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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

#171

Post by pbhjpbhj »

johnfn wrote: post #42
hitekker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three factors. 1. Reddit's internecine subreddit wars required constant admin intervention and mediation. Reddit only has so many hands on deck, so more of than not, they pulled engineers in to help moderate.[1] 2. Reddit is unprofitable, so they have trouble affording top talent. [2] 3. Finally, Reddit's vision for the future has been hazy for the last decade. If the navigators can't chart a course, all the rowing i…

1. Yeah but no engineer should have to get their hands dirty in community moderation. 2. Come on, it's Reddit . I feel like many many developers would be interested on brand alone. I was, for a time. 3. Possible. But there's a difference between adding random directionless features (which they haven't really done), and not doing anything at all (which they have).

Re 1. if they're working on moderation code then they should get their hands dirty regularly.

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

#172

Post by fwdpropaganda »

icelancer wrote: post #123
makecheck wrote: post #102

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

>And if everyone paid this "If I just capture ONE PERCENT of this nine figure market, I'll be rich!" -standard entrepreneurial slide deck The paid rate would be well under 1%. Potentially an order of magnitude lower than that.

1% seems like a huge number here.

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

#173

Post by fwdpropaganda »

throw_away_777 wrote: post #124

Reddit has the worst mobile site i've ever seen, with constant pop-ups that make the site basically unusable. Sometimes a good idea and first to the market is better than good execution.

It's the JS. And you can't use it without JS either.

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

#175

Post by shawnee_ »

Reddit has an opportunity to do right everything that Twitter has done (and continues to do) wrong.

It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).

Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.

For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...

A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.

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

#176

Post by coldtea »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #156
Roritharr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a weird position there. I've recently decided on react for most of our frontend in the future because of all the technical advantages this offers and the productivity benefits I see, but I still harbor reservations against react because in practice I've rarely seen react pages that feel snappy and fast, rather than choppy and slow.

Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that? If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.

>Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that?

That has been shown to not hold in actual benchmarks. The real DOM is plenty fast if you do it right.

Here's Facebook's Dan Abramov (of Redux fame): "Myth: React is “faster than DOM”. Reality: it helps create maintainable applications, and is fast enough for most use cases."

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/842329893044146176?la...

https://objectpartners.com/2015/11/19/comparing-react-js-per...

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

#177

Post by greenleafjacob »

ben_jones wrote: post #70
minimaxir wrote: post #48

Here's a quick chart of the monthly number of submissions to Reddit over time (until April 2017): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d3kqAebZiUqmI-GbmvNY... At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election) And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:…

Are there any studies being done in the increase of bot accounts used for social media manipulation and other such marketing purposes?

Yes, http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/

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

#178

Post by FridgeSeal »

stevoski wrote: post #167
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?

Could be Advertising. Reddit could do a lot better in helping advertisers spend money with them. I've been comparing Facebook's Advertiser tools and options with Reddit's. Reddit is miles behind, in terms of making it easy to try different campaigns, different headlines, different messages.

And let's keep it that way.

Pandering to advertiser's inevitably leads to them having too much say (which they don't deserve), and trying to implement ever more tracking and insidious advertising methods.

I for enjoy the fact that Reddit's approach/attitude to advertising seems to be: here's your box-stay in your box, and you'll have these basic tools and you'll fucking like it".

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

#179

Post by jmkni »

throw_away_777 wrote: post #124

Reddit has the worst mobile site i've ever seen, with constant pop-ups that make the site basically unusable. Sometimes a good idea and first to the market is better than good execution.

Yeah, their mobile website isn't very good, neither is their app.

IMHO the only way to use Reddit on a mobile device is to request the desktop site. However, I recently opted into their new user profile thing which is completely broken on mobile (and you can't opt-out).

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

#180

Post by jmkni »

makecheck wrote: post #102

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

That's basically what Reddit Gold is, I can't see them making much more from that than they already do.
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