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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

#311
With a raise that size seems like reddit will be at the mercy of investor best-interests and revenue generation will be priority one rather than the interests of the community.

It's easy to block ads on a browser but not as easy on a mobile app so they keep pushing these dark patterns to get to you to download the mobile app which personally am not a fan since there's an irrelevant 'promoted' post with every page scroll.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Really? I thought it was a fantastic reminder to users: they hold all the cards, and pretending otherwise is just diluting yourself. If only other online platforms were that honest! Imagine Google sending out misleading gmails in your name, or Facebook mining your private messages for incriminating secrets and offering to "share" them with all your friends. There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of a…

For the record, systems at both FB and Google prevent internal employees from doing either. "There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses" is only true in the sense that you can imagine implementations that don't prevent these kinds of abuses.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is still a haven for the far-right. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth that they are tolerated there.

you mean alt right. Alt right is the racism and tariff producing political force.

I would hope you don't have a bad taste from right leaning economics. Not even China can deny the power of Free Markets.

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

#315
post #93

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

I find it ironic that their tagline is "The front page of the internet" but they push you to use a proprietary app.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate? I assumed that quarantining a sub was about the posts, rather than the comments. This is based on my experience of every subreddit having lots of offensive comments (granted, mostly downvoted.)

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

#317
post #128
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.

It depends on the subreddit. If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers. Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.

/r/askhistorians tend to be an echochamber and they like to silence anything that didn't fit their agenda.

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

#318
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evangelical Atheism

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

#319
post #90

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.

I hope it remains. I find it extremely useful for solving niche problems. A recent example of mine was Docker on Synology. It’s a weird interface with some niggling bugs. It turns out Reddit has this nicely covered and I’ve found this repeatedly. It’s way less technical than Stack Overflow but sometimes that’s what I need. The toxic stew can be avoided while the little subs have solved hours of pain.
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