Live data from Hacker News

Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

techcrunch.com

431–440 of 877 posts

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#431
post #193
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the day they crossed the line was when they arbitrarily changed which subreddits were default, removing some (such as /r/atheism) with no real reason. At the very early days of reddit, discussing atheism positively was still kind of unusual in the news. Then, over time, it became a very popular position and advocacy case especially among developers, and new users found the stridency and repet…

/r/atheism was absolutely obnoxious, to the point that the obnoxiousness of some of the users is still a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric > a community that is still one of the most hated As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

If you believe that then you're living in a bubble. Please, go outside your comfort zone and see how the rest of the population thinks. Hint: It's not what you believe.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#432
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of subs are full of edgelords. The sub was quarantined because they need to make Reddit more palatable to investors and advertisers.

A lot of subreddits had that happen to them. It's sad because they are choosing who can speak and who cannot.

Yeah like /r/theredpill

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#433
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What incentive do I have to sign up? Arguably the best Reddit experience is only available when you are signed in. Reddit's greatest value come from niche communities. Personally I enjoy things like r/savagegarden, r/mycology and r/askhistorians, so when I log in I see pictures of mushrooms and carnivorous plants, and get to read interesting articles about history and science. If you don't log in and subscribe to t…

Yes we all know the logged in experience is terrific. However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an inte…

Uh, you know you can make multiple accounts and don't need to even associate an email, right? You can browse just as anonymously logged in as out.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#434
Reddit's userbase quality has been in decline for years. The top 10 posts every day are something like:

[Some snarky oversimplified political tweet]

Top Comment:

"It's almost as if [some snarky oversimplified, edgy-teenager-take they stole from John Oliver]."

Seeing the news that reddit was bringing in more investors just now made me want to take a peek at what the competition was up to. I remember Voat.co being set up when Reddit started banning a bunch of subreddits, so I figured I'd go check that out...Don't do it. The content is just straight racist desires for ethno-states, and an extremely popular conspiracy that Democrats favor abortion because they drink the blood of children. I'm not kidding: https://voat.co/v/news/3016128. The top comment is literally "Every article I've read on this has omitted WHERE THEY GET THE GODDAMN BLOOD FROM."

So, ya. Guess we're stuck with reddit for now...

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#435
post #289
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/atheism was absolutely obnoxious, to the point that the obnoxiousness of some of the users is still a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric > a community that is still one of the most hated As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians. If you believe that, I don't even know where to begin. People in the US Bible Belt get death threats if they declare their atheism. Online isn't offline. And most people still exist more in the offline world.

Both of your viewpoints are right - it entirely depends on what one is considering community.

In meatspace there are plenty of social communities where you will be looked down upon for being religious (if you really don't believe this, you either need to travel more or you need to keep questioning social dogmas even after you've found some place you fit in). The many more places where you'll be looked down on for being atheist does not support making one sweeping generalization - opposing flavors of intolerance do not cancel each other out!

It's similar to how the KKK is still a problem, yet we've got this new trend of oppressing free speech online. It's tough to affect the entrenched players in any game, and all too easy to attack easy targets in a simulation of fighting the good fight.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#436
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear that the only reason it's still open is because of a court order or an FBI surveillance letter.

This is hilarious. Yes the reason the subreddit for the President of the USA is allowed to exist is so the FBI can gather evidence.

on Russians, yes.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the horde of edgelords in WPD totally isn't one of the reasons the sub got quarantined. Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.

Dare I ask what an edgelord is?

Imagine someone who makes an edgy joke, then imagine someone who makes only edgy jokes, constantly - then they stop being funny.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#438

It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is an unfair characterization fueled by my recent frustrations with the direction the site is going. I don't think it is unreasonable to point out that reddit is failing the expectations of their users, but I don't doubt for a minute that the individuals working…

I find this sort of slightly gloating incredulity at just how "obvious" the things a company ought to be working on are to be surprising. You have almost none of the information required to make informed judgements about whether or not Reddit's product team is incompetent (maybe they're doing way better than they should be under the circumstances?), or whether they're focusing on the right things. There are definitel…

The site is literally down for me right now. Second time this week.

Several high profile issues i encounter on a daily/weekly basis:

- Sometimes you are "not logged in", but when you click the login button, it says welcome back and you're properly logged in.

- Subreddits can change background color pagewide, which renders dark practically useless.

- It's so resource intensive that simply scrolling will make a youtube video in another tab start lagging.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#439
post #309

I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time. All of that is aside from t…

You had me believing that reddit was a bad place to work. When you complain that the CEO gave drugs to an employee in a cabin I started to question if your opinion matches my value system. When you were shocked they hosted other points of view then I completely changed my mind because reddit is a place for all viewpoints and thought reddit is starting to sound like a great place to work. Sounds like teams are impleme…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit played a big part in the 2016 USA elections that crowned Trump. Reddit had to change its front page algorithm to avoid having Trump content near the top of the page for almost the whole time. The subreddit in question organized itself to mass-upvote certain posts at certain times, and Reddit wasn't prepared for such massive, non-organic influence. I wonder how big of a part the Russian bots and trolls played.…

Reddit is still a haven for the far-right. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth that they are tolerated there.

Almost everything on Reddit is far-left, or at least anti-Trump. Every front-page sub (e.g. r/pics, which you'd think would be completely non-political) gets bombarded with this spam. You have to actually go looking to find right-wing content, letalone "far-right" content which I haven't come across unless you deem memes to be far-right.

Hell, the fact they won't change r/politics to a more accurate name and remove it from the front page shows you exactly who Reddit caters to.

Post reply on HN