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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

#281

Post by Shivetya »

jug wrote: post #112
rkho wrote: post #63

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 phy…

Yes, discoverability of "good" subreddits is not there. But on the other hand I think Reddit get too much criticism. I find most subreddits besides the big catch-all ones like /r/pics good. Basically all the TV shows have fun post-episode discussions and going through Game of Thrones, Black Sails or The Expanse wouldn't have been the same without Reddit for me. It becomes the group of buddies I can vent or be in awe…

Actually it may be best to unsub to most of the default subs including pics because of the political noise (which /pics magically banned since the Jan 14 and may continue past the one month ban). Seriously, too many subs are so over the top flooded with managed political crap it just poisons the well. Reddit is actively managed by political groups because of its position in the internet.

the targeted subs is where its at on reddit. So my recommendation is edit your subscriptions and remove all but what you specifically came for.

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

#282

Post by rangibaby »

lmm wrote: post #236
juped wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just works because Google is at a more advanced stage of decay into content farm dystopia than Reddit is.

Maybe. But content on reddit has better provenance data than content on the web in general; reddit has found a version of identity that strikes the right balance. You can take an arbitrary comment and be able to tell with reasonable confidence whether there's an at least somewhat "real" user behind it, in a way that you just can't for a random blog or a product review anywhere else.

That's what the marketers want you to think

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

#283

Post by dbbk »

jug wrote: post #112
rkho wrote: post #63

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 phy…

Yes, discoverability of "good" subreddits is not there. But on the other hand I think Reddit get too much criticism. I find most subreddits besides the big catch-all ones like /r/pics good. Basically all the TV shows have fun post-episode discussions and going through Game of Thrones, Black Sails or The Expanse wouldn't have been the same without Reddit for me. It becomes the group of buddies I can vent or be in awe…

They've actually done a lot on discoverability recently. In fact just looking at the homepage now I can see two sections devoted to surfacing rising communities.

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

#284

Post by lolive »

I have never used Reddit ever (nor Usenet). Anyway I have discovered Reddit while searching for i3 faq and help. (i3=the window manager). They simply use Reddit as their stackOverflow/support forum.

Tell me Reddit is the Usenet+StackOverflow of everything and the rest, and I create an account RIGHT NOW!!!

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

#285

Post by the-dude »

betwixthewires wrote: post #207
comboy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a company that made people moderate their content for free. You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.

My favorite reddit search result story: I asked a question once on Reddit, got no answer, figured it out on my own, then added my solution to the thread because I've been saved countless times by the guy that does that on the internet and I wanted to pay it forward. A couple years later, I have the same problem and remember solving it but don't remember how, search it and find my own answer. This distils down basical…

I have more or less the same story, but then about DejaNews.

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

#286

Post by NathanielK »

wtf_is_up wrote: post #173
rkho wrote: post #63

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 phy…

There's a sweetspot where the sub is big enough that there's activity and content of interest but not so big that it just turns into a mess of low effort upvote farming. There's also a few different sub archetypes that have formed. For instance /r/nfl is a low effort upvote farm due to its size, but the moderators do a fantastic job of policing submissions. So if you use it as a news aggregator, it's great. Just don'…

Smaller subreddits are beings dead is partially due to reddit's Hot ranking algorithmn. It is designed to have fresh posts up top on the daily [1]. Unless you switch to an alternate rating scheme (monthly top is helpful), any subreddit without hundreds of posts per week is basically dead.

Large subreddits with thousands of weekly posts have the opposite problem, where low effort posts will dominate the top if unmoderated. [1] https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...

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

#287

Post by sneak »

CyanDeparture wrote: post #224
sprite wrote: post #178

They are purposefully making Reddit absolutely terrible on mobile web browsers. They constantly try to force you to download the app, don't let you read full threads without it, etc. It seems it just constantly gets worse and worse.

The mobile web site is particularly awful. The app Apollo - https://apolloapp.io/ - is fantastic for browsing reddit if you're on an iDevice. (I have nothing to do with the apps development, just a fan), it is such an excellent experience I upgraded it to the paid version. Give it a go for a day if you can install it on your device.

Twitter also once had a robust third-party app ecosystem, until they were forced to inject more and more ads to boost revenue.

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

#288

Post by throwaway0a5e »

rkho wrote: post #63

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 phy…

>HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice

You mean /r/YouCantDoItCallAPro

The advice and professional subs Reddit devolve into content of "I barely know anything about this field but I can google it as needed" quality. The broader the field and the lower the barrier to "sounding like you know what you're talking about" (home improvement, personal finance, legal advice come to mind) the more this is true. There are some really small niches where this isn't yet true but they are few and far between.

Whatever subject you are intimately familiar with go look on that sub and you will see a lot of low quality crap, worthless tropes held up as gospel, lack of nuance and opinions generally below even what novices in the field put out being held in high regard. Now realize that every subject is like this. (related: Murray, Gell, Mann amnesia effect)

For all of it's faults, at least 4Chan hit you with a "everything here is bullshit and you're a fool to believe otherwise" (or something along those lines) on their home page

>Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey

>Posture for, well, fixing my posture

If /r/Keto fixed your diet and /r/Posture fixed your posture it wasn't advice you needed. You could have learned the same things reading a couple low quality wikihow articles. What you needed was psychological, a perception that the group believed those things, a way to legitimize the advice or some other veneer of legitimacy. I don't want to speculate what's going on in your head but Reddit advice is fundamentally mass market low quality drivel. Now, the world is full of small problems and the average guy doesn't need an NFL dietician to help him lose weight or a boiler engineer to design his guest bathroom plumbing, the service industry practically runs on $20 Walmart no-slip shoes, etc. etc. so mass market low quality solutions do work for a lot of people and lots of use cases (hence why they're mass market). But my point is that it's folly to put Reddit advice on a pedestal like it's good for the same reason you shouldn't look for quality philosophical debate in the youtube comments of amateur political analysts.

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

#289

Post by Kbelicius »

leereeves wrote: post #264
matsemann wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half of the content on r/popular is hate speech about the right. [Citation needed]. You don't do your point any favors by being hyperbolic. And as always, the "both sides are both equally bad"-rhetoric is just discussing in bad faith.

I was going to say my citation is r/popular itself, but it looks like there's less of it now that the election is over. During the election it was disgusting. The toxic content is still there though, like a LeopardsAteMyFace post crowing about the death of Ron Wright, and as if to prove my point: "This thread has been locked due to extremely toxic and rude comments." Such as the current top comment "...I'm really pas…

> The toxic content is still there though, like a LeopardsAteMyFace post crowing about the death of Ron Wright, and as if to prove my point: "This thread has been locked due to extremely toxic and rude comments." Such as the top comment "...I'm really past playing nice with even the memory of these fucks...... Rot in hell, Ron."

Comment that you decided to quote contains no conservative hating just hate towards Ron, because of his behavior and others who behave in that way. Why would you even think that that was a conservative hating comment?

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

#290

Post by tommit »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #231
paulmendoza wrote: post #93

Stop raising money. Each time you do that you increase the pressure on the site to make more money to earn the valuation. If the company is valued at $6B today then it probably needs to get to at least $18B valuation in two years. How? By trying to extract even more money from the users.

Promote buying more "wholesome" awards to cancer related posts I guess. Are they selling an ad free experience yet? I'm sure they'll shut down the APIs allowing third party clients (like Apollo) soon, like Twitter did.

I know they won't care in the big picture, but if they actually do shut down the 3rd party APIs that will conclude my 10 year journey on reddit.
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