It’s been an interesting couple of weeks at Reddit. The self-proclaimed “Front Page of the Internet” has been in a state of transition, as admins and investors work towards better monetizing the service.
Ellen Pao’s brief trek as CEO was peppered with controversy. Redditors questioned her policy regarding “safe places” after the admin team banned sub-reddits like Fat People Hate, but left racist haven Coon Town intact. Reddit’s community places a fairly high value on “authenticity”, and Pao’s personal life seemed to rub many the wrong way. High profile lawsuits regarding gender discrimination, and a husband accused of millions of dollars worth of investment fraud, fed an unending examination of her actions, policy, and whether she was the right fit for CEO of a social news aggregate built on volunteer labor.
Recently, the firing of a high profile community admin, responsible for coordinating the wildly popular AMA question and answer sessions, threw more fuel on a smoldering fire. Moderators, volunteers in charge of managing individual sub-reddits, protested by blocking access to their specific forums.
Ellen Pao took to traditional media to apologize for missteps and miscommunications, but this only added to the ire, for many it was further illustration of how out of touch Pao was with the Reddit brand and community. A petition calling for her removal as CEO quickly topped 200,000 signatures.
Today, announced on the site, not through a third party news service, Ellen Pao will be stepping down as Interim CEO and will be replaced by Steve Huffman, one of the original co-founders of Reddit. Yet this change at the top of the management chain will likely do little to influence policies that many Redditors might find objectionable.
There are several issues for the site moving forward, not the least of which is monetization. It’s a classic internet trap. Build cool site. Let people use for free. Build in a way to make money. Watch users freak out.
Reddit is in a precarious situation as they draw huge traffic, which requires a lot of servers to satisfy that traffic. The also rely on people who work for free to create content, moderate discussion, and advertise for the site. Reddit not only needs to entice people to come and consume media on the site, they need people to create it. It’s remarkable they’ve been able to keep the lights on without completely wrecking the service with sponsored posts and ads, but their current monetization schemes are likely unsustainable given the growing popularity of the service.
In an admin letter to the community, an effort was made to call attention to some of the uglier aspects of the site:
As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.
If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.
[1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.
Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.
Certainly sentiments most reasonable people would agree with.
Little information was give on how Reddit might better police activity however, and many feelings are still raw regarding the recent deletion of some controversial sub-reddits. For a site that built its reputation on light touch moderating, some might view heavier-handed regulating as censorship. Accusations that Pao was deleting news articles focusing on her and her husband, for example, were never addressed by the Reddit admin team.
Lastly Reddit has a problem of process. While the site is currently a dominant force in social news, voting on what stories are popular and deserve more attention, Reddit did not create this paradigm. The site rose to popularity after a string of unpopular changes at rival social news service Digg scared away top users. Other sites have been adopting similar news submission and voting tools, and searches for “Reddit Alternative” have spiked dramatically over the past several weeks. This audience has proven fickle before…
While many users are voicing their support for removing Pao, Reddit still faces some exceedingly difficult challenges. How do you entice new users to consume and contribute if they might also discover controversial content? How do you police questionable activity without censoring? How do you monetize without compromising the site’s brand and without ostracizing moderators and top contributors?
Their next several steps will be obsessively scrutinized by their community and competitors alike.
You can read the full CEO announcement on Reddit. How do you think Reddit should handle these next transitions? Drop us a comment below!