It's pretty clear to me that Reddit has always lacked a solid experienced science-driven data person. Someone who can pinpoint an issue, formulate the issue into a product-driven concrete problem, come up with hypotheses on how to fix the problem, then use their vast wealth of data and users to test and/or implement them.
It's not just the ad hoc unintuitive "solution" they came up with to mask votes (which most people agreed was a user-antagonist step in the wrong direction). It's a lot of things: their inept response to spam/vote brigading/other abuse; their lack of personalized content discovery (state of the art from 10-15 years ago would probably suffice). I could go on, as a product-driven data scientist who has been on reddit since the early days, I'm constantly struck by how little they do with the amazing data they have.
It's not just the ad hoc unintuitive "solution" they came up with to mask votes (which most people agreed was a user-antagonist step in the wrong direction). It's a lot of things: their inept response to spam/vote brigading/other abuse; their lack of personalized content discovery (state of the art from 10-15 years ago would probably suffice). I could go on, as a product-driven data scientist who has been on reddit since the early days, I'm constantly struck by how little they do with the amazing data they have.