Alexis and I talked for a long 30 minutes. After some pleasantries and his assistant grabbing me a beer, we launched into discussion on the website. We talked about defaults, the user experience, subreddit discovery, and a few other things. I went into the discussion knowing about his meeting with Stratfor, and the issues with how active Eglin Airforce base is on reddit. However, after the discussion and a further review of my research I'd state that Alexis seems to be a very genuine and well-meaning guy. Any issues that have been raised either by myself or by others seem to be the result of Alexis not being at the helm, combined with a general lack of resources. They currently have ~70-90ish employees, the bulk of which are working on issues relating to scaling (reddit recently had 230M monthly users, including 1/3rd the US). If reddit is focused on anything, it is continuing to grow and serve their massive user base. As such, we discussed several topics:

• Defaults and subreddit discovery - Alexis agreed that the default subreddits were a major problem. Not only have the mods there developed a culture extremely toxic towards individual users, but also because the users didn't have an easy way of finding healthy communities devoted to their individual interests. We discussed a "learning" algorithm which learned based on voting and click-through behavior, we discussed inter-subreddit advertising, and a few other left-field ideas [including terrible suggestions from reddit like massively increasing the on-boarding process].

• Communities vs Mods - We spent a good deal of time on this relationship. IMO reddit continues to see communities as being owned by moderators. I have the opposite view that the community is the important entity, and the mods serve that community. This is important as most of reddit's suggestions have involved placing the burden on individual users... something that Alexis eventually agreed was bad. We talked about how his team has done nothing but develop mod tools, while failing to deliver even a single tool for communities to protect themselves against abusive moderators. I mentioned Voat's solutions, as well as discussing something as simple a "approval vote" for a community's mods.

• A catch-all subreddit. I showed Alexis the "Death of Reddit 3.0 post, and we had some discussion about the removal of /r/reddit.com from defaults. He reacted extremely positively about the suggestion of bringing this back. We will have to wait to get more details on this, but I view it as the most promising part of the conversation. If we do not get this back, and Alexis makes no further comment on why... there is likely a very bad reason. Here's a snippet of some follow up convo we had.

All-in-all, I consider it an extremely productive meeting. Alexis isn't Stratfor-style evil... he's simply an average guy who worked hard and took advantage of an unbelievable opportunity. Now he's sitting as part owner/operator of the #9 most visited website in the US. I don't doubt that there are many organizations and individuals abusive reddit, but Alexis on the whole has too many other priorities and doesn't have enough resources to give it the attention it deserves. He is open to great ideas, but the process to get those implemented needs improvement.

PS: To follow up on the advertising point, I'm interested in crowd-funding a campaign to advertise how terrible /r/me_irl is, and drive more traffic to an alternative. Similar campaigns can be lead against /r/europe and others. I'm open to ad design, campaign direction, and funding. Let me know if you'd like to assist.