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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

#61

Post by EnFinlay »

justwalt wrote: post #43
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...

Same. I haven’t deleted my account but I haven’t browsed the site in over a month. I’m far more productive now. I had started off by trying to unsubscribe from the subreddits that were mainly image based. This didn’t really make much difference as my sub list was already too saturated, and I would scroll further to find the quick attention satiation. Eventually I realized it wasn’t worth the trouble. HN is different…

Likewise, been off for over a month (yay New Years) and my productivity has been significantly increased.

And I agree about HN, it's similar in system, but the content is very different. I'll look at the front page and maybe read 2 articles and their comments in full, and actually feel like I've learned something or it wasn't a complete waste of my time.

Gotta cut those dopamine drips. So many companies make their money figuring out how to hook you.

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

#62

Post by baragiola »

yalogin wrote: post #29

Reddit is the only social media I use. Never used any other services at all. The only annoyance is the redesign. It completely sucks. Very much reminds of the digg 4.0 redesign before it died. I don't know why all these aggregation sites go to that look and feel but its very bad to use. Hope they don't abandon supporting the old design. That would definitely make scale back my time on there significantly.

I use https://old.reddit.com since I can't grasp the new UI

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

#63

Post by nilkn »

wowzap wrote: post #17
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.

Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.

It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.

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

#64

Post by simias »

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 seen this dialog (the misleading "[OPEN] [CONTINUE]" one) on mobile Firefox as well. Besides that you have the pulsating "open in the app" at the top of every page.

Fortunately I have u-block origin so I could just add a few filters to get rid of that nonsense. It doesn't solve the terrible performance however (because apparently you need a top-of-the-line smartphone to load and display a few kB of plaintext comments).

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

#65

Post by smitty1110 »

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?

You can probably grab the IDFA or the ADID with an app directly, and having a stronger linkage between an online identity/cookie probably makes the data more valuable for advertising purposes.

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

#66

Post by Communitivity »

tapoxi wrote: post #3

Is there an ActivityPub or similarly decentralized alternative? I don't want to get invested in reddit only for them to shut down their API (it'll happen, always does) and force me to use their garbage mobile client.

Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter. The Join Mastodon website [https://joinmastodon.org/] has a good introduction.

Mastodon is not currently an alternative to Reddit though, but I think it could be, if it got significant contributions towards forum functionality. Perhaps by treating each tag, or each of a certain type of tag, as an individual forum. A 'Trunk'?

On the other hand, Discourse [https://www.discourse.org/about] might be a better candidate for an alternative, in some ways. With Discourse though each "Reddit" would be a Discourse board on a specific server. To do a true Reddit alternative you'd need to plug individual Discourse servers into a P2P mesh.

Ideally I'd like to see a Discourse-like or Reddit-like UI on top of a Mastodon back-end (which would be using ActivityPub).

If you want to work on this as well please let me know and maybe we can work together on it (@BillBarnhill on Mastodon.technology or Twitter).

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

#67

Post by jedberg »

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…

The irony of that comic is that reddit had more traffic than Digg when Digg died. The "mass influx" from Digg to reddit wasn't all that massive, because most of those people were already reddit users too.

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

#68

Post by jandrese »

callinyouin wrote: post #28
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #8

Reddit has been raising money for almost 15 years! I wish I had the connections to VC's that reddit apparently does. I can definitely spend all the money a VC gives me, then raise more money, and then spend all that money, and never turn a profit for 15 or 20 years.

I've been thinking about this, too. If you have the right connections and can pull down a bunch of VC money year after year for your business it seems you could go your entire career without having to generate profit!

It seems crazy to me that Reddit can't figure out a way to become profitable. Facebook is hilariously profitable on a fairly similar business model for example. It's not like Reddit is without ads, nor are they lacking in data they could sell (albeit not as high of quality as Facebook or Google). They even sell "Reddit gold" for real money.

Maybe they have exceptionally high operating costs? Or are they just really bad at selling ad space? I get that there are some advertisers that don't want to go on there because they are afraid their ad will show up next to a picture of a naked lady (which is something Reddit could control pretty easily), but Reddit is so big that it seems pretty hard to ignore.

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

#69

Post by zozbot123 »

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…

It's an interesting question. "Reddit as a business" would seem to have an incentive to keep their esoteric and weird communities going, otherwise it's hard to see their appeal over other social-media sites. The notable thing about the dark patterns you correctly point out is that they hit the casual users really hard, but most dedicated users (the folks who plausibly provide the content and indeed community that ultimately gives Reddit its value) can easily get around them. It will be interesting to see if this pattern can prove sustainable.

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

#70

Post by save_ferris »

collyw wrote: post #21
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.

> I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.

Centrism has fallen out of favor in our political discourse, largely because of the polarization of the current administration and culture.

Maintaining a centrist position can't work when both parties see the other as actively undermining/destroying the fabric of our system (i.e. Trump packing the courts with activist judges, dems raising taxes to Vietnam era levels.)

Identity politics largely doesn't permit nuanced political opinion because you're cast out if you don't subscribe to all of the major tenants of the party you're trying to loosely align with.

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