modnews

Look, I understand that no company in the world is going to publicly speak about an employee firing. That's a no-go for a million very good reasons. Unlike many here, I would never ask about that.

(My secret fantasy right now is that venture capitalists are throwing money at Victoria to start up a public-figure social-media PR agency. She's about the most well positioned person in the world for that at this moment. But that's another story.)

However: you did abruptly fire the sole person you had coordinating all AMA's, which I think it's fair to say were at that moment bigger than Reddit itself, and which were your main feature as a website. It's like abruptly deciding to cook the goose that lays golden eggs, and not even for Christmas dinner, just because it's a Thursday and there aren't any good leftovers in the fridge.

And then you did it right before 4th-of-July weekend, while the Internet had plenty of time to freak out over it but while presumably most of you were out of the office. What even the fuck? Do you even Internet, bro? Timing.

I say "were at that moment" because the way you handled things may have killed the AMA pop-culture movement for good, or at least Reddit's dominance of it. Perhaps Twitter owns it now. How do you feel about that? Or perhaps AMA's are "over" and the internet will move on to something else, and you dropped the ball. That was your ball. That you owned and held, and now it fell down the drain into the sewer. No more ball. It was a great ball, and we all enjoyed it and it was yours, and it was the biggest thing on the Internet, and now it may very well be gone.

More importantly, if something with the similar global cachet of AMA's emerges from Reddit in the future, how do you intend to follow up on it? Do you have a plan for that sort of thing? You should.

I would agree that it's untenable to have such an asset revolve around a single employee like AMA's were with Victoria. No corporation would should allow that. You should have had a whole team assigned to that function, well before the POTUS decided to participate in one. That's where you made the mistake. That's what you should be responsive to, and have a plan in place to look out for and respond to going forward. It's almost as if you had no awareness of the importance of AMA's and had some minor employee in the back handling them because no one else was doing it, instead of focusing on supporting a major site feature. And then abruptly got rid of that employee without having any idea of how important their function was.

Tools, communication and resuming the famously laughable search function (I use Google for my Reddit searches) are all well and good, but:

I'm more concerned about structural foresight. Not even foresight, it's all hindsight at this point. If something emerges out of Reddit that becomes a huge deal, are you going to look out for that, put team support on it so that it's not hanging by a single-employee thread, and.. I'm not sure what I'm asking here. Just do it.

One of the great things about Reddit is that it's a platform. The basic functionality is something that the users can shape into something you didn't expect. As a company, you need to be responsive into what we build in your sandbox, and make the most of those assets that we develop for you. The next "thing" to become popular in Reddit, maybe more popular than Reddit, could appear any moment. You don't want to "Victoria" it again when that happens, do you? When the President of the United States is doing a Q/A on your site, you should be having board-level meetings on why that is happening and what you can do as a company to support that feature going forward. Not just shuffling that function to a single employee who it turns out you viewed as disposable anyway.

Structurally support what becomes groundbreakingly good about Reddit, in a responsive and forward-looking fashion.

That's the promise I want from you. But I need you to demonstrate that you understand this. That you're even grokking this concept. I'm seeing nothing here in that regard.

Hope you're listening. Best of luck. I'm still rooting for you to get it together.