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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

#231

Post by rb808 »

stevenj wrote: 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…

Maybe re-write is back end improvements rather than UX change? The site often is overloaded which could be the reason they want to rewrite.

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

#232

Post by ArmandGrillet »

stevenj wrote: 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 also fear a redesign, the core of Reddit is a fast consumption of a high number of links and text snippets. Everything that goes against readability and speed (i.e. ads or a pretty UI) will hurt my experience... but should increase their revenue.

I really fear the future of Reddit, it's a website that I deeply love but I cannot see how it can be improved or made sustainable as what makes it so good is also what makes it a place where ads do not have their place.

Hacker News offers a very similar experience but I trust YC and its community. HN is a small place run by people that could recreate this website in a day, I don't see how it could ever die or change in a bad way. That's not the case of Reddit.

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

#233

Post by virtualized »

dcole2929 wrote: post #146
virtualized wrote: post #55

But.. but I began to like Reddit. Now they want to take it away from me by destroying it. > It’s going on a hiring spree Ouch. > redesigning its website For no reason other than giving the unnecessary people from the hiring spree something to do. > Huffman would like to end 2017 with around 300 full-time staff The current number of 230 employees is already about ten times too many. What the hell do they need the addi…

For a site with the kind of traffic Reddit has from as many locales as reddit has, 10 people wouldn't even be enough to comfortably cover basic SRE requirements. Forget new features, they would literally spend all of their time just barely keeping the damn thing working. Their would be no admins. No Secret Santa, nor any of the various many things Reddit currently has that requires the support, and more importantly t…

I assumed that 10-20 people would not include anyone who ever physically touches a server. Now that I think about it, it might make sense to not outsource hardware issues at Reddit's scale. I don't know how many people you need to keep Reddit running, but more than a hundred sounds wrong for such a basic web site.

I don't need Secret Santa and no support. What kind of trust do you mean?

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

#234

Post by ijafri »

ijafri wrote: post #230
ijafri wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digg wasn't Batman. Point. On topic Digg didn't survive the wrath of voting rings. They stopped using it. That irioncally killed it.

By voting rings I meant that were promoting real 'amusing' stuff to pile up banner ads CPM revenue. They invested a lot in 'amusing stuff' and as well as keeping Digg alive.

Also Reddit is alive because of them, they play by the rules, who is gonna invest billions of hours to keep Reddit active without any kind of reward in return ... Rewaeds could be depending on the sub Reddit you run.

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

#235

Post by shawnee_ »

wl wrote: post #198
sirtastic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of one. Google's material design. I love it and feel it tied their apps together while making them easier to use.

Material design ruined Google News on the desktop.

Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sources in their original place, date stamp, author, etc. The original links are where the real stories hide... not in this curated crap.

Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense.

Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones.

I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.

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

#236

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

crazypyro wrote: post #209
paganel wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less I've been a reddit user for 11 years now (and a lurker for a year before that), I think I was the first (and I think only) blogger from my country that wrote about reddit's rewrite from Lisp, I've seen the comments section implemented, the move to programming.…

Its especially hilarious considering Reddit really took off because of Digg making a huge re-design mistake. One thing that drives me nuts about the new profile pages is that comments are not even shown on the first page when it was the almost the ENTIRE content of the previous "profile" page. Really silly to hide it behind the 2nd tab and only cater to content submitters who are a massive minority of users (but that…

It's the constant pressure from VC's for better monetization. One of the features being discussed on the thread over on Reddit that is planned to be introduced is a location-based front page. This will make targeted ads by location an easier product for Reddit to sell and mine data from.

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

#237

Post by spike021 »

dageshi wrote: post #78
xiaoma wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people The reasons I left Digg for Reddit were the information density and the ease of rapid browsing. Eliminating those in favor of "cards" is incredibly short-sighted.

I would not be surprised if they shift everyone to the new view but allow users to switch back to the old style via preferences.

I would be.

It sounds like they're rewriting the whole front end. Why would they want to spend time and effort doing that and then, in addition to continually tweaking/adding to it, also maintaining a legacy interface?

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

#238

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

provost wrote: post #175
pmoriarty wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I recall Digg did a complete redesign for version 4, even the backend systems and database. And the users abandoned it shortly after launch.

> web redesign (codename: Reddit4)

I seriously can't tell what's going on at reddit -- are they embracing their Digg-ness?

Ed:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...

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

#239

Post by virtualized »

jahabrewer wrote: post #57
cleansy wrote: post #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.

> ask for donations like WP does Isn't that what reddit gold is?

I usually like to pay for a premium account on other sites even if I wouldn't have to, but for some reason I don't do it on Reddit. In hindsight, my gut feeling was right, because they are in fact backstabbing butts in seats who sell out to greedy investors at first opportunity. Rich assholes who think they can make another Facebook are the easy way to get a "hiring spree". Gold was the slow and horribly marketed way.

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

#240

Post by peu4000 »

t0mbstone wrote: post #149

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…

> The redesign is a massive effort and will take months to deploy. We'll have an alpha end of August, a public beta in October...

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...

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