The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I’m not surprised, but man, whoever’s running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.
If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
I disagree that the punching bag strategy is effective - even looking beyond the obvious example w/ knock-on effects Elon has done from Twitter -> Tesla, you’ve got Adam Neumann w/ WeWork, Travis Kalanick w/ Uber, etc. who’ve taken similar personality deflection strategies - it only caused more long-term harm than good for both medium-term operations and brand reputation.
It’s not a sustainable strategy and it’s pretty cringy to see it happen from an investor perspective.