Every time this theory comes up I feel the need to ask "what changes"? Surely you don't mean to say that they brought in a CEO just to ban one subreddit and fire one employee? I think it's more a case of bad timing. What changes have there been that were really unpopular - and predictably so?
Well, the biggest change is one of perceived tone by the community. That is, Many redditors, correctly or incorrectly, were under the impression that reddit the website and the company were for Free Speech at a libertarian level - To paraphrase Voltaire "I disagree with what you're saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Since Pao has been on, it has been made clear that this is not the case (Nor was it ever, really, but that's dust in the wind), and that Reddit is being "cleaned up". Of course, the clean up will now mostly be brushing the ugly subreddits under the rug until they cause a ruckus again and they get banned.
And that's the way it has always been. But I guess perception is what matters, and people are only cottoning on to this now.Of course, the clean up will now mostly be brushing the ugly subreddits under the rug until they cause a ruckus again and they get banned.
Was a daily user of reddit for four years. I saw a marked decline in quality and what was actually posted. Back in heydays, lot of talk on Occupy Movement, 99%, Snowden, Assange, privacy movements, heavy tech focus, gaming. Left of center. The last two years, last year especially, I've noticed a radical shift. All the political stuff, anything that questioned corporate interests, has been dissapearing. Reddit has been actively policing the site and removing posts not because they're obscene, but because they believe in different theories of politics, economics. Been a lot more blatant advertisers, shills pretending to be users, trying to sneak in references to popular name brands. And with Ellen Pao, at the same time it became quite clear that the executive people who bought Reddit were wanting to monetize it, bring in advertisers, turn it into a money making machine. Which means dumbing down, taking away the politics, take away the dissenters, censor what's allowed to be discussed, flood the site with advertisement. More managing speak. More jargon from the admins. Increasingly out of touch. There's been shown a real clear push to stop focusing on the community, and focusing instead in monetizing and making a quick buck, no matter if it drags the site down, no matter if it kills it. And given we're living in a time when a lot of people are getting angry about how politics and laws are manipulated by people in power, people with money, widening economic divide between upper class and all the lower class, it's understandable why the Reddit issue became as inflamed as it did. Important to keep in mind: a lot of the drastic changes, shifts in content... Imagine you live in North Korea. All information gets filtered, North Korea decides what info you hear. Unless you educate yourself, you accept this, and it doesn't occur to you what's happening. North Korea doctrine is all. When you're INSIDE it, it's hard to tell. You can only tell via statistics, causal analysis, research, long term analysis, data comparisons from year to year, etc. it's about the absence of once was. And many people are so easily distracted, they don't notice. And the people who DO notice are told they're imagining things, what's the hubbub about?
It's not the admins (read: reddit employees) making those changes, tho. The mods are the ones who're making those changes and decisions, and they are doing that in large part as a response to a shift in the userbase that has lead to a lot more bitter fights over anything related to social justice issues. The actual changes coming from the admin team have been almost unnoticeable, and even the banning of FPH was reasonably in line with their banning of other subs like /gameoftrolls and /niggers.
Which highlights the whole problem of the land grab that subreddits are, and why hubski is just fundamentally a better way for a community. Monetizing it is going to be much harder but honestly, there are ways that don't involve turning the community into a product.
It's a different way, and better isn't a useful term unless you define your metrics for what constitutes better/worse. Users here are far more responsible for managing their own curation, and topic-specific communities will be much more weakly defined and amorphous. Significant growth of this site will be a real stress test for how this style of social media will work at scale. One of the great features of reddit is the ability to create small, closeknit, well-defined, single topic communities that can be joined with little hassle by new members.
Over the last year, off the top of my head? Move all the employees to SF per the VCs. End the outside vendors on Redditgifts and monetize that marketplace as a reddit Inc space. Drive popular, yet "offensive," content off the visible parts of the site. This is why /r/cutefemalecorpses and /r/coontown still exist. End salary negotiations. The conspiracy theory is that this is to lower payroll costs. Then there are the mod's frustrations of a lack of support from Reddit Inc employees as to what is brigading, spamming, how to deal with trolls, etc. That is off the top of my head. I bailed on Reddit last year and don't go there anymore, but I do note the drama when it leaks out to the normal spaces on the Internet. Example, Forbes, CNN, BBC, Guardian have all been running Reddit stories.