A system-thinker’s approach to building trust 🔴 Evan Hamilton, Reddit
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“It's way better if members are passionate and loud than dispassionate and quiet. The fact that they care enough to yell is really a gift.” - Evan Hamilton
Show Notes
Reddit is the mothership for sub-communities known as “subreddits,” each of which covers a different topic from ask historians to cats standing up. Subreddits are each managed by a team of volunteers.
Thus as the Director of Community at Reddit, Evan Hamilton doesn’t have just one community to cultivate. He has hundreds of thousands of very distinct communities he’s tasked with serving.
These “Redditors” have a history of being candid with their feedback. In July 2015, thousands of Reddit moderators shut down a significant portion of the site’s subreddits to collectively boycott the company. Evan has been instrumental in rebuilding and sustaining trust with volunteers in the years since.
We talked with Evan about how Reddit builds with transparency and empathy at such a significant scale.
Just like when building a fire, there’s an order of operations you can follow to cultivate communities that burn bright.
In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we take you through three stages of building a community: sparking the flame, stoking the fire, and passing the torch.
Evan offers insights into the second step: stoking the fire. Here are four ways Reddit has paid attention and built with users who keep showing up.
Building Empathy: Moderator Road Shows.
In the first couple years after the 2015 boycott, Reddit focused on creating a space for frustrated users to feel heard by Reddit, even when it meant Reddit’s team had to hear the same frustrations over and over. They did this through conversations online, via video calls, as well as going out and doing road shows.
Reddit employees went across the country to “hang out and have beers with moderators.” Very intentionally, there were no formalities or presentations to lessen the power dynamic. Evan told us, “we weren't creating a space for people to come and yell. We're creating a space for conversations.” The hope was for Redditors to see the people working on the site as humans, and vice versa, after a significant breach of trust.
Image provided via Evan.
Maintaining Transparency: Working in Public.
“When you surprise someone, they default to defensiveness,” Evan shared with us. In Evan’s first year at Reddit, they went through a redesign. And nothing says, “surprise!” quite like a website redesign. To get ahead of user defensiveness, the Reddit team consistently shared what they were working on and held open discussions centered in their own subreddit r/redesign.
“There was plenty of frustration,” Evan shared, “but nobody felt like they were being blindsided or ignored.” Developing in public gave Reddit the time and space to ease people into change and bring them along for the ride.
Image provided via Evan.
Maintaining Transparency: Community Council.
Reddit has formally asked a hand-selected group of 50 moderators to join them in building the future of Reddit. When Reddit is working on a project that can’t be revealed publicly, they tap the community council, who are under NDA, to have candid conversations with them about their opinions.
The community council serves as a stepping stone between the Reddit team and the wider community. When the platform comes out with new decisions they can confidently say, “we are listening to you. We started this whole project by talking to your peers and here's where we landed because of that.”
What’s been crucial in the success of the program is choosing members that will both criticize Reddit when they are doing something wrong and work with them to build and make things better. They’ve made an effort to mirror the diversity of the subreddits in the council to hear different perspectives.
Image provided via Evan.
“If you only think at scale, you will fail.”
Reddit has more than 100,000 communities and 52 million daily users. At that scale, making decisions that “just” affect only 5% of users is significant— 5% of 52 million is still many, many people.
So Evan’s team has built processes that help sort signals from noise and systems that can scale. For example, they created a moderator reserves program for when a subreddit has an unexpected influx of traffic and the moderators need some emergency help. Moderators can request this group of “reserves” to come in and help them.
One of the values of Reddit is “remember the human.” At select times, Evan and his team also do things that don’t scale. They’ve stepped in to help an individual or a subreddit because “those people are what makes Reddit run and without them, their passion, their contributions, we would be nothing.”
Working at scale with the human touch is a balancing act. As Evan told us, just as you can’t get “stuck in the weeds of dealing with every individual,” you also need to execute your work “in a way that's compassionate and accepts that these users are real humans whose lives are affected by your choices.”
Image provided via Evan.
Get Together is produced by the team at People & Company.
We published a book and we’ve worked with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
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