week. The reddit leadership team issued statements to press multiple times but never engaged with mods until now. It's a fine example of creating your own crisis and then failing at crisis management.
This is about *engagement* with the reddit community and mods. Understanding what is working well, where the mod volunteers could use support, where creative ideas are bubbling up, and where collaborating can help make reddit a better (and profitable) place.
Instead, management is taking a *doing things TO reddit community members and mods* approach instead of *with* reddit.
Seriously. These are nice-to-have things but reddit has grown without them. It's about the community and collaboration and engagement.
The Victoria Taylor fiasco you created should be a guiding light. Instead, you keep dancing around the key lesson. She engaged with mods, understood needs, and provided a gateway into reddit management that allowed mods and communities to advance.
Step one in an apology should be an understanding as to why Victoria's work mattered and how you might be able to create better support systems / engagement with mods and the community to duplicate this behavior. Instead, we're getting vague hand-waving about /u/krispykrackers figuring things out...somehow.
It's already figured out. Engage, listen, collaborate, and set limits where needed.
At what point did your fears of becoming Digg II overrule common sense that reddit needs to make money? That the community as a whole will not understand this concept?
You and your investors need to make money to keep this thing rolling.
Go ahead and sign up with a search engine company to monetize search tools. Get warrants and boost the value of a good, new search engine. Tie it into key advertising that matches with communities.
Virtually wall off NSFW areas for advertising so that you can get some of the revenues that way.
Get the Board together and make someone a full-time CEO so that you can set your own course. This interim nervousness isn't helping. Make a call. Any call.
Engage with the community to understand what might be more acceptable ways for reddit itself to become profitable. Ideas and thoughts seem to be locked in the reddit leadership pantheon.
Maybe show a little more humbleness if that's possible. /u/kn0thing comments on eating popcorn while reddit is burning sure is cute from a Silicon Valley On High perspective. Same with the CEO talking to press dismissing the very people that help to make reddit work. That's not leadership, though - it's the type of negative audacity that turns even us supportive redditors off.
Time to put on your big-reddit pants and adjust your leadership style or this empire is going to crumble.
Collaboration is key. Time to really reach out and work together. Or throw tools and communication quips into a burning building and issue press releases while Rome burns.
Honestly, there is a strong core of mods and redditors here ready and willing to help out. To help lead. It's up to you to honestly reach out for assistance and to open those communication channels.
Comment by splattypus at 06/07/2015 at 18:36 UTC
15 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Very well said.
You can do it *with* us, by keeping mods in the loop, offering guidance about how you wish them to react when efforts to monetize the site overlap with their subreddits (i.e., ads as you mentioned with the NSFW stuff, brilliant idea), or it can happen by forcing the site to go against the grain of the community and its traditions.
Users *want* reddit to succeed, or we wouldn't be here at all. Mods can be a great ally in assuring that everyone attains their goals. But not if we're kept in the dark and expected to adapt and keep up to every change or 'feature' implemented seemingly on a whim with little directive and less followup support.
Comment by Werner__Herzog at 06/07/2015 at 20:32 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Well put, we need more pragmatism.
Comment by dvidsilva at 07/07/2015 at 02:57 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Comment by [deleted] at 07/07/2015 at 00:13 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
