Reply All - #31 BONUS: The Reddit Implosion Explainer

Episode Date: July 9, 2015

We meant to take a week off, but we just couldn't help ourselves. Our entire episode this week is a Yes Yes No about the recent (and massive) dustup on Reddit. Note: This episode has been updated to include a correction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All, show about the internet, and PJ Vote. We were trying to take a vacation this week and not put out an episode and work on other stuff. But apparently that is not what happened. We had a conversation with our boss, Alex Bloomberg, about Reddit and the crazy implosion moment that they had this week. And it turned out really interesting. And at the same time, a lot of people have been asking us to explain what has been going on with Reddit. And so we figured it would make more sense to actually put this out this week while the story is happening and people have questions about it. So here you go. It's a bonus.

Welcome once again to Yes Yes, No, a segment on our show where we make fun of our boss for not knowing about all of the boring arcane internet crap that we know about. The description keeps getting more and more concise. It's amazing. Yes, so I'm here again because the internet continues to confuse me. This is not something that I have a specific tweet for or I don't have like, this is not something that I've come across. It's come at me in many, many ways. Something happened on Reddit? Funny you should mention that.

PJ-O., do you know what happened with Reddit this week? Oh, boy, do I. So Alex Goldman, do you know what happened with Reddit this week? Yes, I do. Alex Bloomberg, do you know what happened with Reddit this week? No, I don't. I'm not entirely sure you want to get right down to it

what Reddit is Wait, really? Wait, what do you think Reddit is? I know it's a message board or something. Right? Yeah. You're not wrong.

But the deal with Reddit is imagine it as like a giant marketplace with booths that cover different topics. And they're called subreddits. So there's Reddit as a website, but then there's a subreddit about video games. There's a subreddit about music. There's a subreddit about everything. There's a, there's a Gimlet subreddit, which is just about Gimlet media. Oh, yes. But then there's

also like, did we set that up? No. Someone, a fan set it up. And the way that it works is, so Reddit, the company has a moderation team of like a surprisingly small amount of people. Like the entire company has less than 100 employees. And then each person who sets up a subreddit and it, and it's a it's free to do and you can make as many as you want, they are the moderators of their own subreddit. And since there's no one moderating what subredits are created, there are subredits that are incredibly racist. There are subreddits devoted to upskirt shots of women in public. There is a very popular one until very recently called Fat People Hate. Wow. But so then the other thing that makes us really fascinating is that like Reddit is a really valuable media

company essentially. You know, like Kandai Nass owns them. Condi Nass owns Reddit? Yes. And the reason that they're valuable is that it's such a huge community. And so if you're someone whose job is to like write about stuff on the internet, like Gawker or BuzzFeed, a lot of how they sift stories is just by trying to find something that's becoming popular on Reddit before their competitors.

And if their stories get linked to by Reddit, that's a huge, like they are a sort of tastemaker in this insane way, but it's a tastemaker run by volunteers. And so when the company wants to like tell people to shut down a nasty subreddit or whatever, they risk alienating the volunteers who run the site. And if they piss those people off, they have nothing. So Reddit is sort of powerless and powerful at the same time. A lot of times when you hear a story about an out of control mob on the internet, that mob came from Reddit. What's the worst mob on the internet, Reddit story? That's tough. That is tough.

They ID'd the wrong person in the Boston bombing. Oh, that was that. A guy who had committed suicide. It's not a place where everybody behaves badly, but some of the worst internet behavior happens there. Also, those naked celebrity pictures that were stolen, I think, last summer.

Yeah, that huge hack of nude celeb photos. The prime, like, distribution point was right at. And Reddit was in this place where they were like, eventually they caved, but at first they were like, we don't censor our users. There's, like, a very strong libertarian streak. which means that they, by and large, try not to censor or remove any content unless it breaks the law. Okay, so that's plenty of Reddit background.

But something new is happening. So the new thing that happened is there's a woman who works at Reddit, who I keep calling Victoria Jackson. Victoria Taylor. Victoria Taylor. And her job is to coordinate AMAs, which are like oftentimes celebrities, but it doesn't have to be. There are interviews on Reddit. You go on and anybody can ask you a question, and then the group of people who are there will vote on the questions you answer. It's a really interesting format.

Yeah, you guys did an AMA, right? We did an AMA. Yeah. How was that? Were people mean to you? No. I did one when I was working for On the Media, and the first like five questions were about whether I like anal sex. And one of them was like, if you could have $100 million in grant funding for On the Media or 100 million anal sexes, which would you choose?

It was something to that effect. I think my response was like, why would I have to choose between those two things? Why not have both? And that actually like really calmed people down. Yeah, it's like an unruly class. A hundred million anal sexes. So the woman whose job it was to like wrangle celebrities to do the AMAs or even like us. She was one of the few people at Reddit who seemed able to talk from the company's perspective to the users of the site.

They really loved her. Right. And she left the company last week, and the company would not say why, but it just caused a crazy revolt. And the people who run the big attention getting subredits shut them all down. Whoa. They essentially blacked out the site. In protest? In protest.

Yes. So it greatly reduced the information that they had, and everything that was on the front page was a link about how upset everybody was about Reddit. Like, it really was pretty crazy. Why did they fire her? Does anybody know? There's a couple theories. I mean, do we know she was fired? Maybe she just left?

She was fired. They've never denied that. She has said, I'm dazed by this whole thing. I don't know what happened. Oh. So to get back to the question, there are stories about why she got fired. They all cast her as the good person standing up to a cynical company. And they're very simple.

And so I don't totally trust them. For the people who use the site, it's this place. And they imagine the people who make. make money off the site as being evil. But it's probably like any small company and it's probably somebody being let go is personal and weird and complicated. And it's not the kind of thing that you can go out in front of a mob of 100 million people and talk through or that you should. But they're in this position where their users want a kind of intimacy that they can't give them. And I guess there's still like a crux of a question in there, which was sort of like, what this woman, Victoria Taylor,

what did she do that inspired such devotion? She was a booker. She booked interviews for Reddit. Not that booking is a really important job. And it's like I understand why. But it just seems like a strange, like what inspired such a connection. I think that for, in a lot of cases, the only time that Reddit's paid employees interacted with users on Reddit was to admonish them for bad behavior. and Victoria's interaction was more like,

I'm going to help you coordinate this thing. I'm going to help you get this person to your subreddit to make your subreddit more popular. I'm going to listen to your complaints about this and respond to them in this subreddit. You know, it's like I feel like a lot of times for Redditors trying to contact someone who actually worked at the company was like being put in one of those automated telephone systems

where you couldn't reach anyone. And she was the operator at the end of the line. And then there's one other part of the story. which is that it's not just about this hero, Victoria, who got fired. There's also a villain, and the villain is the relatively new CEO of Reddit, a woman named Ellen Powell. Oh, now her, I know. Really? Because of the clan of Perkins lawsuit, they're a big VC firm out in Silicon Valley, and they were just recently, and Ellen Powell sued them for sexual discrimination.

Right, right. Wait, too. Our worlds collide. Finally. Which, my world, which wasn't my world, like a year ago. But now it is my world. So Redditors are really angry at her. A lot of them are angry at her in ways that are sexist or racist.

And she is doing her best to try to talk to them. My favorite thing was this post that she made where she came out and she used all this corporate language. Like, we're trying to address with solutions and forward thinking and action plan and feedback. And I was so on her side. I was like, she's trying to make it better, you guys. Can't make something overnight? Like, I was so, like, rapturously reading this press release. And then all these people said, you should have said this five years ago and you haven't done anything.

Wow, you're a real rude, man. I'm a steed. I read that. You're a company man. I read that and immediately I was like, this is such like a non-response. This is terrible. You're still punk, Goldman. Pop punk, bam.

Anyway, this also happens to dovetail with another thing that happened at Reddit about a month ago. Yeah. Which is that they decided to ban a bunch of subreddits, including fat people hate, for encouraging or allowing harassment. There's no appeal process. There was no warning or explanation. They were just gone.

And the anti-censorship crowd at Reddit found this very offensive. So a website has popped up that's called Vote. V-O-A-T, not V-O-G-T, dot CO. And it's basically like a Reddit clone. And they have sort of set themselves up in opposition to Reddit saying, hey, guys, we offer the same services. We have none of the censorship. Right.

And people are abandoning Reddit in droves. Are they really? Yes. The user signups for vote.com, they're like out of control. But nobody really thinks that Reddit's kind of like... What's the thing? What's the thing? Google Trends.

So Reddit alternatives as a search term. If you look at the... It's a hockey stick. It is a total hockey stick. In 2012 and 2013, it is like a slow rumble on this chart. And then as of this year, the popularity of this search term is unbelievably huge. Yeah, but what is it? I mean, is it like going from 2 to 100?

is it going from like one to let's just compare it to the word soup that what is that going to okay it's much higher soup is higher yeah was not that higher much higher it was quite seasonal yeah it's totally seasonal oh is that just a flu season

no no one wants soup in the summer right right right everybody wants it from october to january I think it's because they are getting sick in october do uh not that this is going to tell us anything either but do red alturno's first podcast Take that, Reddit alternatives. Reddit alternatives measures a little higher than it did against soup. But it's basically a flat zero-down-line.

Wait, do podcasts versus soup. This is fun. Oh, wow. See? Wait, so who's winning? Soup is winning. But podcasts are a much bigger contender than I expected them to be. We're like approaching soup in summer.

Podcasts, almost as popular as soup as super. That's a good motto for Gimlet. I don't know if this is yes, yes, no anymore or what. But this is why I find all this stuff really interesting. It's because if you're Reddit or any site like it, like link sharing sites that drive a ton of traffic but don't actually make that much money relative to how influential they are, you're always going to have this problem and it's not really solvable.

You don't make enough money to hire a huge amount of employees to keep all these masses of people happy. Right. But you need masses of people for your site to work. And every time you piss off, you know, these people who are doing a lot of free work for you, they'll leave. But like ultimately, like, I don't know what's going to happen.

Usually when everybody gets mad at a tech company, I roll my eyes because tech companies don't care and they always survive. You know, people can get mad at Facebook and it'll be here tomorrow. I don't know what will happen with Reddit. Right. I think it'll be here, but I think this matters.

And I don't think they know how to solve this. I mean, when it first happened, Alexis O'Hanian, the founder, the guy who should most know what to do, jumped on a threat of angry moderators, and they were like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? And he said, I don't know, popcorn sounds pretty good right now. Like, this is internet drama, I'm going to eat some popcorn. I don't think they have a master plan.

Right. So my main takeaway is that podcasts are almost as popular as soup in the summer. Yes. So are we at yes, yes, yes. We are definitely a yes, yes, yes. That's interesting. And it's a strangely poignant yes, yes, yes. Okay, that is our bonus episode.

We'll be back next week with a full new episode. We'll see you then. Oh, actually, this is PJ again, chiming in with a correction for this episode. We said that Reddit is owned by Kandai Nast. Kandai Nass used to own Reddit. Now Reddit's largest shareholder is Kandaynest parent company, Advanced Publications. We are still sure, though, that eating soup in summer, unless it's gazpacho, is super weird.

Okay, see you next week, for real.