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The Surprising Demise of Reddit
Well, it seems Ellen Pao managed to step in yet another bucket of syrup.
This is going to require a bit of back-story..........
Some people on the Internet really go for quantity. On their Twitter account, they follow hundreds of people. On Facebook, they connect with thousands of "friends." And in their browser, they visit dozens of web sites each day.
I tend to be a minimalist. I have precisely 100 friends on Facebook. If I decide I really want someone to be a friend, well, someone else is going to get the boot. On Twitter, even though I have over 13,000 followers, I follow only 8. And as for web sites, there are only three sites I visit repeatedly each day: Slope of Hope, ZeroHedge, and Reddit.
In case you've been hiding in a cave somewhere, Reddit is one of the most frequently-visited sites on the web, and it was recently valued at half a billion dollars. It consists of myriad "subreddits" which focus on particular topics of interest, each of which is managed by unpaid (and evidently very dedicated) moderators. Readers can upvote and downvote tidbits of the web, bringing to the front page of reddit itself, or any particular subreddit, the most interesting articles and curiosities.
There isn't a day that goes by where I'm not entertained and better-informed thanks to reddit and the millions of people who make it possible. Similar to Wikipedia, it's one of those delightful free gems on the web which isn't slathered with advertising and is made possible mostly by the heart and hard work of its community. Slope of Hope, in a miniscule way, is very much like that.
None of this would be especially interesting were it not for the shitstorm taking place at this very moment in the usually placid world of Reddit. To wit:
As you've gathered from the above, a woman named Victoria Taylor was fired for reasons that have not been explained, and Redditors are absolutely freaking out about it.
Victoria, pictured here, was the director of communications for the past couple of years. It strikes me as odd that the firing of one individual would cause such a revolt, but I don't consider myself a "deep" Redditor at all. I have a parasitic relationship with the site, similar to "lurkers" on any site (including Slope). I contribute nothing to it. I don't even upvote/downvote stuff. I just go there to read. So I don't pretend to "get" the subculture there at all.
But for some of the folks there, I'm sure this weekend is one they'll remember on their deathbed. The Reddit community has never been particularly keen on the company's Interim (and everyone emphasizes Interim) CEO, Ellen Pao, about whom I wrote a number of articles here on Slope regarding her widely-publicized sex discrimination lawsuit. In fact, they really, really, really hate her.
It would be sort of like if every Sloper really couldn't stand me, but they tolerated me only because my friend Dutch did such a great job - - - and then I fired Dutch. That's sort of what's going on.
Now keep in mind Reddit isn't some weird, edgy, nobody-ever-heard-of-it site like Slope. It's a big, big site (which is why the likes of Time magazine are writing about what's going on right now). The Reddit community is upvoting anything they can that has to do with (a) other companies that pissed off their customer base and lived to regret it (b) getting rid of Pao (c) general castigation of Pao.
Want to know the real shame of this? A missed opportunity. And as a former Internet entrepreneur myself, I can't help but shake my head at this one..........
About a year ago, a couple of guys put together a site that does exactly the same thing as Reddit called Voat. The thing with communities is - - - once a community has a home, it stays there. Reddit is ranked as the 32nd most popular web site in the world. Want to know Voat's rank? 20,100.
So there's no way Voat would have ever amounted to anything, because there's no reason for anyone to leave reddit and go to Voat............until this weekend. Suddenly everyone agitated to basically jump ship and make Voat the new Reddit. And while it's virtually out of the question that this would have happened, Voat had an amazing opportunity to capture a meaningful chunk of those users. Even if it was only 5%, that would have make Voat a real business.
But what folks are getting instead when they try to go to Voat is this:
Thus, one of the top links on Reddit is this:
The sad thing for Voat's founders is that once they've finally got their infrastructure act together and can actually handle the traffic coming their way, this whole Reddit thing will have blown over. So they'll have invested in a bunch of equipment and bandwidth, only to see themselves vault from 20,100th place to 19,900th. It's a damned shame, and frankly, they've blown the opportunity of a lifetime.
The most amusing subreddit of all right now is PaoYongYang. (Someone even made a painstaking claymation of Ellen Pao singing "Why Don't You Go Over to Voat?") Here's what it looks like; you, uhhh, can kind of get the idea:
There's even a petition going around to dump Ellen Pao from Reddit which has garnered 100,000 signatures as of this writing. ("A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top", has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground") Again, the community really, really hates her. Partly because of her sketchy husband. Partly because of the Kleiner lawsuit. But mostly because of the perception of how she treats the community.
And that, frankly, is the principal point of this post (I'm not looking for excuses to put up pictures of Pao's peculiar countenance). Community matters. Indeed, in this hyper-interconnected world in which we live, it matters more than ever. If you're involved in any kind of Internet business, the relationship not only with your users but between your users is the glue that holds your enterprise together.
The thing is, humans are a tribal lot, and they will gladly band together and turn against the people or institutions they feel have wronged them. On this day (I'm writing this on July 4), look no further than these lines from a document you may have heard about:
....all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Personally, I found Ms. Pao singularly unlikeable, based on everything I've read, and just as I hope our friends in Greece throw off the EU shackles with a resounding "Oxi!" vote on Sunday, I hope the Redditors succeed in their quest to kick Pao to the curb and send her back to Buddy Fletcher, where husband and wife can romantically contemplate whom they'd like to sue next.
- advertisements -
And speaking of Pao's husband, wow, talk about SKETCHY and suspicious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Fletcher
One big useless telco data fuck to grabass all our cash
I never vistited Reddit, am not on facebook, don't twitter and don't follow anybody on twitter. I have 20 favorite websites at most (ZH one of them, if not nr. 1). Oh, and I haven't owned a TV since 2001.
The DSM-V might consider me mentally ill, the government might consider me an enemy of the state and the Millennium generation might consider me 'out of touch' but I feel actually quite happy.
Winning! when National Review and Reddit go down there's hope Based out of San Fransicko Reddit is the go to for learning about and pushing the phony White Privilege/Supremacy fraud as well as Climate Alarmism. You want lib news Rachel Maddow style, Reddit is for you.
Here is a sample reddit.com/r/education/ If you want to see a real good bashing of the Civil War South, the Confed flag by lib intellectuals.
NOT National Review. New Republic although National Review has slidden since Buckley
reddit was outed as heavily editing/manipulating stories re Israel/Palestine.
You can guess the ideological tendencies of those doing the thought policing...
Wow. I have zero followers on twitter.
I've always been partial to 4chan. The posters there appreciate the idiocy of it all. Plus, Baneposting is the dankest meme of modern times.
http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/4chan-reddit-tom-hardy-batman-lock...
Yahoo sends its condolences Reddit
REDDIT
The electronic equivalent of a transgender bathroom wall.
Place is crawling with queers.
Reddit, "subreddit", Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, etc. All of them are a total fucking waste of time. Something to give morons a sense of self worth, cause them to falsely believe they actually have some sort of purpose in existing, and that they actually have "friends".
ZH, Drudge, and occasionally, Huffington post for a little lite humor and that's it.
Reddit? That site makes me sick. Its one of the worst hangouts for liberals and so called progressives to stroke each others narcissism with the help of government trolls, who are supported by other govt troll accounts who together make sure that anyone commenting with sensibility and reason about anything political are ganged up on and downvoted to oblivion. Reddit was recently bought out by a jewish owned media company to specifically push the official narrative and propagandize based on random upvotes and downvotes that supposedly reflect objective views on various topics. These visible votes are there to shape public opinion and are under the total control of site administrators and moderators who lean heavily liberal. Ive stopped visiting that site for years.
dup
Reddit? Why would anyone go anywhere besides Zerohedge and Drudge?
truthfrequencyradio.com has also experienced the same problems as VOAT . been over a week now...
oh - how about that Philadelphia cable cutting incident recently .... a fat fiber cable....ouch, that hurts
I'm totally into GOOGLE'S AI humor.. Adolf * gets the sugestion of * Pao....
How long before typing in "Barak Obama" has the google suggestions "Do you mean Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?"
Lots of whining about a public forum not meeting the standards of one of its users.
There's a subreddit for that.
an important lesson about anything of value on the internet
the value can walk at any moment
it is not bricks and mortar
When I first got started with Visual Combat, it took me one day to determine that I wanted nothing to do with reddit and the digital Nazis called moderators.
Same one day with me. A moderator is a controller.
Reddit's moderates controlled thought, not non sequitur.
No, every public site has moderators, even this one, site won't last more than a few days without it.
But I don't even like stackexchange, where the moderation is rigidly on topic, and you have to earn so many red points before you can do this and so many greens point before you can that, yada yada.
There's some art, and some manners, involved.
Also, you can't have more than about X contributors on a site before it collapses of popularity, "Nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded". Slashdot has suffered from this since the beginning.
On the plus side, of course you need good topic control, but you also need a small core of good commenters, makes it seem like a community, like the bar in Cheers. Otherwise it's just the kind of barking chaos you get in the comments sections on the newspaper sites and such.
This is part of the reason I don't even try to cope with Facebook, Twitter, or hardly any of the major social sites, they do not fit these guidelines.
This. Yes. Thats why I accept that migration to Fight Club 2.0 is inevitable at some point.
I don't know jack shit about Reddit. However it's not difficult to figure out what's going on here.
When a company decides to make sudden and unpopular changes it hires an "interim" CEO to do the dirty work. They take all the heat and stick around just long enough to implement new policy and fire people.
Then the "interim" CEO leaves suddenly, with a bag of cash and disappears. The employees (or in this case, the community) feels victorious. Yay! We win! They will now be more likely to accept the new management that are all still ass-hats, but less so than the "interim" CEO they dubbed Hitler. And after some kind of outreach bologna the storm settles and tomorrow is a new day.
Mission accomplished.
We call those interim CEOs "hatchetmen".
With no morals or scruples, they sell their souls for a few sheckles of gold.
Fuckers - all of them.
PSYCHOPATH = first described systematically by Medical College of Georgia psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley in 1941, psychopathy consists of a specific set of personality traits and behaviors. Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses.
Public sites have a half-life of about four years before they implode for one reason or another, I think it's one of those laws of psychohistory. You have to moderate them tightly or they go even faster, but at some point the moderation goes nuts and the site dies. As certain as the planets in their orbits.
"Similar to Wikipedia, (Reddit) is one of those delightful free gems" --Tim Knight
Am I understanding you correctly, Mr. Knight... that Wikipedia is a "delightful free gem"? Note to self: cross "Slope of Hope" off the list...
I gave up on reddit when I realized it is tightly controled propaganda site. http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1dz470/most_reddit_addicted_...
Aren't they all, aren't they all.
I sometimes browse MMA forums, for MMA news, rumors (and the occasional bikini pic of female fighters) and the level of general knowledge and awareness is frightfully low.
Reddit's demise wasn't surprising at all. They followed the same recipe as Digg did, censorship and blatant propaganda which made everyone migrate to a better platform. Voat & Frizbee are great alternatives.
If you are a reddit goer like me, check out my multi-reddit, News for Americans. Has the broadest collection of news from home, around the world, left, right, conservative, progressive, libertarian etc.
Doesn't help her cause that she's fugly as all get out.
'Fugly' does not quite describe her; if she put on white-face, she would look just like a "Scream" mask. I would be more inclined to have a threesome with Hitlery Clitton and Nancy Piglosi than I would to go near that brain dead, dirt legged Asian twat...
Obligatory "Why the looong face"? Or is it Lueng?
It's a fucking message board. Those have been around since the 1980's, yet somehow this one is magical and worth half a billion.
Social Retard Media.
wo wo wo, I don't understand your complaining about the valuation. I would have expected at least 20 billion judging by the other Social Retard Media sites.
But these days we have mice to point and click on topics instead of having to select a number or enter a keyword with the keyboard = $500,000,000 valuation.
And no busy signals!
I am Chumbawamba.
and dat modem don't skreeeeech at 'cha
The essential problem is that every last little decent thing in the world is getting the full blown corporate workover. Every last thing that people do for simple pleasure, or to share, or for community is grabbed up and monetized.
The Pao bitch was hired because she convinced some big money guys that she could make Reddit corporate friendly and extract mega cash from it's millions of rabid users. Of course, that won't happen. But like most psychopathic business hardcases she believes like a religion that everything in life can be turned into profits.
Yup Binko.
My fitnesspal - awesome app. Bought by UnderArmor for 425 million.
Now, they want to charge me 9.99/month, or 49.99 bucks per year (my choice, whee!) for a premium version. Are they FUCKING INSANE? And I've read they've also offered 39.99 per year; using an internet connected social customer base to ham-handedly try different price points. Unsmart UnderArmor, unsmart.
They didn't water down what you get for free (yet) but who in the heck thinks ANY app is worth 50 bucks per year? So you overpaid, UA; your problem, you deal with it.
Too true Binko.
I miss radio the most. Remember real DJs? My station had a guy called MoonDog and he had a real talent for picking a killer playlist. Plus, he howled when he came on at midnight. That shit was a special WKRP-kind of cool.
Now I pay for Pandora.
hands up you got me lol, had to check google.
Didn't somebody over at that VC place get a little Kung Pao on the side...?
Fuck all thse worthless companies propped up only by QE Infinity.
You're gonna like this one: "technological fauxgress"
Concentrating on useless fucking "apps" and staring at screens non-productively like good-for-nothing retards instead of building great things to harness the Earth's electromagnetic energy. The last guy who tried was (proverbially) crucified.
Tesla, we hardly knew ya.
Yeh sure Reddit will come back.
Just like MySpace, AOL and the alt groups on usenet.
soon to be joined by Facebook