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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

#331

Post by vacri »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #197
herrkanin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand this romanticising of free speech on private platforms. Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies? That's just asking for assholes. If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.

The problem is that in the space of {things that are unmentionable in polite company}, there may be a few nuggets of important new ideas, but those nuggets are lost in a torrent of shit. I think it's important to be able to discuss taboo topics to find those important nuggets. From my perspective it's not totally crazy to have complete free speech platforms to pursue that goal, but it's probably better done in privat…

There's a difference between discussing taboo topics and simple abuse. Calling people libtards (the #2 when I just looked at Voat) is simple abuse, not discussing a taboo topic.

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

#332

Post by justinzollars »

rdtsc wrote: post #303

I don't understand this. Anyone remember a time when companies used their developers to update their site without having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars? > An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: So they will look like Facebook. Because nothing says cool and trendy like the social site your parents and aunts and uncle…

Once I was fortunate enough to work at a company that did not take VC money. I was very very lucky. It was a combination of luck, and ethical founders.

On the other hand, a VC funded company I worked for (Hampton Creek) seemed like a ponzi scheme. When I quit the options strike price was so expensive I couldn't afford to pay for the options nor the taxes to "gain", the alleged hundreds of thousands of dollars in value it was "worth". What a joke. I think in the end we will see a lot of these companies are loaded with red ink and offer very little value.

I venture to say a majority of these unicorns are pump-and-dump schemes.

Your intuition seems right. I remember a time when companies used their developers to update their site without having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

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

#333

Post by nilkn »

kamaal wrote: post #308
rdtsc wrote: post #303

I don't understand this. Anyone remember a time when companies used their developers to update their site without having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars? > An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: So they will look like Facebook. Because nothing says cool and trendy like the social site your parents and aunts and uncle…

>>That sounds odd too me as well, maybe I am not versed in startup culture. Having a goal of going from 230 to 300 people seems like a pointless metric (and wasteful). It's like saying "I want to write 1000 lines of code today". This one of those largely company things where bosses assert their authority and power in the organization based on the head count under them. So in many companies people hire extensively eve…

This phenomenon is just starting to happen at the company I work at. It's a great company in almost every dimension, but this particular problem is especially insidious and almost impossible to stop once it happens.

Every manager is encouraged to increase the number of people they manage. Managers in turn get disproportionate rewards compared to developers (such as offices -- not even the most senior ranking developers get offices, but the lowest ranking managers do), so developers are encouraged to go into management. Before long, the company is bloated with highly paid managers managing managers, top-skill developers no longer developing, and the supposed dual technical track is hardly anything except a bullet point on some other manager's resume.

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

#334

Post by vacri »

krapp wrote: post #261
msla wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So Hacker News is a regression to the mean, then?

Sure. It's much more general-interest than it used to be, and business content has cratered.

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

#335

Post by ThomPete »

I hope reddit have a strategy for implementing that change gracefully and how to deal with the most noisy opponents. I have helped a lot of companies redesign their communnities/forums/products. Its a serious minefield as a lot of people will protest (but most wil cope). even small changes can throw people into revolution mode. And its most often not the actual design which will get people complaining but the change itself. going to be very interesting to see how this will play out.

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

#336

Post by loomer »

joekrill wrote: post #13
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 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.

All of reddit's code, except spam prevention, is open source.

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

#337

Post by CamperBob2 »

rrdharan wrote: post #309
CamperBob2 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is a pretty trivial piece of work compared to Reddit. Nobody would lose a moment's sleep if YouTube's comment system were radically revised, and few would complain if it went away entirely. On Reddit, the comment system is everything .

Can't tell if you are joking, but just in case you aren't: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/11/09/google-plu... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/14...

The integration complaints had absolutely nothing to do with design aesthetics. There were some serious privacy concerns that arose when Google unified YouTube accounts with accounts used for other Google services.

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

#338

Post by CamperBob2 »

heartbreak wrote: post #306
CamperBob2 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is a pretty trivial piece of work compared to Reddit. Nobody would lose a moment's sleep if YouTube's comment system were radically revised, and few would complain if it went away entirely. On Reddit, the comment system is everything .

YouTube's comment system was revised a few years ago when Google+ launched, and people definitely "lost sleep" over it.

Not because of the design, though. The way they introduced unified IDs was viewed as problematic (to put it mildly).

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

#339

Post by chakalakasp »

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 am reminded of the time FARK did a minor remode on their site. Users were maaaaaad. Then, the site's effective senior VP wandered in and told everyone they'd get over it. They did not.

A small but significant of why Reddit is as big as it is is the exodus of users after Digg and FARK started monkeying with formats and generally went deaf when users freaked out.

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

#340

Post by vacri »

CM30 wrote: post #176
dang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying this for almost as long as Hacker News has existed.

So it's like Mad Magazine and was 'at its best' when you first started reading/using it?

I started reading it in the 80s, and think that the best content was from the 60s and 70s, and took an objective drop when they started to include advertising (as does anything when you start slapping advertising on it).
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