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

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

#561

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I'd love to be surprised with a decent competitor but all of the Reddit spin-offs I've seen are all trying to be not-Reddit, and that often includes keeping the community niche/exclusive.

I think the killer app would be to keep the community somewhat exclusive but also have a great breadth of niche, expert content. There was a time when Reddit hit this sweet spot (although there were also very large subs that attracted the worst users). One of the main issues with reddit is that a lot of niche interest subreddits are 90-99% non-practitioners or extreme amateurs, even when weighted in terms of contribu…

r/haskell has been much more helpful than StackOverflow for me.

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

#562

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

It is also still a haven for the far-left. Does that leave a bad taste in your mouth too?

While I question whether this is true, if it is, yes, it does. Violent extremism, or incitement of violent extremism, of any form, should not be tolerated.

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

#563

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Reddit is a top 20 globally ranked site that does not come anywhere close to performing at the level of other sites that share a similar popularity. In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways: 1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs). 2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are doc…

> I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit I'm sure you don't mean to, but as an FYI, when you say: > It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated It does sound like you're judging the individuals. I totally agree with everything you said in this post, I just think the way to couch it is not by seeming to attack the competency of people who have business pressures / goal…

Their product team have probably made exactly what they were instructed to ... I've severely cut back since the recent "you must use our app" UX took over, it's pretty terrible.

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

#564
post #485
post #325

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The disgusting and disrespectful portions might be a reference, but it was the "Glasses at the end of his nose" line that jumped out as a potential dog whistle. The response with 25 upvotes that talks about Shumer's "sniveling nose" also doesn't help. I know that politicians getting criticized for their looks is just part of the equation and Trump is a big victim of that. However it is a little different when you are…

The antisemitism accusation is completely over-the-top ridiculous. Trump's own daughter is a Jew. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and not one democrat showed up for the ceremony. There are a couple openly antisemitic members of congress now, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Louis Farrakhan hasn't even been disowned. This is a case of projection if there ever was one.

> Trump's own daughter is a Jew.

She's also a woman, but I don't think anyone would see that as sufficient to refute the claim that Trump is a misogynist. Not that Trump was even referred to here except as a victim of the popular act of mocking politicians appearance.

> Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem

Being a Christian Zionist, or politically pandering to Christian Zionists, isn't incompatible with anti-Semitism.

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

#565

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You're claiming that a rogue employee can't take it on themselves to do that on their own initiative. Either of those companies could trivially choose to do those things as a management decision. Maybe it doesn't make good business sense today, but who knows what the business landscape of 2025 or 2030 looks like?

And then my comment would be false. But as it stands today, it's true. I do think you overestimate how trivial it would be for "management" (who? a senior PM? Sergei? Zuck?) to decide to turn off all internal security controls so individual Googlers could send emails using someone else's identity--it would likely run afoul of multiple current laws and contracts, to speak nothing of the universal, strong internal obje…

Do they actually prevent malicious abuse, or do they just catch people after the fact and fire them? I know from reading about the NSA that they watch what data agents retrieve, and they're restricted by policy from going snooping, but there's nothing except fear of losing their job that stops them.

Google's servers have the ability to send email from myname@gmail.com and it comes with all the appropriate DKIM signatures to be from "me". They have some kind of auto-reply system such that their computer can automatically send "as me". They're already 90% of the way there: I think you've overestimating how big a change this would be.

I'll also say that I have little to no confidence in "strong internal objections". VW engineers built the emissions-cheating system, Facebook engineers built Beacon, Google engineers dutifully slurped up everyone's private wifi traffic. As long as management dressed it up a little bit and/or reassigned any dissenters, I'm sure they'd get a compliant team to build whatever garbage they wanted.

Obviously you think you're the good guys, and you'd never do that, but you'd be surprised how "good" people can gradually slide into really unethical behaviour. If you haven't read them I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood

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

#566

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"permanently" for Conde Naste defined values of permanence. Legacy mode will be phased out as soon as it has served their purpose of smoothing over the transition. Or, it will be allowed to die of neglect, slowly becoming less and less compatible with the site until fully unusable.

And that's fine. I absolutely can't stand the new layout, so if that happens I'll stop using it. Probably not good for their metrics for a 13 year user of the service to stop using it I'd guess. I don't even block ads on it. And I sometimes click them if they're relevant (which, lets face it, they are these days).

11 for me and what used to be 30-60 minutes a day (I like certain subreddits /r/programming /r/chess /r/ Etc.) is maybe 15 and not at all for days now.

I miss old reddit, nothing else really fills the niche in a unified way.

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

#567
post #524

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Can you elaborate? I was, kid you not searching for good subreddits and then cane to HN for suggestions and found this on front page.

Reddit changed for the worse when they shifted from community focus to business focussed. There are so many ways that changed the website and everyone will tell you the same. The redesign was the last straw that got me to leave the website. These days the website is packed with adverts, incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) and its packed with an incredible amount of tracking. The content qual…

>incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) //

I think that is to ensure that when they tell you "it's faster to use via our app" that they're telling the truth; certainly when the 3 "use app" buttons per mobile view came along mobile appeared to get slower (the change also including cunning "continue" confusion to make people think they're continuing to use the website but they're really "continuing to nothing and instead changing your mind and installing our app").

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

#568

Control-F: distributed (0 results) Control-F: peer (0 results) Control-F: p2p (1 result) Can we seriously not come up with a way to make a distributed reddit? I imagine running a client on sandstorm.io which is pulling content from subreddits that are each hosted in a sandstorm.io instance. Is the problem with that that it becomes too easy to doxx someone? That we like having a centralized authority that we can "trus…

>Is the problem with that that it becomes too easy to doxx someone? That we like having a centralized authority that we can "trust" for authentication / authorization / pseudo-anonymity? Dox, send child pornography through, use to sell narcotics, plan hitman assassinations with, etc, etc. Not to mention all the fun stuff organized bands of miscreants can do to other people. Just look at Wil Wheaton's adventure with M…

So, I happen to believe in government regulation. Is your assertion that in the predator-prey relationship of free speech vs speech regulation, that the government cannot possibly keep up? That any (new?) forms of communication will enable people to engage in illegal speech, and so therefore are bad?

I'm not trying to egg you on, I'm genuinely curious what you think our attitude should be.

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

#569

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You usually would move over to something better, not worse.

Yeah, Voat's not an appealing alternative. There's an ActivityPub-powered, federated link aggregator in the works[1], that could work out really well as each community could have their own rules and if you don't want to federate with a particular one, just block them. 1 - https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo

Off topic but man do I like gitlabs current UI on iPad, not seen it for a while.

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

#570

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So what? That demographic self-selects to be hard to track, so there isn't any good way to track their decision on the pop-up regardless.

Allow me to send a request parameter “?stfu=Y”

Which breaks on search result and referral traffic, forcing users to install third party extensions to maintain, thus creating new security vectors.

Why not just load your own css and set the div to "display:none;" then?

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