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kleinbl00  ·  4670 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A necessary change in policy
I have a chatlog from an hour long conversation I had with Hueypriest on Sept 2, 2011.

In it, I warn him of impending Anderson Cooperdom.

In it, I warn him that Reddit's inability to police its users was going to bite him in the ass but hard.

They've known they've had this problem, and they've known they've been vulnerable. The problem is, the minute they decide to start policing content, THEY CAN NEVER STOP.

It's really not a moral issue for them. They paint it as one because it allows them to be lazy. It's a practical issue - they've got 14 people there, 5 of them are half-time, 2 of them are marketing, and the rest of them are coders. They've had an open invitation for a "community manager" since September 10th but they haven't hired anyone.

The interesting thing now is that SA has learned that they can push Reddit around in hours. Not only that, but they haven't begun to find all the hives of content that they must now police. SA is not likely to warn them when they find it (and they will go looking). SA is likely to jump up and down shouting "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA GOOGLEBOMB!" just to see the admins dance.

it's not a small problem, either. I've seen a Quantcast report for Reddit from 2009 in which the term "jailbait" was fully 20% of their referral traffic. That's another reason Reddit emphasizes Google analytics over any of the accepted traffic counters.

Interesting times.