Steve Huffman explains why Digg's version-4 redesign catastrophically failed: it removed user submissions, skipped testing, and couldn't be reversed. Reddit's redesign takes the opposite approach, rolling out slowly over six months with parallel testing and the ability to revert, making it low-risk and user-focused.
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So we'll open up to the audience for questions. If you have questions, raise your hand and Juan will bring you a mic.
Hi. Yeah, I really enjoy Reddit. It's one of the best places on the internet to see an actual conversation, especially in an incredibly controversial topic. For instance, the ongoing coverage of the Syrian civil war is very comprehensive. There are all sides represented, and there's no other medium that I've ever seen that. One thing I have to ask you about is you used to have a competitor called Digg.
Yes.
And there was a point at which Digg was the number one of the top social media sites on the internet. And then there was a huge migration of Digg users to Reddit. What do you— and after a big Digg redesign, what do you think the mistakes that they made were that caused them to fail and how Reddit was a better alternative?
Sure, sure. And it's a good question, especially in the context of us doing a big redesign. So Digg was founded about 6 months before us. We didn't know about it. And when we found out about it, we were just like— it was almost creepy. Because it was a lot of the same ideas we had, but prettier. Now, it was prettier, but the technology was not as good. But they were about 5 times bigger than us. And we were second fiddle to them. They were Silicon Valley darlings. And so every conversation we had with investors was like, yeah, but how are you better than Digg? Digg did— Digg version 4 was the redesign that basically killed the company. They committed suicide effectively. I've not seen many companies do it quite so quick. And this is one of the few days, I said there weren't many days in Reddit where our traffic spiked. Spiked, this was one of them where our traffic basically doubled over the course of like 3 days. What happened was they did this redesign of the site that effectively got rid of user submission. They basically said the content is all gonna come from publishers. The users are still gonna vote on it, but the content's coming from publishers. And that was like— I don't know. I mean, in my opinion, very, very dumb. But really, not just my opinion, all of the users too were like, what the hell? Like, the point of Digg is user submission. And so they made that boneheaded product decision. They launched it without testing. And then they couldn't roll it back. And like any of those, if they had just done more user testing, if they had thought more hard about it, or if they could have just undo it, I think it would have been just fine. But much to my fortune, They basically tripped running over the finish line. And we were there to pick up the ball. And so it's so silly. And so for us, we're going through a big redesign ourselves. And it's actually a common thing on Reddit where people are like, oh, well, okay, you're gonna die just like Digg. And I'm just like, you clearly do not know what happened with Digg. They really effed that one up. And so for us, for example, in our redesign, we're taking it very, very slow and doing a ton of user testing, qualitative and quantitative. And the rollout plan will take probably 6 months, and we may never actually fully cut over. There's no reason why we can't continue to run the old site next to it. But yeah, that was— just watching that, we were just like, it's like we won the lottery. I kind of feel like we won the lottery. So thanks.
Dig.
Thanks, Dig. Thank you for the question.
All right, my question is, why are you guys trying to implement new, or what new features are you guys trying to implement to make Reddit seem more attractive than other user bases like Facebook or Instagram? Just how recently YouTube added like gifts a viewer, like what are you guys trying to add new features to the site?
Yeah.
Like, what features, or why, or—
Or just any, like, any future plans to add anything to Reddit?
Oh, yeah, yes.
To make it more attractive, or more friendly to other new users?
Sure, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so what are we doing to make Reddit more appealing to new users? That's actually the core of what we're doing. There's a lot of things. So one of the challenges of Reddit is, you know, you can listen to me talk all night long about how great and wonderful and empathy and connection and this and that, And then you go to Reddit's front page and you're just like, what the fuck? Like, what's that guy talking about? Because it's not at all obvious when you go to Reddit's front page how broad it is and the depth of the community and the level of engagement. It's just not at all obvious. So that's a big problem. And you also see a feed that is kind of one-size-fits-all for the whole world, but it's very US-centric and predominantly English. And so that puts a ceiling on how far we can grow. So we're redesigning the website so it'll be more visually appealing. We're working on a lot of our relevancy algorithms so the odds that you see something that you find engaging are increased, right? We're really focusing on creators and moderators because more— better creator tools and moderator tools means more communities. More communities means more breadth. And more breadth means more users. And so we see the difference even in our native mobile apps on iOS and Android, which we released last year. The engagement's like 5 times higher in our native apps than it is on the web. And the content is the same, but it's presented in a modern UI. But the onboarding, like we're just now working on onboarding, it's basically not there. It's still as obtuse as ever, but the engagement's a lot higher. The gender balance in our users is much better. And that's a result of just purely better product. So there's a couple of big things. The redesign, recommendation algorithms, kind of geo-targeting, and smaller things, kind of medium things like hosting video and different content types. And then a million little things. But a lot of the work we're doing right now is just basic block and tackle product work to make what we call our product strategy for 2017 is make Reddit welcoming. Make Reddit welcoming for creators, make Reddit welcoming for new users. And then how much international penetration do you guys have? So about 50% of our traffic is non-US, but it's still mostly English. And so that represents a pretty massive opportunity for us.
