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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

#231

Post by exergy »

ransom1538 wrote: post #224
toxicFork wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has a lot of distinctly separate sub communities that grow, start new, and die out individually, and some which even hate others. So I think that helps to protect from "community death" effect. For the other websites you mentioned, they all feel like "one community" each.

really - myspace was one community? Forums don't have 'topics'? wtf. This is insane. This is nuts. Reddit wont be around in 4 years. It will be a total joke like all the other online communities.

Why the vitriol? Forums are as close to being "cult-like" as it gets. They are effectively a subreddit in the form of a website.

As to the claim of reddit dying within four years, lol! I'll take that bet.

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

#232

Post by threepipeproblm »

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.

The CEO Steve Huffman recently admitted to editing his political opponent's posts. Maybe they can't get anything done because they're redditing all day.

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

#233

Post by ReverseCold »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
Alex3917 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Assuming those are real accounts and not bots.

Many people also create multiple accounts for various purposes like joke accounts/throwaway accounts/etc.

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

#235

Post by alecco »

If reddit founders and investors make bank out of content generated for free, the content creators will get pissed off there's nothing for them. And they'll move on.

YouTube is the only one I see who is really trying to make it work. Instagram worked it out by placed ads for the most popular models.

And a key sin of all these sites is they think the content is theirs. It's not. Stop trying to regulate it to be what you want. It is what it is and you should be thankful, very thankful, they chose your site to host it. But this doesn't seem the case. The reddit admins in particular seems to hate a large part of their content-creating user base.

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

#236

Post by frankdenbow »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #98
theprop wrote: 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.

Because it worked well for Google and Facebook

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

#238

Post by zhte415 »

wvenable wrote: post #73
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…

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.

And kuro5hin, where users sit around on stories endlessly trolling them or asking for clarification before they got published.

Kuro5hin did achieve some of the most amazing content, however.

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

#239

Post by balladeer »

shawnee_ wrote: post #175

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 focu…

> Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego

That's what Reddit has been, in my humble opinion, since I've started using it - since 2005.

Country subs, most of the most famous subs, pretty much everywhere - it's just a lot of nonsensical quips, flame wars, karma hoarding (Reddit has a different unparliamentary word for that starting with "w"), the ubiquitous herd-mentality - one comment (mostly a "quip" reply) that came early gets bigger and bigger and everything else takes naturally a back seat, your very genuine doubts, points getting downvotted to oblivion sometimes for no apparent reason. It's a big list I believe.

Yes, there are subs which are good and can actually mean some meaningful interaction but it's not very proper to always call reddit right or better than Twitter or any other medium by referring to those few subs like /r/TrueFilm [0], then there's /r/DepthHub and /r/TrueReddit which are supposed to be "good" reddit but there are just no interactive discussions there they usually connect to popular comments usually highly gilded and popular ones.

Initially /r/ImAA seemed promising but that's just a PR board or been reduced to it. No, candid conversation (and I don't mean masala and gossip and scandal) is as rare as it gets. Places like /r/AskHistorians are as difficult to start participating that you just give up in the first go - it doesn't at all encourage participation; you don't know who you will flare up with your seemingly innocuous comment. At many places Reddit makes being a newbie almomst a crime and then there's instant justive too.

Reddit, for me, is mostly about what I have mentioned above and mod ego, monopoloy and knee jerk reactions and botached interventions by admins if at all they do. Abuse goes unchecked which is compounded by the herd-mentality. Like really unchecked and it's a hell for female users. The famous Reddit saying goes like "There are no girls on the Internet" and whenever a user is indentified as one it's almost unlivable there for them. And then there's doxxing.

Reddit sometimes works for just a lurker whenever I need something and it has it. Or a casual browsing for few minutes here and there.

[0] Conincidentally when I opened it there's this post from a day ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/6hg21r/the_declin...

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

#240

Post by raldi »

jacquesm wrote: post #16
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?)

> Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic? They don't have to pay dang for that I'll be happy to oblige, this is a toxic comment because of that last bit, essentially you are just stirring the pot and baiting the moderators. As for the value of HN to YC: it's a recruiting and marketing machine the likes of which you'll rarely find for any kind of money, I suspect that no matter what Dan…

Also, HN provides YC with unending nuggets of insight.
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