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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

#651

Post by bttf »

nostromo wrote: post #260
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…

The worst dark patten in my view is 1) growing an online community around a set of values 2) growing so big you eclipse all competitors 3) suddenly changing your values to appeal to advertisers. Reddit is in good company here, notably with YouTube and Twitter.

An old-fashioned term for this is: selling out.

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

#652

Post by zmmmmm »

It's weird how I see this as a failure and their surviving so long without doing this was success. It feels to me like the only reason they could be pursuing this is because they've given up on their original mission and vision. I hope all the investors have a good think about Digg to remember how fickle and transient online communities like this can be.

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

#653

Post by trustmath »

rootusrootus wrote: post #583
asdff wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'He' is probably a small team of people using that account to repost paid content. There are dozens of massive accounts like this, I wish I had a comprehensive list to filter them all without going through user history one by one.

What is the point of aggregating so much traffic into a single account when it is not really a single person? Too easy to notice, too easy to block, why wouldn't someone paying to have content posted use many different accounts?

The account eventually gains some level of recognition - while you have vocal haters, you also have people that upvote their content (likely based on the username) to the frontpage. Most of what gallowboob posts is garbage and I guarantee you that if it was coming from accounts with less karma or notariety it wouldn't reach the front-page. You have to consider that some of the people upvoting are people commenting on the threads.

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

#654

Post by rhegart »

Tencent is leading the round, Reddit is one of the best places to get news trending. Is it concerning the Communist Party might have some control over what information the public views? Tencent is less beholden to the CCP than perhaps any major Chinese company, so that’s good. I don’t think it should be an issue, but it’s good to know.

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

#655

Post by anitil »

babypuncher wrote: post #230
wnevets wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many more issues with Reddit, I'm surprised they haven't been digg'd or myspace'd yet.

As soon as a viable alternative pops up that doesn't seem tailor made for racists, I'm there. So far every competitor I've seen pop up seems to think Reddit's biggest problem is their (rather weak) stance against hate speech and user harassment, and not all the actual problems being discussed here.

There's a great video by Folding Ideas which talks about the issues with secondary services (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI - this is in the context of video platforms)

One big 'bootstrapping' problem is that the first to adopt a new platform are the people who are _too toxic_ for the original.

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

#656

Post by AngryData »

arcticfox wrote: post #197
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…

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…

They have also been fairly recently quarantining political subreddits, more specifically socialist subreddits.

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

#657

Post by TheOperator »

this_user wrote: post #537
6cd6beb wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.

> This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform. I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not. The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors.…

I see reddit as having three levels of censorship. User (downvotes), moderator, and administrator. The users can give a sort of "wisdom of the crowd" analysis that lets them evaluate subjective/borderline decisions better than moderators. Moderators deal with more clear rule violations like spam. Admins take a minimalistic hands off approach only getting involved when communities are bringing bad press to the site, bothering other communities, posting illegal content, that sort of stuff

The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever. They're not just merely banning subs now. They're quarantining them. They've systemically changed their algorithms to stop controversial content from being seen by most users. They're saber rattling against mod teams more and stacking mod teams. The users have gone from a core of mostly geek to well your typical eternal september users. The moderators are censor-happy and seriously don't know how to fuck off.

Reddit will never be as good as it once was because its size is such a liability. This is a site which went from a founding member risking jail to post stuff from JSTOR to the internet to founders who decided they've "Grown up" ($$$) and don't care about free speech anymore.

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

#658

Post by korm »

[deleted] wrote: post #589
HNLurker2 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate more about the part of being messy? Is it really like the open sourced of lobste.rs with messy code that just works? Also I am sorry for your job experience.

[deleted]

When Reddit rolled out their new mobile site I had strong suspicions the org must be a mess internally. Out of all the problems one stuck out to me. For many months the comment sorting dropdown took 15 seconds to open from a warm start. That is a billion dollar company making newbie mistakes with React as if it was an intern doing the rewrite.

But the situation employees like you have been describing is surreal, I would never have imagined.

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

#660

Post by mediocrejoker »

andrepd wrote: post #403
epistasis wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degradation seems to directly correlate with the modern-feel of the page. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It seems that modern front end fashion is a huge step backwards from earlier fashions in web development.

i.reddit.com. 2010 mobile app feel, blazing fast, light on resources. As it should be.

This is great. Now all I need is a plugin for mobile safari/chrome/firefox that rewrites all reddit URLs to append /.compact
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