Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt.
I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up.
Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
Yeah, I wasn't referring to the quality problem (I'm in full agreement with you on that). I think they are in a better position that Digg at the Digg-bar point (even with low qual participation, engagement still seems deeper than Digg at that time), but the quality is decidedly Eternal September (lower, really).
This is a movie plot. Seriously. Condé Nast is the government. They are largely incompetent and mostly concerned about political infighting and palace intrigues.
The reddit team is the hodge podge group of geeks that happened to be (insert constrained environment here):
* on a cruise ship with the worlds top nuclear scientists (and a bomb!)
* touring an underground viral research facility on a school outing during which there is a "containment breach!"
* orbiting earth in an experimental space plane they built in their barn when the entire GPS sat system FAILS!
The government (condé nast) can do nothing to assist them other than sit uncomfortably on the edge of their chairs, wrinkling their expensive suits, waiting to see if our intrepid developers succeed.
Unlike a Hollywood production, however, we don't know if this plot has a happy ending. I'm rooting for our plucky team, but the clock is ticking.
Tick.
Tock.
(I'll leave the rest of you to imagine the movie poster)
If you don't weed out your counter-productive citizens you end up with Digg. If you do, if you keep it tight, you might be lucky enough to have a metafilter.com which after a decade is still an amazing place.
Strangely, Something Awful is actually a great model for a community. A great case-study in how to keep a community from imploding.
Hah really? Something Awful is site where everyone rehashes five-year-old in-jokes, has a weird cult-like mentality towards the rest of the internet, and makes money by repeatedly banning a small number of people over and over again. I'm a member there, and the place is clearly dying out.
I thought that too until I got an account recently. There are really some excellent subreddits hidden beneath all the memes and reposts. Places like TwoXChromosomes, Seddit, DepthHub, TheoryOfReddit, and TrueReddit really have a great deal of value and sharp minds in them. As soon as you venture off the beaten front page path of pics and funny, you get to places that approach Hacker News level of comment quality.
I've had to retreat from the over-exposed groups and into the smaller niches, but that's hardly a way to run a community. It's too fragmented and discovery is hard, with word of mouth or casual linking in the sidebar being about the only way to reasonably discover new places to explore.
Reddit's user community has never been stronger, but the platform is in serious disrepair.
There's a lot of truth to this. I'm doing everything I can to use my influence on the board of reddit, inc. to help, but the team we've got in place now has been carrying the torch brilliantly since we left.
Fairly niche perhaps, but i think Wired benefits from it. Other than the natural posting of wired articles on reddit, there have been a couple of articles in wired which originated from reddit content.
There is a lot of potential for datamining and finding trends, what is popular, what would go down well, etc, which they may well be doing too.
I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.