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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

#181

Post by jules-jules »

bduerst wrote: post #105
ForHackernews wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-n…

But why not mine bitcoins client-side with millions of mobile users? (/s)

If that would mean staying independent and free from economic/political interference, why not?

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

#182

Post by asdff »

wnevets wrote: post #90
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…

There are so many more issues with Reddit, I'm surprised they haven't been digg'd or myspace'd yet.

All the issues stem from new populations of users contributing to the site, not a top down change. Reddit 5+ years ago was a different place because it was a much smaller place.

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

#183

Post by gristle »

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?

Engineering: - Infrastructure (500M MAU) - Web Dev - iOS Dev - Android Dev - Design - UX - Localization

Data: - Ranking timelines - Ad performance - Recommendations - Business analytics - R&D

Product: - Coordinating across the above 2 and adding/measuring (new) features

Sales: - Ads

Finance/HR/Admin/Accounting/Office Manager(s)/Recruiting: - Running a company

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

#184

Post by ken »

GordonS wrote: post #93
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

It's the 21st century Clippy. "You look like you're trying to do X. Here, let me help you do Y instead."

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

#185

Post by dalbasal »

For anyone in the know, what are reddit's big costs? Wikipedia has employees @ 230 in 2017, for whatever context/scale that contributes.

The article doesn't mention plans. Are they just getting while the going's good, or is there something expensive that they plan on doing?

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

#186

Post by cbau »

rconti wrote: post #144
wowzap wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whe…

The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.

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

#187

Post by minimaxir »

throwaway427 wrote: post #44

I will often scope google searches for product reviews or food/recipe/diet/fitness knowledge to reddit. This is not the sole research I do but it does tend to be pretty high quality data. I would not be surprised if Reddit is an ML/AI dataset gold mine.

Reddit's public-facing data is very useful for ML/AI.

On the data science end, you can do a lot to gauge important topics and user behavior: https://minimaxir.com/2018/09/modeling-link-aggregators/

On the silly AI-end, I made a subreddit consisting only of text-generating RNNs: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditNN/

Reddit's internal data is even more robust.

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

#188

Post by klausjensen »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #24
wowzap wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.

UCG?

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

#189

Post by beagle3 »

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?

Users are more likely to give apps e.g. location permission, or contact list permissions, which make a user value (in eyeball models) aignificantly higher than a web user.

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

#190

Post by jules-jules »

jakebasile wrote: post #116
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.

At least we can continue to use old.reddit.com for now on desktop. On mobile, I refuse to use their own app since it's hot garbage and stick to Apollo, which works pretty well so far.

Yep, as soon as they stop offering the old design I am out.
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