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Reddit files to go public

reuters.com

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Re: Reddit files to go public

#291

Post by 14 »

briga wrote: post #236
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.

> some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize Can’t block ads when they’re disguised as user content. Viral marketers have had a heyday hawking their products on Reddit

I recently noticed the same posts popping up and they contained the exact same comments but instead of the comment saying 1month old it would say like 3 hours. I asked and some suggested it is karma farmers and they use the same posts and same comments that generated a lot of likes in the past to get karma and once they have a lot of karma their posts are more likely to hit the front page. I wish I could block posts from reappearing but they just slap a new title and don’t show a proper thumbnail and trick users to watch it again.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#292

Post by danjac »

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…

> This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers

Nope. It's the result of perverse incentives and poor management. I can imagine the developers (even the designers) had a good vision of what to build and how to build it, only to be overruled by management with ideas like "make it janky as hell so we can force all our users to our mobile app to track them better".

Re: Reddit files to go public

#293

Post by krzyk »

bogota wrote: post #270
ferdowsi wrote: post #33

Congratulations folks! I'll say that Reddit has become one of my favorite sites to visit occasionally and I feel they've earned their success. I honestly feel it is a positive factor in my life, for the little I use it. There's really excellent content to be had, like well moderated educational content at subreddits like r/AskHistorians and r/COVID. I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find else…

Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market. Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

> Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

No, reddit has threads/subjects. Facebook posts organization almost does not exist, it is unusable to read anything there.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#294

Post by camillomiller »

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.

On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild. It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens

Re: Reddit files to go public

#295

Post by danjac »

hetspookjee wrote: post #253
qbasic_forever wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're mad at explicit decisions made by product owners, like the content on the frontpage or dark patterns that push mobile app usage. I guarantee none of the rank and file engineers are responsible for those decisions, and they almost certainly detest them just as much as you. The problem is if they don't implement them then they don't get a paycheck and can't put food on the table. It's silly to pai…

Your last argument can be applied to about anything regarding performing unethical tasks to stay afloat. I don’t find it convincing for engineers that work for Reddit. They can start work at any other tech company, too, so by absolving all the blame is a bit much, in the end they choose to implement it right?

Well, at least they're not working for Palantir or Meta, so give them some credit.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#296

Post by jgod »

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…

Interesting idea. Tapatalk is the only thing I've seen that attempts to unify UX for different forums

Re: Reddit files to go public

#297

Post by phist_mcgee »

bogota wrote: post #268
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re all Bay Area engineers. So switching jobs is an inconvenience with a raise on the other side. The changes aren’t their ideas but it’s not like they can’t refuse. They can just work anywhere else. They probably don’t care.

I mean… browse through HN for the day. According to its users you shouldn’t work at any company that pays well because they are all evil. At a certain point you just don’t care what people are writing on forums.

If HN had its way, we'd all program our servers using common lisp using emacs, serving pages with zero CSS or javascript.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#298

Post by bagels »

ipsin wrote: post #189

So does an IPO make their dark patterns ("download the app or we will annoy you forever") better or worse? It's either money for continued operations or the pressure to milk active users for cash.

Unlikely to be better. Same or worse.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#299

Post by discardable_dan »

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.

Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0]

When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that."

Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...

Re: Reddit files to go public

#300

Post by GhettoComputers »

greiskul wrote: post #288
GhettoComputers wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Split the site. Forums were good because they had culture. Reddit’s subreddits leak into other ones. They will split it to one that is NSFW and SFW soon for advertising reasons. Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned. Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts. Bring back visible downvotes. Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would s…

> Ban politics. That's a political statement.

And allowing the rule breaking the donald for such a long time or banning it wasn't?
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