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Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

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

#71

Post by austenallred »

Alex3917 wrote: post #25
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.

> Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I read through the front page of each of the top 5,000 subreddits (by subscribers) over the last few weeks, and a lot of the subreddits are adding hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per week. They seem to have gone into hypergrowth recently without anyone really noticing. The other interesting thing of note is that of the 125,000ish posts I read through,…

I believe Sam Altman about this time last year mentioned that Reddit grows by more users than Hacker News has total every day.

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

#72

Post by austenallred »

jacquesm wrote: post #29

Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?

It's pretty clear, to me at least, that they'll become one of the biggest websites of any kind, and with a massive amount of data around what people like and are interested in.

Pretty simple to imagine that being worth far more than $1 billion. Their user growth recently has been astounding.

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

#73

Post by wvenable »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
beager wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment thr…

Digg and Reddit kind of came out of the lack of change at Slashdot. Slashdot had many problems with obvious solutions and originally digg was just slashdot where users could submit stories.

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

#74

Post by FiveDegrees »

gtm1260 wrote: post #49
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment thr…

I agree! It feels like a good portion of the time when I see a new feature on a website it seems like it only exists because all the people needed to create it are employed at the company and we can't have them just sitting around all day.

I'm looking at you, Slack.

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

#75

Post by elgenie »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #69
ktta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is actually facing a lot of flak for their plan of disabling CSS. This has made several of the subreddits announce themselves as Pro-CSS - sort of a rebel against the admins. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red... https://www.reddit.com/r/ProCSS/

I haven't seen a single sub where CSS would add value. The worst example is r/science where colourful tags make it especially noisy.

CSS adds tons of value in sports subreddits. It's used to display stuff like the league standings and details on the day's game.

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

#76

Post by jacquesm »

austenallred wrote: post #72
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?

It's pretty clear, to me at least, that they'll become one of the biggest websites of any kind, and with a massive amount of data around what people like and are interested in. Pretty simple to imagine that being worth far more than $1 billion. Their user growth recently has been astounding.

I agree with the first bit and the last bit. The bit that makes no sense to me is that their value should be predicated on them making at least that much in either profits or some kind of exit.

Since almost all attempts to really monetize Reddit in the past have failed because of massive backlash from the users I wonder what the plan is. There has to be some kind of major change to either Reddit or to the audience to warrant the valuation.

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

#77

Post by notatoad »

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.

Every time they introduce any changes, the userbase revolts. The outrage that happened when they announced they were going to let people put a bio and photo on their profile pages made it sound like the world was ending.

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

#78

Post by dredmorbius »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #69
ktta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is actually facing a lot of flak for their plan of disabling CSS. This has made several of the subreddits announce themselves as Pro-CSS - sort of a rebel against the admins. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red... https://www.reddit.com/r/ProCSS/

I haven't seen a single sub where CSS would add value. The worst example is r/science where colourful tags make it especially noisy.

https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius

Availability hueristic and personal bias. There are others.

CSS is a tool. Often, but not always misused.

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

#79

Post by Judgmentality »

austenallred wrote: post #72
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?

It's pretty clear, to me at least, that they'll become one of the biggest websites of any kind, and with a massive amount of data around what people like and are interested in. Pretty simple to imagine that being worth far more than $1 billion. Their user growth recently has been astounding.

Why are users worth money if they're barely being monetized? Considering how big (and old) reddit already is, they should already be profitable, and hence shouldn't need to raise money - unless they're planning something radical and expensive. Reddit is a cool site and wildly popular, but that doesn't mean it's going to make billions of dollars.

Also I suspect the site is increasingly populated with bots, not real users. I'd actually imagine the site is less popular this year in terms of real users than it was a year ago, although I have no way to know that and could be wrong. I'd need to see hard evidence to believe it hasn't had a rapidly growing bot population though.

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

#80

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

I'd prefer a different approach: a true draft / submission cycle for more substantive works.

This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same.

Under this model:

* An item would be submitted.

* If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue.

* A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub).

* The item is then submitted.

This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind).

For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).

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