>Pali Bhat joined Reddit from Google about a year ago — he’s actually Reddit’s first-ever chief product officer, which is pretty surprising considering that Reddit is a series of product experiences: the reading experience, the writing experience, and importantly, the moderation experience. One thing we always say on Decoder is that the real product of any social network is content moderation, and Reddit is maybe the best example of that: every subreddit is shaped by volunteer moderators who use the tools Reddit builds for them. So Pali has a big job bringing all these products together and making them better, all while trying to grow Reddit as a platform. > >Pali wanted to come on Decoder to talk about his new focus on making Reddit simpler: simpler for new users to join and find interesting conversations; simpler to participate in those threads; and simpler to moderate. We talked a lot about the tension between what new users need when they’re learning to use Reddit and what Reddit power users want — if the goal is to grow the site, you run the risk of irritating your oldest users with change. > >We also talked about video. Reddit is rolling out a dedicated video feed, which sounds a lot like an attempt to compete with TikTok, which every social network is trying to do — and we talked quite a bit about Google and search. Lots of people use Google to find things on Reddit, which is often used as a criticism of Google’s search quality. I wanted to know if Pali thinks Google is vulnerable in search, if Reddit can become a primary search engine for people, and most importantly, what he took from Google’s culture and what he left behind in organizing Reddit’s product team.

This was an interesting interview. Of particular interest to me was that before Pali there was no chief product officer. Even without that though the product team(s) seemed to be doing a passable job at the very least. Hopefully this new director impacts the user experience in a positive way in the coming months and years.