Slowe: CSS remains one of the worst toolkits imaginable
Chris Slowe · Reddit hit 1M users in 1 year. The key was listening to users—& not doing what they said. | Reddi... · PMF Show · Jun 10, 2024 · at 9:23
Reddit CTO Chris Slowe reflects on backend versus frontend web development tools while recounting building web applications in 2005.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You know, first discoveries of some of the new kids, the new things that come along with CSS, which, you know, to this day remains one of the worst toolkits imaginable.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Chris Slowe
Slowe: Reddit pseudo-anonymity drives authenticity by removing influencer incentives
“Even though we are sort of pseudo anonymous, the incentives are such that Authenticity is what comes out of that because there's no reason to try to be like an influencer.”
Slowe: Early co-founder equity disputes signal a lack of trust
“It's a really bad sign. It's a sign of lack of, it's like, it's actually, that's probably, it's like, it's a sign of like immediate lack of trust. It's like, they don't actually trust each other enough.”
Slowe: Sidebar editing had the biggest impact on Reddit's community culture
“The feature that no one really notices that I think had the biggest impact was We gave mods the ability to edit the content on the side of the page where you could actually explain like the community, just say what it's about, because you had to be able to say…”
Reddit Never Had More Than 10 Employees Until 2011
“We never had more than 10 employees up until 20 11.”
Slowe: Engineering leader output becomes the people, not the code
“When you go through that shift of having to actually, your output is not the software, it's the people who are building the software now. And you become more and more removed from the actual day-to-day software development.”
Slowe: Reddit's core ranking algorithm was mostly unchanged for 15 years
“We had it publicly In the open source version of Reddit from about 2008 till 2017. And honestly, that, that algorithm didn't change markedly for most of the first 15 years of Reddit. So it was a very straightforward setup just based on, like, age of the conten…”