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Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

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Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#51

Post by ben_jones »

Someone1234 wrote: post #31
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #15

last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these…

Reddit has 230 staff (as of July 2017). edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc). My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?

I could easily see 100 engineers split between operations, front-end/back-end/mobile, DBA, etc. I could see a dozen each of marketing, HR (moderation + community management), project/product/team management, and C-level. The rest could easily be sales.

Sure you could argue you don't need 100 engineers for that, but if you factor in on-call rotations and how they're constantly refactoring everything...

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#52

Post by jandrese »

brettgriffin wrote: post #5

I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.

Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation!

The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge.

The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood, but the world has tons of bandwidth now so nobody cares. Plus as far as I know nobody posts binaries to Reddit by UUencoding them and splitting them across hundreds or thousands of posts--torrents are much less hassle.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#53

Post by tradecraft »

Someone1234 wrote: post #31
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #15

last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these…

Reddit has 230 staff (as of July 2017). edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc). My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?

You forgot to divide by 12. It's $1.9m/month for staffing assuming average annual all-in comp of $100k and 230 headcount.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#54

Post by maxxxxx »

komali2 wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too. Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

I think it has to do with analytics but maybe someone else knows more.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#55

Post by komali2 »

EnFinlay wrote: post #2

Fun, I deleted my 9 year old account last night. It's wasn't out of some high-minded thing about how they're turning more into Facebook or privacy or anything. That site just hits my dopamine so effectively I had to quit and block it in my /etc/hosts. I am spending more time on HN though...

>I am spending more time on HN though...

Same boat. Twitter as well.

Snipped reddit, went to twitter. Snipped twitter, came to here. Seems I just can't get enough of "talking with people on the internet."

GF says I should try to find a book club. She's probably right.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#56

Post by gfwhuuku »

ppod wrote: post #45
minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

I've always thought that the day they crossed the line was when they arbitrarily changed which subreddits were default, removing some (such as /r/atheism) with no real reason. At the very early days of reddit, discussing atheism positively was still kind of unusual in the news. Then, over time, it became a very popular position and advocacy case especially among developers, and new users found the stridency and repet…

I welcomed that change. They had handpicked a few left-leaning subs like that one. I also remember there was one about feminism. I believe that was a bad idea, to position themselves like that. Maybe it was a good idea when reddit was a niche website. Now, as far as I know, they simply have an algorithm that shows the most popular posts of all subs, except a few ones that are banned (like the popular the_donald, a sub for supporters of Donald Trump). I'm not saying that I like the idea of a blacklist or that it is the best solution, but it's better than a whitelist.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#57

Post by bduerst »

gfwhuuku wrote: post #25
minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

I think that new banner is so much better than the old one, though. https://i.imgur.com/PF3Zc8R.jpg

It's still bad. They should cookie the choice so it doesn't always pop up every time.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#58

Post by lancesells »

komali2 wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too. Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

Metrics, ads, notifications, install base.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#59

Post by ForHackernews »

replicatorblog wrote: post #14

It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent." I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of th…

About 5 years ago, Reddit hired a crypto guy, Ryan X Charles, to make something called "reddit notes"[0] that they could never explain[1]. He wasted his time re-implementing bitcoin in Javascript[2], and was eventually fired.[3]

I guess you could say they were already early pioneers of the "cryptocurrency scam flameout" pattern.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditnotes

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/reddit-notes/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_re...

[3] http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/reddit-notes-is-not-going-to-h...

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#60

Post by jedberg »

marknadal wrote: post #46
minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

Max, would you be willing to evaluate Reddit alternatives? One is https://notabug.io/ after the Aaron Swarz quote, has seen hypergrowth since it started a few months ago using our P2P tech.

You do realize that reddit owns Notabug, Inc, yeah?
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