Oh great.. it will finally become so bad I will stop wasting my time there. Great!
Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
491–500 of 877 posts
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#492I 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…
At least you don't need an email to sign up.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is still a haven for the far-right. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth that they are tolerated there.
While this may be true, Reddit's "free speech" ethos has been part of its DNA from day 1. Reddit has also gone a long way to getting rid of the most egregious content (I mean, jailbait???) What would you suggest the alternative is? I think the real problem is that society is coming to terms with the fact that anonymous free speech isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I don't think it's accurate to say that reddit has a free speech ethos. Maybe "free speech up until the point where it causes problems with revenue". For example, a year or so ago Reddit overhauled its rules to ban subreddits that were used to facilitate exchanging or gifting drugs (including alcohol and tobacco). However that rule has an exemption saying that advertisements for alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics are still OK. So /r/beertrade gets banned, but reddit will still happily show me ads for some winery founded by MIT grads.
Reddit will also ban subreddits for hosting content that some people may think is "bad", but definitely not illegal. Not that I miss /r/shoplifting, but the discussion itself wasn't illegal. They also banned legal things like firearm schematics and r/brassswap
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're claiming that a rogue employee can't take it on themselves to do that on their own initiative. Either of those companies could trivially choose to do those things as a management decision. Maybe it doesn't make good business sense today, but who knows what the business landscape of 2025 or 2030 looks like?
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is ~1 year younger than Facebook, and ~1 year older than Twitter.
That is amazing. While Facebook has reached world domination and died again (spawning an empire and catapulting its owner to be one of the world's richest people), Reddit still seems to be slugging around in the "we have something, maybe we can monetize it idk" phase. While admire that CN is not squeezing them to death, it appears like Reddit is vastly under-managed.
The reddit audience was historically very resistant to advertising. When it began it really wasn't a million miles away from the HN audience, could you imagine the drama we'd have here on HN if suddenly banner ads started appearing?
Reddit grew to the point where its audience is now a lot more broad and the previous audience is a vocal minority. They can get away with ramping up ads and other behaviour because the audience is no longer sufficiently monolithic to revolt.
Bearing in mind in the past the audience did revolt and basically kicked out the then CEO (temporary CEO but still...) Ellen Pao, in what was a kind of full scale riot that shut most of the site.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#496last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these…
"No other expenses"???
I'm sure their hosting and server costs are huge considering the traffic they get everyday (#5 in US according to Alexa).
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to get such connections with half a billion active users.
I'm actually quite amazed at this. I thought Reddit had gone the way of Digg some time ago. Isn't it mostly manufactured content these days? I certainly remember it had that feel about it at certain times in the past when they were trying to paper over a mass exodus.
Its really not - I can't think of a single game community site of which a subreddit isn't the better/more popular option - ditto with all sorts of interests (other than programming/entrepreneurship which HN has a pretty good slice of).
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#498That explains why they are being so aggressive about using the app. They are trying to up these numbers for investors. I feel less hatred towards them now that I understand that.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both of your viewpoints are right - it entirely depends on what one is considering community. In meatspace there are plenty of social communities where you will be looked down upon for being religious (if you really don't believe this, you either need to travel more or you need to keep questioning social dogmas even after you've found some place you fit in). The many more places where you'll be looked down on for bei…
> Both of your viewpoints are right - it depends on one's actual surrounding community. It's much easier to choose your online community, which creates the impression of the whole space lining up with your beliefs. No, I'm not letting you get away with "equivalency". That kind of mental gymnastics is what allows these kinds of "talking points" to exist. Christian churches are not taxed. Atheist non-profits are. Chris…
It's not "mental gymnastics" to attempt understanding the viewpoints of a different group of people. FWIW I'm atheist myself - I've just gotten to the point where I can accept that religion as a concept has some positive aspects, and that knee jerk dismissal is the exact same vein of ignorance that atheists are persecuted with.
> Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US ... Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution
So, you have implied that it would be progress for a traditionally-married couple to have medical decisions for their spouses questioned, in the same manner that an unlegalized gay couple does. This is the inherent problem with framing things in terms of privileges instead of rights - it implies that the way to make things equal is to tear others down, rather than supporting rights for all.
IMO, but I'm certainly not a scholar here - if you look at the actual messages of Jesus (et al), they were preaching against the oppressive power structures of their time. Their specific dogmas were then calcified and turned into their own oppressive power structure, because real understanding requires continuing vigilance.
If you're not yet to the point where you can forgive the overly religious, then I understand. But closing that door is just setting your dogma up to be a tool of the next oppressor.
Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't work for people who browse Reddit without cookies or signing in, such as for those who use Private Browsing.
So what? That demographic self-selects to be hard to track, so there isn't any good way to track their decision on the pop-up regardless.
Allow me to send a request parameter “?stfu=Y”