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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

#571

Post by vvillena »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #303
LeoPanthera wrote: post #255

Earlier 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.

Far-right communities would be alright if they could be hate-free. They usually have a hard time doing that.

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

#572

Post by HNLurker2 »

asdfx wrote: post #538

I have a naive question. All these moderators do spend considerable time and effort on reddit. And now reddit is going public, do the moderators get paid going forward? why would someone want to volunteer for a profit making company?

Because it hosts the community itself.

Perhaps a reddit alternative would be just a reddit hoster that hosts the platform for X$ and moderators find a way to get paid.

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

#573

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mort96 wrote: post #156
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

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.

It would be interesting to know how much more a user is worth to them when they install the app; it must be quite significant.

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

#574

Post by srverma »

dx87 wrote: post #79
komali2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too. Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

Forcing people to use a native app means they can inject ads without having to worry about being blocked by a browser extension.

It's also a way for PMs who own apps to build habit-forming loops. If you download the app, you can send push notifications, deep link from email, etc. "Better experience" and all that, ultimately leading to more ad impressions or a purchases in-app.

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

#575

Post by baroffoos »

saagarjha wrote: post #356
gowld wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I started working on a read only script to grab stuff from reddit years ago and then they changed it so you need to go through the whole register for an api key even for read only requests which didn't work for me because I wanted users to download and run the script themselves

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

#576

Post by mattigames »

alexanderdmitri wrote: post #559
mattigames wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"edgelords"? Really? That's the best word you found to describe them?

What would you suggest?

Offensive? Anyway got dowvoted a lot so maybe "edgelords" its the best word for it! Even I should start using it against people I dissagree with.

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

#577

Post by vvillena »

ww520 wrote: post #239
vvillena wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit played a big part in the 2016 USA elections that crowned Trump. Reddit had to change its front page algorithm to avoid having Trump content near the top of the page for almost the whole time. The subreddit in question organized itself to mass-upvote certain posts at certain times, and Reddit wasn't prepared for such massive, non-organic influence. I wonder how big of a part the Russian bots and trolls played.…

Reddit by and large was actively against Trump during 2016 and thereafter.

Reddit is not a single entity, it is a clustered social network. The small part of it that supported Trump managed to create and empower a meme machine that is still going strong.

Subreddits are like thinktanks. They are the perfect breeding ground for internet content. You can gauge popularity, you can quickly refine the content based on the comments received, and if you're lucky you can even kickstart and guide whole movements.

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

#578

Post by pbhjpbhj »

komali2 wrote: post #39
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…

Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too. Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

A lot of people are mentioning tracking, etc..

I think another major reason is that if someone is seeking to amuse themselves then in a browser they're as likely to skip over to another website; whilst in an app there's a mental barrier to that. I imagine people are more likely to change and view another subreddit, rather than jump to another website altogether.

There's a censorship angle too, wherein the app operators get greater control over the message their users receive than do website operators.

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

#579

Post by conception »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #557
deminature wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not stopping those people from speaking, they're just hiding that content from average users. It's reasonable to think the average redditor probably doesn't want to see death videos alongside their cat pictures and memes.

>"the average redditor probably doesn't want to see death videos alongside their cat pictures and memes" // Was that possible _by accident_ in recent renditions of reddit? IME you have to be in a reddit where that sort of content is, and change settings to make it default visible?

/r/all potentially could have anything pop up, no?

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

#580

Post by kristofferR »

andrepd wrote: post #351
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.

Apollo and an "open in Apollo" shortcut is IMO a much better solution.
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