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Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value
- yumraj 8y agoIt doesn't say if Tencent gets a board seat or not. Without a board seat the impact should be less...
- carboy 8y agoIf they don’t get a Board seat it would be the dumbest $300m ever spent, but if they don’t get a Board seat it means their interests are already protected and represented.
- jedberg 8y agoI think I read that Tencent only put in $100M of the $300M. Which means they only bought 3% of the company. That wouldn't warrant a board seat.
- carboy 8y agoI’m done with Reddit. It was a nice ride, but now it’s officially over. They’ve been trying to turn reddit into Facebook, a personal data vacuum, but now it’s going to get ugly. Considering the valuation, remaining as an unpaid moderator for a reddit sub, is absolutely crazy. Hopefully all the mods up and leave, nothing like letting others get rich from your free efforts.
- dymk 8y agoYou and I both know that's not going to happen. There's no shortage of people willing to moderate subs.
- fortytw2 8y agoI also decided it's as good a time as any to rip reddit out of my daily life, after using it for the better part of the last 10 years. Between the crushing "download our tracking riddled app" / "switch to our shitty new redesign" push recently and massive amount of engineered sponsored content, instead of paid-for advertisement, there's nothing there keeping me interested. This most recent funding round is just icing on the cake. It's only a matter of time before they go down the twitter path and outright ban third party apps.
- 0xADEADBEE 8y agoI appear to have independently parroted your comment! I do apologise. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who feels that way though!
- etrautmann 8y agoI quit cold turkey from ~1 hour a day in 2014 to zero and have never regretted it once.
- chrisper 8y agoI tried that but I get FOMO. Like I feel like I get to discover so many interesting things (news about niche games etc) because of Reddit but at the same time I also hate it.
- 0xADEADBEE 8y agoWhile I think this is a little extreme, I understand fully the sentiment behind it. It's lamentable considering how simple the site is but there exist currently, no good alternatives! I suppose we can attribute that at least partly to the Network Effect. I've been tired of it since the front-end redesign; I grew weary of the dark patterns, the constant nagging to use their app when on mobile, the fact that my back button took me to the top of the page and (most of all, in fact) the overall quality of the threads, so my usage has decreased dramatically over the last 3 months. I suspect I we are no longer longer Reddit's target audience and they will do very well going forward but it's a shame for me at least, that something I've been using for over a decade is fading into background noise.
- computerex 8y agoNot to mention the fact that the site for some reason performs like shit on mobile. Never underestimate a corporate company's ability to overcomplicate/encumber a simple product to the point where it's barely usable.
- Simon_says 8y agoThey want to push you to the app.
- Deimorz 8y agoI 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 (which, like you mentioned, is manifesting through the redesign, the dark patterns, and so on). They've now taken $500M in VC since I left. A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit with the goal of building a site that would actually be able to stick to its principles and 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 focuses on higher-quality non-fluff content and discussions, and gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoWhere do you find yourself spending your internet time instead?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sureaboutthis 8y agoI don't have internet time. I only go to the internet when looking for something specific or to kill time waiting for something else. Otherwise it's more important to spend it getting things done or with real people. Sitting on the internet, otherwise, is no different than clicking channels on the TV.
- confounded 8y agoAt least the APIs mean it’s possible to have third-party open-source clients.
- movedx 8y agoMy advice would be to treat it like a tool: look up what you need, ask questions when you need to, but ignore it the rest of the time.
- baroffoos 8y agoIts a tool covered in weird gunk and makes your hand feel dirty every time you use it. The website is slow and bloated and filled with mountains of JS and tracking
- movedx 8y agoTrue. The new UI is a joke. I've always hated most modern website UIs, though.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoI used to spend hours a week on Reddit, but I've consciously made the effort to avoid it. Unless it comes up in search results, in which case I'm using it as a tool.
- rchaud 8y agoIt's not Stack Overflow; Reddit is designed to be visited daily and 'engaged' with. That said, I do go to Reddit first when I'm looking to answer questions like HDD recommendations or things to do in my city. That's because searching Google for it will give me nothing but awful content mill blog posts stuffed with affiliate links and SEO-optimized keywords ("Best USD Hard Drives in 2019"). On Reddit you actually get the feeling that the question is trying to be answered by actual people.
- movedx 8y ago> It's not Stack Overflow; Reddit is designed to be visited daily and 'engaged' with. I don't care how it's designed. It can be used as a tool.
- chrisper 8y agoA lot of the moderators in Reddit are powerhungry or are marketing shills. Since it satisfies their needs I don't think they mind it being not paid.
- rchaud 8y agoBefore long, a glorious new age will dawn: the era of the Reddit influencer.
- diminoten 8y agoA lot of the replacement sites are trying to do things differently, but honestly at this point a straight clone that does nothing/only the very few most obvious things might just be what's needed, if only because the next company will get a clean(er) slate to work with.
- zethraeus 8y agoThis is a hilariously petulant article.
- fermienrico 8y agoI've seen Reddit degrade painfully over last 8-10 years. It was full of intelligent comments, insight and unique perspective from people all over the world. Browsing the front page and reading the comments makes me sad that instead of intellectual discourse, we have a 3 billion dollar meme making machine. I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go with typical social networks. There is no lack of funny things on the internet. Even witty jokes have no place here because slowly and surely it will erode away why HN is a gem of the internet.
- sixQuarks 8y agoI’m a 13-year reddit user. The quality of the site going down is simply a symptom of its popularity. Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him. You can still find intelligent discussion on reddit, you just have to do a lot more work filtering.
- djohnston 8y agonot sure why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right. if hn got a user base the size of reddit's overnight, you can be sure the quality of discussions would similarly degrade. the same is true for every social network (digital or otherwise) i've ever been a part of.
- robertAngst 8y agoHN has gotten worse since I started visiting ~2 years ago. That said, still some of the best comments.
- peteretep 8y agoI have been here rather longer than you, and not noticed a decline in the time period you’ve identified. I do note however there seems to be a tendency in all communities for people to think it declined since they started using it.
- farresito 8y agoMaybe if they get another $300M round they will be able to afford some designers to fix the abomination that the current design is.
- adtac 8y agoI think a few DNS records can fix their UI, don't need 300MM for that. Just make reddit.com the same as old.reddit.com.
- brownkonas 8y agoThe mobile app UI is fantastic IMHO. List is snappy, easy to perform upvote, downvote, comment.
- Springtime 8y agoMaybe if it actually worked for me. I often end up receiving the 'use the mobile app' prompt on Firefox for Android, or the Reddit logo splash screen. For a mobile friendly UI I prefer the open source app RedReader (which has a nice dual column view for wider screens). Otherwise for casual link clicking I'll just use old.reddit.com, it's snappier to load as well in my experience.
- jakebasile 8y agoTheir mobile app (on iOS) is pretty terrible in my opinion. I use Apollo. It's fairly priced and the developer is responsive, and it feels like an iOS app not a web app.
- curiousDog 8y agoI'm probably a luddite but the new reddit ui is downright painful to use.
- nineteen999 8y agoYou probably are, but plenty of non-luddites agree with you.
- simook 8y agoI agree. The previous UI was much better.
- SN76477 8y agoThe new UI feels like a roomful of fresh graduates designed it.
- baroffoos 8y agoI think my brain has linked together modern ui with slow, broken and full of tracking. I think there might be nothing really wrong with the actual UI of reddit but its all the other things that got lumped in with the redesign. Every time I see an old looking website or program its almost a refreshing feeling that it isn't going to try to suck money and data from me.
- aylmao 8y ago> I think my brain has linked together modern ui with slow, broken and full of tracking. Big +1. Also design that favors metrics. Why did they include this one thing? Why did they remove the other? They're probably pushing you to use the site in a way that increases time spent on site by xx%.
- randlet 8y agoI use the "Old Reddit Redirect" FF add on which redirects all Reddit links to old.reddit.com which still uses the nicer old UI.
- wiggler00m 8y agoChina now owns the front page of the internet.
- steve19 8y agoWell 10% of the front page of the internet, and they do have 20% of the world population. There is no way China would allow Reddit to operation in China, and there is no way China would allow a western company to own a significant percentage of "the front page of China".
- alexdumitru 8y agoReddit's slogan is "the front page of the internet". I think he's referring to that.
- wiggler00m 8y agoYeah was referring to the slogan. No shade.
- 77pt77 8y agoCan you even browse reddit behind the great firewall?
- lanevorockz 8y agoDefinitely not like in the west, user interaction tends to be very closely tracked. Although, China became a model that the EU is trying to copy.
- x15 8y agoConsidering that Chinese tech companies have grown dramatically because of the GWoC and have enough money to invest left and right in foreign countries, it would be nice, but utterly unrealistic, if EU could copy that success model. EU values the privacy of its people, the online interactions are certainly not tracked like in China.
- steve19 8y agoWaiting for the API to be turned off to force use of the official app. I am subscribed to lots of niche subreddits and love browsing reddit from my app of choice, but when the day comes that they force me to use the reddit app, I will abandon ship. They won't care, because they probably make no money off of me.
- itake 8y agoThey have almost made their mobile website un-usable. You have to click 3-4 buttons just to close out all of the popups. If you browse in Incognito mode, you have to close everything every time.
- flatline 8y agoThe original desktop site on mobile works fine for me, it’s all I’ve ever used. But it’s not the default and the redesign is unusable, so you have to configure each new browser you visit the site on. My usage has definitely dropped over the last few months due to usability alone.
- ngold 8y agoRed reader is fantastic for mobile. Ad free and night mode looks the same as hn version with night mode.
- artursapek 8y agoWouldn't that break all bots, which are sort of a staple of reddit?
- theNJR 8y agoTencent has a meaningful ownership of American youth. 12% Snap 7.5% Spotify 40% Epic Games 100% Riot Games 100% Supercell 5% Reddit Hollywood has also been moving in this direction, with a lot of Chinese investment in the studios, and blockbusters adding special scenes with Chinese actors and locations. What does it mean for America when it's no longer the owner or creator of culture? It's historically one of our largest (and most important) exports. I'm not sure if that claim to fame is a net positive for the world, but the changing of this guard will certainly have a local impact. I'm just not yet totally sure what it means, broadly.
- mulmen 8y agoIt sounds like you're conflating entertainment with culture.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoI’m not sure we have culture anymore that isn’t entertainment.
- mulmen 8y agoReally? That's sad. Our democratic values are not motivated by entertainment as far as I can tell. Neither is our capitalist approach to the economy. Really I'm not sure what component of American culture is driven by entertainment, other than the consumer oriented nature of our economy. But in that case entertainment is just one of many products.
- atomicUpdate 8y agoThe president is literally an ex-host for a reality TV show.
- mulmen 8y agoAnd most Americans don’t like him.
- fru2013 8y agoThe amount of censorship on Reddit by moderators for arbitrary reasons, completely defeats the purpose of having community-controlled content. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/
- gammateam 8y agoArbitrary, or to secure investment Reddit used censorship, its super effective! +++++$300,000,000
- LeoPanthera 8y agoSee also: https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete
- dirtylowprofile 8y agoRecently I've been asking more programming help on Reddit because I get more friendly response there compared to Stackoverflow.
- temp1928384 8y agoI hate websites that try too hard to get you to download the app...incredibly annoying to open Reddit on mobile web
- peteretep 8y agoI don’t know what it means for America, but what it apparently means for China is no more Chinese villains in films for an international audience
- jeffdavis 8y agoDo you have evidence of this?
- theNJR 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-movies.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...
- actuator 8y agoHey, thanks for that. It was certainly an interesting read and scary. It is scary to think that if this continues there will be people outside China who would have never heard of Cultural Revolution, Famine under Mao, Uighur "re-education" camps, Tibet etc.
- echevil 8y agoPeople inside China also heard all of those things, just with different perspectives.
- throwaway46e21 8y agoHonestly, as an Asian American, I actually prefer the villain characters as opposed to the new “sidekick/background” character trope. Hollywood writers and producers still know how to marginalize these new Chinese characters and unfortunately, it seems the Chinese audience is still naive to it. At least the villains had agency. These new Chinese sidekicks only purpose is to serve the “American” hero.
- echevil 8y ago
- syntaxing 8y agoIs there a good alternative to Reddit? I've been a pretty heavy user for almost a decade but they have been disappointing these past couple of years. I hate how their "principles" aren't consistent. They ban certain subreddit for certain violation while keeping others that fit the same exact category. They never provide an answer to the commuity either. Where do I go to now?! HN is my only safe haven left...
- anfilt 8y agoPeople used to host forums dedicated too a topic. Forums are still a thing... Reddit, is just a forum of forums... Why do we need centralized forums anyways?
- atomicUpdate 8y agoBecause they are a million times easier to browse when all on one site and there (usually) aren’t any worries about cross-promoting different subreddits. It also makes it a lot easier for knowledgeable people to poke their heads into a random thread and offer an opinion compared to going to another site. Unfortunately, all of that was a lot better 10 years ago.
- anfilt 8y agoHowever, people who would create a forum for a topic were often more dedicated. Same for those that seek out such a forum. You also got a lot of different quality of content from dedicated forums. At least for technical ones from my experience.
- rchaud 8y ago> It also makes it a lot easier for knowledgeable people to poke their heads into a random thread That rarely happens in practice. Knowledgeable people's comments have to be made at the right time in a post's popularity window (< 24h) for it to have been upvoted early enough for other users to see. If you come across a thread that's even a couple of days old, on a popular sub, you won't bother commenting because you know no one will see it. Unlike a message board, new replies to an existing topic do not take it to the top of the thread list page. It is usually the opposite situation that is true. A certain post hits the Reddit front page (usually a meme or political post), and all of a sudden the community is overwhelmed with new subscribers, who are either trolling/brigading because they don't like the content, or simply bringing down the quality of the conversation by posting more memes etc., because that's what they think the sub is about.
- faleidel 8y agoFor anyone interested, I'm making an open source clone of reddit that is federated using activityPub. Everybody can host it's own server and each server can talk to eachother so you can interact with threads and comment from other servers. The project is in very early stage, but it's usable and lind of cute. https://moontreeproject.org https://moontreeproject.org
- colordrops 8y agoI think there are multiple projects of this sort. Is there an effort to make sure they are all compatible with each other? Does that even make sense?
- faleidel 8y agoThe other one similar that I know of is prismo. If they all use activityPub they will be compatible. They will also be compatible with mastodon (which is like twitter), peertube (which is like youtube) and many others.
- puranjay 8y agoMaybe they'll use that money to finally teach their engineers some CSS media queries and build a mobile website that isn't completely trash
- rchaud 8y agoThe only thing they're likely to be engineering is that nested div monstrosity FB uses to obfuscate sponsored posts from adblockers.
- jliptzin 8y agoAs a site that derives the vast majority of its value from the contribution of its users it is a shame that they didn't open at least some level of participation in this round of funding to its users.
- stevenwliao 8y agoThe constraint is SEC filing requirements https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/2000-investor-limit.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/2000-investor-limit.asp Wealthy investors can find a connection or pay a bit of a premium with companies like https://equityzen.com/trending/reddit/ https://equityzen.com/trending/reddit/ who (last I checked) promise you most of your share of the gains in exchange for a cut and keeping ownership over the actual options.
- gesman 8y agoRedeadit. Made in China now.
- samstave 8y agoWhat we need to see is if people like /u/gallowboob get any of this funding
- doorbellguy 8y agoWho or what is that?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoMarketing professional who has mastered manipulating Reddit audiences for corporate clients.
- doorbellguy 8y agoAnd they're getting away with it so far?
- samstave 8y agoHe may be the most successful shill in history... @jedberg, is it you? (although youre not greek and never stated your mom recently died...)
- x3n0ph3n3 8y agoGo to /r/all and count how many posts are his.
- samstave 8y agoFYI - a good thing to do is add a /u/ as a 'friend' on reddit, and their username will stand out in an orange box if you want to spot it easily...
- doorbellguy 8y agoWow. That is a lot of effort being put for internet points. That person seems to moderate a lot of communities too!
- bluetwo 8y agoWhere are the youth of this generation and why are they not creating the next killer platform?
- asdff 8y agoTechnology companies matured into consumer hostile mammoths, no room for small competition anymore. Build something just good enough to sell off to a big guy and move on. It would be impossible for the events leading to myspace/facebook/reddit to happen again today.
- arman_ashrafian 8y agoIm a CS undergrad right now and in need of a side project... I'll start right now :) But for real, the idea of Reddit seems perfect to me its just way to popular now. Maybe a platform where you need to pass some sort of quiz created by the mods of the different communities in order to post/comment? I could see this having lots of issues though. Also I don't really mind reddit going to shit ever since I found HN a few years ago.
- rchaud 8y ago> Maybe a platform where you need to pass some sort of quiz created by the mods of the different communities in order to post/comment? FB groups have had this ability for a while. I'm in one (a meme page for a semi-popular TV show) and to keep the quality of conversation high, new members have to answer 3 questions about stuff from the show correctly to join.
- baroffoos 8y agoCould it be that this generation of new programmers will never see their new tech invention become meaningful? If someone creates a new idea and it takes off they either get huge offers from existing companies to buy it or those companies use their huge resources to build a bigger and better version. In the age of the start of facebook and reddit there were no mega corps taking interest or possessing the talent in these areas.
- scottydelta 8y agoReddit was outraged when the users heard that Reddit was going to take $150M from Tencent but now there is not a single mention of it on the frontpage even after they took double the earlier reported amount. I cannot help but think if it's the Reddit's censorship is in play here.
- yourbandsucks 8y agoOr maybe the userbase democratically chose cat pictures. At a certain point, it's our fault for having a decadent and exploitable society. Why has Reddit needed to raise hundreds of millions long after being established?
- calibas 8y agoWell there's a deep conflict of interest and no accountability...
- baby 8y agoOr people don't mind THAT much that a Chinese company has a stake in Reddit. It is probably not going to change much, if not increase relationships between the US and China.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 8y ago> I cannot help but think if it's the Reddit's censorship is in play here. For sustained outrage, it needs to be something that cuts to core of everything Reddit treasures. Take away their ability to harass and ridicule overweight people online and you will have a war on your hands.
- peter_retief 8y agoTencent is part owned by Naspers, originally a local South African media company who by some accounts have played a big part in the Tencent's success Quote from Reuters Founded in 1915, Naspers has transformed itself from an apartheid-era newspaper publisher into a 1.5 trillion rand ($127 billion) multinational with private equity-style investments in e-commerce platforms that also include OLX, the biggest classified sites in India and Brazil, and Russia’s Mail.ru.
- stunt 8y agoSorry but I don’t understand some of these arguments here! Not talking about this particular case, but I saw the same arguments many times. A lot of businesses in EU and Asia are owned or invested by US companies in many different industries. Why are people so offensive when it is other way around? I’ve worked with Chinese! Let’s not blame all Chinese because of what their government is doing.