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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

#201

Post by alt2501 »

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,…

Can you clarify what you mean by submissions from independent blogs? You seem to be saying that the new users are bots or something from media/marketing ? Or am i reading too much iwmto this...

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

#202

Post by NewEntryHN »

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.

Most of the performance loss is due to using a frontend framework at all. Differences in such frameworks is then little. You need two round-trips at each page-load because you need the base HTML page then the data and rendering in the browser is orders of magnitude slower than rendering server-side with a good rendering engine.

I understand the point of frontend frameworks for SPA, not so much for Reddit profile pages which are literally single, static, pages.

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

#203

Post by MicroBerto »

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?)

Propaganda is the primary business model as of late.

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

#204

Post by NewEntryHN »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #45

As others have mentioned development of reddit has been slow for the fact that their Engineering teams were performing Administrative tasks to the point that they could only maintain the site. Since they have cleared that hurdle by instituting more straightforward moderation and administration. The only exception to this is when a reddit admin actively modified a thread by users being hostile. This creates irreparabl…

FYI, this admin was Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

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

#205

Post by dorfsmay »

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.

You can use the desktop site on mobile which if you combine with mobile Firefox's "switch to new tab" makes reading reddit on mobile not suck.

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

#206

Post by SquareWheel »

cJ0th wrote: post #148
denim_chicken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They track us and then sell our data.

ding! Here is what Mr Huffman has to say on this topic: https://youtu.be/6PCnZqrJE24?t=8m13s

This seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Your interests are the subreddits that you're subscribed to. They don't need to do any "tracking" because that's just how the site works by default.

Steve's tone here is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek.

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

#208

Post by hkon »

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.

This seems like a first principle. You find this in every organization which has served it's purpose. Lawmakers, developers, activist groups

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

#209

Post by dorfsmay »

ngold wrote: 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?

What do you mean by "users feel safe"?

IMO, reddit is a thing because it is topic oriented instead of user/ego oriented. It really is the modern day Usenet.

The two long term problems they have though is moneytising and bad/illegal content (moderation).

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

#210

Post by dorfsmay »

jknoepfler wrote: post #89

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…

You can use the desktop/classic version from a mobile device.
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