Former exec thinks his time with Reddit “made the world a worse place”

For nerds like me, Reddit can be a great place. Where else am going to get up to speed on the latest Game of Thrones fan theories, or spoilers? And also cool cat pictures. But it’s no secret that the platform has weathered its share of controversies, with a long list of inflammatory subreddits banned or balked at over the years. Earlier this year, Dan McComas, Reddit’s one-time senior vice-president for product, spoke to Intelligencer about how to fix the strain of toxicity on the platform. The basic takeaway? “It’s awful and it’s gonna get worse.”

…Woo hoo!

To hear McComas tell it, the problem goes right to the top. “I think that the biggest problem that Reddit had and continues to have, and that all of the platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and Discord now continue to have is that they’re not making decisions, is that there is absolutely no active thought going into their problems — problems that are going to exist in coming months or years — and what they can do to combat them,” he said.

"There was never, in any board meeting that I have ever attended, a conversation about the users, about things that were going on that were bad, about potential dangers, about decisions that might affect potential dangers. There was never a conversation about that stuff…The kind of classic comment that would come up in every board meeting was, “Why aren’t you growing faster?” We’d say, “Well, we’ve grown by 40 million visitors since the last board meeting.” And the response was, “That’s slower than the internet is growing; that’s not enough. You have to grow more.”"

So basically, the board members valued growth over all else, including making sure the platform wasn’t allowing, say, a subreddit dedicated to posting provocative shots of underage teenagers, a controversy that got the company in hot water in 2011. So far as the board is concerned, if they get more users, eventually, the massive install base will be worth a lot of money. McComas thinks that’s a losing strategy. “If you look from a product angle, if you look at that just from a funnel basis, it’s like 99 percent of everybody who visits Reddit don’t know what Reddit is,” he explained. “They find it by organic search or from a person sharing it. They land on a page and they leave and they never come back.”

"The biggest opportunity to grow Reddit is to focus on that part of the funnel. By doing that, and putting 90 percent of your resources toward focusing on that part of the funnel, you pretty much completely ignore everything that’s actually going on on the site. You ignore the moderators; you ignore the users who are contributing content; you ignore the communities that are being created and the activities going on within them. You basically risk the health of your platform."

And as McComas points out, if the company did focus on its core base, those users would be happier and create better content, which may attract more new people than would visit if Reddit went after them directly. “It’s a really mismatched incentive structure.”

RELATED PRODUCT

Sigil Tankard from Game of Thrones

Buy Now!

Buy Now!

Then there’s the problem of what to do when an inappropriate subreddit rears its head. It’s the eternal battle between trying to maintain a base level of decency and defending free speech…or in the case of Reddit, trying to maintain a base level of decency and fear of inconvenience:

"There are a couple of subreddits, some of which have been banned and some haven’t, but the FatPeopleHate one was a really bad one. There are a bunch of animal-cruelty subreddits, specifically with a sexual nature, that they would always refuse to ban. The arguments were usually, “We don’t want to touch this because these are our most volatile users and they’ll just make things a nightmare,” and then, ultimately, these things will bubble up, make it into the press, and then we would make a decision to change things. We would deal with the immediate impact, which was painful, would last a week or two, and then it would go away. For the most part, unfortunately, I see them still following this pattern."

So is there any hope for the future? If you’ve read this far, you probably already know McComas’ answer. At this point, he thinks the problems are too ingrained to fix, not just for Reddit but also for places like Twitter and Discord. “I think that if you ask pretty much anybody about Reddit, they’re either not going to know what Reddit is, which is the large majority of people, or they’re going to be like, “Oh, it’s that place where there’s jailbait or something like that.” I don’t think that they’re going to be able to turn these things around.”

You can read the full interview here. Or you can skip that and read the Reddit discussion about it.

To stay up to date on everything Game of Thrones, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels

h/t The A.V. Club