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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#91

Post by blagie »

dcolkitt wrote: post #10
weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

The biggest problem is that their revenue per user is atrociously low compared to other social platforms. That money should be thrown at poaching as much ads talent as possible from Facebook or Twitter.

The problem is that throwing money rarely leads to the outcome desired.

I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.

The term is 'overcapitalized.'

At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).

The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.

Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#92

Post by thehappypm »

weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

I would invest in B2B. Reddit should have just as much of an easy-to-use marketing suite like Facebook or Google have. A team of 10 engineers can do that in a year, then the rest of the money goes to sales.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#93

Post by paxys »

muttantt wrote: post #76

Gotta pay the team of people that wholesale censor information there

Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#94

Post by mdoms »

dcolkitt wrote: post #9

On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real q…

I suspect (without proof) that Reddit's unique user count is far smaller than its actual user count. People proudly use multiple alts and such behaviour is tacitly encouraged by the platform. It's not at all unusual for a user to have alts for gaming, porn and other things. Obvious this phenomenon exists on other platforms but my gut tells me it's far more prevalent on Reddit.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#96

Post by timdev2 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #61
ren_engineer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc. Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

> Reddit is more forum than social network Reddit is mostly cat pictures and funny memes at scale, even calling it a "forum" is a stretch. More like a glorified image board.

I'm not sure I understand your taxonomy. In my mind, an image board is a type of forum (generally anonymous and ephemeral). Reddit is more like a forum than a typical forum than popular imageboards, since users have long-lived identities and posts are permanent by default.

As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#97

Post by leereeves »

paxys wrote: post #93
muttantt wrote: post #76

Gotta pay the team of people that wholesale censor information there

Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).

What makes you think reddit wouldn't just take the third party's money to push the agenda themselves, like many media companies do?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#98

Post by [deleted] »

paulpauper wrote: post #81
muttantt wrote: post #76

Gotta pay the team of people that wholesale censor information there

the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#99

Post by sergiotapia »

In the hn tiktok thread, I saw a salient comment that said: "When I visit reddit I just leave angry".

Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app, and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping, forever.

Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn it around?

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