Live data from Hacker News

Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

bloomberg.com

131–140 of 313 posts

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

#131
post #68
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.

Reddit is very different from other social/consumer tech companies in that they are a very small company. Last I heard, they are somewhere around 200 employees. Compare that to how many employees twitter has and you'll notice that actually reddit is evolving their product at a pretty fast pace for the size of the company. Additionally, from the various threads on reddit that I've seen people post about the company. T…

Valve has less than 400 employees too.

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

#132
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too busy working on April Fools day material: https://redditblog.com/2017/04/13/how-we-built-rplace/

I don't get the need for all these tech companies to prove their "wit" by trying to out do each other on 4/1. Then the tech blogs all rush to cover the various 4/1 "jokes"

Your post answers itself. It's to get free press and to engage your users.

If a company can get a 10X rate of return on an April Fool creation, why wouldn't it?

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

#133
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/

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.

I can't even use their mobile website, I have to just use the desktop one (which has a delayed popup banner that shifts the page a second after load telling me to download their app).

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

#134
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.

....So turn it off?

Reddit has a setting to disable custom CSS on subreddits, so it doesn't make sense why you'd force the subreddits not to have it.

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

#135
Cracks me up why Reddit is the way it is questions. Ask kevin Rose fron tech tv. As soon as Reddit drops its bbs style it is dead. For those complaining about Css RES.

Reddit is only a thing because people feel safe there. What other site of its user base does that?

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

#136
post #135

Cracks me up why Reddit is the way it is questions. Ask kevin Rose fron tech tv. As soon as Reddit drops its bbs style it is dead. For those complaining about Css RES. Reddit is only a thing because people feel safe there. What other site of its user base does that?

On a side note; who was that goofy guy that Rose melted laptops with?

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

#137
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…

They understand they exist because people go there. V3 Digg will alaways be burned in their minds. Replace them and that lesson is lost. And another Voat will replace them. Hopefully without being taken over by a bunch of broke Nazis

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

#138
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Besides spoiler tags, check out any of the sports subs: r/cfb, r/NFL, r/NBA have team flair, schedules, and scoreboards. Without those and the inline images, those communities would lose a lot of their fun.

Spoiler tags is something that really should get a nonCSS solution though, as they work really crappy on mobile.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Because they have the potential to be monetized. I have wild success with Reddit ads even though you can tell the ads products never receive much love (or maybe that's just Reddit generally). Companies are valued based on discounted future cash flow. In other words, investors are betting that at some point in time Reddit will generate billions, even when adjusted for a discount for time. That's not crazy at all to me…

What do you advertise?

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

#140
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.

Recently Reddit introduced a new kind of user profile where you can make text posts to your own profile. It got a huge amount of negative feedback (although I'm coming around to it, personally), and many obvious features, such as being able to mix a user's posts and comments together like on the old profile page, were missing. They claimed they were all-hands-on-deck adding these highly requested features, and even now, over a month later, the only thing that's changed is a slightly bigger hyperlink to the comments page. That to me sounds like fixing what's not broken while ignoring what is.
Post reply on HN