The argument over “Football” and “Fútbol” will go on for eternity, but I never expected it lead to this. The thuggish Redditors (we’re teasing of course) from the disgruntled Soccer subreddit began their barrage yesterday evening, submitting every link relevant to their sport they could find while simultaneously down-voting any stories relevant to Handegg. With only 143 members frequenting the Football subreddit and Soccer’s laying claim to more than 1,500, it was a quick rout. I mean, honestly, we Americans shouldn’t expect the fans of the world’s most popular sport to rename Fútbol in order maintain its distinction from our own Football. As a commenter on Reddit mentioned, perhaps we should just learn to pronounce their sport with the accent and the affronted /r/soccer subscribers should get in touch with user carlosmiguelp, the lone and inactive moderator of the Futbol subreddit.

Speaking of moderators, this never would have happened if the moderator for the Football subreddit had been around to man his post. He’s another inactive user. This brings up a serious issue: Should Reddit ultimately have some power over its user-created subreddits? An ability to pass on moderator duties in instances like these? We’ll do some investigating as there are certainly plenty of subreddits with defunct moderators, open to some form of gaming or manipulation, not just the Football subreddit. Reddit should take some moderation measures and start governing the few mishaps like these. It would give dead subreddits like Football a chance to thrive while also protecting them from manipulation and containing content unintended for inclusion by their absentee creators.

We had a chance to catch up with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit (second from the left).

Alexis now works as a Product Manager for Condé Nast, the now parent company of Reddit. This interview comes at an interesting time in the social news world, as Reddit beta changes are going live and Netscape is moving over to Propeller.com:

For me, not much has really changed. We’ve been given a great deal of autonomy an d we all have health insurance now, which is nice. In fact, whereas my job used to entail everything-not-programming — there are departments full of more talented individuals doing many of the duties a startup has to do much better than I ever could. It’s especially nice not having to do accounting anymore.

2 – Is being a product manager for Reddit different from what you thought?

Frankly, I didn’t know what a product manager was, so I didn’t think anything of it. (I’ve been quoted as calling myself a “project” manager, but I was later corrected — it should be “product.” I’m still not sure of the difference.)

3 – Isn’t it kind of weird?

“Weird” as in different? Sure.

4 – I know that Evan Williams eventually left Google when Blogger was bought out. Your thoughts?

I’m sure he had a good reason to give up all that wonderful free food.

5 – Reddit seems to have fallen out of favor with many people I speak to about social networking. People who are new seem to not be able to break in to the community, and other social networks seem to be either larger (Digg, Netscape) or faster growing (Stumbleupon).

It seems you’re using a pretty broad definition of social networking, which is fine, but we’ve always tried to avoid becoming a “social networking” site (in the “be my friend and I’ll be yours” sense of the phrase). We built Reddit to be a place to go to find new and interesting content online. If a feature wasn’t going to work toward that end, we weren’t going to implement it. For instance, I don’t think Reddit would be a much better site if users could poke one another.

I’m not sure what you mean by “break into the community.” The way we look at it, communities aren’t meant to be “broken into” — like a car, home, or my parents’ liquor cabinet. In that regard, I’m happy people are having trouble “breaking into” Reddit. Our unique front page has an inherent resistance to cheating because of the way links actually rise and fall on it; a determined group of users can’t push a story right to number 1 like on every other social news site — links have to earn a spot on Reddit’s front page by being consistently voted up over time.

Oh, and in a display of bad timing, Netscape announced the shutdown of it’s social news site just a day before I got your email. I suspect the traffic they did have was largely from users who still had netscape.com as their default homepage and thus not the right audience (and perhaps a few nostalgic Netscape Gold-ers?)

6 – You seem to have caught on to this when you sent out your survey on when Reddit jumped the shark. What advice do you have for the new Reddit user?

The only advice I have is from our user-created reddiquette (reddit-etiquette) wiki: http://reddit.com/help/reddiquette

And don’t spam. We hate spammers — Steve especially hates spammers.

7 – How is beta going? When do you think we will see the new version of Reddit stable and rolled out?

The new release is coming out in stages and going well so far (no downtime yet). I notice you blogged about yesterday’s update already; we’ve already seen a solid number of folks branching out into the new communities we’ve opened up.

8 – Who would win in a fight: the Reddit Alien, or the Google Doodle?

Depends on the Google Doodle, really. Some holidays I just don’t think they’d stand a chance, but others might be a bit more challenging. They certainly have the advantage of legacy — I’ll be the first to admit that the entire idea for changing our logo came from [their] logo, I just think I’ve taken it to excess by doing it so often and so randomly. Our mascot is from the future, though, which implies that it must survive, since it was able to travel back in time…

Ponder that one the next time you’re passing the bong.

You may have noticed we haven’t released anything substantive in a while. Well, so has Conde Nast. In light of this, we made some quick changes that are part of a bigger redesign coming soon.

We rearranged the login area to accommodate a new ad size. We also added a handful of new subreddits that should both target under-represented communities on reddit, and can be sold by the lovely ad-sales team.

(emphasis added by me)

Several bloggers have been commenting lately on the different types of content that Reddit users prefer. Having all these new subreddits should really change the landscape nicely.

The old subreddits:

The new subreddits:

It might look like a small thing, but having all of these new communities promoted on the Reddit homepage may have Reddit naysayers giving Reddit.com a second look.