Live data from Hacker News

Reddit files to go public

reuters.com

661–670 of 834 posts

Re: Reddit files to go public

#661
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at Instagram and Whatsapp, perfectly timed investments. What do you mean perfectly timed? If you mean that those platforms shot up in usage/revenue/whatever-metric after their purchase, couldn't that be heavily influenced by the purchase? Neither of those were some small little platform with a groundbreaking new feature before that. Everyone I knew (in highschool at the time) had gotten sick of their parents a…

"All that Zuck did was notice the platform all the kids are migrating to and bought it to keep those users. It isn't exactly "predicting future trends." They tried to do it again when everyone's parents joined Instagram so the kids moved to Snapchat, but thankfully that deal didn't go through" I would argue this is exactly what predicting future trends is. See which way the tide is going and make the necessary invest…

...which everybody does. There is nothing special about that particular smart person's ability to predict the future. Appeals to authority based on selectively chosen past performance... let's see how this ages 10 years from now.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#662
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 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.

For now. Just watch what happens to it under constant pressure from Wall Street to grow and grow and grow...

Re: Reddit files to go public

#663

I can’t help but think this is the end for that site. It started off with a very old school minimalist designed forum vibe and has been devolving into dark patterns and advertisements as of late. I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.

There is, Reddit gold. Not that I’d give them any money for the decisions they made, I don’t reward bad behavior and I paid with my data.

Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018

Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.

How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#664
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…

> An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.

Doing so will first require the Reddit team to develop a competent search engine. Searching Google or DDG with site:reddit.com is far better than native Reddit search for topics. The Camas Reddit search is what you need for a power search to find that one post that you swear you've read five years ago. Neither use case is well-served by the current search implementation on Reddit itself.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#665
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there a…

When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.

What evidence is there for this claim?

I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"With the metaverse, we're no longer restricted by our physical location, but we can all live in the butt." - Mark Zuckerberg

What is this a reference to?

Back when cloud was the big new buzzword several browser extensions/bookmarklets were created to replace occurrences of "cloud" with "butt".

1_player's comment should have replaced both occurrences of metaverse with butt though.

https://github.com/DaveRandom/cloud-to-butt-mozilla

Re: Reddit files to go public

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, Mussolini getting the trains to run on time is a myth as well. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/ It's similar to how the Nazis claimed the Autobahn as their success, even though they were started under the Weimar Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn

Is Snopes having a hard time with money? The article (on mobile) had two huge full-width ads that you had to scroll past, and a persistent banner ad at the bottom, and they're still asking for donations: https://files.catbox.moe/szanpo.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/j9qerx.jpeg I don't mind them trying to fund themselves, but those aren't exactly vetted "ethical ads", are they?

You say that yet even catbox.moe is asking for money. Go check their front page.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#668
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if facebook can maintain mbasic, then reddit can maintain old. the onboarding funnel is towards new reddit anyway, old is mature and _appears_ stable, and most folks new to the platform will use their official app. i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.

The fabricated issues with old are starting to appear, though. Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old. Using the editor to insert links with _ in them on slow, will escape the underscores (…/this_is/ => …/this\_is/), breaking the links for users of the fast version. The worst part (for me) is, that I actually like the new reddit.…

> Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.

Reading through advent of code solutions has been a mess because of this. Some people just won't 4-space it.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#669
post #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…

>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.

Where did the core demographic go?

Re: Reddit files to go public

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop taking "the metaverse" seriously, please. It's a rich idiots dream, like a digital Fordlandia. I can hardly blame people for trying to follow trends, because following trends can be lucrative. "The metaverse" is just not the one to follow. It's nintendos virtualboy, vision getting ahead of substance, fixing problems we don't have. If it succeeds at all, it will be a testament to societies ability to bend to the…

I'm getting really angry at companies squatting names that are basically common nouns. This practice should be banned. It's something I though was more cyberdystopian-esque not reality, but here we are in the future.

As somebody whose primary intellectual interest is how digital communities conceive of themselves and how cultures are curated online, I am not thrilled about 'Meta' to say the least.

Thanks for stealing the shorthand I had for explaining what interested me.

And never mind what a mess it's going to make for any of us who are interested in metadata versus data.

Thanks, Mark. I love it.

Post reply on HN