Would you rather fight millions redditors or one unicorn? - reddit growing up story (3)

From 2010 to 2014, the number of reddit users and pageviews have maintained a growth momentum, but following the growth of the number of users are hate speech, pornographic photos, intimidation, xenophobia and other issues, the company has repeatedly become the source of various conflicts At the center of the storm, this has hit reddit from the CEO to the frontline employees, and you can refer to the second article in this series for details. In 2015, reddit entered its 10th year, can it get back on track?

Ellen Pao, who was sitting in the second position, was appointed as interim CEO in early 2015 after the departure of CEO Yishan Wong. Pao, whose parents are from Taiwan and who was born in the United States, sued her former Kleiner Perkins, accusing company management of gender discrimination in her promotion. The case was later lost by Pao, but the lawsuit left her behind. Feminist stereotypes.

After taking office, Pao revised user regulations in response to the Frappening incident on reddit earlier, prohibiting the release of pornographic photos (so-called Revenge porn) without the consent of the person involved in the photo, and also prohibiting users from posting nuisance remarks. The measures mark reddit's shift from its past "Laissez-faire" policy of laissez-faire on users' speech to limited surveillance. After the introduction of the policy, users rebounded for a while, but after a round of actions to delete comments and subreddits, the resistance has eased slightly. The "crackdown" convinced Pao that the decision was a success, but another decision she made changed her and reddit's direction.

Slightly different from Wong, Pao has fired a number of employees since he took office. Although some of the staff were actually put on the dismissal list earlier than the Wong era, it is estimated that Pao also influenced the decision. On July 2, 2015, many employees were looking forward to the long holiday of the United States Independence Day. They had just passed the tenth anniversary of reddit a while ago. Everyone packed their luggage and prepared to go out with a happy mood, and Victoria Taylor, who was in charge of AMA affairs, also Get ready to relax after the job at hand, and when she takes Ohanian's call, she's off to get off work—she's fired. Afterwards, both Ohanian and Pao refused to admit that he or she made the decision to fire people. Instead, the two accused each other of trying to drive Taylor away.

In any case, the sudden news was a bolt from the blue for Taylor, and her colleagues and even a group of redditors were even more stunned. Everyone agrees that Taylor is a careful and serious person. Under Taylor's management, r/IAmA has developed into a discussion forum with 8.6 million followers. Taylor is a natural contributor to this achievement. The news of her dismissal quickly spread across subreddits, large and small, and many redditors, especially the administrators who had contact with Taylor, were angry. Everyone thought that the AMA session of reddit would be greatly affected after her departure, so they expressed their dissatisfaction to reddit. . The first attack was naturally r/IAmA: during the AMA, the administrator suddenly turned the partition private. At the time, community manager Dell Frost (the employee mentioned above who had said that working on reddit was the most unhappy period of his career) thought that the administrator was just playing a trick to vent, after all, the administrator also occasionally complained to The reddit team expressed dissatisfaction. But soon they realized the seriousness of the incident: 1,200 subreddits were closed in one day, many of which were large discussion forums such as r/science. As more and more discussion forums participated in the shutdown, the situation began to spiral out of control. Netizens and the media called this avalanche-style shutdown "AMAgeddon"—AMA's Armageddon. The remaining discussion forums that were still open were almost washed up by AMAgeddon and Taylor's fired posts, and a new subreddit r/Blackout2015 came into being. In just one day, a group of administrators and a large number of redditors have organized and expressed their dissatisfaction with reddit in different ways. Erik Martin, a former general manager of reddit, was not at all surprised by the rapid mobilization of redditors:

that's what we trained them to do – sort of.
You can't do what we did, organizing against SOPA and against doxing and then say, 'Oh, don't use these organizing skills when it's about us.'

In addition to their grievances against Taylor, the deeper reason behind many netizens is that they are dissatisfied with the company's frequent hasty introduction of new policies in recent years, and the company's stance has been wavering. What's more, reddit has skyrocketed into a giant with nearly 200 million monthly active users. But the admin's tools haven't improved much, which makes the admins wonder how much reddit values their efforts, so Taylor's firing was the last straw that ignited their anger.

After one round of shutdown, redditors upgraded their actions: some netizens initiated a joint signature on change.org to demand Pao's dismissal, which soon collected more than 200,000 signatures; The photos were spoofed on different photos, and more netizens used all kinds of foul language to insult her. The community managers who were supposed to be responsible for mediation were somewhat gloating at the moment. Many of them were familiar with Taylor. They also suffered a lot of grievances after Pao came on the court. The abuse and insults of netizens may be inappropriate, but they express In this way, netizens and reddit employees are united (We connect!), and the discussion about Pao inside and outside reddit is overwhelming. A storm of downfall of Pao seems to be inevitable, and the media even started to use "Revolt" (Revolt) ) to describe the "reddit chaos". In the face of strong opposition, Pao remained unmoved at first and insisted that he would not step down. Until July 10, Pao finally announced his resignation as CEO. According to her, the board of directors asked her to promise to lead reddit to expand its membership to 500 million members, but she thought it was a fantasy and did not accept it. As a result, she had to choose to step down as CEO; but for redditors and the public, Pao’s statement probably Just find the next step for yourself to leave.

This online rebellion has once again demonstrated the powerful mobilization and destructive power of the reddit network army. Although there have been cases where CEOs in the corporate world have stepped down due to offending customers or improper handling of crises, large-scale downfall movements like reddit, and The case where almost all of the participants are from netizens is probably unprecedented, and this "reddit chaos" will probably become a corporate case for major EMBA courses in the future.

Pao also mentioned in announcing her resignation decision:

In my eight months as reddit's CEO, I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly on reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly humanity made me doubt.

I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads , and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity.

No matter how sincere Pao was when he wrote the article (many redditors' comments still complained about her hypocrisy, inhumanity, etc.), the article itself really reflects the beauty and ugliness of reddit. This online world with more than 100 million users reflects the emotions and thoughts of people in the real world to a certain extent, and everyone projects their thoughts on this virtual world more faithfully under the protection of anonymity. It can be a small window for humble people to reveal their feelings, it can be a tree hole where migrant workers ridicule their bosses to vent their grievances, it can be a small platform for home furnishing experts to share their little knowledge of life, it can be a place where hooligans threaten others for fun, and more It is a breeding ground for all kinds of extreme speech and content. These characters and stories are happening every day, and the role of reddit is simply to bring them to our eyes, and we, who have been ignoring these phenomena, are caught off guard by the stark reality.

After Pao stepped down, the board brought Huffman back to the nest to take the reins of reddit. Huffman had cooperated with some entrepreneurs to set up the airline ticket website Hipmunk, but in recent years he also intends to return to reddit development. After reddit experienced the anti-Pao storm, Huffman finally agreed to return to reddit as CEO.

A few days after taking office, Huffman announced a change to reddit's rules: Content that could provoke violence or cause harm to others will be removed. He also introduced a segregation system. If users want to watch and publish some legal but hot content, they can join relevant hidden subreddits after applying. The policies provide a "legal basis" for reddit staff to review and enforce. At the beginning of the implementation, some redditors and subreddits were still persuaded to change after receiving warnings, and as a result, they were banned by community managers. Gradually, redditors and managers also adapted to the new system (because of the chilling effect?). Since then, reddit has also tightened the rules of comments many times: any content that beautifies, encourages others to take violent actions, or calls on others to use violence (including comments, pictures, user names, etc.), these content will be removed, which makes Some traditionally controversial subreddits (mainly far-right or pro-Nazi ideological subreddits) have been shut down. If this change had been implemented a few years ago, it would have been opposed by the majority of redditors, but with the increase in the number of reddit communities, the values It is also gradually moving closer to the mainstream. More and more redditors agree that reddit needs to control these content that may cause physical harm to others, and there are even voices asking for more monitoring. These voices requiring self-monitoring were completely unimaginable in the past, and this reflects After the society has experienced various online and offline conflicts, the public has new expectations for the positioning and responsibilities of social platforms.

After a turbulent 2015, reddit slowly returned to the right track in 2016: the mobile app that was criticized for many years finally launched a new version; Slowe also returned to the nest as CTO, and he led the engineering team to improve the reddit homepage (r/all) and countermeasures. The algorithm of flooding and leaving messages; not only have nearly half of the employees who had been lost have been replenished, but the number has expanded to 150; there is more laughter in the office, and more conversations and networking activities between employees, reddit finally regained its former vigor and vitality. dynamism, and that makes it ready for another big wave: the 2016 US presidential election.

As early as June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency, netizens had opened the r/The_Donald subsection in reddit. At that time, netizens could not tell whether the subsection was used to gather Trump supporters or for redditors to ridicule him. The place for Trump's flamboyant remarks. However, when Huffman returned to reddit and announced the closure of a number of subreddits that were right-wing or holding racist banners, many users of these subsections moved to r/The_Donald. As Trump wins the primaries again and again, the subdivision has been flooded with wave after wave of Trump supporters, and in June 2016, r/The_Donald had more than 200,000 users, making it a special Stronghold for Trump supporters. The redditors in the area discuss Trump and the election with a vocabulary that changes all the time (chao, abbreviations, etc.) . This network army is both organized and familiar with the operation of the algorithm, so it often successfully pushes relevant content to the homepage r/all. The number of times and the amount of r/all occupy so much that Huffman later announced that he would change the algorithm to avoid a single partition ( The implication is that r/The_Donald) dominates the entire r/all.

In addition to occupying r/all, Trump's supporters also produced a lot of trendy pictures and propaganda, and exhausted all kinds of tricks to make their messages get the most exposure (for example, they used the place where they originally issued announcements). Post anti-Hillary or pro-Trump propaganda instead). The most important point is that many redditors of r/The_Donald, especially the redditors who serve as moderators, are very organized and disciplined Trump supporters. When each newcomer joins r/The_Donald, they need to read the beginner's guide and receive "training" arranged by the old bird. There are various documents in the district to record various policies and regulations; each event has an administrator responsible for coordinating and Division of labor, every Trump supporter also knows his position. Philippe Beaudette, who led the community managers during this period, was fortunate enough to witness the activities of r/The_Donald during this period. At the July Democratic Party convention, moderators at r/The_Donald arranged for supporters to post or take some action every 15 minutes during the week-long session with the precision of a mechanical clock. The seconds are not bad, but people who don't know it will not realize that it is the administrator of r/The_Donald who is organizing the action of netizens.

The election was finally won by Trump. After the election, many people began to reflect on the key role of social media in this election. These platforms have traditionally maintained that they are only "neutral platforms" -- a channel for distributing information -- rather than content creators, so the companies insist they are not responsible for the content that is distributed on the platforms. But after this election, the outside world has questioned these platforms for spreading disinformation in the election or flooding the platforms with pro-Trump information. For Huffman, although he does not agree with the remarks and positions in r/The_Donald, he believes that instead of shutting down the district or banning them from distributing pro-Trump messages, the result will only result in the transfer of netizens in the district to other platforms And then repeat the old tricks, so he wants to keep the area and punish them a little bit when they talk too much, so they don't get completely out of control. He also thinks there is a need to allow places like r/The_Donald for supporters to express the faction's political views, it's just the company's responsibility to prohibit them from posting inflammatory or potentially harmful speech, which is exactly what One of the policy changes he introduced after his return to reddit.

A year later, the US Congress conducted an investigation into the phenomenon of fake news frequently appearing on the Internet during the 2016 presidential election. It was found that some organizations supported by the Russian government were responsible for producing and distributing fake news, and then publishing it on different social media, more than 100 million US citizens. Therefore, receiving these misinformation, all kinds of evidence show that Russia is behind the scenes to plan this operation to interfere with the US election, and major social media is the tool used in the operation. While the authorities' investigation focused on Google, Facebook and Twitter, an internal reddit investigation also revealed that Russian-backed groups had also manipulated 944 reddit accounts and used them to spread fake news or biased reports to steer voters toward election support Trump. Afterwards, Huffman pointed out that the interference of foreign powers is related to national security, but a bigger problem is the attitude of the public in receiving and processing messages, because most of these messages are received by Americans and then forwarded, without their forwarding. These messages are hardly read, let alone affect the outcome of the election. It's true that Huffman's remarks seem to exonerate reddit and a number of social platforms, but it's undeniable that in this era of social media, everyone's information literacy (information literacy) is as indispensable to every citizen as language and mathematics. Otherwise, even if the government succeeds in preventing the interference of foreign organizations (a daunting task), citizens can still go viral with locally produced fake news to undermine the country’s political system.

Entering 2017, one of reddit's big projects is to revamp that old interface . Redesigning a website is always a tough job, and changing a reddit page is probably even more difficult. In 2010, reddit's rival Digg lost a large number of users due to the redesign of its website, and reddit's design team still remembers this deeply. Now it's their turn to update the page, and they are naturally walking on thin ice. The new interface of reddit needs to look "trendy", but at the same time not too trendy to catch up with old users. How to achieve these two seemingly conflicting requirements has become a difficult problem for the design team.

In March, reddit piloted a new user page with a group of users and collected their opinions. In a nutshell, this page is similar to a Facebook page. Users can leave comments on this page and track other users. The page can also be used for promotions by companies, brands, and celebrities. Obviously reddit wants to use this change to expand advertising revenue, but for old redditors, a big selling point of reddit is anonymity, and the design of the personal page is obviously contrary to this concept, so the function of this user page is inferior in the test. A flood of reviews - Huffman posted a comment on one of the threads explaining the design, which later received – 863 negative reviews, which naturally gave Huffman a headache. For old users, they just like reddit's high information density, cluttered and difficult to use layout. They feel that this is not only a feature of reddit, but also that newcomers should adapt to this layout by themselves, so as to be more integrated into reddit, but this The adaptation process discourages many new users, and this is where Huffman wants to improve the most. Fortunately, after more users tried it, some users gradually accepted the new layout, and reddit also made changes in response to user feedback. In 2018, the new page was fully released, and users could choose to switch to the new interface or keep it unchanged. This approach helped retain old users and helped reddit successfully weather the potential crisis of this page revision.

As CEO, one of Huffman's goals is to achieve the board's goal: to grow reddit to 1 billion people. The goal that Ellen Pao once thought was out of reach (500 million users) now falls on Huffman, and Huffman believes that to achieve this goal, he needs more funds to be able to achieve it. So Huffman worked hard to find funds after returning to reddit. After a round of negotiations and lobbying, reddit received 200 million yuan in new investment in the summer of 2017. At that time, the market value of reddit was estimated to reach 1.8 billion US dollars, making it officially squeezed into the IT unicorn. the ranks of IT unicorns (private companies with a market value of more than $1 billion). In the same period, the number of users of reddit reached 200 to 300 million, and its website traffic has also entered the 4th place in the Alexa US rankings (reddit ranked 6th in December 2019), second only to Google, Youtube and Facebook. As the engineering and design teams launched new interfaces and functions, the sales team also worked hard to promote reddit's brand page service to major brands, hoping that they could open brand pages and place advertisements on reddit, which greatly increased reddit's advertising revenue. In 2019, reddit received another US$300 million injection, mainly from China's Internet leader Tencent, which raised the market's estimated market value of reddit to US$3 billion.

With the market value of reddit hitting new highs, it has also embarked on the road of enterpriseization step by step. At the same time, reddit has begun to introduce various norms into the platform in order to meet the mainstream values of society and meet business requirements; on the other hand, the reddit community continues to show With its diverse, creative, noisy, and even controversial culture, will this online community lose the love of its users due to changes in reddit? With the rise of xenophobia and right-wing politicians in power, will the reddit community continue to be a hotbed of extreme speech? The 2020 US presidential election has already begun, will reddit become a platform for major candidates to mobilize and spread fake news? These are the questions that reddit will answer next.