Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 877 posts

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

#541

Post by Zecar »

burfog wrote: post #485
slg wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disgusting and disrespectful portions might be a reference, but it was the "Glasses at the end of his nose" line that jumped out as a potential dog whistle. The response with 25 upvotes that talks about Shumer's "sniveling nose" also doesn't help. I know that politicians getting criticized for their looks is just part of the equation and Trump is a big victim of that. However it is a little different when you are…

The antisemitism accusation is completely over-the-top ridiculous. Trump's own daughter is a Jew. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and not one democrat showed up for the ceremony. There are a couple openly antisemitic members of congress now, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Louis Farrakhan hasn't even been disowned. This is a case of projection if there ever was one.

Yeah Trump broke people's brains. Look at this anti-semite: http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170522092440-02-tru...

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

#542

Post by scarmig »

ForHackernews wrote: post #494
scarmig wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And then my comment would be false. But as it stands today, it's true.

I do think you overestimate how trivial it would be for "management" (who? a senior PM? Sergei? Zuck?) to decide to turn off all internal security controls so individual Googlers could send emails using someone else's identity--it would likely run afoul of multiple current laws and contracts, to speak nothing of the universal, strong internal objections there'd be to that change and the high engineering cost to migrate off those systems. And I can't imagine a business landscape that would encourage any company to let individual employees do that.

There are tons of things to worry about wrt BigTechCos, but preventing and auditing rogue employees are something where their incentives align pretty strongly with the public good.

FWIW I do support stronger legal and privacy requirements (with some caveats, mostly because compliance is very expensive and potentially harmful to smaller companies).

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

#543

Post by drankula3 »

Deimorz wrote: post #483
drankula3 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks interesting. Your blog says it has "Limited tolerance, especially for assholes." I'd like to ask you a question that would help elucidate this ethos. Let's say a user makes a comment about how illegal immigrants should be deported, and another user calls the first racist in response. How would the site respond & why?

It's impossible to answer questions like that. Depending on a lot of factors, the response could be anything from "do absolutely nothing" to "ban both users". Community management and moderation aren't simple, black-and-white decisions. Anyone that claims they are has never been involved in doing it at a meaningful level.

This is actually exactly the response I was hoping for. Any community that responds in a black-or-white manner on a cultural issue like this one would be completely incapable of supplanting a global site like Reddit.

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

#544

Post by this_user »

hrktb wrote: post #512
wolco wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him. Why can the CEO even technically get access to the data ? Same with communities, a lot of them get banned. Basically every week I hear about some community get canned, it’s pretty usual, and often justified. Yet these “other points of view” subreddits that are pretty f…

> GP’s comment should be taken into context: the CEO is not just a cool dude, he does stupid stuff like rewriting in DB user comments making fun of him.

Huffman has repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement. Using your admin privileges to edit comments for personal reasons is the kind of thing one would expect from some power tripping admin on some small, privately run forum, but not from the CEO of a multibillion Dollar company that operates one of the largest sites on the Internet. That incident alone should have been reason enough for him to either step down or get fired. In fact, his predecessor as CEO Ellen Pao even commented that she would have fired him for this.

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

#545

Post by marcinzm »

solatic wrote: post #310
ben_jones wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could easily see 100 engineers split between operations, front-end/back-end/mobile, DBA, etc. I could see a dozen each of marketing, HR (moderation + community management), project/product/team management, and C-level. The rest could easily be sales. Sure you could argue you don't need 100 engineers for that, but if you factor in on-call rotations and how they're constantly refactoring everything...

A hundred engineers for a site like Reddit is ridiculous. Scale is not an excuse - WhatsApp being the famous example of a hyperscaled product with many native clients and only a few dozen engineers. And who would Reddit be selling to? Are they going to run their own in-house ad platform? I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.

Reddit provides a pretty large amount of features (once you include advertising, moderator features, subreddit customization, image hosting, etc.) while WhatsApp provided a very small number of features. As a note, Reddit is already running their own in house ad platform and have been for a while.

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

#546

Post by joelthelion »

MrMember wrote: post #119
joelthelion wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good news. I hope it makes them rethink their relationship to their users. Well, otherwise, tildes is looking great.

Every time I see someone mention tildes as an alternative to reddit I check it out to see if I can create an account yet. For [edit] almost a year now the answer has been "no."

It's quite easy to get an account if you want one. Just ask.

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

#547

Post by [deleted] »

opportune wrote: post #464
ssnistfajen wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to be surprised with a decent competitor but all of the Reddit spin-offs I've seen are all trying to be not-Reddit, and that often includes keeping the community niche/exclusive.

I think the killer app would be to keep the community somewhat exclusive but also have a great breadth of niche, expert content. There was a time when Reddit hit this sweet spot (although there were also very large subs that attracted the worst users). One of the main issues with reddit is that a lot of niche interest subreddits are 90-99% non-practitioners or extreme amateurs, even when weighted in terms of contribu…

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by mark_l_watson »

I read the title wrong, that they were raising 3B. Still, raising $150m is large.

Reddit has changed so much over the years but I still like Reddit enough to do an auto-donation every month. I think I support Reddit more out of sentimental reasons because I don’t spend too much time anymore on their site but I enjoy it much more than, for example, Facebook that I only spend a few minutes a month on.

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

#549

Post by dbbk »

solarkraft wrote: post #469
saalweachter wrote: post #346

Earlier 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.

Facebook has over 2B monthly active users, approximately a third of the human race alive today, they have not "died".

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

#550

Post by jlarocco »

umeshunni wrote: post #540
jlarocco wrote: post #511

Must be .com bubble 2.0 if VCs will throw that much money at a company who can't monetize that many users after this many years. Not my money, so I don't care, but I do really have to wonder what their plan is. The way I see it, Google, Apple, and Facebook won't buy them because they're not competitors and they already have more users. And 99% of Reddit users probably use 1 or more of those 3 already anyway. An IPO s…

> So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company? For the second time, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwi... Reddit has an interesting corporate history of being a startup --> acquisition --> subsidiary --> spinout --> "startup" --> ??

Huh, I vaguely remember them getting bought, but didn't know about the subsidiary and spinout parts.

I guess they're all playing hot potato until it goes bust.

Post reply on HN