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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

#611

Post by karmickoala »

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…

I was browsing it using Firefox Focus, it pointed me to two options to use reddit: the app or Chrome (with its logo). I didn't want to open Chrome, so I closed and tried again. Only then I noticed that it was referring to any browser instead of Chrome... Not entirely bad, but a bit annoying.

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

#612

Post by saagarjha »

simple_phrases wrote: post #451
saagarjha wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific native features that you're missing are platform controls, better UI performance, and support for APIs like notifications.

A comments section on a news site doesn't need high performance UI controls or native notifications.

The fact that Apollo exists and is popular (though, I personally don't think its controls are native enough) means that this isn't really true.

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

#613

Post by wolco »

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…

I understand banning of subreddits is evil. I think no subreddit should be banned but the press previously were critical of reddit labeling it a jock-boy hangout who group together and attack gay female online users and dox them. They decided to change things their image to please that group. It made it a worse experience for many but stopped the bad press now a year later they are raising at 3b. Would not be possible without the window dressing.

Many users left, most just complain on reddit. Raw usage is not important at this stage for reddit.

That shouldn't make it a good or bad place to work

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

#614

Post by mschaef »

user5994461 wrote: post #602
throwawaymath wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basical…

>>> Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability? I'd say stack overflow. They're both a relatively simplistic website showing text messages posted by users. Nothing fancy. Reddit is a simple message board as there were many 15 years ago. They don't host images or video themselves, which avoid the issue of bandwidth. They don't seem to have…

I don't have any numbers, but it would honestly surprise me if StackOverflow was within two orders of magnitude of Reddit's traffic.

Edit: here's some confirmation.

Reddit has 330M active monthly users: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many...

And SO has 10,002,577 total:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/9766...

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

#615

Post by humanrebar »

sephoric wrote: post #443
breck wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we all know the logged in experience is terrific. However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an inte…

It's an intellectual freedom that has no precedent throughout history. If you walked into a library in the 1950s and thumbed through a book about communism, you were probably put on a list. If you walked into a privately owned book store, the owners had a right to gossip and tell others what you purchased, and I'm sure many people unfortunately made use of that liberty. This isn't new.

You could go a few towns over and there wouldn't be any gossip because they wouldn't know who the hell you were.

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

#616

Post by _t2kx »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #599
conception wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I could be wrong but it always (in my recollection, so only going back a few years) excluded nsfw? When I last visited even going to a fully nsfw subreddit all the media was blurred out, so you might have NSFL titles .. but if you're that timid then probably any site with UGC is going to be a struggle.

NSFW is not filtered out of /r/all; it is from /r/popular. AFAIK though subs have to opt-in to being part of /r/all.

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

#617

Post by krrrh »

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.

CN spun reddit off as independent company in 2012, though afaik CN’s parent company is still the majority shareholder. They have Sam Altman, Marc Andersen, Peter Theil, Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg as investors (the usual suspects basically).

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

#618

Post by user5994461 »

mschaef wrote: post #614
user5994461 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability? I'd say stack overflow. They're both a relatively simplistic website showing text messages posted by users. Nothing fancy. Reddit is a simple message board as there were many 15 years ago. They don't host images or video themselves, which avoid the issue of bandwidth. They don't seem to have…

I don't have any numbers, but it would honestly surprise me if StackOverflow was within two orders of magnitude of Reddit's traffic. Edit: here's some confirmation. Reddit has 330M active monthly users: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many... And SO has 10,002,577 total: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/9766...

StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin.

I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that, but that's still a fairly moderate site to operate.

It is numerous orders of magnitudes away from the like of google, youtube or facebook.

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

#619

Post by russianbandit »

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 myself have been looking for a good Reddit alternative.

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

#620

Post by humanrebar »

rootusrootus wrote: post #603
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also still a haven for the far-left. Does that leave a bad taste in your mouth too?

Does advocating for single-payer healthcare, free community college, marriage equality, pro-choice, and higher tax rates for wealthy individuals constitute 'far left'? Serious question. I have in mind what I would think of as far left, but I don't see those folks are particularly well represented in the United States.

Being OK with the recent abortion bills in NY and VA is pretty far left. Statistically speaking.

Reddit has also had a problem with anti-religious hate content, which isn't necessarily left wing except that the hate is often pointed at uncultured, socially conservative stereotypes.

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