Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 507 posts

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#221

Post by colinmhayes »

paulcole wrote: post #217
wintermutestwin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a great way to prod those specialized communities to bail to the next diggredditetc. People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).

>People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing). Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them. Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, no…

I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users to a competing service if the community is un happy with the monetization scheme.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#222

Post by sireat »

buu700 wrote: post #145
pageandrew wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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).

I stopped going to /r/AskHistorians because often the only allowed answers were badly sourced.

This is especially prevalent on events that are still relatively recent (last 40-50 years).

Second, it really is /r/AskHistorians ONLY, you are not allowed to mention any personal anecdata (ie participating in the fall of Berlin Wall etc.)

Even worse you are not allowed to attempt to provide official primary sources.

There was a question on WW2 Soviet tank production and German preparedness. I was not allowed to link in secondary comment Hitler-Mannerheim talks where they talked about this very issue!

Mod reasoning: not enough context...

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#223

Post by colinmhayes »

xkjkls wrote: post #86
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

Also reddit itself gives a huge number of ways for advertisers to access the reddit audience without paying for it.

I think this is reddit's biggest issue. Astroturfing is more effective than advertising and it's cheaper too.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#224

Post by pageandrew »

ryandrake wrote: post #214
pageandrew wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was going to say, there are plenty of subs for pedaling that kind of content, but looks like the major one, r/NoNewNormal was just quarantined (ironic) today, which is often the first step towards a total ban. Reddit's a private company, and if they don't want that kind of content on their site, shouldn't that be their choice?

The problem with the "private company" line that, yes, they're a private company, but censorship is definitely still bad!

Free speech is a fundamentally protected right in the US. From the Founder's perspective, the greatest threat to that right was clearly and obviously government, because what other entity could possibly have that much reach into one's life? Up until the internet age, no one could imagine a private company or a private individual having the capacity to infringe upon free speech at scale.

So, we have a Constitutional right to free speech, protected against infringement by the government, which is great, but there is another threat to the free flow of information and ideas, and that is private corporations who can now infringe upon this right at scale. And we don't have the tools or framework to defend it, because private companies can do what they want? Thats not good enough for me. The situation is dire when private companies appoint themselves to be the arbiters of truth, because even with the best intentions, there are bound to be mistakes, as we've already seen. And they don't all have the best intentions.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#225

Post by bwship »

shuntress wrote: post #220
initplus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology, you are describing "placements". A placement with an ad in it shown to a user is called an "impression". I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically. Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeti…

Well they have the money part of that equation solved, at least for a while. How quickly can one blow through $410 million? 18 months?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#226

Post by NationalPark »

f6v wrote: post #105
heywintermute wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...

It’s not going to be Tumblr all over again if they choose to ban it. But I wonder how many people use Reddit just for nsfw.

I wonder if their problem is that the majority of their traffic is unregistered users looking at NSFW subreddits. So they may not actually have that many users they could monetize in the first place.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#227

Post by screye »

uDontKnowMe wrote: post #190
screye wrote: post #160

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 i…

I think it's a common misconception that old.reddit.com is still extremely popular. As a mod of a medium-large sub which should skew highly towards old.reddit.com (developer-focussed content, created at around the beginning of reddit itself), the percent of pageviews on old.reddit.com is right now around 8%.

That is really interesting.

Is it 8% of all users, or 8% of PC users ?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#228

Post by NationalPark »

spfzero wrote: post #213
gruez wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.

That demographic is most sought-after by advertisers because it is the easiest to influence. The ads work better on them. For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more ads, older demographics are harder to reach.

Is it actually true that online ads work better (more conversions?) on that demographic? How do you separate the confounding factor of the effect of age and income on preferences?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#230

Post by buu700 »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #184
buu700 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I have never tried the latter two, but the first one is a very good example of a notoriously bad advice subreddit that almost all lawyers dislike for spreading constant misinformation, and often even seeing people that say the correct thing be banned by the moderators. There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see compensation for their expertise; B) in many…

Interesting, this is the first I'm hearing about that. Typically users will state whether or not they're lawyers, and if so the degree to which they're familiar with the OP's jurisdiction, and threads will often be locked and/or littered with removed comments for the reason "bad advice". Often, the only advice users will receive is to go see a lawyer.

Based on all that, it seemed pretty solid to me. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if I had to guess it's probably more a case of being hit-or-miss than entirely bad. Even a minority of bad advice would stand out to a lawyer in the same way that >=1% of wrong information in a tech publication would stand out to most of us here, particularly if the victims of said bad advice were in serious situations.

(IANAL or an active user of /r/legaladvice. I just pop in every so often when an interesting thread hits my front page, so whatever I'm exposed to is presumably better quality and more actively moderated than what's average for the sub.)

Post reply on HN