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

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#231

Post by colinmhayes » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #174

setr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 c…

My quick Google-ing shows that they make about $100M/year on ads. So they do this and it works decently well. However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so much about not just your likes but the people you're friends with and how much your income is and what stores you've been to and what you d…

Reddit knows all the subs you subscribe to though. They don't have to give all users of a sub the same ad, just give everyone ads based off their most valuable interests.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#232

Post by pageandrew » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #203

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…

Giving fringe viewpoints a megaphone and that kind of validation is a terrible idea. We have seen it be abused and fail us consistently over the last decade in both mainstream and social media.

I don't trust large corporations to decide what is fringe and what is not, because not only is it a slippery slope, it has been abused consistently especially over the last few years.

Look no further than Facebook's handling of COVID "misinformation". From the start of the pandemic, they have enshrined the current statements of the CDC as "information" and everything else as "misinformation". For example, when the supposed "scientific consensus" was that COVID-19 100% came from nature, anyone who suggested it could have been manmade was called a conspiracy theorist and banned from the platform. Now, a year later, those scientists are backtracking, and some are even admitting that they took the natural-origin stance simply to not be associated with Trump, who was taking the other side. That's not science.

It was never a crazy idea. Anyone who could think for themselves knew that. But Facebook declared themselves the arbiter of truth, and decided that anything that wasn't said by the CDC needed to be censored.

When reasonable, logical ideas about important global health challenges are considered "fringe" simply because the authorities have declared them to be fringe, we have a serious problem.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#233

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#234

Post by Shorel » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

ruined wrote: post #47

thefounder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use digg as reference the long term outlook of reddit is not that bright.

digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made. and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion…

The new HTML layout and the obnoxious mobile website are worse than what killed Digg, IMO.

The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking.

Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#235

Post by pageandrew » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #169

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…

Was the front page of anything ever not curated?

Theres a difference between curating the best recipes or cutest cat pics, and censoring certain ideas about pressing global health crises because they don't fit a certain narrative.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#236

Post by xtracto » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

themanmaran wrote: post #7

I'm honestly surprised to learn that Reddit is still VC dependant. Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.

Now that they are setting up Cryptocurrencies in some subreddits (donuts in r/ethtrader and a couple of others that I don't recall right now) they should experiment with reddits where you initially "pay" for posting, commenting, up/down voting. Then somehow if your post gets upvoted or is heavily commented on, you get some of those tokens (shared revenue) as well as moderators in the subreddits that adopt that dynamic.

It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.

It would be an interesting experiment.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#237

Post by civilized » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

Reddit is the only major social media company that gives you the tools to build something resembling a human community online, yet it seems dwarfed in popularity and clout by products like Facebook and Twitter, which seem to me much less capable.

But to be honest, even I don't use Reddit, although I do sometimes search "reddit X" when I want detailed opinions on product/service/business X. Their UX doesn't draw me in at all, especially on mobile. Hope they do something about this with all the cash. They seem to have a lot of unrealized potential.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#238

Post by buu700 » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #189

buu700 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get where you're coming from, as I created /r/relationship_advice. The existence of such blacklists, even "enormous" ones, isn't inherently bad; it's just a reality of dealing with an enormous flood of spam on a $0 budget. That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blackli…

> Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem . I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.

FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be.

In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#239

Post by NortySpock » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:50 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #188

cwkoss wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit should charge for all commercial posts. It would clean up spam and generate revenue. Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs). Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer…

"And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case" Suggestions? This is a complex proplem.

"the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within the last year, with the user having more than X posts per year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than 1000 characters per post, are invited to become moderators"

Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#240

Post by sgerenser » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

Dah00n wrote: post #199

yissp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant. Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in /r/linux.

Agreed, Adobe creative cloud doesn’t even run on Linux!