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Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.
Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.
Three factors. 1. Reddit's internecine subreddit wars required constant admin intervention and mediation. Reddit only has so many hands on deck, so more of than not, they pulled engineers in to help moderate.[1] 2. Reddit is unprofitable, so they have trouble affording top talent. [2] 3. Finally, Reddit's vision for the future has been hazy for the last decade. If the navigators can't chart a course, all the rowing i…
2. Come on, it's Reddit. I feel like many many developers would be interested on brand alone. I was, for a time.
3. Possible. But there's a difference between adding random directionless features (which they haven't really done), and not doing anything at all (which they have).
I love Reddit, but remind me what's their business model? I've never seen an ad using Relay For Reddit. Free content is great but how do they keep the lights on much less justify $1.7 billion? (Also, HN. Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?)
Relay For Reddit is not normal - most Reddit users see ads occasionally. Apparently 6 percent of internet users in the United States use Reddit in their spare time [1]. It is probably the same in Canada, Australia and the UK. If we assume $0.25 in revenue per month per user and 20 million users, that's revenue of $60 million per year. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/reddit-monthly-vi...
Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.
I mean look at Craigslist. Almost no development.
Their struggles with advertisement is something they can actively address now. Before when they were smaller than digg once digg made a huge mister and alienated their users this allowed to flourish into the site it is today. Due to the fear of what occurred to Digg their advertising was less aggressive their advertisements have been less aggressive and attempt to be targeted. But, since reddit is so large now the risk of alienation is much less. Also, other condenders like imgur and voat have tried to take the throne from reddit without success. Also, they have made great strides in making it accessible to everyone and you can get anyone from any political spectrum. If reddit wants to make money they have to broaden their appeal greatly and I believe thats the purpose of the $150m. Hopefully when they do this they won't turn out like digg because they are a much larger network now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.
Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.
Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.
As others have mentioned development of reddit has been slow for the fact that their Engineering teams were performing Administrative tasks to the point that they could only maintain the site. Since they have cleared that hurdle by instituting more straightforward moderation and administration. The only exception to this is when a reddit admin actively modified a thread by users being hostile. This creates irreparabl…
Others had to come in and explain that yes, in fact Mark Zuckerburg could edit your Facebook comments if he really wanted to, and admins could edit your comments on other forums and so on. It's just usually they choose not to.
At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election)
And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:
#standardSQL
SELECT DATE_TRUNC(DATE(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc)), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions
FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*`
WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN "2015_12" AND "2017_04" OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = "full_corpus_201512")
GROUP BY mon
ORDER BY monEarlier quoted context omitted.
Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.
Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment thr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Relay For Reddit is not normal - most Reddit users see ads occasionally. Apparently 6 percent of internet users in the United States use Reddit in their spare time [1]. It is probably the same in Canada, Australia and the UK. If we assume $0.25 in revenue per month per user and 20 million users, that's revenue of $60 million per year. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/reddit-monthly-vi...
I can believe your statistics are at least somewhere in the ballpark. Thus, I still have no idea how you get to a $1.7 billion valuation on $60 million in revenue, nevermind profit.