What was happening
For years Reddit had under-invested in moderation and community. Most of the engineering went into the regular consumer experience. Volunteer moderators filled the gap with third-party tools.
That came to a head when Reddit cut off free use of its API. Moderators protested, and many subreddits went dark for an extended period. For a company built on its communities, losing the trust of the people who run them was a serious problem.
The call
The protest was the symptom. The real problem was a strategic dependency: the people who kept Reddit’s communities running relied on tools Reddit didn’t own.
I founded the Community Engineering department and led a “parity plus” strategy. We would match what moderators depended on in third-party tools, then go further, natively, and address their pain right away rather than on a long roadmap.
What happened
The strategy brought moderators back to the company’s side and saved it from continued blackouts. With native tools in place, third-party apps could shut down, which brought several million monetizable daily users into Reddit’s own apps.
Community Engineering grew from 12 to 40+ engineers in about six months.
Also at Reddit
I also addressed a platform risk in how moderators could take communities private, and tightened the riskiest ownership settings without a backlash from moderators.
I also ran the company-wide program to rebuild Reddit’s web experience for communities and moderators, coordinating delivery across dozens of interdependent experiences. It let the company retire costly infrastructure and save millions of dollars a year.
What I'd tell a founder
When your product depends on someone else's tool, that is a strategy problem, not a backlog item.