Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 877 posts

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

#231

Post by screye »

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…

Don't work for them, but I've had a similar experience.

I find it funny that the OP would ask this question while being an active part of HN. Reddit is HN, for niche topics for which communities are hard to find.

I am regular on subs like r/progmetal, r/boston , r/bodyweightfitness, r/frugalmalefashion and r/gifrecipes . Topics for which I wouldn't find even a close alternative anywhere on the internet.

In addition, there are popular subs like r/soccer and r/dota2 which have developed a personality of their own, with in-jokes, popular posters and regular weekly focused discussions.

In many ways, the front page of reddit is literally the least interesting part of it. I am glad it is that way, because it adds an element of inaccessibility to it, keeping away those without enough commitment. (HN does it too with its interface and topics that need specialized knowledge)

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

#232

Post by ssnistfajen »

arcticfox wrote: post #197
debaserab2 wrote: post #151

It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is an unfair characterization fueled by my recent frustrations with the direction the site is going. I don't think it is unreasonable to point out that reddit is failing the expectations of their users, but I don't doubt for a minute that the individuals working…

They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well. I used to occasionally visit /r/watchpeopledie as a reminder of my own mortality and some of the horrors of the world, but apparently NSFW wasn't enough for people visiting "watchpeopledie" to realize they might see something bad. So they "quarantined" it, which actually means totally breaking it, in my browser at least. RIP. Discussion by others here [0] "I'm…

Yeah the horde of edgelords in WPD totally isn't one of the reasons the sub got quarantined.

Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.

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

#233

Post by nopriorarrests »

jandrese wrote: post #177
nopriorarrests wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a few cases. - you want to advertise B2B software to small/medium business owners. - you want to advertise expensive fashion items to 20-35 y.o. women in NY/CT. Will you pick FB or reddit? And then yes, lack of brand safety for non-targeted ads.

Can you not pick specific subreddits to advertise in (or have your ad appear next to on the home page)? Seems like your userbase self-segments pretty quickly on Reddit, although it's no doubt a fulltime job for several engineers to keep up with the classifications on subreddits. I guess the biggest problem is that so many users don't log in and just browse the default, which is pretty generic. Reddit could track the…

How efficient are subrrddits compared to always logged-in audience which told you their age, interests a location, explicitly?

Rethoric question.

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

#234

Post by NegativeK »

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 convinced me that showing topics based on time-decay does not promote in-depth conversation. Facebook semi-proved it.

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

#235

Post by skinnymuch »

Zecar wrote: post #195
vvillena wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/the_donald should have been closed a long time ago, due to their users and their mods breaking the rules (hate speech encouragement, mainly) that the rest of subreddits have to respect. Reddit has a dark incentive to keep it open, because it's a very popular community that helps Reddit make money, via ads and Reddit Gold.

Go read r/politics comments for 5 minutes and then go read r/the_donald comments for 5 minutes, then come back and tell me which subreddit has the most hate speech. Also let's not forget that r/politics mods sold the subreddit to Shareblue for $2 million.

Do you have a citation for the $2M figure? I tried searching a bit. All I found were random sites saying roughly the same stuff conspiracy subreddits or sites were saying.

I’m not saying something didn’t go on, but if something did happen, where did that number come from besides “anonymous source[s]”

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

#236

Post by ethbro »

ken wrote: post #184
GordonS wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I'll take issue with that. For all Clippy's interpretation problems (way ahead of their time), it was still trying to facilitate actions that were useful to you (not Microsoft).

Dark patterns are defined by trying to willfully get you to do something that's counter to your own intent.

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

#237

Post by koolba »

Has Reddit ever had a profitable quarter, let alone year? I thought I saw that revenue had been rising but they also have significantly ramped up expenses, doubling employees and lots of new infrastructure (ex: their self-hosted video platform).

This sounds like greater fool theory if the investors in the latest round think they'll be able to peddle it for greater than $3 Billion without it ever bringing a dime of actual profits.

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

#238

Post by gowld »

mort96 wrote: post #156
GordonS wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Their mobile website has also started literally animating the "get the app" button; every minute or so, the button pulses for a bit in a deliberate (and in my case, consistently successful) attempt to make your attention move to the button they want you to click instead of the content you want to read. The reddit community is great, but the company seems to not care about their users at all.

Reddit has been on a downward spiral for N years (depending on your perspective), yet the data is near-completely crawlable, and no user-friendly sustainable alternative has appeared. Why? The closest is lobste.rs, which is better in some ways and worse in others, and a few (names I forgot) were good but died from lack of content / user interest.

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

#239

Post by ww520 »

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.…

Reddit by and large was actively against Trump during 2016 and thereafter.
Post reply on HN