VulcanSphere

Kolanaki, 1 year ago

This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.

Mozami, 1 year ago

Reddit was antagonistic when they removed moderators from subreddits, banned their accounts, and did everything else they possibly could to quell the protests. The behavior they're exhibiting to this day isn't new.

McBinary, 1 year ago

They're not fans of Corpos in the cyberpunk community. What a shocker!

Madrigal, 1 year ago

You know, if it’s a hastily assembled bot based on GPT trained using public web data, there’s a good chance it’s already picking up a lot on anti-spez sentiment. There might even be an opportunity for ‘malicious actors’ to accelerate that outcome, should they choose.

Pons_Aelius, 1 year ago

Part 2:

Employees say this could mean more managers may leave through managed exits.

Reddit is not the only tech company flattening its leadership structure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company would reduce its number of product managers and directors to make it more efficient. Meta had given managers the option to be demoted, with the expectation that many would choose to leave. Shopify has also tried to flatten its organization.
Lost trust in leadership

Reddit employees said they lost trust in leadership after a series of missteps. For example, they said they were repeatedly told before the company conducted layoffs in June that layoffs wouldn't happen.

Product road maps changed in May as the company focused on the API changes and on boosting content creation by users.

The recent change to charge for access to Reddit's API also led to protests from moderators. While many employees supported the API changes, they said Reddit's moderators deserved credit for helping grow the site. A former employee who left in April argued that company leadership should have invested more in supporting moderators and that building tools for Reddit's moderator community "has never been a priority" for leadership.

"Reddit has long had staff who have worked hard to provide a better mod experience, but the will to improve this has never come from the top, and Reddit has yet to fund them to the extent they need to," one employee said.

Illustration of a Reddit logo on a mobile phone with a laptop behind it
Reddit.
Getty Images

On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."
Leadership shake-ups

Reddit had some leadership changes earlier this year. Jack Hanlon, who was the vice president of feeds, AI, search, and data, parted ways with the company in March, he and the company confirmed. Hanlon led product and engineering for several areas of the company, including machine learning and data science.

In May, Reddit's head of data science, Jose Lobez, was replaced by Tyler Otto, who'd joined Reddit from Hipmunk, a travel website Huffman founded.

Three employees described Lobez's departure as a surprise, as he was well liked within the data-science organization. "He basically grew the data-science organization himself — a big cultural figure internally," one said. They described Lopez as "pretty open both with reports and about the org as a whole," adding that he "helped deal with interorganization disputes pretty well."

Pons_Aelius, 1 year ago

Part 1

Reddit could slim down management as moves toward an IPO

Thomas Maxwell

Reddit is preparing for an IPO amid controversy surrounding changes to its API.
Reddit employees say the company has a bloated leadership structure with too many managers.
Staffers were told earlier this year that they'd need to do "less but better."

As Reddit prepares for an initial public offering that could come by the end of 2023, it's looking to flatten its management structure, and employees say the company has become bloated with executive- and director-level employees.

Reddit filed for IPO in December 2021, when demand for new tech stocks was at a fever pitch. It said it surpassed $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021. It has also made large investments in artificial intelligence, acquiring the machine-learning startup Spell in June 2022 to help customize ad placements.

Since then, demand for tech stocks has dropped. Reddit laid off 90 employees in early June as it aims to reach profitability. Its revenue growth has slowed, The Information reported.

To prepare for the intense scrutiny of the public markets, Reddit is whipping itself into shape; managers told employees in product earlier this year that the goal was to do "less but better." Part of the mandate could include slimming down middle management.

Reddit is also examining areas of its business where it could squeeze costs. It recently announced a controversial decision to charge for access to its API, or application programming interface, which enables developers to build tools that connect to Reddit. It argued that it couldn't support third-party apps that use Reddit's content but don't provide any money in return.

Insider spoke with five current and former Reddit employees, who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press or had signed nondisclosure agreements to receive severance. They described some leadership moves and road-map changes that caused what one employee described as "thrash."

The 18-year-old social-media company has long had a culture of "trying to do too many things and doing them really poorly and not finishing them at all," the same employee said. Internally, they said, the company would now focus on "having a simplified product plan and sticking to it."

A Reddit representative declined to comment on this story and pointed to a blog post about the company's acquisition of Spell.
A flattening at Reddit

Reddit executives presented a distribution of managers to direct reports during its last quarterly leadership summit in May in New York City. The distribution showed that many managers oversee four to six people. Managers who attended the summit told employees that leadership suggested the company would in the second half of the year consolidate teams with managers overseeing fewer than six employees, two employees said.

Chariotwheel, 1 year ago

I have out an archive link into the thread body for your convenience.

Pandantic, 1 year ago

For example, they said they were repeatedly told before the company conducted layoffs in June that layoffs wouldn't happen.

The same with API charges to 3rd party app creators.

snooggums, 1 year ago

On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."

Spez's hatred for 3ed party apps being successful and LLMs scraping reddit data is clearly based on his failures and jealousy of other people succeeding.

Coelacanth, 1 year ago

While third party app users probably had a larger proportion of contributors, Reddit is big enough to still have plenty of content. Moderators are more interesting and it remains to be seen over time if an erosion of quality moderation happens which would make Reddit even shittier. Especially since Reddit seems to keep fumbling when it comes to providing good first party mod tools, see the whole r/Blind fiasco.

am I wrong in thinking that the users are the product and the advertisers the customer?

As long as profitability is the goal then you are correct.

PhD_in_English, 1 year ago

You’re not wrong and this article really drove this home for me.

Especially how leadership really didn’t care about moderators having the tools they need to do the job they volunteered for.

They don’t care about the quality of the site, just that people keep posting so they can package up all that sweet sweet data for advertisers.

Think about all the little niche communities. I’m sure Reddit can link your username to your real identity internally. Imagine the profiles they can build and sell.

They don’t even care if you stop posting, it’s all there.

Ashtear, 1 year ago

It still makes sense if Reddit's negotiation with the subscription-based third-party apps was never in good faith and this was always about killing them.

akintudne, 1 year ago

Yeah. If this was always the plan, then why didn’t they announce this earlier, especially when people were loudly complaining about losing accessibility and mod tools? Either they made the “free tier” in response to the protests, or they have Twitter levels of shit-tier PR. Either way, it’s clear they don’t know what the hell they’re doing over there.

ryan, 1 year ago

My understanding is:

An app itself has a single OAuth client id. So rather than per user, it would seem to be per app.

This would kill third party apps used by a lot of users, but individually created tools that developers created using their own client IDs would be fine, so like if I spun up a bot on a user account and called into reddit, I'd be fine because I probably wouldn't hit those limits. That's what they mean by "The vast majority of third-party apps and bots fall into the free usage category and should not see any disruptions" - all these little individually run bots and such.

Bots good, third party apps that allow people to actually browse your website in any meaningful capacity bad, I guess?