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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow everything?

The problem is winner-take-all effects and inherent difficulty of getting traffic to new subs.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#142
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…

> higher user engagement

It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple times to finally see the content.

> and time on site

Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get their dopamine hit

The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#143

Reddit is a marketeers dream. Every corporation, product, game, movie studio and consumer device has a big team dedicated to using Reddit for free. Submissions memes and comments are posted by the teams, often out in the open. Reddit gets no income from this advertising. If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.

The more Reddit gets infected by ads, the less value the content will provide. Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#144

What the hell does a site like Reddit do with almost half a billion dollars?! That's insane.

It's not easy to run a company with as many users as they have. As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall. They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I i…

>Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone

The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right target audience.

It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement over the current setup.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#145
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what make reddit great. Certain reddit are heavily moderated and you get great content. If you don't like how moderation done, go start your own reddit.

"Great content" === what are you referring to exactly? The left-wing propaganda that dominates the front page, passed off as "news" or "science"?

Offhand, /r/legaladvice, /r/AskHistorians, and /r/AskScience stand out as being heavily moderated to the benefit of overall content quality. I don't see how any of those would be political propaganda (left-wing or otherwise).

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#146
post #142
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…

> higher user engagement It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple times to finally see the content. > and time on site Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get their dopamine hit The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.

If I'm wrong GP can correct me, but I think "engagement" means commenting/posting/voting, just viewing a page doesn't count as engagement.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#147
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…

One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of. If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/bui…

I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all seem at least reasonably relevant.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#148
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…

Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#149
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..

Three devops to run a website in the top 25 globally? That would be very impressive!

Instagram and Whatsapp had very small teams even with hundreds of millions of users. Reddit has more features but honestly the amount of money pumped in is crazy given that it's well, basically a collection of web forums.

Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.

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