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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

#371

Post by WalterSear »

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."

"Here, help us pay our bills instead."

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

#372

Post by debaserab2 »

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…

Reddit is a top 20 globally ranked site that does not come anywhere close to performing at the level of other sites that share a similar popularity.

In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways:

1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs).

2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years.

3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications.

I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet.

This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.

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

#373

Post by xemdetia »

It's weird to me to see more investment in reddit as it mostly feels like it's gone downhill. It could be my own interests but most of the subreddits who don't have an outside feed (around a game like overwatch, or primary/secondary major city sub) just have been withering away and it's those niches that makes reddit 'stick.' The new design/company focus seems to feel directly in contrast to the staying power that the niche-ness provides and I am not sure how far apart these two points are.

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

#374

Post by saagarjha »

babypuncher wrote: post #359
yyyymmddhhmmss wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Perhaps you might consider yourself to be agnostic?

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

#375

Post by shostack »

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…

Don't forget their still live email signup approach.

Clicking 'Signup" brings you to a single email form field screen that in no way indicates you do NOT need to provide an email.

Clicking 'Next' without entering one lets you create your username and PW without an email address.

As a marketer, I understand (but don't condone or agree with) the thinking behind some of what they've done, but as a user of over a decade, I'm nervous about the direction they've been taking the service, and this is not good news IMHO.

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

#377

Post by AsyncAwait »

sneakernets wrote: post #270
benbristow wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If their API is killed I think Reddit's done for. I wouldn't use it if I were forced to use the official app myself, sure many others wouldn't either. Folk would probably move over to something like voat.co

You usually would move over to something better, not worse.

Yeah, Voat's not an appealing alternative. There's an ActivityPub-powered, federated link aggregator in the works[1], that could work out really well as each community could have their own rules and if you don't want to federate with a particular one, just block them.

1 - https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo

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

#378

Post by throwawaymath »

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…

If nothing else, I think your conclusion that the product team is incompetent (or displays a lot of incompetency) is debatable. That seems very uncharitable. Reddit isn't flush with money the same way Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are. They can't throw wild amounts of cash at a problem to solve it or attract the talent who can.

I think your characterization of Reddit's infrastructure challenges - which basically considers the problems as solved versus unsolved - is the wrong one. In my opinion, a better characterization would be whether or not Reddit has:

1) the money required to attract talent or buy infra, in order to 2) scale the website to extremely high availability under extreme load, while also 3) doing feature engineering and turning a profit.

This seems like a highly nontrivial problem. Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability?

Note that performance is a related but distinct problem from the Reddit UX and advertising. I think that they are probably introducing these kinds of user-hostile changes because they are precisely in the position I've described, and can't find a way to improve performance in the way you're describing.

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

#380

Post by saagarjha »

bduerst wrote: post #57
gfwhuuku wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that new banner is so much better than the old one, though. https://i.imgur.com/PF3Zc8R.jpg

It's still bad. They should cookie the choice so it doesn't always pop up every time.

This doesn't work for people who browse Reddit without cookies or signing in, such as for those who use Private Browsing.
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