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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

#391
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post #381

I've always felt that Reddit would work really well as a non-profit. This would remove the inherent conflict between keeping the focus on communities/shared-interests (what drew me to Reddit in the first place) and the financial incentive pushing towards profiles/gathering personal information for ads. I would definitely donate to Reddit monthly if it went that route.

It hasn't launched publicly yet, but that seems to be what Tildes is going for. https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

Hadn't heard of it, but will definitely keep an eye on it. Thanks!

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

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left. Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason ther…

>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 want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine.

That is a horrible, near sociopathic, line of thinking. You seem to have gotten to a point where you can't even recognize illegal immigrants as human beings.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. Another more recent example is Venmo. Since Paypal acquired them, they've been steadily removing functionality from the website to force users onto the app.

Another good example is Sonos ... they are slowly letting their desktop application die to force users onto iOS or android apps.

In the case of Sonos, it is much darker and user hostile because there is no danger of "web consumers being siphoned off by google" - you have to buy the Sonos components anyway. In this case it is all about metadata and traffic and user profiling.

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

#394

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...

That was beyond unacceptable because it didn't show the comment as have been edited with an asterisks. Which means they have and use special admin powers at will. The only issue to Reddit it seems was that he was caught doing it.

There are people sitting in prison RIGHT NOW from Reddit posts. Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do. You're right, it is beyond acceptable.

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

#395
It's spiraling down now. Too transparent that hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent to shape public opinion. Shills all over the place, in every single subreddit. And if they can take over a subreddit, they'll prop up a new one with the right people in charge by spamming it's content enough that it reaches /r/all.

The clocks ticking on reddit. It used to be such a different beast back in 2005.

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

#396

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.

It seems pretty clear that the only reason it's still open is because of a court order or an FBI surveillance letter.

This is hilarious. Yes the reason the subreddit for the President of the USA is allowed to exist is so the FBI can gather evidence.

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

#397

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.

Eh, they went back to Youtube. I've read the vilest, most shocking and dumbest comments on Youtube (and they had quite a few upvotes) - Reddit is meek by comparison.

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

#398
post #98
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would help if they dumped the AMP pages too. Landing there results in a useless "not logged in" and "partial content" page. AMP is just a terrible fit for Reddit pages.

But the AMP pages give them preferential treatment in Google search results. I doubt they'd want to give that up.

I wonder how important Google Search is to Reddit, though. They are big enough (like Facebook) that they may not need it much anymore, and may have used AMP based on the promise of a better experience (meanwhile deliberately degrading mobile experience).

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

#399
post #309

I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time. All of that is aside from t…

You had me believing that reddit was a bad place to work. When you complain that the CEO gave drugs to an employee in a cabin I started to question if your opinion matches my value system. When you were shocked they hosted other points of view then I completely changed my mind because reddit is a place for all viewpoints and thought reddit is starting to sound like a great place to work. Sounds like teams are impleme…

To your point about viewpoints: Reddit is pretty demonstrably not a place for all viewpoints. Note that I'm not making a normative comment here, I'm just stating a fact: in most of the mainstream and default subreddits, there are a variety of opinions you really can't express without being downvoted.

As for the thing with the CEO giving drugs to someone in a cabin...I think you should interpret this a little more holistically. For a variety of reasons (starting with illegality, and moving on to liability), that is generally not a thing you want your CEO doing in a well functioning organization of Reddit's size. It's not really about whether or not you're personally okay with recreational drug use. It's a bit of a dog whistle. Things that are generally okay can become very not okay in the context of the workplace and professionalism.

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

#400
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was beyond unacceptable because it didn't show the comment as have been edited with an asterisks. Which means they have and use special admin powers at will. The only issue to Reddit it seems was that he was caught doing it.

There are people sitting in prison RIGHT NOW from Reddit posts. Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do. You're right, it is beyond acceptable.

> Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do.

Why, their actions can lend plausible deniability to incriminating information in posts that have not been edited.

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