Reddit raises $410M in new funding • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#151

Post by zpeti » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

pageandrew wrote: post #117

paulpauper wrote: post #81

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.

I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well. I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this: 1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the…

This seems more like a Silicon Valley issue than a Reddit one. And Silicon Valley generally doesn’t have much motivation to get people doing actual stuff, people sitting at home is where the cash is.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#152

Post by baud147258 » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

so more money so they do another UI redesign that's again going to reduce usability and push mobile users towards their app?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#153

Post by BeFlatXIII » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

thisisnico wrote: post #19

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 feel like extraordinary monetization of reddit would ruin reddit, and the reason why people actually like reddit.

If they do ruin Reddit with monetization, I hope it also ruins a few people's investment portfolios along the way.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#154

Post by marcinzm » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

potatoman22 wrote: post #134

emodendroket wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?

>I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.

Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people.

By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#155

Post by vntok » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

sushid wrote: post #45

spike021 wrote: post #37

Yet routinely their service still has incredibly poor performance and there are bugs in their iOS app that have been around for months. Crazy.

It was also down for a few hours this week. Can't think of many 11 figure companies that go down as often as Reddit does.

Shows that in the real world, users don't actually really care about having a five nines availability for a forum.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#156

Post by BeFlatXIII » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

trts wrote: post #71

hbosch wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide bans rare) and the tacit allowance of "objectionable" content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you don…

> if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.

There are plenty of Reddit archiving and mirroring services. Pay one of those for a database dump and you’re off to the races (copyright issues be damned)

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#157

Post by paulpauper » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

setr wrote: post #139

paulpauper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.

The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created i…

I have been on reddit a long time and I have never seen a popular sub ever die unless it gets banned by admins. Splinter subs emerge but the original one remains popular too

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#158

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

thisisnico wrote: post #19

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 feel like extraordinary monetization of reddit would ruin reddit, and the reason why people actually like reddit.

It's already happening with the profile pages being implemented.

I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address.

Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture.

It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#159

Post by subpixel » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #39

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…

You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes, they're far less invasive than the other platforms you mentioned. Just at a very high level: - no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads) - no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites) - limits on how granular targetin…

This seems likely to change.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#160

Post by screye » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

Reddit is simultaneously the most usable and most incompetently run (now that tumblr is dead) social media website on the internet. My hunch is that both phenomena are connected.

___________

The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough.

Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content.

Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.

_________

Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule.

Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken.

Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either.

With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.