Live data from Hacker News

Reddit files to go public

reuters.com

361–370 of 834 posts

Re: Reddit files to go public

#361

I keep wondering, why hasn’t someone made a new Reddit that’s pretty much just the old Reddit? It seems like there’s a ton of demand for it. Disrupt what Reddit has become by creating what it used to be.

voat.co tried. when the last reddit exodus happened in 2017, the site crashed all of the time. you need A LOTTTTTTTTTT of resources to run reddit, and reddit 10x’ed the “unified forum with image and video hosting” problem.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions. Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.

The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.

Do we know who the larger shareholders are? Where do we look this up?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#363
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they were spun off a while ago https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/reddit-just-raised-a-new-r...

> The capital will be used to redesign Reddit’s famously cluttered homepage, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman tells Recode. The company also plans to pour more resources into user-uploaded video. Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable. I'm curious what happened behind the scenes here.

Are they going to compete with YouTube?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#364

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild. It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens

Remember Tumblr with yahoo, so funny. Took a month for a bunch a poor spin offs to cash in.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#365
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a lot Gen Z don't like the old.reddit.com because it looks kind of old fashioned vs say react "modern" pages and they're afraid of lookign old-fashioned. However, that is what keeps me coming back along with relative anonymity and content on topics that I like.

[deleted]

I have always felt that new Reddit's information-sparse and brightly-coloured looks attracted a certain type of emotionally under-developed and low-attention user.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough - Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in - fix the video player on the new site - support the native video player on the old site & polls - remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mod…

Just to pick this one out: > - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a reddit reddit. I think this was added for the OnlyFans pipeline. There is a massive porn community on Reddit, and the entirety of it thrives on this feature. Whether either of us want that, Reddit's decided it is a good an…

Didn’t Reddit ban a lot of the porn content during the same “progressive” ban wave they banned gender critical, the Donald, etc?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#367
Reddit has definitely had noticeable changes over the past 5+ years as they’ve gone through further VC rounds of funding that demand more ROI-centric changes.

I can’t imagine the ways it will change as a public company once numbers are public to scrutiny and the shareholder makeup shifts.

It seems the intrinsic problem with platforms like Reddit (at least from what’s been witnessed over the last 8 years) is that they will inevitably “hit a wall” in a way that will become incompatible with shareholder interests.

By that I mean at some point that hockey-stick growth is going to inevitably taper off and reach terminal velocity before declining as the platform reaches unsustainability. Then, Reddit is going to have to throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks to please investors, or grow by acquisition, which is like a Tylenol level solution. I just don’t see how an advertising and virtual badges driven social platform is ever going to be compatible with the expectations of running a public company to produce returns like in some other industry or sector.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#368
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smalle…

I think that's a very unfair assessment. Reddit is as diverse as the internet itself. There are plenty of good subreddits there and the toxic stuff is easy to avoid. Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to any subreddit that deals with the news or politics. Some subreddits have become too big to properly moderate, unsubscribe to them too.

Reddit may have had a diverse user base in the past but in the last three years they enacted the same heavy censorship we have seen elsewhere and basically have no diversity of thought now in any major subreddit

Re: Reddit files to go public

#369

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement.

Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago.

Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#370
post #334

Good! I‘ll go long on them. Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now. Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content…

> Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse

Why do people keep talking about the metaverse like it already exists and is a huge part of our future?

It's vaporware right now.

Are we all so susceptible to marketing that we've just accepted that if Meta is going all-in on a thing it must be both real and a guaranteed win?

Post reply on HN