Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#11

Post by kaspm » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:53 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #3

Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.

I know for a long time the engineering team was not very big, certainly not the "usual" size of a team with that much traffic (Instagram not withstanding). My guess is the team was simply keeping up with the normal expansion of complexity that comes with scale.

That said, I believe they are heavily recruiting at all levels so if you want to work for Reddit, apply now.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#12

Post by redthrowaway » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:54 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

jliptzin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.

You can't even edit the title of a Reddit post. That's been known for years and nothing's been done about it.

That's almost certainly by design. Just as with tweets, it would be massively abused.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#13

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:56 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #3

Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.

With the immense and demographically diverse userbase, I imagine keeping the site running smoothly and user analytics is their chief focus. Their strategy probably is to introduce changes slowly so as not to alienate or confuse people (I'm looking at you Facebook).

Also, they expose their data via an API that developers have used to make all sorts of features, giving them the luxury of being able to basically test features without actually implementing them.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#14

Post by beager » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:56 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #3

Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.

With zero inside knowledge, it appears to me that they have a very brittle legacy feature set due to scale concerns, tolerated integrations/extensions, and being held hostage by the community. There is new product feature development happening but it appears disjointed from the legacy, which could indicate leadership conflicts on priority, an inability to marry the old and new, or an inability to devote time to anything but upkeep of the legacy.

Previous large-scale changes have been presented to their community and generally have been panned by the community, and often unreasonably so.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#15

Post by SanPilot » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:57 AM UTC

m-j-fox wrote: post #7

I love Reddit, but remind me what's their business model? I've never seen an ad using Relay For Reddit. Free content is great but how do they keep the lights on much less justify $1.7 billion? (Also, HN. Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?)

The reddit.com website has some ads on it. Relay probably uses their API, which doesn't include any ads.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#16

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:58 AM UTC

m-j-fox wrote: post #7

I love Reddit, but remind me what's their business model? I've never seen an ad using Relay For Reddit. Free content is great but how do they keep the lights on much less justify $1.7 billion? (Also, HN. Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?)

> Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?

They don't have to pay dang for that I'll be happy to oblige, this is a toxic comment because of that last bit, essentially you are just stirring the pot and baiting the moderators.

As for the value of HN to YC: it's a recruiting and marketing machine the likes of which you'll rarely find for any kind of money, I suspect that no matter what Dan and Scott are paid it is well worth it to YC.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#17

Post by beager » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

jliptzin wrote: post #5

komali2 wrote: post #3

Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.

Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.

Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#18

Post by Cacti » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #3

Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.

well, they are developing quite a bit, but they test out the features among subsets of their user base long before the features are available to everyone. And in most cases they probably turn out to not be as good as they seemed they would be, and are tabled. They are pretty careful about changing things... I mean, if it ain't broke.

Personally I prefer it far, far more than the constant changes some startups seem to feel is necessary to justify their existence.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#19

Post by fictioncircle » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:01 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

jliptzin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.

You can't even edit the title of a Reddit post. That's been known for years and nothing's been done about it.

To be fair, doing so would require a bunch of cache invalidations and they've always barely had enough money to limp on to the next investor. It would also likely be abused.

Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#20

Post by crispytx » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:03 AM UTC

Isn't reddit already successful? Why are they raising money? Shouldn't they be generating profits and returning those profits back to their shareholder(s)?