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Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

reuters.com

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Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#61

Post by devlopr »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #31
pragma84 wrote: post #24

I imagine a great deal of Reddit's value comes from the fact that its front page is essentially a mass viral advertising engine under the guise of original content. I remember reading only a handful of moderators control all of reddit's most popular subreddits, the ones frequently hitting the front page. These I'm sure are just sock accounts for marketing firms to use when they mass promote content. I wonder how much…

Hopefully this doesn't come off as too aggressive, but can I ask why it was necessary for you to create a new account in order to make this comment?

The person could have lost a password. Been at a different machine. Works for reddit. First time poster / long time reader. Some people have been on this site so long they just like to play a game where they try to get to 500 karma as fast as possible. Then they start over and try to beat previous best time.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#63

Post by rkho »

Reddit is an intentionally designed dopamine machine with some areas of usefulness. There are pockets of great, high signal communities on Reddit that have not been unbundled. Discovery, however, is a mess.

Some examples of some great subs:

- HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice

- Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey

- Posture for, well, fixing my posture

I've also bought and sold various digital and physical goods through HardwareSwap, GameSale, SteamGameSwap, and others. One of Reddit's strengths is being able to tie a username to a post history across many interests, which has given me enough confidence signals in buying and selling things on there. I'm sure fraud happens, but I have personally not (yet) been affected by it when transacting on the platform.

But the main, core "Reddit experience" as algorithmically produced by r/Popular is a complete dumpster fire. It's the noise of the entire internet, jam packed into a webpage. So many low quality posts and comments that encapsulate all the negatives about "internet culture". There's no room for thoughtful discussion and discourse on the majority of the site, just shitposting and low rung commentary.

Because of that, having a productive/net positive Reddit experience comes with a high barrier to entry in knowing which communities to pay attention to and which time sinks to avoid.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#64

Post by AznHisoka »

cercatrova wrote: post #25

Seems quite expensive. Reddit doesn't make substantial revenues, so I'm not sure what investors will gain with yet another funding round.

Maybe in pre-2019 valuations. If anything it’s too cheap now. Probably worth 5-10 times if this was a public company.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#65

Post by batiudrami »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #52

I wonder why Zuck isn't buying it. He dropped 19B on whatsapp. Surely reddit is a good deal at 6B??

A lot of moderation trouble and not really a direct competitor to one of their products in the way WhatsApp threatened Messenger. Much higher risk of users abandoning the platform too due to weaker network effects.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#66

Post by frakkingcylons »

What feels like a big missed opportunity for Reddit is having a front-page without the low-quality subreddits. People often say to just never visit /r/popular because of all the garbage, but it's unfortunately the only way to discover subreddits when you’re not looking for anything in particular. Sure, if you know what you're looking for, it's pretty easy to find the appropriate subreddit. But if you just want to wander around, you have to sift through the terrible crap that shows up on /r/popular.

I'd love it if there was something that helped filter this content automatically. Currently I keep manually blocking these subreddits, which was a lot of work at first (my block list is currently ~200) but it's helped a lot.

I'm trying to solve this for myself actually by starting with filtering low-quality comments on Reddit and HN. I made a Chrome extension that helps me label comments as I read and stores them in Google Sheets. Then I use those labeled comments to train a custom NLP model that can categorize comments (good or bad, hide the comment if it's bad). So far, I'm spending most of my time trying to build a good dataset for my tastes. It's not too bad so far (~80-90% accuracy).

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#68

Post by nefitty »

pid_0 wrote: post #53
goalieca wrote: post #2

Reddit seems even better than Facebook at owning your mind.

It is, which is why I quit for good. Reddit free for a month now when I used to check r/all multiple times a day. Reddit is cancer.

My current internet samsara cycle is Reddit, HN and Twitter. I truly feel like there are hooks in my brain that compel me to mindlessly browse these three sites over and over again. The better I get at them, and the more positive feedback my comments get, the deeper the hooks go in.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#69

Post by throwawaysea »

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #18

Congrats to them big time. It seriously doesn't get the recognition it deserves as the most impactful social media platform. To me, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media today is less about connecting people and really about driving targeted and calculated impressions of X to audiences via a user's feed. This is astro-turfed to feel organic and botted to death by everyone because of how much influence it…

> what I find awesome about reddit is its ability to connect people and really have group conversations on almost anything

I see Reddit at its best in niche subreddits but it is far from a place to have conversations on almost anything. The site as a whole as well as most of the biggest subs have banned various topics or lines of discussion in a bid to align to progressive left political views.

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