Official Reddit announcement posts now follow a well-defined archetype. The latest accessibility announcement is just the latest example.
In the old days, official reddit announcement posts were a little different. Spuds, or another high-level admin would reply to a comment. Dozens of users would then reply with something like “When are you going to ban r/the_donald.” The threads were massive and quickly became unwieldy, but they seemed organic.
Once reddit started hiring admins who don’t seem to really know what reddit is, I started to notice a new trend. By now it’s moved on from a trend to a template or better yet, an archetype.
Here is the archetypal pattern to an official Reddit announcement post in 2023:
- Reddit makes an announcement that is downvoted below 20%.
- The individual admin making the announcement (sometimes) litters the post with cringe gifs and meme-speak in a ham-fisted attempt to break the ice.
- This admin will only be authorized to speak on the topic of the post but will be asked about a range of items.
- The admin will answer 4-8 questions, mostly praise or comments with a neutral or positive tone.
- The admin replies will mostly be downvoted well into the double digits.
- After answering a few questions, often without ever replying to any follow-up questions, the admin vanishes as the thread is overwhelmed with criticism and ridicule.
In a short time, reddit will announce a new contributor program that will use some kind of crypto currency to allow users to pay other users for content. If recent patterns hold, and we all know they will, there will be aspects of this program that are surfaced in the comments of the announcement. These aspects will be alarming or concerning in some way and will highlight ways in which bad actors could exploit the feature. It will be clear that reddit had not considered these items raised by users and did not adequately interact with their userbase prior to the feature announcement to ensure the smoothest possible launch.
Reddit management doesn’t seem to fuly understand that the freedom they grant their mods to build and manage their communities – which is the entire reason that users come to the site so that they can be marketed to – creates a much higher bar for communication and interaction around site architecture and feature changes with those mods / users. The pattern has been repeating for years: new features are rolled out half-baked, are not highly adopted. Admins are disincentivized to iterate on these features because of the low adoption rates. The feature is then abandoned or deprecated.
The last announcement post on r/modnews by the VP of community was the worst example since 2015 when Victoria was fired. Reddit, inc has done nothing to mitigate the anger, they haven’t even apologized, without which no healing could ever happen.
And the next announcement post will be no different…
Standby.
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