Introducing Reddit’s Simplicity Plan • Bully, the chief product officer at Reddit, is announcing plans for Reddit this year, focusing on simplicity. • This year, Bully is splitting some of the interface apart to make it more simple, with a focus on text and video. • This is based on the insight that 500 million people visit Reddit monthly, but that the product is something that should be for everyone.
Nilay Patel
Balibat, you are the Chief Product Officer at Reddit. Welcome to Decoder.
Pali Bhat
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Nilay Patel
We’ve got to start with some news. Today with the podcast, you’re announcing your plans for Reddit as a product this year. Your theme is simplicity. You’re splitting some of the interface apart to make it more simple, focus on text and video. How did you arrive at these changes?
Pali Bhat
The biggest insight we had was there’s a ton of people, about 500 million or so folks who visit us monthly. But honestly, our product is something that should actually be for everyone. We found Reddit to be kind of like this in thing where ifMaking Reddit Simple for Everyone • Reddit is planning to make its product simpler this year in order to make it more accessible to everyone. • The changes will focus on making the product more userfriendly, with an emphasis on text and video content.
Nilay Patel
Got to start with some news. Today with the podcast, you’re announcing your plans for Reddit as a product this year. Your theme is simplicity. You’re splitting some of the interface apart to make it more simple, focus on text and video. How did you arrive at these changes?
Pali Bhat
The biggest insight we had was there’s a ton of people, about 500 million or so folks who visit us monthly. But honestly, our product is something that should actually be for everyone. We found Reddit to be kind of like this in thing where if you actually got the joke and you’re on the inside, you really understand Reddit and you love it and you see the value of it. And you might even go and start putting in Reddit and all of your Google search queries. So you get Reddit results because you know that’s the place you trust for authentic information. But if you don’t know about Reddit and you don’t understand it, it’s a bit inscrutable, it’s a bit chaotic, and it’s hard to get. So what we wanted to do was really make Reddit for everyone. Keep it great for all the folks who are already on Reddit, but then keep it welcoming for everyone in the world. And so a big push of that is making the product just more simple and simple in every way, simple in how you discover communities, simple in how you join communities, simple in how you participate.Introducing the New Reddit: Simple, Intentional, and Decluttered • Reddit is planning to make it easier for new users to get started, by providing them with easier access to content and features, and by decluttering the site. • These changes are designed to increase user growth, and to convert Reddit users into signups.
Pali Bhat
Now, if you’re a new user and you’re coming into that mix, you do want to make sure that it’s easy for them to get all of the basics before they graduate into using more of the power features. Right? And I think that’s the real nut that we want to crack this year, which is making everything really, really simple. And so we’re doing this in a few different ways, right? So first, some folks want to consume text content, or some folks want to consume video content. We want to make the whole experience more intentional. You pick the kind of feed you want, we’ll give it to you. Because we’ve got great content across formats and across modalities. And it’s really about just giving users that flexibility, just tailoring the whole experience based on the intent of the user. The second bit is we want to declutter Reddit, right? It is chaotic. It is a little bit too complex for new users. And we want to make that just redesign and reorganize that experience so they can navigate Reddit and not have to worry about all of the power user features on day one. They’ll get to it because we know there’s value in them. They just don’t have to get to it on day one. And today we put all of it in front of you.
Nilay Patel
Are these changes designed to increase user growth? Is it designed to convert people into Reddit signups?The Product Manager’s Dilemma: How to Set Up a Successful Product Team • The product team at Google is not welldefined and does not work well. • The product manager at Google is not empowered and does not have control over the product.
Nilay Patel
You just got a job as head of product. You got to set up this team. You are the perfect person to ask this question that I have been basically dying to ask for a long time. I feel like Google set up a model for how a product team should run. It created the modern conception of a product manager who’s really empowered, who’s a CEO of a product, this whole, all of this stuff, these cliches about what a product team should Do. And then everyone else just sort of inherited it. And there’s not actually a lot of introspection about whether that shit worked. And if you look at Google today, the answer is like, maybe it didn’t, right? Like there’s a reason they have 19 messaging products and none of them are a success. There’s a reason that Android is constantly fractally expansive, but also seemingly reactive to Apple at every turn. And it’s the sort of culture of product inside of Google. You’ve stepped outside of that. You’ve described something that is not quite that thing, especially this focus on why are we even doing this, which I think is a question that Google should ask itself more often. Is there an opportunity to rethink that core product team idea, that core product structure? Is that happening enough? Yeah,How Google’s Former CEO Keeps the Company’s Focus on the User • Google’s founder, Larry Page, has always taken a laser focus on users and ensured that the company is dreaming big enough. • One of the things that Page intentionally didn’t take with him when he left Google was the struggles that the company had working across teams.
Pali Bhat
Look, the two things that I’ve always taken is a laser focus on users. And the second thing is ensuring that we’re dreaming big enough. Because not enough people actually think at the scale that Google often thinks at. I’ll give you an example. When Street View originally came out, there was a lot of reports of, oh, this is going to be some toy thing that only is done for like mountain view streets, as an example. Well, it turns out there’s Street View in really tiny streets around the world. Right. And that scale is something that I’ve always appreciated about Google and something that that scale thinking is something that I’ve taken with me. The focus on the user, which, you know, you could argue that Google has lost some of, but I was there long enough that I always like focused on that and I’ve always kept that. Those are two things I’ve taken. What I intentionally didn’t take was really some of the struggles that Google had working across teams. You spoke about like N different messaging products.Google’s Search Problem • Pauli sees search as an opportunity for big and small companies alike. • Google has fallen down on the job in some way that people perceive as an opportunity. • The evidence that Google is getting worse at search is that people are looking at other companies to see what they’re doing better.
Nilay Patel
We have to take another break. But when we come back, I asked Bali about search. He’s an ex-Googler. So, you know, I had to. You mentioned search several times. You see search as an opportunity. A couple weeks ago, I was in Redmond to look at the new version of Bing. I talked to Sachin Adela. He sees search as an opportunity. The idea that any set of companies, big or small, is looking at Google and saying search is the opportunity is frankly shocking, right? They’ve fallen down on the job in some way that people perceive as an opportunity. And when I ask others, what’s the evidence that Google is getting worse at search? TheHow Reddit Plans to Keep Its Community Safe from Generative AI • Reddit is a platform that is focused on providing authentic human experiences, and they are worried about being overrun by generative AI. • However, they are open to all kinds of tools, and they believe that it can be a fun experience to chat with a chatbot within a subreddit.
Pali Bhat
Of all, we’re not scraping the rest of the internet. We have to start with just looking at our own data. We’ve got so much data. In fact, arguably, we are one of the sources of content that people want to use for training models, et cetera. The first thing that we do is looking at our own data because we’ve got a lot of data to look at. In terms of how we think about it, though, it’s twofold. First, the real value proposition of Reddit is it’s the human face of the internet. So if you want authentic human conversation and genuine interactions, you go to Reddit, right? And it’s high quality and you know what you’re going to get. That’s something that we believe there’s always going to be a need for. Will there be fun experiences that you can create with a chat bot within a subreddit that you might want to shoot the shit with. Yeah, we could see things like that be part of the experience, but our focus really is making sure that our authentic experiences are always available for users.
Nilay Patel
Are you worried about Reddit being overrun by generative AI? We’ve seen a lot of other platforms have to ban chat GPT-generated content. We’ve seen sci-fi writing competitions have to shut down entries because it was getting out of hand. They couldn’t moderate it. Has this started to happen to you?
Pali Bhat
We don’t see that flood yet, but it’s certainly something that we’re keeping our eye on because we want to make sure that we’re keeping Reddit Reddit.
Nilay Patel
Does that mean that you wouldn’t offer some of those tools to people?
Pali Bhat
No, look, we’re open to all kinds of tools, right? Because we think it could be additive to the experience, but it has to be additive and not just spammy. Because the core of
