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Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

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Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#21
post #18
post #3

>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?

steem would be cool

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#22
post #3

>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…

Reddit is pretty bad without the RES extension, it's not surprising they want to change that.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#23
post #18
post #3

>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?

Voat (https://voat.co/) is also an option I've heard of before but never used. However I just looked at their front page and the number 2 post is titled 'How to solve the Voat's antisemitism problem' and the image contains an antisemitic slur so that's not very promising.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#24
post #18
post #3

>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?

Hacker News

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#25
post #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 profit…

Brings to mind an article I read circa 2001 where a Google executive said, "Look, we could be profitable next month if we covered the site with annoying ads, but we're not going to do that. We're focusing on growth now."

Worked out okay for their investors.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#26
post #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 profit…

I guess the brand is getting quite valuable.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#27
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're doing a Digg. End of an era. What's the "reddit" that everyone will migrate to when they change the UX?

Voat ( https://voat.co/ ) is also an option I've heard of before but never used. However I just looked at their front page and the number 2 post is titled 'How to solve the Voat's antisemitism problem' and the image contains an antisemitic slur so that's not very promising.

Voat is a complete shithole these days unfortunately. It was very quickly overrun by disgruntled members of Reddit's alt-right fringe community.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#28
I wish Reddit would pay some more attention to the meat of its content...the comments.

The default view/experience is awful, imho. Let's assume there are about 10 separate logical lines of thought, which have been expressed as "root" comments - that is, responses to the original post. These have been upvoted.

What do you see when you start browsing? You'll see the top voted root response...and then potentially pages upon pages of upvoted s*tpost responses, rhymes and pun threads that get beaten to death, in jokes, memes, etc. Only after you scroll through all of this will you get to separate discussion thread number 2.

Next up - down voting has long ceased to be a mechanism for true moderation and getting rid of off-topic or nasty comments. It is just the default "I disagree with you or don't like what you said for some reason" action, and once the downvote spiral starts, it's very easy to just get wiped out of the conversation.

The problem this leads to is the super prevalent group-think and echo chamber nature of most sub-reddits any more. As much as the reddit "hive mind" is a joking expression - it has also become all too real. Many popular reddits even have a corresponding ____circlejerk counter part - to me, evidence of how common this effect is (if you haven't read one of these, they are usually a humor outlet where people make sarcastic/parody posts of the common recurring themes in the actual sub-reddit.)

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#29
post #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 profit…

a) The investors may have been given a different answer as to how much Reddit cares about making money, even in the short term (I don't mean that they were mislead, but that it would be bad PR to tell the Reddit community the opposite)

b) They may have a plan towards profitability over a certain period of time that they haven't shared with you or me but that was convincing enough to potentially be a good investment (or maybe other scenarios, such as selling to an even bigger company who already can monetise... such as Google)

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#30
I would love to see reddit being more like a wikipedia than a facebook. If they cut the sales team out and ask for donations like WP does, they would do just fine. I was on reddit before I was registered on FB and quite frankly I love reddit.com way more than FB for many reasons. It's a shame that they go down the hypergrowth-unicorn model.
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