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Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

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Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#111

Post by mikekchar »

peteretep wrote: post #62
robertAngst wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has gotten worse since I started visiting ~2 years ago. That said, still some of the best comments.

I have been here rather longer than you, and not noticed a decline in the time period you’ve identified. I do note however there seems to be a tendency in all communities for people to think it declined since they started using it.

I started about 4 years ago. While I haven't really noticed much of a decline in comment quality, I think I have noticed a trend towards articles from large mainstream publications making it to the front page. Having said that, the front page as I write this is full of TechCrunch, so it is very possible this is confirmation bias ;-)

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#112

Post by Deimorz »

nindalf wrote: post #102
Deimorz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site (which, like you mentioned, is manifesting through the redesign, the dark patterns, and so on). They've now taken…

This comment would have been fine without the preceding humblebrag. "Oh its so difficult dealing with massive interest from HN, but oh well I'll take the hit for your sake". Admit it, if a bunch of folks from HN join it's great for you.

It was more that I already spent about 6 hours between yesterday and today replying to emails instead of doing the things that I'd prefer to, but you're right, I wouldn't be posting if I didn't want the attention.

I'll remove that line, it was just me sighing and didn't add anything of value.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#113

Post by uncletaco »

lanevorockz wrote: post #46
abnry wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very good advice. One of my most upvoted Hacker News comments was saying that creating an account and whitelisting the subreddits you want to read is a tremendous improvement on reddit. Funny thing to me is that it is really hard to isolate yourself in this way on Twitter. I've spent a lot of time trying to do this but politics always seems to leak through. One thing that has helped is by turning off retweets…

Twitter is a rage machine, that’s what makes people glued to it. Twitter threads are also a waste of time.

Honestly my twitter experience became a lot better once I self imposed a rule to not follow politicians, journalists, and dedicated joke accounts. Now it's mostly fighting game community nerds and anime nerds who spend most of their -- who am I kidding, our -- time making memes and checking to see who's showing up where in terms of cons or tournaments.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#114

Post by uncletaco »

sixQuarks wrote: post #10
fermienrico wrote: post #8

I've seen Reddit degrade painfully over last 8-10 years. It was full of intelligent comments, insight and unique perspective from people all over the world. Browsing the front page and reading the comments makes me sad that instead of intellectual discourse, we have a 3 billion dollar meme making machine. I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go wi…

I’m a 13-year reddit user. The quality of the site going down is simply a symptom of its popularity. Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. You can still find intelligent discussion on reddit, you just have to do a lot more work filtering.

> how dumb the median joe is

FTFY, to bring a little reddit to this thread.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#115

Post by adventured »

colordrops wrote: post #94
adventured wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does it mean for America when it's no longer the owner or creator of culture? That premise is no more valid today with China than it was at the height of Japan-takes-over-the-world mania. Japan via Sony accumulated a large ownership position in US music. Sony acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 for $3.4 billion, a huge deal at the time. Nintendo and Sega took over US video gaming from Atari. What did it mean? N…

It's very different this time. Japan was under the American umbrella of influence when it was supposedly going to take over. China is a rival and a resource-rich nuclear super power with orders of magnitude more leverage and a very different set of cultural norms and behaviors. I don't think it will go the way it did with Japan.

Japan had a larger GDP per capita than the US from 1987 until 2000.

Inflation adjusted their GDP was nearly as large in 1995 as China's is today. They did that with 1/11th the population. China will never accomplish something that dramatic economically.

Japan held a lot more influence over the US at the time precisely because we were allies. China will never be allowed to acquire large numbers of important US companies (and vice versa), because we're unlikely to ever be allies. Japan's holdings of the US national debt back then as a % were also far greater than China's position is today.

In 1991, it was Japanese billionaires dominating the global richest 50 list. Taikichiro Mori and Yoshiaki Tsutsumi were the two richest people in the world, at $15b and $14b. That's nothing like what is occurring today, American billionaires are dominant.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the Japanese corporate giants that ruled the global economy. Today it's American corporate giants by a large margin. China's giants mostly can't leave their own borders and never will. The regressive command economy straight-jacket - mixed with political doctrine-based restraints - that their companies are permanently ruled by, won't allow it.

China's leverage today is not orders of magnitude greater than Japan at its economic peak. Asia as an example was far poorer across the board in 1985-1995 than it is today, Japan towered over Asia economically in a way China never will. In 1985, South Korea's GDP per capita was 20% that of Japan; China was 2.5% that of Japan; and so on.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#116

Post by knolax »

nindalf wrote: post #102
Deimorz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site (which, like you mentioned, is manifesting through the redesign, the dark patterns, and so on). They've now taken…

This comment would have been fine without the preceding humblebrag. "Oh its so difficult dealing with massive interest from HN, but oh well I'll take the hit for your sake". Admit it, if a bunch of folks from HN join it's great for you.

Having just tried Tilde, I think a bunch of users HN going to Tilde would probably be equivalent to a bunch of Reddit users going to HN. The quality of discussion is going to go down as the forum gets bigger.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#117

Post by tzs »

curiousDog wrote: post #11

I'm probably a luddite but the new reddit ui is downright painful to use.

...except for the post editor. It is an improvement. If they put the new editor in as an option in the old UI, I'd be quite happy.

But the rest of the new UI? I seriously do not get it. It't not just the look, which is a matter of taste [1]. It just does some weird things that make absolutely no sense to me.

For example, when you go to the comments for a post, it puts them in some kind of overlay window, with the post listing under it. I suppose this is great for quickly getting back to the post listing, as you just have to hit the close X up in the corner and it goes away and you are instantly back.

However, since the post list is still there while reading the comments, if you do a search within the page in the browser (well...in Firefox...I haven't tried in other browsers) it finds hits on the "hidden" post list too.

The good news is that if you open comments, and get this overlay window view, all you have to do is hit refresh. When the page refreshes it gives you a more normal comment view, without it being an overlay on the post list view. So now searching works like you'd expect.

Also, on Edge, scrolling is messed up in the overlay view. Apparently they are handling it themselves in JavaScript for some reason, and it doesn't match native browser scrolling making it feel awkward at best and hard to use at worst. So refreshing to get out of overlay mode also gets you a properly scrolling comment view.

But WHY would they have these two different ways to view comments? It makes no sense to me to have it come up one way, and then have refreshing change it to another way. (My guess is that the first way--the terrible one--is what it is supposed to be all the time, and the refresh thing is a bug).

[1] That doesn't mean I like it...the colors, fonts, styles, etc., of the post list make it hard for me to read efficiently. At first I thought maybe I was just used to the old style, and so to give it a chance I've stuck with the new UI for months and nope, not getting any better.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#119

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

wvenable wrote: post #104
sixQuarks wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a 13-year reddit user. The quality of the site going down is simply a symptom of its popularity. Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. You can still find intelligent discussion on reddit, you just have to do a lot more work filtering.

I've been using reddit for 12 years and the quality of the site has gone down considerably in just the last few years. The trolling, bots, and hate speech seem to be rampant. There has been a concerted effort for certain ideological groups to take over popular subreddits like country and city specific subreddits to push a specific agenda. All this happens while plenty of other niche subreddits go on as usual. I'm sub…

Reddit has become a platform to manipulate public opinion. I have witnessed some very strange things on Reddit where I presume a company, government agency or malicious groups take over a subject and comments to steer the opinion. It’s easy to spot. Personally I treat Reddit as a place for humor and occasional insight, but mostly humor.

Re: Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value

#120

Post by sureaboutthis »

sixQuarks wrote: post #10
fermienrico wrote: post #8

I've seen Reddit degrade painfully over last 8-10 years. It was full of intelligent comments, insight and unique perspective from people all over the world. Browsing the front page and reading the comments makes me sad that instead of intellectual discourse, we have a 3 billion dollar meme making machine. I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go wi…

I’m a 13-year reddit user. The quality of the site going down is simply a symptom of its popularity. Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. You can still find intelligent discussion on reddit, you just have to do a lot more work filtering.

This is what has happened to Stack Overflow. Especially once redditors started pointing to it.
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