I hope this redesign does not turn into a LinkedIn style disaster. Sometimes I wonder if these redesigns happen not for some well-argued business purpose but for overinflated departments having to justify their existence (which I strongly suspected in the case of LinkedIn's redesign which made the site unusable for months).
Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
11–20 of 451 posts
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#12>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
I still remember Digg. Great community, but once they changed the UX and some features, everything went downhill.
the UX changes weren't the real problem, though they exacerbated the real problem. the real problem was a dramatic change in the content promotion algorithm that de facto transformed the front page of the site (which was much less cuztomizable than reddit's) into a corporate sponsored content billboard.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#13>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
I believe Reddit's code is open source -- is that still correct? I'd guess this "rewrite" won't be?
In any event, I find it hard to believe this won't be Digg all over again.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#14>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
This could easily kill Reddit. I hope they'd do deep-long A/B test.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#15> Still, he says making money is “not our top priority,” estimating the company spends only about 20 percent of its resources on its advertising business. Huffman declined to share revenue totals. The company is also not profitable.
I can't imagine giving $200M to a group of people who publicly say they're not focused on ensuring I get it back. Is this a VC investment or a charity?
Also, have they not achieved profitability after 10+ years because they don't know how to make enough money (i.e. ad sales team is weak), costs are too high (i.e. bad code so lots of infra or too many employees), or is it just not possible to be profitable in this space?
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still remember Digg. Great community, but once they changed the UX and some features, everything went downhill.
the UX changes weren't the real problem, though they exacerbated the real problem. the real problem was a dramatic change in the content promotion algorithm that de facto transformed the front page of the site (which was much less cuztomizable than reddit's) into a corporate sponsored content billboard.
The diggbar, wrapping the digg iframe around linked content wasn't well received either. I think that was a contributor to the downfall as well.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#17>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
I still use i.reddit.com which I think is a better mobile interface. It loads very fast, I can scan through posts very quickly, and it uses very little mobile bandwidth. If I want to click through and see an image, I can easily do that.
They keep adding more things to the default mobile interface (suggestions, ads, pictures) that slow it down and make me avoid using it.
I think they don't realize how much of their community actually likes that reddit is text based. Changing to an image based platform or video based would be disappointing.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#18>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
So they're doing a Digg. End of an era.
What's the "reddit" that everyone will migrate to when they change the UX?
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#19Ugh, trying to fix marketing issues with more engineering....
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#20> Huffman’s plan for the new funding includes a redesign of reddit.com — the company is literally re-writing all of its code, some of which is more than a decade old. An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath.
this sounds risky for a couple reasons. I hope this is a bit hyperbolic and they are only referring to the frontend. But anyway: rewriting everything from scratch is a monumental undertaking and can delay other important enhancements. Rewriting everything partially contributed to Netscape falling behind its competitors[1] and eventually to its irrelevance. The other reason it is risky is that maybe the site's simple and functional design is what made them so successful in the first place?
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...