I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened.<p>Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, etc.--all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).<p>This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we'll make the best of it.
Heh. I love the conceit that anyone would believe Wong resigned only over "location and amount of money to spend on a lease".<p>Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. " (<a href="http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit" rel="nofollow">http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit</a>)
Relevant context: Wong wanted everyone who worked at Reddit to move to San Francisco in an attempt to increase cohesion.
<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-forces-remote-workers-to-relocate-to-sf-or-get-fired/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-f...</a><p>Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?
Nice words, growing it 5x is great.<p>Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't <i>that</i> big a deal.<p>But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?
I logged out of reddit about a month ago. I changed my password to something incomprehensible. To me, reddit has become a link aggregator over being a social place. I still visit about a half dozen subreddits daily, but only insomuch as to get my news.<p>I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.<p>I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.
<i>Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun, I am happy they are coming to a close and I am sure the new team will do a far better job and take reddit to great heights.</i><p>Heh.."sort of". But seriously - good moves @sama. This part of your post seems to be getting less attention but it should be highlighted. It's tough as hell to jump into the middle of a fire when a top executive resigns, and it's commendable that you rolled up your sleeves and did it. At some point, if ever possible, a post about the past week would be hugely interesting.
Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.<p>1) Personally responded to feedback emails.<p>2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!<p>3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare.<p>Hoping for great things!
Straight from the horses mouth - answer here from Yishan on Quora: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CEO/answer/Yishan-Wong?srid=X&share=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-CE...</a>
Here's the announcement on the reddit official blog: <a href="http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html</a>
There's a few things that I'm guessing could have contributed to this final straw that broke the camel's back moment:<p>- Yishan's response to the ex-employee publicly calling him out and revealing their work performance in a non-professional manner. (not undeserved, but not professional for a CEO)<p>- The response or non-response to the Fappening.<p>- Not a lot of movement on making the site work great for mobile leading to the rise of Alien Blue and other clients gaining popularity.<p>I don't know if there was a lot of pressure to improve revenues since generally the audience is pretty allergic to blatant advertising but we shouldn't forget that Reddit is a business.
Could the new team please review and censor some of the unquestionably evil subreddits? (ie: brutalizing women, dead babies, animal sex, etc). There's just no reason whatsoever such places ought to exist.<p>Out of conscience, I chose to stop reading Reddit for allowing such subs to exist. I am not asking others to do the same or to adopt my beliefs, but I say this because I really enjoyed being a redditor. I'd like to return, but not if pure evil is allowed to continue there.
Amazing the the new SVP of Product is a guy who one day said "It would be cool if reddit had a secret santa." While not working there.<p><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-santa-the-creator-of-reddits-gift-exchange-the-worlds-biggest.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-sant...</a>
Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.
> It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total.<p>I'm sure McDonalds sold more hamburgers in the last 8 days than my local butcher sold steaks too. If HN would ever reach that degree of attrition it would <i>be</i> reddit.<p>At the risk of being elitist, let's hope that never happens.
Man, the whole thing reeks!<p>The big guys invest in Reddit -> weeks later a wedge issue is found, CEO is isolated and out -> blog post to convince the masses that this is still the good old Reddit: 'Look! Ohanian is coming back!'.<p>The way this announcement desperately tries to water down the significance of the event, speaks chapters, IMO.
Why did he write: "It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total."<p>Was that a dig at Hacker News?
This is such a strange thing to resign over. For cooler companies like Reddit and more name brand places like Google and Apple, location is not incredibly important for hiring, but it's HUGE for retention.<p>When you're excited to start a new job it's easy to overlook the commute. Things come into perspective 6 months later when you're wasting up to 1/12 of your life on a bus/train.<p>I've personally made this mistake and have noticed when interviewing candidates that one of the top reasons they give for wanting to leave their current position is that it's too long of a commute.
Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons.<p>Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.
Knowing nothing more about the issue, I honestly believe he's right in wanting to move the office out of the most expensive area in the Bay. It's a strain down the line.<p>Unless something fundamental changes in city planning I'd expect a certain degree of crowding out of that area.
I've always had a gut feeling that Sam Altman is not what he acts like.
Just because Paul Graham says he is great doesn't mean he is. It's just his personal belief and could be just a propoganda.... Nothing can be believed in this world anymore, news are not actually news, People don't mean what they say, they say what they don't mean, they act different that the reality and internet world is going crazy, unethical, greedy and more... Start ups are just made to make money, People are easy to fool, one guy comes up and make millions, says start up is great and all the people like Donkeys and Yaks start a 'Start-up'. Why? To make money.... doesn't matter what their action's effects are, they are just crazy to make money. They are dishonest, greedy but they call themselves successful...why, because they earned money... Bring on the Artificially intelligent machines, get rid of the humanity... sooner than later...
This post has an interview with Pao and Alexis: <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-interim-for-long/" rel="nofollow">http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-int...</a>
This came out of the blue and unannounced on reddit.com. I have a feeling there's more to this than announced.<p>I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.
Understandably there's very little details here, but I'm curious to know if Alexis is moving to SF, he's played a big role in the NYC tech start-up world recently.
Oh, good. Put a SJW at the top of Reddit's chain of command. The drain circling is making sucking sounds now...<p><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint</a>
2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminating in his resignation. He likely already knew his days as the CEO of reddit were numbered.<p>This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.