Reddit's cofounder said that at first the company felt like 'a homework assignment that got out of hand' rather than a business

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 130 points – Reddit's cofounder said that at first the company felt like 'a homework assignment that got out of hand' rather than a business
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Reddit's cofounder said that at first the company felt like 'a homework assignment that got out of hand' rather than a business::Reddit's cofounder Steve Huffman said in its early days he filled up most of the site with content using different accounts until it got more users.

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Not everything has to be a buisness.

This is the part that Silicon Valley doesn't get. We can, do, and need good things that don't make money.

They need to make some money - infrastructure isn’t free, employees need paid, etc. they should be self sustaining.

They don’t need to be 2009-Google profitable though. That pipe dream needs to end. 3-5% YoY growth is plenty.

Or, how about a simple nonprofit that charges a nominal fee to fund infrastructure? I'm willing to pay for a good service, especially if I'm pretty sure they're using my money to improve the service itself.

The idea that non-profits aren’t profiting-seeking is the biggest misunderstanding in the world. I work for a large one, and it’s absolutely the same rampant penny-squeezing 30%-unsustainable-growth-seeking monstrosity as anything in the Valley. The pittance that gets thrown to “charitable causes” is just another tax dodge in an otherwise profit-demanding venture. Swap “shareholders” with “the endowment” and there’s no difference at all.

Much better to be a for-profit company with a charter demanding where profits in excess of modest growth targets are spent internally.

That's too bad. I'd be interested to see some statistics about how customer experience is, on average, with non-profits vs private companies vs public companies. Maybe it's still a net win even if there are awful non-profits

Most nonprofits don’t do a lot with the general public. They have the community they serve (which is getting something for nothing and therefore “customer service” is not a thing) and the community that funds them (where, of course, service is king). How the company treats you on the outside very much depends on which side of that equation you’re on.

This is necessary behavior for nonprofits, at least in the US, because of the demand for charitable giving. It’s ultimately a decent structure for a charity, but a pretty awful way to run a product or service business, since the incentives are all on the opposite side of “good product/service”. Private for-profits with strong, conscientious leadership do much better - I encourage you to read up on Patagonia and Gore-Tex as examples.

Yeah, I've read about Patagonia and love their model. I'm just skeptical in general because leadership can change. The Non-Profit stamp provides certain legal rules, whereas a private charter is enforced by the people who have power to change it.

I'm absolutely a fan of responsible for-profit companies like Valve (esp. wrt company structure), and I wish that was the norm instead of the exception.

That’s what I’m saying - there’s absolutely nothing about nonprofit status that demands a company not act like a total asshole. Have a look at all the really bad ones like the Komen Foundation or Red Cross if you want an example.

Best bet, barring adding more legal mechanisms to the law, is a private for-profit with careful leadership. Yeah, it can change, but companies that put values first can and often do confer those same values to future leadership. Versus, of course, publicly traded companies where rampant growth at all costs is the only legal requirement.

The problem is that for the number of users, a centralized platform is terrible at scaling. This is why they seek advertising revenue so much.

The only efficient way to solve this problem is by decentralizing, which is what Lemmy's doing.

Eh, kinda, but I see Lemmy as multiple centralized services, not actually decentralized. All of the content I view is stored on my instance, even if it was created elsewhere. This means it's going to have issues scaling because there will be a ton of copies of everything throughout the fediverse.

A properly decentralized service won't have so much duplication, it'll have just enough redundancy so it's not at risk of failure if too many nodes fail.

Ah, I see your point.

If we want to be precise, we could say Lemmy is federated.

There's centralized, federated,and distributed (e.g. DHTs).

On federated networks like Mastodon, I can send messages to my followers that I'm moving instances; after I finish moving, my followers can refollow me on the new instance.

I can export and import the people I finish and my block lists. I'm not sure if Lemmy has this functionality, but the point is that it's still better than Reddit. A node daying doesn't mean the end of the network.

The ideal would be to have a fully distributed version of Lemmy, where people could join virtual instances over a distributed architecture. Perhaps that will be possible one day, but for now Lemmy's better than nothing.

Yup, I'm actually working on one distributed alternative, but I'm not sure if I'll ever actually finish it.

And yeah, Lemmy is good in that it's resilient to nodes dropping off, but it doesn't solve the problem of costly hosting. I would assume the total cost of running Lemmy is way more expensive (perhaps an order of magnitude) than running Reddit, for the same number of users, because of how much duplication and communication there needs to be across instances.

So yeah, I'm here while lemmy is sustainable, but I'm worried about how it'll scale.

They want 100 million $ houses on beaches that's why they are going after an IPO. The whole idea that they are not making money is laughable

This was my biggest wtf.

Companies like reddit used to love that shit - make something awesome to get a massive audience... And THEN monetize. So what the hell is he talking about "business"?

It isn't even that it doesn't need to make money. It's that it doesn't need to keep making more money than it did last year. It's okay to have "stagnant" growth. It's okay to just keep doing well rather than keep increasing profits.

Huh, so that's how Steve Huffman ended up moderating r/jailbait

TIL

To be fair, at the time mods of a subreddit could make anyone else a mod without their permission, and adding people as mods of distasteful subreddits was a common prank.

Im aware, but to be fair spez didn't treat the people that made his content and/or modded his platform for free fairly. He betrayed their trust and destroyed their communities, all because he wanted ever mooooaaaar despite having more than most, a common diseased mindset these days. "GIMME ITS MINE" no matter the harm done to others.

My philosophy in life isn't "treat others as you would have them treat you." In our sick world, that makes you a mark, sadly.

My philosophy is: In a vacuum, not knowing who someone is, be kind. But once someone shows you who they are, treat others how they treat others.

Steve Huffman isn't worthy of respect. He's a greedy piece of shit.

I don't disagree with any of that. I just want to make sure all the criticism is in good faith here, and I think the jailbait thing isn't. I don't think he was even working there or actively using that account at the time.

When you design and run a platform, it is your responsibility.

If you design the platform to allow anyone to "create a morally objectionable community and then associate it with anyone else", you are responsible for this oversight.

It's not like spez took that responsibility and reacted accordingly. He didn't care, didn't change anything, and the simple fact that he could have fixed it in a matter of hours but chose not to is complicit enough to admit wilful association.

So, in my book, for all intent and purposes, him not doing anything with that mod access is irrelevant. What is relevant is him not doing anything about that mod access.

I'm sure spez was responsible for that design decision or oversight, but he left the company in 2009 and did not return until 2015. User-created subreddits were still a pretty new feature when he left and I don't think that form of abuse had caught on at the time.

There's plenty to complain about spez is actually responsible for, but it's Hueypriest or yishan you want for the time period we're talking about.

I'll have to admit that I'm pretty unknowledgeable about the reddit history.

I was even unaware that spez left the company, all I know was that it is based on an original idea from Aaron Swartz[^1], and that it's a damn shame he was "made an example of" by the American establishment, only for daring opposing to their "values" of "knowledge is only for the powerful".

If only they had left him alone, or had enforced a punishment on par with his "fault", he would still be alive, and we would have likely have seen a ton of extremely cool innovations from him.

[^1]: I checked the information after writing this, and it turns out, at least according to Wikipedia, to be false: reddit was in fact founded by spez and Alexis Ohanian, in 2005, and Swartz joined via a merger, in 2006. However, this goes against what Swartz himself said in an interview:
"I was with the Reddit team back when we were coming up with the idea, in the months before the first Y Combinator Summer Founders Program started. We eventually began working together full time around that November [2005]".

I was one of the first hundred or so people who didn't know the founders to make a reddit account. While I can't claim any deep insider knowledge, I was on the site and paying attention to developments. The idea that became reddit came from Paul Graham and was fundamentally a more social version of Delicious. What Arron Swartz was working on at the time was Infogami, which was pretty much a wiki, and became reddit's wiki when the companies merged.

His prosecution was certainly unjust and his suicide tragic, but I don't think either has anything to do with Reddit.

Oh fuck I didn't even notice your nick... you're u/Zak on reddit??

Also, nah, his prosecution had nothing to do with reddit, this was my mandatory "fuck the abusive intellectual property and its consequence on the life of the common people" plug. Sorry 'bout that.

you’re u/Zak on reddit??

I am.

It's funny, because when I was searching for the information, I found your post... so I guess I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and just asked you here... 😅