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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

#351

Post by andrepd »

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…

>recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push users to the app

They've been doing that for months now. Plus their mobile site is hideously slow and bloated.

Here's a tip: http://i.reddit.com. Looks old but does the job.

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

#352

Post by tzjmetron »

georgespencer wrote: post #343
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…

I find this sort of slightly gloating incredulity at just how "obvious" the things a company ought to be working on are to be surprising. You have almost none of the information required to make informed judgements about whether or not Reddit's product team is incompetent (maybe they're doing way better than they should be under the circumstances?), or whether they're focusing on the right things. There are definitel…

Agreed.

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

#353

Post by saagarjha »

fivefive55 wrote: post #292
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…

"10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out." Reddit goes down pretty rarely and I can't remember when it was ever down more than an hour or two. It also definitely didn't go down for the SuperBowl that I saw. The…

Reddit often goes "down" in that the front page is kept functional but trying to go to the comments page or interact with anything will cause it to 503.

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

#354

Post by saagarjha »

epistasis wrote: post #322
IggleSniggle wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, the web app used to be really good. Much better than the native app. Since then they have been making the web app increasingly worse over time, actively degrading its functionality and pleasantness to use.

The degradation seems to directly correlate with the modern-feel of the page. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It seems that modern front end fashion is a huge step backwards from earlier fashions in web development.

It's completely possible to have a "modern" page that is also nice to use; it's just that with Reddit modernness and horribleness have been conflated together and it seems like they go together.

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

#355

Post by urda »

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…

Blocking /u/GallowBoob did nothing but improve my reddit experience.

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

#356

Post by saagarjha »

gowld wrote: post #238
mort96 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit has been slowly ruining their API for the last couple of years.

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

#357

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

sneakernets wrote: post #296
crowdpleaser wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party The democrats have moved further left than republicans have moved right since 1994/2000: http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarizat... What's interesting is that most democrats want a more moderate party and most republicans want a more right/conservative party: https://w…

I really think "The illegals" needs to be erased from the discourse. Unless they have a distinct species moniker, they're still human beings located in the wrong place politically (in the geographical sense).

And rapists are just humans that would up with the body in the wrong place?

Sorry man, I don't buy the "words can hurt" argument for people who for noble reasons or not break the law. People who overstay Visas or sneak across boarders, are breaking the law. They are illegally existing someplace they shouldn't be according to the laws of that land.

I fully support your rights to argue for open borders. I'll vote against that, but I'll support your 1A to petition the government.

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

#358

Post by mindslight »

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…

That is one usage pattern.

The alternatives aren't just visiting the main page while being logged out, but for instance hitting a thread or subreddit that is linked from another context. Like say a mobile app that uses a subreddit for the occasional announcement/discussion, which is where that nag popup gets really annoying.

I also visit several niche communities directly. And despite having a decade old account, if I want to comment I usually create a throwaway nym. Obviously that experience isn't as integrated as it could be, but that's the tradeoff we all have to make in the surveillance society!

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

#359

Post by babypuncher »

yyyymmddhhmmss wrote: post #212
babypuncher wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not really. I don't claim to have proof that there is no god. I merely assert that not existing is the default state in the face of evidence-less existence claims. There could be a god, but that possibility has no bearing on how I live my life. If you want to ascribe a set of beliefs to me, the closest might be secular humanism.

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

#360

Post by Liru »

JoeSmithson wrote: post #330
Liru wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, when they created comments and manipulated their timestamps to make it seem like they were created far earlier than they actually were, for advertising purposes.

What incident is this referring to? I can't find anything via a quick search...

It didn't blow up like the comment-editing incident, but I was referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/7a2mle/possible_...
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