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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

#241

Post by simlevesque »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #163
onion2k wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Server time doesn't pay employees.

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

#242

Post by technofiend »

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…

Wow they're going to Digg themselves into oblivion, pun definitely intended!

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

#243

Post by iblaine »

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 completely agree. Part of what has made reddit great has been being scrappy. Reddit hardly had the resources to roll out new features. Like craigslist, the site has remained relatively unchanged over the years. This $200M will be used to expand the operations. The new employees will be put to work on new features. And those new features are going to kill reddit. It'll be like Digg all over again.

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

#244

Post by Rainymood »

paganel wrote: post #177
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 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.…

> It's enough that they've managed to mess with some users' profile pages which are now unusable (they now look like some sort of FB/MySpace kind of thingies)

I was very confused and put-off by this as well.

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

#245

Post by nhebb »

raldi wrote: post #25
koolba wrote: 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.

Google was still a fairly young company at that point. Reddit is 12 years old and had a $1.6B valuation prior to this $200M infusion. They've already achieved growth.

I think the investors' motivations are non-financial, akin to how YC invested in Quora.

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

#246

Post by eduren »

virtualized wrote: post #233
dcole2929 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>basic web site

Thats kinda simplistic. Setting aside the fact that reddit is much more complicated than it appears at first glance...

I don't care how simple the site is, being the number 5 most visited site in the US[1], kinda comes with some SRE and infrastructure challenges.

[1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US

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

#247

Post by BLanen »

Chardok wrote: post #95

I am of the opinion that trying to turn a profit on something like Reddit is a catch 22. The concept of Reddit, which is user generated content curated by users, doesn't have a lot of need for a middleman, more of just a few moderators and admins to keep everything running smoothly. The power of the website is solely in its users and their content generation. Unfortunately these slow changes have been eroding what wa…

Yea, man.

Subreddits like coontown, jailbait, fatpeoplehate & a bunch of nazi subreddits really provided valuable debate and dialogue. Voat now has all that 'dialogue' and I don't think anything of value was lost.

But complaining about CTR shows your colors when both sides spend similar amounts.

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

#248

Post by dageshi »

narrator wrote: post #167
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…

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.

Nah it was growing pretty hard even before Digg fucked up, that sure helped but Reddit was going places whether Digg screwed up or not.

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

#249

Post by lftl »

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…

They still do this with the old mobile interface (which I greatly prefer to the current one). If you just append .compact to a URL you get the old interface.

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

#250

Post by mbesto »

Mahn wrote: post #193
mbesto wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. Depends on your definition of "better". Facebook has done several redesigns that the audience has groaned about and here we are 1 billion users later. TechCrunch did a large redesign several years, and here we are, still reading TC articles. The list goes on and on...

> still reading TC articles That's debatable (albeit for reasons other than design)

Heh, I knew I'd get dinged for that. As much as I loathe TC myself, it does still get linked here often and the design, while funky at first, hasn't appeared to have had a significant negative impact on them.
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