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Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

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161–170 of 451 posts

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

#161
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…

Also good luck selling a new design to the hive mind.

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

#162
post #75

The announcement on Reddit also says they are changing their privacy policy to remove support for 'Do Not Track' https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...

That seems pretty evil, especially given the justification:

> DNT is a nice idea, but without buy-in from the entire ecosystem, its impact is limited. In place of DNT, we're adding in new, more granular privacy controls that give you control over how Reddit uses any data we collect about you.

What does it hurt to keep supporting it? It's actually pretty ironic: "DNT doesn't have total support across ecosystems, so we stopped supporting it".

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

#163
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. I miss the early days of Digg before people starting getting concerned about their points and front page drama started.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. What 'broke' looks like for a business like Reddit is a question about generating revenue rather than design (though the two things are intrinsically linked). If the company can't make money with the current design then it has to change.

Reddit does make money though - Gold sales alone started paying for the servers after the admins added a meter to the side of the homepage that showed a daily "goal" to pay for server time. At the time, it was posited as an opportunity for the community to fund their own party. Of course, the monetization train just kept rolling from there - starting with AMAs, now (according to some) with sponsored content embedded organically. Presumably this redesign will only accommodate the trend further.

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

#164

I don't get why a company who keeps the entire Internet talking on a daily basis is only worth less than $2B but a company that lets teens take snaphots and share them is worth many billions.

$SNAP is down nearly 50% from its IPO. We'll see where its valuation really settles.

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

#165
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't Voat where The_Donald threatened to go when they finally got slapped around for their antics?

Yet not a peep about spez surreptitiously editing user comments.

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

#166
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be able to send me an invitation to signup to lobste.rs please? mail at-symbol therobotking dotcom

Any site which requires this type of thing to signup sounds like one I don't want to be a part of. Seems like a recipe for a hive mind.

You get a hive mind or you get regression to the mean, by which I mean you either aggressively filter for people with specific qualities, which is apparently a hive mind scenario, or you end up with the same kind of commentators you find on every other let-everyone-in platform.

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

#167
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…

I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse. A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl. I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would b…

Well's there's always the smoking hole in the ground known as Digg. They royally screwed that site up and crashed and burned hard with their redesign. That's how Reddit rose to prominence in the first place.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a common misconception that Digg's failure was what pushed Reddit into the mainstream, but the truth is that Digg was on the decline and reddit on the rise long before the redesign. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202...

True, but your data also supports the view that the redesign hastened Digg's death, and seems to correlate with increased growth at Reddit. I.e., Reddit was doing something right, and Digg was shrinking. The Digg redesign fiasco accelerated both trends.

I won't argue that, but I think the trend data makes a convincing case that Reddit's rise and Digg's demise were inevitable, regardless of Digg's redesign failure.

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

#169
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The free speech part of Voat is great. I don't think it's so much overrun as that the only people there are the ones with radical opinions. I wouldn't use Voat for other reasons, but that's just me.

> I don't think it's so much overrun as that the only people there are the ones with radical opinions.

This is the issue with a lot of pro free speech websites, or a a lot of 'alternatives' to popular platforms in general.

Unless the more popular site completely jumps the shark, only the more extreme users (read, those angry with the old service) move over. So the site gets more extreme due to them being the only ones represented, and hence attracts more extreme users as a result. Repeat ad infinitum, until the new site is filled with people who are so far to one extreme of the political spectrum that it actively puts off a lot of more moderate potential users.

The only way Voat can get out of this is if it can draw in people who aren't interested in Trump, GamerGate or fringe politics.

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

#170

If you are going to re-design a site like reddit, your best bet is to keep the old version in place, but allow people to also view all of the same content in the "new" design. For example, release the new design on new.reddit.com and let viewers migrate over to it at their own pace. Once you have a lot of people using the new reddit instead of the old design, you can migrate the old reddit to old.reddit.com and put t…

Exactly right. People like different interface styles; a big chunk of the current audience likes the current style. OK, they want to expand to people like me who prefer different styles, good call; but they shouldn't hang people who like what they have out to dry! Yeah, it's more work to come up wiht an interface that's flexible enough to support the different styles ... but they just raised $200M so can presumably afford it.
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