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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

#91

Post by jandrese »

YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #38
Someone1234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

thats crazy. yeah exactly. what do 230 people do there?

Reddit serves out a crapton of pages every day. They need a robust backend service which means you need people to maintain it.

Beyond that you have community managers, people to run AMAs, people to manage ad accounts, HR, etc... 230 people to run the one of the largest and most dynamic sites on the Internet doesn't seem out of line.

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

#92

Post by KindOne »

aluminussoma wrote: post #34

Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.

You can disable the redesign. Its also somewhere in the preferences.

http://old.reddit.com

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

#93

Post by GordonS »

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…

2 things about Reddit's "use our app instead!" buttons:

1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around

2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website

I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me

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

#94

Post by CobrastanJorji »

jandrese wrote: post #52
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,…

Also, on Usenet 2.0, it's eternally September.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by fxfan »

darkpuma wrote: post #71
ppod wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You didn't need to be religious to find /r/atheism obnoxious. Anybody remember that "faces of atheism" meme years back? Possibly the most obnoxious, pretentious and self-congradulatory thing I've ever seen become popular on reddit. At first it was funny, but reddit is pretty good at pushing jokes long after they've become stale.

It was a place meant as a consolation/safe-space for people being hated on for not believing in stuff without proof.

It became a place to hate on everyone who didn't believe in atheism.

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

#97

Post by jedberg »

jron wrote: post #82
jedberg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

notabug.io isn't owned by Reddit.

I'm aware of that, I'm just saying they own the corporation with the same name, which they got when they acquired Aaron's company.

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

#98

Post by ChrisSD »

tyingq wrote: post #47
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…

Would help if they dumped the AMP pages too. Landing there results in a useless "not logged in" and "partial content" page. AMP is just a terrible fit for Reddit pages.

But the AMP pages give them preferential treatment in Google search results. I doubt they'd want to give that up.

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

#99

Post by peeters »

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.

Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).

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

#100

Post by blotter_paper »

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…

Another clear red line was when spez started editing comments.[0] It was childish and non-consequential, but should have resulted in an immediate exodus from the platform. I'm not politically aligned with r/The_Donald, but I think this sort of petty power abuse should not be forgiven; the platform needs to die, as an example to other platforms.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...

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