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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

#91

I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the b…

OT: but I feel the same about imgur. You can't use their mobile site to upload pictures anymore. You have to request the desktop site or install their app.

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

#92
post #5
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.

But there are several issues they don't bother fixing either. They could at least address those.

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

#93
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes! Slack is dangerously close to the point of "every new feature makes it worse", while basic features that should work (scrolling to earlier in a channel that reloads history feels like a roulette wheel) stay broken.

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

#94

I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the b…

If you're on iOS, you'd just move it from one sandbox to another.

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

#95
Last I heard Reddit was doing less than $10 mn / year in revenues. It's highly under-monetized, but it looks difficult to grow in 5 to 10 years to generating $150 million in annual profits to justify this valuation.

I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).

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

#96
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ages ago an admin said "yeah it would make sense for post titles to be edited within the first x minutes of making one", an incredibly low-hanging fruit that has been requested since forever. It still hasn't been added.

I can think of a few problems with this just off the top of my head:

The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam)

For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time

Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job

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

#97
post #54

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…

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/

They've since decided to keep the custom CSS: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6auyq9/reddit_is_p...

What's worse is that their new mobile site and their profile pages use more whitespace. A sign of things to come probably.

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

#98
post #95

Last I heard Reddit was doing less than $10 mn / year in revenues. It's highly under-monetized, but it looks difficult to grow in 5 to 10 years to generating $150 million in annual profits to justify this valuation. I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).

I don't understand how investors still think that "Step 1: get a lot of users, step 3: profit" is a great business model.

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

#99

I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the b…

I sort of believe that the push to mobile is to utilize technologies like GPS, and for tracking purposes / more information points. To get to know the [s]customer[/s] mark better than they know themself. Also, the ISPs may help this push since mobile data is more costly to the consumer than regular ethernet cable type data. wired > wifi

/takes off tinfoil hat

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

#100

I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the b…

OT: but I feel the same about imgur. You can't use their mobile site to upload pictures anymore. You have to request the desktop site or install their app.

I've been bypassing it by manually entering http://imgur.com/upload
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