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

• ihuman 8y ago
  >But supporting and moderating all that content isn’t cheap What? Moderators don't get paid at all to moderate.
  • gfwhuuku 8y ago
    They have paid site-wide moderators. I've been banned many times by them, even for posts in very niche subs, and I've also been in many subs that were banned, so I imagine they have a few paid mods like that.
    • leadingthenet 8y ago
      Those are called admins, not moderators (which are all unpaid).
• trumped 8y ago
  Hopefully that will be the end of reddit and the start of something new.
• replicatorblog 8y ago
  It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent." I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of the few platforms that would allow a crypto economy to develop and provide an alternative to the dominant money-making models.
  • ForHackernews 8y ago
    About 5 years ago, Reddit hired a crypto guy, Ryan X Charles, to make something called "reddit notes"[0] that they could never explain[1]. He wasted his time re-implementing bitcoin in Javascript[2], and was eventually fired.[3] I guess you could say they were already early pioneers of the "cryptocurrency scam flameout" pattern. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditnotes https://www.reddit.com/r/redditnotes [1] https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/reddit-notes/ https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/19/reddit-notes/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_reason_ryan_charles_was_fired_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2uadvd/the_real_re... [3] http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/reddit-notes-is-not-going-to-happen/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/30/reddit-notes-is-not-going-to-h...
    • bduerst 8y ago
      But why not mine bitcoins client-side with millions of mobile users? (/s)
      • jules-jules 8y ago
        If that would mean staying independent and free from economic/political interference, why not?
        • ForHackernews 8y ago
          Because users like their batteries? Because trying to do crypto properly in a language without integers is recipe for disaster?
        • bduerst 8y ago
          That would require Bitcoin to be free from economic/political interference first, and given the the block size debacle and concentration of power with the Chinese miners, that's not the case.
  • jedberg 8y ago
    The irony of that comic is that reddit had more traffic than Digg when Digg died. The "mass influx" from Digg to reddit wasn't all that massive, because most of those people were already reddit users too.
  • si1entstill 8y ago
    (on the crypto note) is something like https://steemit.com/ https://steemit.com/ what you are envisioning? It does seem like we are stuck in a cycle where we are super into platforms until they become large and too beholden to investors, then we swap. Some kind of truly community driven (open source) federated service does seem like a real answer to this problem. Maybe we will all end up on Mastodon-like services pretty soon.
    • xur17 8y ago
      Steemit is interesting to me, but I'm not sure I'd want something that's so focused on users making money to replace reddit.
  • Deimorz 8y ago
    > I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent." I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site. A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit and start working on a site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093) It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it gets several hundred posts/comments a day and is progressing steadily. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, send me an email at the address listed in the blog post and I'll be happy to give you one.
    • dfed-mpls 8y ago
      Love what I've read so far and have sent an invite request. Thank you for your work, I was beginning to lament that all social media would fall into the toxic shitpost aggregator turned VC cash machine role. (I totally miss my old BBS too...)
    • babypuncher 8y ago
      This sounds exactly like the kind of Reddit alternative we need. Most competitors right now seem to think Reddit's biggest problem is their policy against user harassment and hate speech (even though this is barely enforced at all). Just based on your blog post, you seem really in tune with what the real problems with Reddit (and social media as a whole) are in 2019.
    • qgsrw3fd 8y ago
      Do you have any screenshots of what the website looks like? I'm curious. I'm not asking you to make them just for me, I want to know if they already exist. If they don't and you don't want to make them, that's fine.
      • 8y ago
• EnFinlay 8y ago
  Fun, I deleted my 9 year old account last night. It's wasn't out of some high-minded thing about how they're turning more into Facebook or privacy or anything. That site just hits my dopamine so effectively I had to quit and block it in my /etc/hosts. I am spending more time on HN though...
  • kozikow 8y ago
    My solution is unsubscribing from subreddits that are too clickbaity and do not "educate" me. I sometimes realize "Reddit is too fun today", "oh yeah, I am logged out".
    • ihuman 8y ago
      Is there something wrong with it being fun?
      • c0nfused 8y ago
        It's a pretty bad time sink for some of us. I have it blocked on my work machines so I don't get sucked down the click and scroll rabbit hole when I should be working.
  • sf_rob 8y ago
    Agreed, I've mostly quit Facebook, which was never that enthralling to me, but Reddit / Twitter / Podcasts / Hackernews are all much more interesting. None of them are adding significant value to my life other than that dopamine hit, but I still haven't left them.
  • justwalt 8y ago
    Same. I haven’t deleted my account but I haven’t browsed the site in over a month. I’m far more productive now. I had started off by trying to unsubscribe from the subreddits that were mainly image based. This didn’t really make much difference as my sub list was already too saturated, and I would scroll further to find the quick attention satiation. Eventually I realized it wasn’t worth the trouble. HN is different though, there’s far less clickbait and no thumbnails. I regularly read articles that I feel teach me about important or very interesting topics. It’s pretty rare that I would read an article in full from Reddit. HN comments are often filled with valuable insights that I think will benefit me in the future, and jokes are fairly uncommon. I’ve been more and more frustrated with the low effort Reddit jokes over time. Sure, the concept is the same between the two sites, but I think my frame of mind is very different when I browse either site. I don’t see myself needing to cut HN out as I did Reddit because it doesn’t have the same effect. HN is meat and veggies and Reddit is candy. Or a dopamine drip.
• YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  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 things.
  • Someone1234 8y ago
    Reddit has 230 staff (as of July 2017). edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc). My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?
    • YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
      thats crazy. yeah exactly. what do 230 people do there?
      • jandrese 8y ago
        Reddit serves out a crapton of pages every day. They need a robust backend service which means you need people to maintain it. Beyond that you have community managers, people to run AMAs, people to manage ad accounts, HR, etc... 230 people to run the one of the largest and most dynamic sites on the Internet doesn't seem out of line.
      • gristle 8y ago
        Engineering: - Infrastructure (500M MAU) - Web Dev - iOS Dev - Android Dev - Design - UX - Localization Data: - Ranking timelines - Ad performance - Recommendations - Business analytics - R&D Product: - Coordinating across the above 2 and adding/measuring (new) features Sales: - Ads Finance/HR/Admin/Accounting/Office Manager(s)/Recruiting: - Running a company
    • 8y ago
• tapoxi 8y ago
  Is there an ActivityPub or similarly decentralized alternative? I don't want to get invested in reddit only for them to shut down their API (it'll happen, always does) and force me to use their garbage mobile client.
  • cjslep 8y ago
    I think Prismo is in development as well as another to-be-announced one. Edit: And Anancus is a link sharing app too I believe.
  • Communitivity 8y ago
    Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter. The Join Mastodon website [https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/] has a good introduction. Mastodon is not currently an alternative to Reddit though, but I think it could be, if it got significant contributions towards forum functionality. Perhaps by treating each tag, or each of a certain type of tag, as an individual forum. A 'Trunk'? On the other hand, Discourse [https://www.discourse.org/about https://www.discourse.org/about] might be a better candidate for an alternative, in some ways. With Discourse though each "Reddit" would be a Discourse board on a specific server. To do a true Reddit alternative you'd need to plug individual Discourse servers into a P2P mesh. Ideally I'd like to see a Discourse-like or Reddit-like UI on top of a Mastodon back-end (which would be using ActivityPub). If you want to work on this as well please let me know and maybe we can work together on it (@BillBarnhill on Mastodon.technology or Twitter).
  • faleidel 8y ago
    I'm making an activityPub reddit clone: https://moontreeproject.org/ https://moontreeproject.org/ The code is open source and on github: https://github.com/Faleidel/moontreeproject https://github.com/Faleidel/moontreeproject
• mrnobody_67 8y ago
  ... because raising large rounds at high valuations has worked out well for other media companies like Buzzfeed, et al.
• brettgriffin 8y ago
  I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.
  • wowzap 8y ago
    Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.
    • xeromal 8y ago
      Depends on the subs you subscribe to. Reddit is as good as you make it to be.
    • sosodev 8y ago
      In most subs I'd say you're right. Niche subs can be really great though.
    • nopriorarrests 8y ago
      This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.
      • klausjensen 8y ago
        UCG?
        • nopriorarrests 8y ago
          User Generated Content
        • 8y ago
• dswalter 8y ago
  I expect this raise to result in a number of enhancements to the user experience which make it a more pleasant and enjoyab[Open this link in the Reddit App?]le place to discourse.
  • TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
    The abundance of AMP links in Google search results, and how they purposely block actions, feels like some cheap SEO hack ala Experts Exchange in 07/08 or Quora.
    • bluedino 8y ago
      Who's fault is that? They're trying to get you to use Chrome or the Reddit app to view the AMP links so I wasn't sure who to blame.
• ltbarcly3 8y ago
  Reddit has been raising money for almost 15 years! I wish I had the connections to VC's that reddit apparently does. I can definitely spend all the money a VC gives me, then raise more money, and then spend all that money, and never turn a profit for 15 or 20 years.
  • callinyouin 8y ago
    I've been thinking about this, too. If you have the right connections and can pull down a bunch of VC money year after year for your business it seems you could go your entire career without having to generate profit!
    • jandrese 8y ago
      It seems crazy to me that Reddit can't figure out a way to become profitable. Facebook is hilariously profitable on a fairly similar business model for example. It's not like Reddit is without ads, nor are they lacking in data they could sell (albeit not as high of quality as Facebook or Google). They even sell "Reddit gold" for real money. Maybe they have exceptionally high operating costs? Or are they just really bad at selling ad space? I get that there are some advertisers that don't want to go on there because they are afraid their ad will show up next to a picture of a naked lady (which is something Reddit could control pretty easily), but Reddit is so big that it seems pretty hard to ignore.
      • cm2012 8y ago
        I can answer this as an advertiser. Most reddit users don't log in or subscribe to subreddits, and thus reddit has a very small targetable userbase. Like, if I want to serve an ad to business owners, I can serve it to subscribers to /r/smallbusiness but that audience exhausts very quickly. All of FB's users are logged in and can be targeted by interest.
      • nopriorarrests 8y ago
        Consider a few cases. - you want to advertise B2B software to small/medium business owners. - you want to advertise expensive fashion items to 20-35 y.o. women in NY/CT. Will you pick FB or reddit? And then yes, lack of brand safety for non-targeted ads.
• minimaxir 8y ago
  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 users to the app: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025 https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025 ) That said, it seems like the really bad dark patterns I reported 7 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841) no longer appear to be in place.
  • gfwhuuku 8y ago
    I think that new banner is so much better than the old one, though. https://i.imgur.com/PF3Zc8R.jpg https://i.imgur.com/PF3Zc8R.jpg
    • bduerst 8y ago
      It's still bad. They should cookie the choice so it doesn't always pop up every time.
      • 0xJRS 8y ago
        That wouldn't fit the business model of "push them to the native app as hard as possible"
      • saagarjha 8y ago
        This doesn't work for people who browse Reddit without cookies or signing in, such as for those who use Private Browsing.
        • bduerst 8y ago
          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.
• omega3 8y ago
  I find that the quality of the content and discussion on Reddit has been slowly declining. Even previously high quality/very specialized subreddits are getting overrun by poor content and snowflakes.
  • rootusrootus 8y ago
    I feel the same way about HN. Which makes me think maybe it isn't really Reddit or HN that are changing.
• ben_jones 8y ago
  Reddit will continue to face decisions between their community and business goals, often with the community goals being ethically green and the business goals being ethically grey. I have every faith they will choose the business goals with every matter of consequence, which is why I want to ween myself off it.
• yalogin 8y ago
  Reddit is the only social media I use. Never used any other services at all. The only annoyance is the redesign. It completely sucks. Very much reminds of the digg 4.0 redesign before it died. I don't know why all these aggregation sites go to that look and feel but its very bad to use. Hope they don't abandon supporting the old design. That would definitely make scale back my time on there significantly.
  • baragiola 8y ago
    I use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com since I can't grasp the new UI
• Theodores 8y ago
  This is a crazy revenue model. It is reminiscent of the dot com era when land grabs were a thing. But a lot has settled down since the fun days and it is not possible to get investors onboard with promises when there is a clear track record. The track record does look okay: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit There is continued growth in engagement. But still, shouldn't the actual product - the website - be built out by now with all the content coming from users, therefore not much of a business case for investment? How can they have this continually growing audience and not be making enough bucks to pay the bills and grow organically?
  • eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    > It is reminiscent of the dot com era when land grabs were a thing That's exactly what it is. A land grab of people's attention.
• aluminussoma 8y ago
  Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.
  • joelthelion 8y ago
    That's good news. I hope it makes them rethink their relationship to their users. Well, otherwise, tildes is looking great.
    • MrMember 8y ago
      Every time I see someone mention tildes as an alternative to reddit I check it out to see if I can create an account yet. For [edit] almost a year now the answer has been "no."
      • Deimorz 8y ago
        Tildes only started last May. Where were you checking for the several years before that?
      • joelthelion 8y ago
        It's quite easy to get an account if you want one. Just ask.
  • rlv-dan 8y ago
    In case someone missed it: replace "www" with "old" to get the old design back.
  • KindOne 8y ago
    You can disable the redesign. Its also somewhere in the preferences. http://old.reddit.com http://old.reddit.com
    • 8y ago
• tdees40 8y ago
  It amazes me that a fourteen year old company with a mature business model requires equity financing. I'll never really understand how tech companies work, I guess.
  • dcole2929 8y ago
    That's mostly because they DO NOT have a mature business model. Reddit struggles because their main source of revenue, ads, performs poorly on the generally tech savvy audience that makes up the core of their platform. They have been trying to figure out for literally the entire life of the company how to turn a top 10 visited website into actual consistent and repeatable revenue. You'd think it be pretty simple but look how much push back they've gotten on even relatively benign monetization strategies.
• kodablah 8y ago
  I have an idea for Reddit if they want to make money: I know your site is open source, but it is not an easy setup. The mixture between forum, customizable subreddits, and almost chat-like threading is tailor made for intra-company communication. We all feel the pain of ephemeral chat and closed-recipient email to do business. Employees need a way to show off, communicate, post neat things, customize their department's subreddit, etc. But you can't keep the Reddit branding because it is unprofessional. So...take Reddit, make it easier to install on-prem, charge for this enterprise version, and change the name and default look of this on-prem version to distance itself from the traditional Reddit. Then watch the money roll in as I and others would pay to have more than just a forum (sorry discourse).
  • Liru 8y ago
    Modern reddit isn't open source.
  • zozbot123 8y ago
    You know that NNTP is a thing, right? It's not like the "chat-like threading" was Reddit's invention.
    • kodablah 8y ago
      This is like telling someone installing Sharepoint that they know NFS shares are a thing right? Or a business using Slack that they know IRC is a thing right? Who is claiming Reddit invented it? They have made it approachable...hopefully one day all these people pointing out open alternatives that technically have feature parity will recognize why there's a difference in adoption.
• throwaway427 8y ago
  I will often scope google searches for product reviews or food/recipe/diet/fitness knowledge to reddit. This is not the sole research I do but it does tend to be pretty high quality data. I would not be surprised if Reddit is an ML/AI dataset gold mine.
  • jelled 8y ago
    I take the same approach. Compared to something like amazon reviews the information tends to be more reliable. I'm sure there are plenty of paid shills but my sense is that most people who post on reddit aren't trying to sell you something.
  • minimaxir 8y ago
    Reddit's public-facing data is very useful for ML/AI. On the data science end, you can do a lot to gauge important topics and user behavior: https://minimaxir.com/2018/09/modeling-link-aggregators/ https://minimaxir.com/2018/09/modeling-link-aggregators/ On the silly AI-end, I made a subreddit consisting only of text-generating RNNs: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditNN/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditNN/ Reddit's internal data is even more robust.
    • bob_theslob646 8y ago
      >Reddit's public-facing data is very useful for ML/AI. assuming that the users generating the data are humans and not bots....
• nopriorarrests 8y ago
  The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent. 150-300mln is probably small amount for Tencent and they are not looking for a quick return, I guess.
• m_ke 8y ago
  They've spent the last year fudging their metrics with the new design to make this happen. The infinite scroll and image first post layout has ruined the quality of the content.
• axaxs 8y ago
  The only problem I have with Reddit from a valuation perspective is that it doesn't really offer much 'secret sauce.' The tech itself is not great, and I don't really know of anyone who likes the redesign. Point being, the value is all in the users and content. Users are fickle, and as we saw from Digg (and lesser extent, StumbleUpon), can flee en masse at any moment. That's a tough pill for me to swallow as a potential investor.
  • CabSauce 8y ago
    The social media cycle. Get popular by being good, get bad by monetizing, lose enough valuation to be bought by the next big social media trend.
  • jandrese 8y ago
    It seems like their big problem is monetization. They're probably reluctant to monetize too aggressively given past experience with companies like Digg, where the users saw the system turning against them and fled. Somehow Facebook managed to do it, but you still hear grumbling about how big of a mess the news feed is and people searching for something that can replace it.
    • axaxs 8y ago
      Well, that was kind of my point I should have expanded on. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, et al have a -lot- of interesting tech behind them. From "creepy" suggestion algorithms, calls/video calls, face filters for pics and videos...the list goes on and on. Sure another company could do it, but it's got a higher barrier to entry. Reddit has nothing interesting or proprietary. An unreliable clone would probably take a single person all of a day or two.
  • ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    I think it'll be interesting to see if reddit can survive when they inevitably shut down third party apps. If you don't think this is something they might do, just hop on over to their mobile site real quick. It's full of banner ads and misleading layouts (clicking the image in a image post takes you to a download the app page, you have to click the tiny link below it).
• companyhen 8y ago
  Remember when reddit said they'd use the money to pay their users and then stopped talking about it completely? https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/reddit-notes-plan-paying-users.html https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/reddit-notes-plan-payi...
• zzzeek 8y ago
  I wonder if reddit would consider giving some sizable donations to the many open source projects (two of which I am the creator of) that have powered their software platform for many years which has brought them such prosperity.
• CryoLogic 8y ago
  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.replace(newURL); }
  • Klonoar 8y ago
    Uhhh, you don't need a plugin... you can just set this to happen in your Reddit profile.
    • Sendotsh 8y ago
      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.
• rubyn00bie 8y ago
  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 incentive do I have to sign up? Why should when its in such a hostile way. The incentive clearly is for them the organization to get new funding and not for me as a user since functionality has been reduced for NO reason. It's like Quora... that worked great for funding but has really done a lot to develop a mature business, eh? ... I'm gonna go pour out some coffee in memory of Digg.
  • agumonkey 8y ago
    I somehow naturally managed to stay away from bad subs.. that said their long effort to revamp the site is so sadly annoying I consider letting go.
  • jhedwards 8y ago
    > 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 things you're interested in then you will see memes, jokes, pictures of people's pets etc, it's a totally different experience. Disclaimer: work for Reddit.
    • toomim 8y ago
      Signing up for an account is cool. But we are talking about installing the app.
    • breck 8y ago
      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 intellectual freedom that to many people is non-negotiable. Reddit is now taking money from a Chinese company, where this kind of anonymity is not possible. That’s frightening to me as a longtime reddit user, both logged in and anon.
• anonytrary 8y ago
  The HackerNews community is more appreciative of these problems than Reddit's. But Reddit will suffer from the same problems that Facebook and Twitter suffer from, if not already. Reddit users are easily manipulated by engineered content and engineering content on Reddit is not hard if you know what you're doing. Evidently, there are power-users on Reddit (e.g. /u/GallowBoob) who know exactly how Reddit ticks and can get practically anything to the front page in front of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Reddit is huge -- I suspect they will be bigger than Facebook (maybe not in valuation, but usage) in the next 7 years and these problems will only be exacerbated. Facebook isn't what 12-13 year olds today are interested in. Reddit is a more apt model for online discourse and culture than Facebook ever was.
  • vvillena 8y ago
    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. I'd love to read an in-depth book about it.
    • porpoisely 8y ago
      Most of the content on reddit's frontpage in 2016 was anti-trump just like it is today. Reddit changed its algorithm because reddit admins supported hillary. The donald subreddit is no different from politics. The only difference is that one has the support of reddit and the other does not. And even bigger difference is that reddit admins allow reddit's power users to spam anti-trump propaganda from multiple subreddits. The idea that reddit helped Trump is absurd. Pretty much every social media company was anti-trump and many, like google, actively worked against trump.
    • ww520 8y ago
      Reddit by and large was actively against Trump during 2016 and thereafter.
• debaserab2 8y ago
  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 at reddit are very talented) 10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out. What has the focus been if not stabilizing their infrastructure? It appears to be the introduction of a single page application that feels clunky, conceals ads better, and implements all kinds of dark UX patterns. Meanwhile, there are still bugs that have existed for years that still aren't fixed. There's even a redirect loop that you can get stuck in during authentication in certain scenarios that will completely break the site and bring you back to the same page until your session expires. It's been there for at least a year now. Reddit has gone full digg v4 EDIT: After thinking about this more, I'm not sure that reddit going full digg v4 means that they'll share the same outcome as digg. The internet now seems to be a small set of companies so entrenched in their position due to swallowing mass amount of users and raising enough funds to optimize all the various little corners that can be optimized. Reddit might not actually be dead, but as they continue to optimize the weird and cool ways that people used to use the site, I know it will be for me.
  • arcticfox 8y ago
    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 a senior mod at /r/watchpeopledie, and we can all see through Reddit's bullshit and hypocrisy" and here [1] "Just a few thoughts on the hypocrisy of Reddit's quarantine" [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_a_senior_mod_at_rwatchpeopledie_and_we_can_all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just_a_few_thoughts_on_the_hypocrisy_of_reddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just...
• chrisper 8y ago
  Sadly I feel like Reddit has become like a Facebook news feed. That and the fact that now so many comments keep getting deleted and posts locked makes me wonder who the target audience is these days. Also the overzealous moderators are annoying.
• entity345 8y ago
  "Raising a huge round": spin to say that Tencent is buying a 10% stake.
• all_blue_chucks 8y ago
  [this thread has been locked due to moderator laziness]
• dalbasal 8y ago
  For anyone in the know, what are reddit's big costs? Wikipedia has employees @ 230 in 2017, for whatever context/scale that contributes. The article doesn't mention plans. Are they just getting while the going's good, or is there something expensive that they plan on doing?
• sifoobar 8y ago
  I've used Reddit since day 1. The new website is a usability disaster, and one that they don't mind shoving down your throat at every turn. Moderators are increasingly beating anyone who isn't politically correct enough over the head with their moronic code of conduct and banning users for simply disagreeing. Most of the people who still hang around are very negative individuals who seem to be there more to project their hatred in general than to learn and/or share. Oppose their abuse and they'll invariable mob up on you and make sure your posts never see the light of day. If I was Aaron Swartz, bless him; I would be turning in my grave by now.
• chx 8y ago
  Looking at some of my current favorite subreddits (usbchardware, manybaggers) there are interesting avenues of monetization -- group buys, affiliates etc. Reddit is not doing any of this.
• screye 8y ago
  I would not be surprised. Reddit is easily my most visited internet community and go-to for many niche matters as well. I use it through 3rd party apps or my PC, so have mostly avoided their dark patterns. I love HN, but the limited scope of the discussions here (for obvious and good reasons) makes it far less frequented than reddit. Reddit is like a slightly worse HN for everything else apart from CS/Tech. I also love how everyone I meet in the US seems to feign ignorance about Reddit, despite it being the Alexa #5 website here (behind Google,Amazon,FB and YT) It is almost as if people don't want to be called a redditor despite using the website a lot. It is also the site with the 2nd greatest daily time per visitor (behind only salesforce), above YT, Facebook, Twitter or ...... pornhub ....
• koolba 8y ago
  Has Reddit ever had a profitable quarter, let alone year? I thought I saw that revenue had been rising but they also have significantly ramped up expenses, doubling employees and lots of new infrastructure (ex: their self-hosted video platform). This sounds like greater fool theory if the investors in the latest round think they'll be able to peddle it for greater than $3 Billion without it ever bringing a dime of actual profits.
  • thirdplanet 8y ago
    They have never had a profitable quarter or year.
• rc_kas 8y ago
  Hrm, this smells like another step towards the death of Reddit. The things they will have to due to justify that valuation will not be pleasant for the users.
• ryanmcbride 8y ago
  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 the fact that the workforce acted like a bunch of teens that just arrived at college and are going crazy due to lack of supervision (Every project had to be tiptoed around because of complicated interpersonal relationships). Not to mention the CEO offering drugs to people in his cabin at camp Reddit (the yearly retreat they do) Oh, and the fact that the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. Apparently last year Steve (ceo) told everyone to enact a hiring freeze while he figures some stuff out, and then after a month or two, when managers informed him of all the candidates they passed up, Steve freaks out and tells them that they should have hired them. During the hiring freeze. That he enacted. The app also sucks. They try to make everything play embedded, so that if you want to share it, you pretty much have to share the reddit link, because the link to the actual content is hidden. That's bad enough but the embedded stuff also barely works. More often than not I have to go directly to the source for an embedded video or giphycat thing to play. Every story I've heard about reddit sounds like a nightmare. It really sucks that it's become the defacto repository for so many hobbies.
  • 6cd6beb 8y ago
    >the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content. This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.
    • vkou 8y ago
      That's because at first appearances, the Reddit hive mind would make Karl Marx blush red. Dig a little past the front page, though, and all the problems of having those groups share the same space with everyone else become evident.
    • 8y ago
• jplata 8y ago
  For those commenting about the reddit redesign, I'll shamelessly plug my alternative web-ui: https://lurrker.com https://lurrker.com However, for those who prefer old.reddit you may still not enjoy this more modern approach.
• buzzert 8y ago
  Something about Reddit that has been really irking me lately is the decline in quality of the comment threads, which is arguably one of the only reasons to visit the site nowadays since link aggregators are so common. People seem to treat commenting like a game instead of a forum for discussion. I often see the same patterns from Twitter there (i.e., inciting outrage to get upvotes, virtue signaling, or just pointless jokes on serious articles). The introduction of Reddit Gold has made this substantially worse, as now there’s an additional point system which awards single comments instead of points of discussion.
  • protonimitate 8y ago
    I don't disagree, but I think this has been the case for a while now on reddit. I haven't noticed any drastic change in comment quality over the few years, and I've been using it almost daily since 2012. There are communities that moderate very heavily and don't allow the joke/sarcastic/low-effort comments (askhistorians, politicaldiscussion, etc).
• ThomPete 8y ago
  It's still simultaneously a mystery to me that a company like reddit with all their years behind them and all the traffic still needs to raise rounds and a wonder that its possible to raise capital for such a company.
• miguelmota 8y ago
  With a raise that size seems like reddit will be at the mercy of investor best-interests and revenue generation will be priority one rather than the interests of the community. It's easy to block ads on a browser but not as easy on a mobile app so they keep pushing these dark patterns to get to you to download the mobile app which personally am not a fan since there's an irrelevant 'promoted' post with every page scroll.
• JoshuaRLi 8y ago
  GET NEW REDDIT No thanks. If old reddit ever gets taken away, I can only hope that they'll keep the APIs stable so that 3rd party clients can continue to live on.
• dbg31415 8y ago
  How are they not profitable yet? Every third post seems to be an ad. Their new design is hideous, but other than that it doesn't seem like they're doing anything tech-wise. So is all the money just going into hosting fees? Or am I missing something?
• bob_theslob646 8y ago
  > Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. How much does it cost to run a website like Reddit per year?
• ggregoire 8y ago
  Interesting that most of the comments here are about Reddit itself (the product) and almost nothing about Tencent. For reminder, Tencent owns - Riot Games (League of Legends, one of the most played game in the west) - Epic Games (Fortnite, another one of the most played game in the west) - and now Reddit (one of the most visited social network in the west)
  • thirdplanet 8y ago
    So just purely based off investments, Saudi Arabia owns Twitter. Russia has had its hands in Facebook since 2009. Now China has a big stake in Reddit. Genuinely curious where this will lead.
• wpdev_63 8y ago
  Reddit is worth more just for the political influencing alone. It's known within certain circles that they manipulate the voting system so that articles of their choice reach the front page.
• randomsearch 8y ago
  On Paul Graham's topic of "unicorns hiding in plain sight", I think news aggregation/discussion along the lines of Reddit is today's MySpace opportunity: an incumbent that could easily be bested 10x.
• _zachs 8y ago
  Planning on making my own Reddit that will have no future plans to be monetized and will focus on the actual users. Who's in?
• wmnwmn 8y ago
  Well, it was fun while it lasted.
• jb3689 8y ago
  All good things must come to an end
• xemdetia 8y ago
  It's weird to me to see more investment in reddit as it mostly feels like it's gone downhill. It could be my own interests but most of the subreddits who don't have an outside feed (around a game like overwatch, or primary/secondary major city sub) just have been withering away and it's those niches that makes reddit 'stick.' The new design/company focus seems to feel directly in contrast to the staying power that the niche-ness provides and I am not sure how far apart these two points are.
• crispytx 8y ago
  They've really fixed the effectiveness of their ads with the site redesign, so maybe the increased valuation is worth it. Not really something end consumers notice, but as an advertiser I definitely have.
• intopieces 8y ago
  I know $3B is a lot for a valuation, but I can’t help but feel like it should be higher, given how influential the site is.
• gavman 8y ago
  I've always felt that Reddit would work really well as a non-profit. This would remove the inherent conflict between keeping the focus on communities/shared-interests (what drew me to Reddit in the first place) and the financial incentive pushing towards profiles/gathering personal information for ads. I would definitely donate to Reddit monthly if it went that route.
  • e1ven 8y ago
    It hasn't launched publicly yet, but that seems to be what Tildes is going for. https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
    • gavman 8y ago
      Hadn't heard of it, but will definitely keep an eye on it. Thanks!
• dexoplex 8y ago
  Tencent, the giant tech company leading the funding round, owns Wechat and is helping to implement elements of the Chinese Social Credit System. One such recent feature for the program they are trialing is nicknamed the "Deadbeat map". https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-24/new-wechat-app-maps-deadbeat-debtors-in-china/10739016 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-24/new-wechat-app-maps-d...
  • taurath 8y ago
    They also own League of Legends maker Riot Games, have a large stake in Fortnite maker Epic Games, and a rediculous number of services. They are putting their money literally anywhere there are eyeballs and attention.
• VikingCoder 8y ago
  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 "trust" for authentication / authorization / pseudo-anonymity?
  • e1ven 8y ago
    I had worked on one a few years ago, which used a DHT to exchange messages which were signed GPG JSON. At one point I had it using a Dining Cryptographers-style algorithm to post messages fairly anonymously. I don't recall if that stayed in. One problem with P2P these days is that you need people to run servers, which they don't typically want to do. I made a small RaspPi box they could run, and planned to run a public instance for people who didn't want to go that far. One problem I ran into is how to stop terrible posts. Freenet/etc have a problem with people sharing illegal and harmful material, and I didn't particularly want to help with that. Additionally, when you create an alt-platform, it gets used be people who are kicked off of mainstream platforms. I didn't really want to end up creating a service primarily used by pedophiles and nazis. I think there are ways to solve the technical challenges, but it's still difficult to solve the community-management in a distributed/sane way. (The solution I came up with btw was opt-in mods. People could publish a ban list, and you could subscribe to whomevers you want. But I don't think that's a great long-term solution) I still think there is some good work to be done in this space, and I may circle back to it someday, but the community elements are vexing. You can see my version at https://github.com/e1ven/Tavern https://github.com/e1ven/Tavern
  • marcinzm 8y ago
    >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 Mastodon for an example.
• sergiotapia 8y ago
  It's spiraling down now. Too transparent that hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent to shape public opinion. Shills all over the place, in every single subreddit. And if they can take over a subreddit, they'll prop up a new one with the right people in charge by spamming it's content enough that it reaches /r/all. The clocks ticking on reddit. It used to be such a different beast back in 2005.
• smrtinsert 8y ago
  In an increasingly consolidated social media space, I'm so glad Reddit still exists as an independent entity. At this point I consider their independence patriotic.
• oskkejdjdkjd 8y ago
  Reddit is awful. I used to absolutely love reddit in 2010, 2011. Back then, reddit was at a stage where it was just starting to be mainstream. Most of the people who had found reddit on their own or by word of mouth, and who had liked it, were cool and smart, so to speak. At the same time, reddit was becoming very popular and being seen more and more as a meme-ey social movement. As the importance of reddit became more apparent, it galvanized all those cool, smart people to work very hard to create excellent content and generally nurture the community. That was the key to the goodness of early reddit: a very high caliber subset of the user-base being driven to put tons of effort into content creation and community management — driven by the intoxicating idea that reddit was the next big thing more or less. I remember visiting a friend at UCSB in 2011, and everybody talking about reddit. One of his female roommates asked if I browsed reddit. It was just a very exciting thing back then. But now look at it.
• simonsaidit 8y ago
  Reddit was great back when done in lisp and mostly about programming and Paul Graham essays. Back before Digg died.
• gwynn 8y ago
  $2.7 billion pre-money valuation from Tencent? Really? Sounds like a soft power overvaluation loan.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• dmode 8y ago
  I am actually surprised that Reddit is only valued at $3B. Given the amount of traffic and engagement, I thought the valuation would be fairly higher. Pinterest has a $10B valuation, Reddit definitely feels more popular than Pinterest.
• tinco 8y ago
  Reddit isn't worth $3B, and management trying to justify the validation and provide returns to the investors will kill it. Just a quick peek on `/r/beta` will show you the weird things Reddit is doing to maximize value and how it is alienating users. Unobtrusive ads don't make investors enough money, Facebook has already shown that. To derive maximum revenue per user, you need to drive your users to the edge of not enjoying the site anymore. With these investments Reddit will be walking that line, and who knows if Reddit is too big to digg?
  • zachlatta 8y ago
    What about Instagram? People seem to like their ads, at least from the friends I've talked to.
• cralder 8y ago
  If you want to fix Reddit, come build the replacement with us! Our team of 5 at Upstream is creating a social content platform that combines crowd-sourced curation with machine learning to map the web by topic and surface relevant content for your interests. We also provide content recommendations from friends/influencers and help people create playlists of their favorite finds. We've built an alpha and are moving toward a public beta. Email me at chris_alder@berkeley.edu if you're interested in seeing a demo. We're looking for skilled devs to join the team.
• ralusek 8y ago
  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 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...
• tootahe45 8y ago
  I'm confused why Reddit has gotten a free pass on the fake news thing when from my observations they're #1 in that department, ahead of Twitter and then Facebook. Reddit offers the easiest sign-up process making it a haven for vote-manipulation (and thought manipulation) bots. They only just started 'locking' compromised accounts, which just forces a password reset which bots totally can't do. Could it be that the fake news & bots on Reddit just support the correct side?
• jarjoura 8y ago
  OMG, the amount of hate in here, it's so disturbing! I know we're all entitled to our opinions, but this is quite depressing. Reddit has been such an incredible space for me to discover myself and adds tremendous value to my life. I for one celebrate that they are growing and look forward to a long future together.
• btbuildem 8y ago
  Oh great.. it will finally become so bad I will stop wasting my time there. Great!
• throwaway415415 8y ago
  That explains why they are being so aggressive about using the app. They are trying to up these numbers for investors. I feel less hatred towards them now that I understand that.
• jlarocco 8y ago
  Must be .com bubble 2.0 if VCs will throw that much money at a company who can't monetize that many users after this many years. Not my money, so I don't care, but I do really have to wonder what their plan is. The way I see it, Google, Apple, and Facebook won't buy them because they're not competitors and they already have more users. And 99% of Reddit users probably use 1 or more of those 3 already anyway. An IPO seems unlikely because they're not making enough money. So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company?
  • umeshunni 8y ago
    > So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company? For the second time, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwired-acquires-reddit/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwi... Reddit has an interesting corporate history of being a startup --> acquisition --> subsidiary --> spinout --> "startup" --> ??
    • jlarocco 8y ago
      Huh, I vaguely remember them getting bought, but didn't know about the subsidiary and spinout parts. I guess they're all playing hot potato until it goes bust.
• covercash 8y ago
  Reddit is still great if you take the time to curate subreddits that pertain to your interests and you use a 3rd party app (Apollo is really fantastic.) I mostly spend my time moderating r/CrohnsDisease and making sure the people who post there get at least one thoughtful reply. I browse r/all most days but rarely do I post content or comments outside of my main subs because there’s just so much toxicity on the platform. I wish Alexis had been able to influence the core values of the company before leaving the second time, he seems like one of the few genuinely good people at that level of major tech companies these days. It’s a shame he’s moved on to other things.
  • DanTheManPR 8y ago
    I find the front page basically without value... ...but individual subreddits for can be quite valuable global public spaces for specific topics. They're centralized, searchable, and generally don't put any walls in front of non-registered users. A lot of internet searches will lead you to years-old posts on a subreddit dedicated to the subject, with a long discussion thread, and links to more of that same content on that same subject. Forums previously filled this function (and usenet before), but Reddit has the advantage of a more modern and consistent interface. Facebook groups could have potentially filled this role, but are totally opaque to outside searches, and so are not easily discovered.
• SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  What a great time to point out an example of Reddit behavior just today... https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/an6vek/video_from_the_lawyers_has_been_released_in_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/an6vek/video_from_t... You have to be some special sort of special to think Reddit Inc isn't complicit in the censorship going on. That's not a long term sustainable position. They're far too obvious about it.
• scoot_718 8y ago
  For what exactly? What would they spend 3 Billion on?
• asdfx 8y ago
  I have a naive question. All these moderators do spend considerable time and effort on reddit. And now reddit is going public, do the moderators get paid going forward? why would someone want to volunteer for a profit making company?
  • e1ven 8y ago
    Semi-paid volunteers are legally tricky - https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/ https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/ People volunteer to moderate communities because they care about the value of that community. Not dissimilar from running a small forum.
  • HNLurker2 8y ago
    Because it hosts the community itself. Perhaps a reddit alternative would be just a reddit hoster that hosts the platform for X$ and moderators find a way to get paid.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I read the title wrong, that they were raising 3B. Still, raising $150m is large. Reddit has changed so much over the years but I still like Reddit enough to do an auto-donation every month. I think I support Reddit more out of sentimental reasons because I don’t spend too much time anymore on their site but I enjoy it much more than, for example, Facebook that I only spend a few minutes a month on.
• king_magic 8y ago
  Reddit has become a hostile trash fire of a user experience. Can’t figure out why people subject themselves to it.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• bluecalm 8y ago
  I still can't understand how Reddit needs 150-300 million to keep functioning. Is there any information about how much money they spend and for what purposes?
• nabla9 8y ago
  * valued roughly $10 per monthly active user * Must make something like $0.01 - $0.007 ROI per active user per year to justify that valuation without growth. * If user base grows, you can reduce those numbers accordingly * If you take into account the risk that comes with new competition, valuation should go down. 20 years from now Reddit can be as valuable as Slashdot, Myspace or Usenet. Personally I think Reddit has limited lifespan. $3B valuation is based on dot-com type hype. World changes and Reddit's is very basic technologically. When popularity goes away and next big social media innovation comes, Reddit's value plummets. It's never going to die completely off, of course.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• kumarvvr 8y ago
  As one of the most addictive sites on the internet, Im surprised the valuation is that much low.
• rblion 8y ago
  Reddit is going to challenge Facebook. I have started to lose interest in Reddit too. I never thought I'd say that but it's way more noise than signal these days too. I have also grown to prefer reading books and time away from screens more and more. A tech backlash is underway for millions of people in the developed world. A sense of burnout seems to be common among under 40 year olds.
• sorryforthethro 8y ago
  Reddit is the most powerful psychological mass-manipulation tool every developed.
• zmmmmm 8y ago
  It's weird how I see this as a failure and their surviving so long without doing this was success. It feels to me like the only reason they could be pursuing this is because they've given up on their original mission and vision. I hope all the investors have a good think about Digg to remember how fickle and transient online communities like this can be.
• rhegart 8y ago
  Tencent is leading the round, Reddit is one of the best places to get news trending. Is it concerning the Communist Party might have some control over what information the public views? Tencent is less beholden to the CCP than perhaps any major Chinese company, so that’s good. I don’t think it should be an issue, but it’s good to know.
• cronix 8y ago
  Ah, the great kiss of death. The service will only go downhill from here as they try to appease investors at the expense of their users.
• makecheck 8y ago
  The single thing keeping me on Reddit is the existence of “old.reddit.com”. There has not been one compelling change to the site in years. Quite the opposite, every change seems to be made by someone hell-bent on driving every potential visitor away, and frustrating the rest. It’s frustrating, too, because content shouldn’t be hamstrung by the way you reach it but that’s the “modern” web. User interaction is a crucial part of any product.
• echofavor 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing. You can also share your ideas for free on www.echofavor.com
• monochromatic 8y ago
  Real question: is there any way to short reddit’s stock at this stage?
• pl0x 8y ago
  There have been some improvements in reddit since Alexis Ohanian is back but with this came the popups to install reddit and censorship of many subs.
• Proven 8y ago
  Haha, what valuation? It's by far the worst site I still visit, and it can't be fixed. It's simply crap, with more and more annoyances such as the reminders to switch to the tracking-ware-infested mobile app. Reddit is worth almost nothing.
• kingkawn 8y ago
  Seems like the users should get a cut since they are as much part of the product as the architecture of the site itself. Is this heresy here?
• angel_j 8y ago
  How many reddit users here hit the [-] to minimize discussions?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• joering2 8y ago
  3,000 millions. Not 3 million, not 30 or 300. 3 thousand millions dollars. Unbelievable. And they barely make and revenue. Think about this for a moment.. if internet would stay like this for the rest of your grand children life, then they would make that money back. Bu we are at the tip of an ice berg. 15 years ago nobody knew half of the world will be using Facebook, daily. To think that those giants survive in next 25 or 50 years and everyone will get their money back and then some more.. its staggering!
• killjoywashere 8y ago
  If you think Russian trolls on Facebook is bad, wait till you see what happens when China owns Reddit.
• jtwigg 8y ago
  I quit reddit back when I quit facebook. Best choice I ever made, I would encourage you to do the same.
• throwmeback 8y ago
  I miss the days of uncensored content on Reddit. This is what drew me to using it in the first place. Nowadays it's the place I get my porn fix from sometimes.
• dizzylight 8y ago
  Tecent is evil company collecting all user infos and handles them to communist party.
• Rainymood 8y ago
  Mark my words, Reddit is going to become the new Digg.
• babysasquatch 8y ago
  super beta but https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im on the horizon
• babysasquatch 8y ago
  https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
• babysasquatch 8y ago
  https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
• babysasquatch 8y ago
  not stuck! working on new project who’s goal is real-time news-centric with quality conversations.. beta site up at https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, would love to get some feedback!
• gremlinsinc 8y ago
  I wouldn't mind so much if it was like a platform thing like email... Choose an app, then all Reddit links default to that. I'm not going to switch from relay anytime soon. At least then it wouldn't be so annoying.
• smpetrey 8y ago
  Why go for a Series D? Why not just IPO or direct list?
• dnate 8y ago
  The only thing that still keeps me there is old.reddit.com If support for that ever gets removed, I'll be gone as well.
• EamonnMR 8y ago
  Reddit's new dark pattern to push the app is "log you out at random intervals on mobile."
• vit05 8y ago
  Reddit is quite unknown in Brazil, India and several other countries where social media are used by millions of people. This represents an opportunity, but also a risk. Opportunity to grow in these countries, or see another company offering similar service arise and gain momentum. If @spez give me 10 horses with food for 20 days walk I could come back with more than 30 million users from Brazil alone.
• newintellectual 8y ago
  Exactly what about this crappy software and user interface merits a 3 billion dollar valuation?
• lazyhummingbird 8y ago
  Ctrl-F for "moat" and found none. That said, they're the first thing to pop into my browser bar when I press R.