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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

#771

Post by michaelt »

joefkelley wrote: post #521
nostromo wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that this process sucks. Do you think it's possible to do 1 and 2 without 3? How could a business that remains focused on benefiting free users compete/profit?

In some people's ideal world, Reddit would run an extremely lean organisation. Instagram got acquired when they had 13 employees, showing you can be successful with a very small number of employees.

If Reddit had 10 employees and a $5 million annual salary budget, all the employees would be very well compensated, but they wouldn't need to raise $300 million from investors or aggressively pursue ad revenue by pushing an app to avoid ad blocking.

Personally I'm not sure if running as a pseudo-nonprofit would work or not. It's possible there's a cat-and-mouse game with spammers, astroturfers, and griefers that can only be solved with large numbers of employees and high revenue. Perhaps successful online nonprofit projects like Internet Archive and Debian have only avoided this because the don't have the combination of user-generated content and a large user base that make them attractive to spammers. Or perhaps the fact Reddit has so many more users than MetaFilter is a sign sites following this model just don't get big.

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

#772

Post by majewsky »

rjf72 wrote: post #734
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand a developer/company wanting to do the app route to regain control (and not having to deal with the annoying inconsistencies/hacks in different browsers/versions), but is ad / tracker blocking really the major driver of going the app route?

You can see indirect evidence for this by looking at the exponential rise in ad-blocker-blocking efforts from a wide array of sites. 'Hi, we see you're using an ad blocker. Please turn it off.' That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades. Companies in recent years are getting aggressively desperate as the web becomes increasingly user friendly. At the same time,…

> That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades.

What is "several years"? This has definitely existed, say, five years ago. Not at this scale, of course, but it's not a recent invention by a long shot.

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

#773

Post by zaarn »

TylerE wrote: post #337
rjbwork wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just permanently set your account to use the old layout/view. I've noticed little to no changes other than user profiles, which are the "old new" ones. On my phone I use reddit is fun. I have no issues at all with reddit atm in terms of them fucking with my experience.

"permenantly", except for the bug where about 1 pageview in 10 it still redirects you to new reddit. I think it's something related to improperly configured (server-side) caching or something.

I just use one of the many addons that redirect you to old.reddit.com.

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

#775

Post by medecau »

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.

It's the Peter Thiel/Sam Altman receipt.

- http://zerotoonebook.com/ - https://playbook.samaltman.com/

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

#776

Post by zapzupnz »

avhon1 wrote: post #709
mediocrejoker wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/compact-reddi...

> mobile

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

#778

Post by OpenBSD-supreme »

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.

>username: babypuncher >complains about racists

You sure are a ball of hilariously backward priorities!

Racists are people too, and just like pedophiles on the darknet, racists on opennet forums act as a canary. When political policy trumps liberty, the racists get the gas and act as a warning flag that freedom of thought and civil discussion is in jeopardy. Moderation should minimally kill spam, and maximally kill prima facie uncivil behavior (of which civilly expressing the idea that blacks are inferior or jews control the banking system are not uncivil behaviors, whereas "fvck you nxgger!" is).

The internet used to be an open space where squelching even ugly, factually wrong, and unpopular expression was anathema, then one day the political became personal online and into the trash this golden rule went.

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

#779

Post by zapzupnz »

benbristow wrote: post #249
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do mind them promoting their app, it’s a horrible app and they’ve continually ruined their website. The only way I can stand to use reddit anymore is through Narwhal, at least until they kill their 3rd party apps API.

If their API is killed I think Reddit's done for. I wouldn't use it if I were forced to use the official app myself, sure many others wouldn't either. Folk would probably move over to something like voat.co

I tried Voat, but it was just full of Pao-era ex-redditors engaging in two-dimensional-spherical masturbatory activities about how amazing Voat is compared to reddit.

Pretty much all the Voat analogues to my favourite subreddits devolved into that in between occasional bursts of genuine activity and reposts of whatever's trending on reddit.

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

#780

Post by Aeolun »

mattigames wrote: post #727
Aeolun wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t mean you disagree with them. It’s that they write their comments for maximum shock value. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s hardly desirable.

That's the intended meaning, but someone could always call someone else that just to dismiss their argument pretending that it was said for shock value instead of persuasion; and for what I have read that's how it is commonly used.

That’s a possibility, but most well reasoned and argued thoughts do not turn into a shock piece, so I’m inclined to think not.
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