Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by porpoisely » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

vvillena wrote: post #149

anonytrary wrote: post #120

The HackerNews community is more appreciative of these problems than Reddit's. But Reddit will suffer from the same problems that Facebook and Twitter suffer from, if not already. Reddit users are easily manipulated by engineered content and engineering content on Reddit is not hard if you know what you're doing. Evidently, there are power-users on Reddit (e.g. /u/GallowBoob) who know exactly how Reddit ticks and can…

Reddit played a big part in the 2016 USA elections that crowned Trump. Reddit had to change its front page algorithm to avoid having Trump content near the top of the page for almost the whole time. The subreddit in question organized itself to mass-upvote certain posts at certain times, and Reddit wasn't prepared for such massive, non-organic influence. I wonder how big of a part the Russian bots and trolls played.…

Most of the content on reddit's frontpage in 2016 was anti-trump just like it is today. Reddit changed its algorithm because reddit admins supported hillary. The donald subreddit is no different from politics. The only difference is that one has the support of reddit and the other does not. And even bigger difference is that reddit admins allow reddit's power users to spam anti-trump propaganda from multiple subreddits.

The idea that reddit helped Trump is absurd. Pretty much every social media company was anti-trump and many, like google, actively worked against trump.

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

#212

Post by yyyymmddhhmmss » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #191

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…

I'm a proud atheist, in part thanks to early Reddit. /r/Atheism at the time it was removed from the default subs list was a toxic cesspool filled with a lot of the same kinds of hateful rhetoric and magical thinking they criticize religious groups for. Removing it as a default was the right call.

>I’m a proud athiest

Might we say you are a religious athiest?

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

#213

Post by asdff » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

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.

The heavily moderated academic subs are great (/r/askhistorians and the ilk), but massive subs like /r/science are filled with clickbait headlines written by people who haven't read the literature or understood it's broader importance ("x in carrots can target tumor cells" -frontpage upvotes, yet published in a crap journal, or anything ctrl-f CRISPR). Many comments on these articles are only informed by these partially-true-well-not-quite headlines, yet they sail to the tops of threads.

Maybe some of the CS subs are better in quality, that's not my field, but the only biology sub I've found where technically trained people regularly post and comment has only like 50k subscribers and posts reach the top with 100 votes.

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

#214

Post by breck » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

jhedwards wrote: post #174

rubyn00bie wrote: post #108

I actually hate Reddit these days. I've never really been into their various communities/subredits- and on occasion they're really useful spots of information or entertainment. But... Their current "force you into app" (which appears to leave you logged in, able to make account changes, even if you change your password) approach is fucking horrible. Their mobile navigation is broken by design and.... for what? What i…

> What incentive do I have to sign up? Arguably the best Reddit experience is only available when you are signed in. Reddit's greatest value come from niche communities. Personally I enjoy things like r/savagegarden, r/mycology and r/askhistorians, so when I log in I see pictures of mushrooms and carnivorous plants, and get to read interesting articles about history and science. If you don't log in and subscribe to t…

Yes we all know the logged in experience is terrific.

However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an intellectual freedom that to many people is non-negotiable.

Reddit is now taking money from a Chinese company, where this kind of anonymity is not possible. That’s frightening to me as a longtime reddit user, both logged in and anon.

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

#215

Post by dsfyu404ed » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #139

nilkn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.

>Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.

I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).

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

#216

Post by guildan » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #42

collyw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For all the good and enjoyment I get out of Reddit, sometimes it seems like it's just various angry mobs that coalesce and split as needed to maximize the amount of angry voices present at any one time for any one topic.

I'm an avid gamer, but honestly I can't read popular gaming subreddit (wow and halo for game specific sub), it's almost depressing. There's so much flames and complaints that you can even appreciate something without getting a lot of flake.

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

#217

Post by skinnymuch » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

binarysaurus wrote: post #129

dx87 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing people to use a native app means they can inject ads without having to worry about being blocked by a browser extension.

Many users who use mobile adblockers will use one across the entire device (easy on rooted Android) instead of just a browser extension.

How many users have rooted Android? Especially people in the west who are worth a lot more to advertisers?

It can’t be that high anymore. All the signals seem to be that rooting is trending down. I could be wrong of course as I have no hard data.

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

#218

Post by asdff » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

scrooched_moose wrote: post #115

KindOne wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable the redesign. Its also somewhere in the preferences. http://old.reddit.com

But "somehow" it forgets my preference constantly and I have to 'opt-out of redesign' several times a day. And, if you follow any links, it sends you straight back to the new version.

There are also browser extensions that force the redirect everytime. I haven't seen the redesign since it was released.

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

#219

Post by idointernet » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

rwc wrote: post #166

lftl wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really amazed they still let the old mobile interface work for the most part. Just add ".compact" to any URL and browse almost annoyance free (newer features like video don't work, but that's not too surprising).

I've been switching the "www" in "www.reddit.com" to "old" with good results.

good call!

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

#220

Post by martinald » Tue, Feb 05, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

ageitgey wrote: post #102

komali2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The prevailing "business person" thought is that app users are more loyal (high value) while web users are temporary users that Google will eventually steal away from you when they decide they want to be in your market and want to stop putting you at the top of search result pages. See Yelp's decline as Google started putting their own local results above Yelp and the resulting lawsuits. As a result, most Silicon Val…

Agreed. This is a great analysis. Also keep in mind if the funnel thinks web users are low value and app users are high value, if web users fall it is a sign that the strategy is working. Not that you have loads of annoyed users.