Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by verall » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:35 PM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #69

ktta wrote: 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.

Lots of meme subs hold a lot of their value in their CSS.

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

#252

Post by verylittlemeat » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

Sophira wrote: post #195

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…

> What Reddit does right is focus on topics , primarily, not personalities. I think they've been trying to change that recently; they've been focusing more on content creators - people like Shitty_Watercolour who are known Reddit-wide for the original content they post. As you noted, they launched a new type of profile which basically turns it into a subreddit, which they're pushing as a way for content creators to p…

Not that it has any impact on the validity of your statement but it's a funny coincidence that shitty_watercolour retired from reddit only a couple weeks ago.

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

#253

Post by Medaber » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

Reddit's brand is toxic. It's an echo chamber for Bernie Sanders supporters and people who hate healthy, fit people.

I can't imagine it's a good investment, even though many people use it.

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

#254

Post by CM30 » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #12

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't even edit the title of a Reddit post. That's been known for years and nothing's been done about it.

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

I'm sorry, but this reason for not having title editing (and post editing on other sites like Twitter and GameFAQs) always bothered me to hell and back.

Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused.

It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all.

I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.

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

#255

Post by pharrlax » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

chippy wrote: post #218

Reddit has a huge value I think which has not been mentioned - that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free. Sometimes they do that under the covers, so to speak, and some users don't like it (e.g. hailcorporate) but often they will promote their products transparently, and often normal users don't mind. The most obvious example is Netflix on /r/movies. Multiple empl…

>that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free.

Another phenomenon I've been seeing more of is a company that gets in early to a niche gaining control of the subreddit around that niche, tilting the scales in their favor.

Two examples I can think of are /r/nootropics, whose mod team is led by the owner of nootropics supplier Ceretropic, and /r/amazonmerch, whose sole mod is the owner of MerchInformer, a SaaS Amazon Merch research product.

They're each careful to never moderate in an overtly heavy-handed way that would cause a user revolt, but nonetheless, their companies are mentioned in the each subreddit far more often than their competitors. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and one that will only worsen as these niches grow in popularity.

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

#256

Post by orf » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:48 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #129

rickhanlonii wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, allowi…

I mean whatever your concerns are, the admins/developers of Reddit are okay with this change.

where ok, or at least one was in a comment posted 'ages ago'. That's very different.

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

#257

Post by vosper » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:50 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #247

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:…

newbie here... where can i run this thing? from your post it seems like someone is hosting "fh-bigquery.reddit_posts" somewhere?

BigQuery runs on Google Cloud, which has a monthly free tier.

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

#258

Post by baby » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

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.

I don't know about the website, but I was really impressed at how fast they released a new iOS app (right after buying Alien Blue) which looks pretty awesome as well.

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

#259

Post by CM30 » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 2:59 PM UTC

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.

I don't think that would work out for very, for a number of reasons:

1. Reddit already has competitors, and lots of them. By putting a 'pay to join' barrier up, they just send said competitors more users which gives sites like Voat a huge boost in popularity.

2. It's also competing with online forums and community sites, the vast majority of which are free. Will people really spend money to talk about say, video games or R/Gaming or R/Games when tens of thousands of forums for the same topic exist and are open to join for free? Perhaps not, which would give the likes of IGN, Gamespot and NeoGAF a huge boost among many others.

3. $12 is a lot of money for some Reddit users. For example, people in poorer countries/where the local wages are lower, people without a steady job or career and kids/teens in general.

4. Reddit's entire popularity is dependent on the work of its users. If they can't afford it or leave, then the site will lose out on future popular content, and likely enter a popularity death spiral.

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

#260

Post by samstave » Sat, Jun 17, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

zhte415 wrote: post #238

wvenable wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't been on K5 for ages .. can you recollect some of amazing content to tell me what I may have missed?