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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

#701

Post by maceurt »

slg wrote: post #661
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong but it always (in my recollection, so only going back a few years) excluded nsfw? When I last visited even going to a fully nsfw subreddit all the media was blurred out, so you might have NSFL titles .. but if you're that timid then probably any site with UGC is going to be a struggle.

The binary SFW/NSFW designation is also a problem. First there is the difference between NSFW text and NSFW visuals. You will see plenty of text posts on Reddit labeled as NSFW because they include a dirty joke, talk about sex, or includes something incredibly un-PC. When it comes to visuals, there is a big difference with how comfortable people are with sex vs violence (NSFW/NSFL). Some people would be happy to see…

I don't know how reddit even operates while having subreddits dedicated to hardcore pornography and extreme gore and violence on the same domain as sfw subreddits. Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, do not allow those type of things for a reason, because once young children start using the site and the parents/ media find out what their kids could be looking at, their is a large amount of outrage. Reddit seems to have not had that problem, because it is not as popular and harder to use for < 13 year old demographics, but if reddit keeps pushing an easier to use layout and keeps expanding, then they are gonna run into this problem at some point.

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

#702

Post by amvalo »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #232
arcticfox wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well. I used to occasionally visit /r/watchpeopledie as a reminder of my own mortality and some of the horrors of the world, but apparently NSFW wasn't enough for people visiting "watchpeopledie" to realize they might see something bad. So they "quarantined" it, which actually means totally breaking it, in my browser at least. RIP. Discussion by others here [0] "I'm…

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.

I think WPD is genuinely important. There are edgelords, sure. Watching and thinking seriously about what I saw there changed my perspective on life.

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

#703

Post by erikpukinskis »

dhimes wrote: post #398
ChrisSD wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the AMP pages give them preferential treatment in Google search results. I doubt they'd want to give that up.

I wonder how important Google Search is to Reddit, though. They are big enough (like Facebook) that they may not need it much anymore, and may have used AMP based on the promise of a better experience (meanwhile deliberately degrading mobile experience).

I bet Reddit does pretty well on long tail queries. It's one of a few high pagerank sites that has a little content on just about every subject.

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

#704

Post by kamaal »

debaserab2 wrote: post #151

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…

>>It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years.

The kind of things happen when their goals get set like:

1. Increase mobile app sign up/usage by 30%.

2. Revamp UI and launch by 2019.

etc etc.

People optimize for what they are asked to, setting fire to pretty much everything around.

>>They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out.

Kind of strange, because they rewrote their whole site in Python, which was originally in Common Lisp. All of that to solve this problem.

Seems like it was just a project for some one at Reddit to get a promotion.

OKR are a gift that keeps on giving.

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

#705

Post by Sendotsh »

Klonoar wrote: post #681
CryoLogic wrote: post #103

This works with most user script plugins like GreaseMonkey, ViolentMonkey or TamperMonkey: // ==UserScript== // @name BackToOldReddit // @namespace Reddit // @match *://www.reddit.com/* // @grant none // @run-at document-start // ==/UserScript== const currentURL = window.document.location.toString(); if(currentURL.includes('//www')) { const newURL = currentURL.replace('//www','//old'); window.document.location.replac…

Uhhh, you don't need a plugin... you can just set this to happen in your Reddit profile.

This lets you do it without an account though. An order of magnitude more people use reddit logged out with no account, than those that have an account.

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

#706

Post by SXX »

dopamean wrote: post #389
rubyn00bie wrote: post #108

I actually hate Reddit these days. I've never really been into their various communities/subredits- and on occasion they're really useful spots of information or entertainment. But... Their current "force you into app" (which appears to leave you logged in, able to make account changes, even if you change your password) approach is fucking horrible. Their mobile navigation is broken by design and.... for what? What i…

As a long time reddit user I actually find the product to be borderline unusable without an account. There's so much noise and the account features allow you to focus in on what you want to hear. I've never used the official reddit app so I cant speak to it but I have used an android app called RedReader for a few years now and it is my preferred way to browse reddit. I highly recommend it.

This. Can't recommend RedReader enough.

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

#707

Post by zanny »

giarc wrote: post #496
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #15

last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these…

"No other expenses"??? I'm sure their hosting and server costs are huge considering the traffic they get everyday (#5 in US according to Alexa).

Until recently Reddit wasn't hosting any images or video on their own servers. That was a recent "innovation".

They could also feasibly curtail the custom styling on subreddits to reduce the space burned on hosted images there for backgrounds and headers.

Besides that all Reddit ever was was a lot of text.

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

#708

Post by markrages »

ndnxhs wrote: post #524
HNLurker2 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content.

When it first began. before there were subreddits, it was a place for respectful, serious conversation.

A few years later /r/TrueReddit was started as an attempt to get back to the glory years. Now it's as bad as the rest of reddit.

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

#709

Post by avhon1 »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #660
andrepd wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i.reddit.com. 2010 mobile app feel, blazing fast, light on resources. As it should be.

This is great. Now all I need is a plugin for mobile safari/chrome/firefox that rewrites all reddit URLs to append /.compact

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/compact-reddi...

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

#710

Post by alasdair_ »

minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

I am using reddit less and less because of the insistence on using the app no matter how many times I decline.

They have also become particularly creepy and anti-privacy lately.

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