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Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

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Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#61

Post by natrius »

rm999 wrote: post #52
natrius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I actively read them, I valued the communities of Slashdot, Fark and Metafilter just as much as I value the Reddit community. Reddit is less unique in that regard than you might think. It is absolutely more replaceable than the New York Times. It's mindboggling that I even had to type that last sentence.

Your evidence that reddit is replaceable is you've used similar sites (most of which are basically dead in the water at this point). But in the same paragraph you exempt the new york times from that same reasoning. There are several large high-quality newspapers out there competing with the new york times (washington post, wall street journal, la times, chicago tribune, etc). I love the times, but "it may be less uni…

"Your evidence that reddit is replaceable is you've used similar sites (most of which are basically dead in the water at this point)."

That's the point. Internet communities come and go all the time. None of them have proven to be hard to replace. Quality news organizations don't pop up every few years.

The New York Times has competitors, but not equals. All of the papers you mentioned (except for the WSJ, which is indispensable in its niche) have a small fraction of the subscribers the New York Times does, which seems like a pretty good metric for unique value.

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#62

Post by slurry »

kami8845 wrote: post #24
majormajor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "impact of it disappearing" is your metric, I don't think it would take long for new Reddits to pop up if it disappeared tomorrow.

Reddit has a unique and incredibly community. If you take the time and actually explore all of the amazing small subreddits that have developed their own cultures & rulesets and the content they've created, I doubt you would make this statement. There are great people in the specialist subreddits. Reddit is only worth as much as its community and that is _incredibly_ hard to reproduct and immensely valuable. Just loo…

> Reddit is only worth as much as its community

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#63

Post by awakeasleep »

lessnonymous wrote: post #51
rm999 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you see drastic and sudden changes in reddit, it's usually something external. In this case the beginning of December marks the end of the semester for college and high school students, who use reddit more during reading period/christmas break. They will soon start school again and things will return to normal. That kind of behavior has been pretty much the norm for years at reddit. Not to say it's ubiquitous, r…

I hate this sort of joke. It reinforces the behavior for people who don't see it as a joke. And there's a lot of them. "Oh, it's OK and funny to call people faggots" I wish regular Redditors would stamp this shit out. No, I'm not being unnecessarily precious or PC. I used to laugh at distasteful misogynistic jokes (and worse) but somebody pointed out to me that joking about it normalizes it. And to the depraved part…

Too true. And in the same way we forget "simple" tasks like googling a tech support question are actually advanced behaviors, we become blind to the fact that the vast majority of the world isn't ironically playing with our expectations all the time.

And furthermore, irony and the "it's a joke" mentality can be used to justify the continuation of behaviors that don't meet people's own standards. It's easier to repeat a lame justification for thoughtless behavior than to spend months working to break a bad habit.

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#64

Post by lwat »

OriginalSyn wrote: post #47
lwat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It moved but you can still do it. https://www.google.com/reviews/t

Well that link works but the filtering doesn't... If I search for "Javascript" W3Schools is top result despite the fact I blocked it.

You are right, it does seem to be broken :(

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/N72...

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#66

Post by awakeasleep »

rplnt wrote: post #27
cremnob wrote: post #3

In recent years I've really grown to despise Reddit, so I'm going to get a kick out of the angst that Redditors will feel when they gradually realize that their interests and Reddit's interests diverge.

To like reddit you have to unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and swera to never read discussions in them. Then find yourself a nice set of smaller subreddits that you like. Either there are alternatives with stricter rules to the default subs or there are more specific subs.

There are important flaws to this approach.

Every interest has different levels of content. Pictures range from works of art that took hours to conceptualize, to images of a cat butt with a text overlay.

As a subreddit becomes more popular, the greatest common denominator's interests take precedence. And while you can attempt a solution by splitting the sub community, say, no text overlays, that doesn't work as well everywhere.

For example, a programming community needs to split into subs for languages, and the technical level of the articles. This makes aggregation more difficult, and ruins an information flow that would include a home for overall high quality posters-- now they have a more difficult time determining where to post, and must question whether the articles they submit meet the requirements for technical depth etc.

Even then, the process of dilution begins again as the lesser posters begin to inflate the sub communities.

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#67

Post by eurleif »

kami8845 wrote: post #37
DanBC wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would have said the same about MySpace or text-only Usenet at one time. Imgur has some voting stuff now, and it'll be interesting to see if that helps it take off or not. And there are other sites trying to develop good communications. Hubski, for example.

Hubski looks interesting. I'll keep an eye on them, though do they do still look very tiny. I don't think Imgur will ever take off. There is no fostering of individual subcultures like there was with subreddits. Basically their entire content revolves around funny images. Their comments never become thoughtful like reddit's. MySpace started in 2003 and lost the battle to FB in 2008. Reddit was founded and has been gr…

>I don't think Imgur will ever take off.

Huh? Imgur already has more traffic than reddit. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c...;

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#69

Post by batiudrami »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #54
sillysaurus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have something to say that starts with "I hate to be that guy" then just don't say it. You're not their main audience, and they're massively popular. They're continuing to grow in popularity, and they're becoming increasingly relevant as a primary source of information. Reddit represents a fundamental step forward in how the internet interconnects everyday people. You may not see anything worthwhile, but in re…

A year ago I would have bought that. Log out, look at the front page and repeat this with a straight face: >It has the potential to affect and influence generations.

That's because the front page is crap though. When they fix subreddit discovery (and Alexis mentioned in a comment reply that they're working on it), so that you actually find communities about what you're interested in, rather than presenting the opening page of the website as a cesspit of juvenile idiots, then it'll be great (again).

But, they have to not screw that up first. It's not a simple problem - you have to communicate how the website works, give indications of the kinds of subreddits you can find, and get them to create an account and actually choose some before users get bored and click away.

Re: Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation

#70

Post by buttscicles »

slurry wrote: post #62
kami8845 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has a unique and incredibly community. If you take the time and actually explore all of the amazing small subreddits that have developed their own cultures & rulesets and the content they've created, I doubt you would make this statement. There are great people in the specialist subreddits. Reddit is only worth as much as its community and that is _incredibly_ hard to reproduct and immensely valuable. Just loo…

> Reddit is only worth as much as its community http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/

That's only one example of one of the hundreds of active communities on the site though. Steer clear of subreddits relating to charged topics and large subreddits and there are tons of good communities on reddit.
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