Reddit Blog

> But this is what we wanted? [...] Why do we pretend this is not intentional?

I don't think in 2005 anyone expected a global, free communications network, video calling and a camera in every pocket to lead to an "epidemic of loneliness" - quite the opposite in fact.

Facebook: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." [1]

Youtube: "Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories." [2]

Reddit: "focused on our north star of bringing community and belonging to everyone in the world" [3]

Tiktok: "Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy." [4]

Apple: "We believe that business, at its best, serves the public good, empowers people around the world, and binds us together as never before." [5]

Instagram: "Where everyday moments bring friends together" [6]

Snapchat: "empowers people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. It's the easiest and fastest way to communicate the full range of human emotions with your friends" [7]

Discord: "Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives. We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to…

Reddit's privacy policy here seems to be pretty clear [0]

> Deleting Your Account

> You may delete your account information at any time from the user preferences page. You can also submit a request to delete the personal information Reddit maintains about you by following the process described below this table. When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content. After you submit a request to delete your account, it may take up to 90 days for our purge script to complete deletion. We may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.

If you say you are deleting information and they don't do it, they are violating their privacy agreement.

Of course, that is in clear conflict with their TOS. [1]

> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.…

There are well over a million subreddits.

Even counting just large groups, there likely several thousand subreddits which have individually-specific focuses and moderation criteria. Reddit reports 100+ million active subreddits.[1]

The two problems with moving to an in-house, wage-labour moderation team are that this is expensive and wage labour at prices Reddit is likely willing to pay will not meet the standards of dedicated volunteer teams.

From various sources I've encountered over the years, human-based moderation peaks at somewhere between 500--1,000 items/day (multiple sources put a peak at about 700--800, though that's with very thin review). Reddit ... doesn't seem to offer stats on daily / monthly comment volume, though it claims ~60m DAU and 13 billion posts and comments overall. I'm going to SWAG[2] and assume roughly half of those have occurred in the past five years, which would mean that there are ... about 3,300 posts / comments day. Which seems low, so my SWAG's probably wrong. If 13 billion items are posted per year, then there are ~35 million items posted per day. That seems possibly high, though Facebook's claim is 5 billion items/day, so ... maybe? shrug

One criteria I've suggested for moderation elsewhere is based on prevalence, which is the number of times an item is viewed. Short version: prevalence follows a power-law distribution, and as the views threshold is raised, the number of items falls off drastically. With some tuning and…

I use Apollo to read Reddit, but mod using desktop web.

Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.

But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.

I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.

There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.

There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.

IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.

I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.

When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.

But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a…

Reddit (https://www.reddit.com) | Site Reliability Engineer | Onsite (SF Bay Area)
“The front page of the internet," Reddit brings over 330 million people together each month through their common interests, inviting them to share, vote, comment, and create across thousands of communities.

The Reddit Infrastructure team provides a stable, humane foundation for Reddit Engineering to develop, deploy, and operate their services on. As we have continued to build out our offerings, our next step is to spread knowledge around the org about infrastructure, incident response, performance analysis and optimization, and other pertinent things pertinent to service ownership and operation. One of the pieces of this is our new Site Reliability Engineering program.

As an SRE at Reddit, you'll embed within a division with the mission to share knowledge, amplify productivity, and reinforce a team that is operating services at tremendous scale. You will work on/with Kubernetes frequently and also contribute back to InfraRed, our internal infrastructure product. Automation, analysis, and optimization are some of your favorite words.

If any of this sounds interesting, please see our listing below!

* SRE: (SF/Bay Area): https://grnh.se/93eec9c21

SF-only for this particular position, but do check out our other remote-friendly openings across numerous functions if you are generally interested in Reddit: https://www.redditinc.com/careers

Copying this right from the Reddit TOS for all those who consider posting anything of any value there, present or future:

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

(https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-february-15-2024)

tl;dr: "We will be able to do anything we fucking want with anything you contribute to our site"