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Reddit files to go public

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Re: Reddit files to go public

#461

Post by skinnymuch »

silisili wrote: post #402
nunez wrote: 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…

Genuinely curious...are you old enough to remember Digg and what happened to it? I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing. It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.

I’ve done posts before. As have others. The scope, popularity, and longevity of the fallen past top sites like Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Slashdot, Altavista, Excite. Or web builders like Geocities, Angelfire. Other social networks like Bebo, Hi5. Other messaging apps like Viber. Or older ones like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ.

Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense.

As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users.

Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays.

———————- Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment:

Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year

Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...

Re: Reddit files to go public

#462

Post by thinkingemote »

Would this be the first public porn platform?

A flippant remark, but Reddit is a not insignificant facilitator of pornography alongside many great safe for work subreddits and we will probably see them trying to stop this before or after going public. That or changing the terms of use for users to be 18 from the current 13.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#463

Post by skinnymuch »

hericium wrote: post #407
silisili wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious...are you old enough to remember Digg and what happened to it? I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing. It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.

> It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear. Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_... [2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...

Similar to my response to the OP, the comparisons don’t work because IRC as a whole, no less one network, are not empires. Reddit did a god awful redesign. Then piled on forcing their official mobile app usage by limiting the site more and more. Unlike the small geeky IRC world, none of this did anything to curb Reddit popularity. While it’s entirely possibly an equivalent move in IRC or some other niche geeky place would have an exodus or major consequences.

Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry.

Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year

Digg peaked at 30M monthly users.

A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]:

“Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion”

These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...

Re: Reddit files to go public

#464

Post by bsjks »

akyoan wrote: post #304
throwaway1777 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking shots at the engineers is too far. Reddit is about a million times more stable than it used to be a few years ago. Also I don’t think Reddit or the Internet needs “saving”. They’re both more successful than ever by any common metric whether we like the direction they’re going or not.

Backend sure, it’s more stable. What’s on the front is inexcusable though. This is not just dark patterns: shit straight up doesn’t work. Good engineers don’t ship that. The video player has sucked for years so much that I built a service that fetches the raw hls URL and plays that directly in the browser. Night and day. How do you mess up something that works out of the box?

My experience only having used old Reddit is that it’s stupidly slow all the time and it goes down at least once a week for me (I’m not looking at it all the time…)

I can’t think of a single website with that many backend problems.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#465

Post by jiveturkey »

henning wrote: post #200

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.

> I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is.

Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q.

Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!

Re: Reddit files to go public

#466

Post by cblconfederate »

Reddit is very old, with old unpaid moderators that moderate arbitrarily and a user base that has now been trained to devolve everything to their lowest common denominator which is politics. There are few niches that are useful as aggregators, but moderating those subreddits must be exhausting (e.g. covid19).

Looks like they really need to be disrupted but i guess investors don't think there s enough money in building another forum. And they may probably be right.

What is a reason to invest in reddit's future?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#467

Post by thinkingemote »

skinnymuch wrote: post #463
hericium wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear. Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_... [2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...

Similar to my response to the OP, the comparisons don’t work because IRC as a whole, no less one network, are not empires. Reddit did a god awful redesign. Then piled on forcing their official mobile app usage by limiting the site more and more. Unlike the small geeky IRC world, none of this did anything to curb Reddit popularity. While it’s entirely possibly an equivalent move in IRC or some other niche geeky place…

It's the early adopters that move, not the masses that eventually follow a few years later. It's a small community that shapes crowds.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#468

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

axguscbklp wrote: post #281
mightyquacks wrote: post #210

Reddit used to be amazing Now it's like a red flag in your resume if you worked for reddit Then they made a whole mess on the homepage. This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers. Its like junior engineers who cant write code. Reddit mobile is not bad, but stop trying to make me install it. There are people who only wants to use web. But your web engineers are garbage their ads is incredibly bad. there are…

I hope that no single organization replaces Reddit. Let a billion independent forums bloom. For the sake of discoverability, it would be nice if a decent subset of them implemented more or less the same API that search engines could call from the outside and that their UIs could expose to users so that users could easily move from forum to forum. But discoverability is double-edged - it builds size but it also brings…

> Let a billion independent forums bloom.

They did. Your first paragraph describes Reddit perfectly.

> it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with

Which website(s) are you thinking of?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#469

Post by 55555 »

ExecuteOrder99 wrote: post #397
JCharante wrote: post #287

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…

> 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 Investors(which includes VCs/angels,etc. AND employees) should be rewarded, whether that's the risk they take (ex. VCs) or the work they put in (employees). I'm confused where this viewpoint came from, given every business works this way -- a comp…

They don't mean that it should never happen, they mean that given the growth prospects of Reddit they should just become a regular business instead of continuing to try to get a VC return.

VC investors indeed try to get VC returns but sometimes their bets fail and that's part of their portfolio theory.

The early investors have definitely done well already.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#470

Post by Gareth321 »

Shared404 wrote: post #274
cyberge99 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found reddit from the great digg.com exodus. They didn’t learn.

Which raises the question. Where will people head from the reddit exodus?

There are lots of interesting potential new homes popping up, including SaidIt.net, Tildes.net, Gab.com, even Parler.com and/or whatever Donal Trump has announced. Problem for all of them is their lack of critical mass. Reddit is slowly squeezing users and communities out to appeal to advertisers, but they haven't had their Digg moment yet. That would be something like killing old.reddit.com. Such a catalyst would cause a huge portion of their userbase to leave. So far, they've been too smart to do that, but I can foresee a bunch of new management entering the business after IPO and making those "tough" changes.

I'm also seeing various communities simply making their own websites. rdrama.net, for example, is surprisingly successful. kotakuinaction2.win is also doing quite well. I'm sure there are other, even better examples. At first I was resistant of this fragmentation, but I quickly came to embrace this reversion to the internet of yore. It wasn't so long ago that we would go to individual sites to discuss certain things. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that we've embraced monolithic communities for all of our media and social consumption. I don't think it's healthy, and perhaps this fragmentation is exactly what the internet needs right now. Less algorithm-generated outrage in the dystopian "news feed," and more user-driven experiences based on choosing which sites to visit. A crazy concept for many today.

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