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Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

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Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#281

Post by awkwarddaturtle »

conception wrote: post #157
herrkanin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand this romanticising of free speech on private platforms. Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies? That's just asking for assholes. If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.

Exactly. The best subreddits on Reddit are the ones heavily moderated like /r/science.

/r/science is a terrible sub. It's pretty much people from /r/politics pretending to be scientists. It's a politic sub.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#282

Post by awkwarddaturtle »

herrkanin wrote: post #90
debacle wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free speech part of Voat is great. I don't think it's so much overrun as that the only people there are the ones with radical opinions. I wouldn't use Voat for other reasons, but that's just me.

I will never understand this romanticising of free speech on private platforms. Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies? That's just asking for assholes. If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.

> Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies?

But reddit did implement free speech policies. It defended free speech for many years.

> That's just asking for assholes.

Or open discourse.

> If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.

What's an asshole to you? Atheists? Muslims? Environmentalists? Trump supporters? Hillary supporters?

Who gets to decide who an "asshole" is?

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#285

Post by makecheck »

stevenj wrote: post #3

>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…

I hope they aren't using the mobile version for inspiration, either. To this day I "request desktop site" on mobile because information density and pinch-zoom are too valuable to give up for UI du Jour.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#286

Post by baldfat »

onion2k wrote: post #112
baldfat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. I miss the early days of Digg before people starting getting concerned about their points and front page drama started.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. What 'broke' looks like for a business like Reddit is a question about generating revenue rather than design (though the two things are intrinsically linked). If the company can't make money with the current design then it has to change.

Why does everything have to be increased in income? That is just a plan for disaster for something like this in the long term. Sustainable and paying for employees is not acceptable?

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#287

Post by dghughes »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #236
crazypyro wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its especially hilarious considering Reddit really took off because of Digg making a huge re-design mistake. One thing that drives me nuts about the new profile pages is that comments are not even shown on the first page when it was the almost the ENTIRE content of the previous "profile" page. Really silly to hide it behind the 2nd tab and only cater to content submitters who are a massive minority of users (but that…

It's the constant pressure from VC's for better monetization. One of the features being discussed on the thread over on Reddit that is planned to be introduced is a location-based front page. This will make targeted ads by location an easier product for Reddit to sell and mine data from.

Ugh. I've become the product.

Necessary or not squeezing more profit out of the site is going to drive many people away I saw it we all saw it with digg and slashdot.

I can even hear "Let's try for 5% growth next year!"

Then if there is no growth the cuts begin from the bottom up to protect the executives. Be warned! First they will come for the lunchroom coffee creamers...

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#288

Post by accountyaccount »

sloppycee wrote: post #210
accountyaccount wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most major redesigns end up being a mistake. It's cool that they're re-writing, but they should change things for users in an iterative way or they're going to get extreme backlash. People do not respond well to drastic change to the point where even quantifiable positive change is often met with complaints. It could very well be superior, but the moment someone says "like Facebook" about any sort of newsfeed the res…

Honest question, why is it cool that they're re-writing? To me this signals that the company has stagnated, or has grown beyond technology; it's an engineering team with no new ideas, no innovation, that's desperately trying to remain relevant in a company that is becoming less and less about the technology. That's just my experience, but think about it. If a company has other revenue streams they can capture using n…

A lot has changed since they started, I imagine it's a nice "if you had to start all over again how would you do it differently" moment. A lot of companies don't really get that chance, hence: cool.

Now, maybe it's completely wrong for them and they shouldn't be — that's a totally fair assessment. I honestly don't know.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#289

Post by taurath »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #236
crazypyro wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its especially hilarious considering Reddit really took off because of Digg making a huge re-design mistake. One thing that drives me nuts about the new profile pages is that comments are not even shown on the first page when it was the almost the ENTIRE content of the previous "profile" page. Really silly to hide it behind the 2nd tab and only cater to content submitters who are a massive minority of users (but that…

It's the constant pressure from VC's for better monetization. One of the features being discussed on the thread over on Reddit that is planned to be introduced is a location-based front page. This will make targeted ads by location an easier product for Reddit to sell and mine data from.

And many many users will leave, as they did with Digg. It's too large and lowest common denominator already, and a major redesign will be the impetus for a brain drain as all users will have a shared gripe. HN is a very likely spillover target, and already is for a lot of the programmer focused discussion that used to be Reddits core user base. I've watched so many communities die from monetization, the cycle really writes itself.

Eventually even HN will get too bloated and need to fracture.

Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

#290

Post by andrenotgiant »

JosephLark wrote: post #156
stevenj wrote: post #3

>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…

I'm not surprised about the total rewrite at all. I've mentioned before about how reddit appears to only be hiring for Node.js and React. I am not enthusiastic about the redesign at all. From what I've seen so far, it will be uninspired, blocky, and slow. There is a preview of the direction here, on the new profiles page [0]. This may be because I'm not logged in at the moment, but it does seem a little faster than i…

can't agree more, I understand why they feel the need to update but I think the direction is just a reaction to current trends, they're not tapping into what really makes reddit tick.

-un-needed design - Reddit gets money and hires a designer, designers want to make something fresh and elegant and beautiful! Just let it be text, all the sites that people really use on the open internet are just text. Wikipedia, Craigslist, Google Search, Reddit, text!

-un-needed new stack - Reddit gets money and hires a developer, developers want to use React and Node.js because it's fresh and elegant and beautiful! The only place I see any potential benefit from react-ification is in super-high pace threads like sports games or big AMA's, but reddit's long tail is essentially static content please dont make me initialize 300kb of javascript OS every time I hit a reddit thread from Google.

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