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Reddit: One of social media's oldest companies is also its most undervalued

122 points by hubraumhugo 6y ago

greg387 6y ago
Thanks for posting!
est 6y ago
China has an MAU just behind Germany? Is this a glitch in the Wall?
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Another episode of soy chugger sucks reddit’s dick. You’re all such pathetic unimaginative faggots.
jonathanstrange 6y ago
Well, I spend most of my Internet time there but I'd say that forum web pages like that are generally overvalued, so perhaps Reddit isn't undervalued after all and other companies are overvalued. Also, their ads only work for limited type of content like software and web apps. I tried an ad for a book there once and it had zero effect. My girlfriend always receives ads for military drones by Lockheed Martin, which is strange since she's only interested in cats and r/food. I guess one of the reasons why reddit is so popular is that it doesn't really work for this commercial stuff too well (and their website also breaks down from time to time). It's as charming as the cat gifs we watch on it.
zeronine 6y ago
I'm sure George Carlin would love knowing one of his quotes prefaced an article about how a company can squeeze more advertising money out of it's user base. While I'm still complaining: "You now need an email to sign up..." You don't, you can just click 'next' without entering one. "The mobile experience was improved" It wasn't. It's designed to be so frustrating you just download the app.
- Guthur 6y ago
  +1 on the mobile, the constant push and underhanded tactics to get me to download app is exceedingly annoying. Reddit is not the only guilty one there, though feel more insistent than many.
  - fumblebee 6y ago
    On the bright side, for me at least, the repulsive mobile web experience has meant I spend drastically less time on Reddit.
  - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    The situation with mobile reddit got out of control. It is impossible to browse anything without the app unless it is a post on r/popular or r/all. Out of spite I downloaded 'a' free reddit client and bought the full version. The constant stream of useless notifications of the official app is just disgusting.
    - Guthur 6y ago
      I've no idea what the official app is like, but they're pushing it so hard that I can't imagine it's for my benefit :)
      - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
        My cynicism backed hypothesis is that they want telemetry, location tracking and all that kind of stuff. Also knowing Tencent has a stake on Reddit [1], I am even more inclined to avoid it. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/08/tencent-invests-social-platform-reddit.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/08/tencent-invests-so...
      - trey-jones 6y ago
        I'm not a heavy reddit user - I don't subscribe to any subreddits or anything like that. But I do have an account and I occasionally post and comment. I had the mobile app installed for a few months and I thought it was pretty good. I uninstalled it because I was using it to kill time on my phone, and it was becoming habitual (nothing going on? open reddit app). My solution to those types of things is to cut the cord, and I don't ever miss them. I would call it an upside actually, that I don't even want to browse the site on my phone.
neuronic 6y ago
The subversive marketing and political astroturfing really annoy me as a long time reddit user. Nowadays there are companies which sport hundreds or thousands of alt accounts to drive marketing or political agendas. Posts like the Enchroma (scam) advertising on r/pics last week are just the obvious tip of the ice berg. Companies share post templates to just fill and spread in targeted subreddits. Many mods are paid for channeling the "right" content just like Instagram/YT influencers are paid for product placements. It's not some hobbyist forum for the more popular subs. It's a marketing engine.
- surge 6y ago
  Yeah, reddit has suffered it's Eternal September several times over. The astroturfing and low value content/commentary makes the default front page with the default sub-reddits like looking at a magazine rack at the check out counter. The niche sub-reddits (non-default) are sometimes worth going to but have their own issues with being echo chambers. In either case, I've reduced my usage of the site and been looking for other alternatives (besides this one) that I can kind of get in on the ground floor with.
  - edrxty 6y ago
    And in the vein of Eternal September, they're accidentally created a moat to prevent anyone from creating a board with its own unique culture because: A) everyone assumes reddit culture is internet culture and will transplant it everywhere (see HN over the years) B) reddit is big enough to have captured a large portion of internet discourse and therefore people who are deemed unwelcome are a significant portion of those who aren't on the platform. If you attempt to start a board, you'll quickly find that those individuals will descend on it and destroy it with hate unless you have exceptional moderation capacity.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The real money is in capturing subreddit moderators. It’s an open secret in the PR industry that if you can get moderators of popular subreddits (for your market) on your side, then it’s easy to throw the conversation in your favor. Moderators are the invisible hand the sway the conversation on Reddit. They have immense power to remove posts and comments that they disagree with. PR companies are more than happy to arrange for subreddit moderators to receive free product, chats with company executives, even trips for office or factory tours. It makes the moderators feel like they’re “in” with the company, and they began moderating accordingly. In some cases, popular subreddit moderators simply start their own businesses selling to particular subreddits. Some of them truly are honest, but others are looking to make a quick buck selling courses, putting affiliate links in subreddit Wikis and other activities.
yunruse 6y ago
As interesting as these data are, I’m not sure if there’s necessarily anything wrong with the value of reddit’s MAU. As the post lays out, it has a liminal feel to it, but that sorta loses its punch if you put all thrusters into redesigning without any clear goal. As it stands, I find reddit’s award system nice in principle, but in practice it feels so obnoxious that, ironically, I paid for a third-party client that smooths over the UI weirdnesses and hides this layer. But it ultimately remains a layer on top of things that can be hidden. Change that up, and it becomes something the user can’t ignore, and you risk damaging community at the expense of profit.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
Parts of reddit are of large negative value to the world. But I guess those are social externalities from the advertiser's point of view.
thundergolfer 6y ago
Unbundling the big subreddits is an interesting idea, but further meddling with the activity of a subreddit’s valuable core users is more likely to destroy the value of that community than unlock it. Reddit’s enduring quality comes from its supporting of a basic platform that allows continuous growth of some niche subreddits until they ‘fail’ and scare away its core users, having those core users found new niche subreddits which themselves go mainstream and ‘fail’. Rinse repeat. r/WallStreetBets was an enormous social media success story but I have huge doubts that Reddit could give a team the job of unbundling that sub without that team poisoning the magic. The “meaningful upgrades” I thought were pretty solid.
olivierestsage 6y ago
It's hard not to sense that Reddit's at the beginning of a (very long, slow) decline in relevance. Almost every day I see some comment by an "ex-Redditor," "Reddit refugee," etc. on HN and similar sites. Obviously this is not representative of The General Public, but it might be an indicator of where they're going.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  According to Alexa, Reddit gets more visitors than Wikipedia. I doubt they're going anywhere.
- hoseja 6y ago
  I think they really want to turn it into more of a Pinterest and get rid of the opinionated techie.
- tester34 6y ago
  For every HNer that "leaves" Reddit there's probably hundreds of thousands people that just found about this site, they probably come from non-US. but I think they'd decline hard if they turned off old.reddit e.g now.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Some loud people will always leave, but reddit just this months got a lot of free ads (gamestop) which certainly will counter the leavers.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Yes. Beware the "vocal minority" and the tendency for their behavior to badly distort the signal to noise ratio and potentially even make it look like the opposite of what it really is.
    - sadgrip 6y ago
      I think in the case of Reddit though that vocal minority could account for some non negligible amount of the content the site relies on. The site needs its power users or it has nothing to deliver to the casual user.
villgax 6y ago
If only search on reddit was fixed...
- doodlebugging 6y ago
  Reddit's search being broken is a feature. If you make the search functionality work efficiently then it is easy to see that many common questions on hundreds of subreddits have already been answered in detail so that anyone who can find that post only needs to engage long enough to read one post and its comments. If search works, there is less need for anyone to become a redditor and to remain engaged with the site. It becomes like a blog post that gave you the information you needed but offered no incentive to read earlier entries or to subscribe for updates. So, if Search really worked a majority of the time, there would be less need for new posts and therefore less user engagement and fewer eyeballs on the ads they push. New users come because they heard that there is a subreddit where lots of knowledgeable people discuss the product, hobby, etc that they are interested in. Subreddits in general are that bomb pizza joint that everyone raves about where the pies are burned at 600* in a wood-fired oven to produce that awesome thin crusty goodness with just the right amount of char. Reddit itself is the soggy disappointment that you get when the middle of the slice slumps flaccidly on the way to your taste buds because the vegetable pieces were too thick and moist and under-cooked for that delicious thin crust to support. The highly focused subs are the crust, the main subs are the disappointment. EDIT: Downvoted. Pretty funny. I have been a redditor since 2006. Reddit today is a fantastic but disorganized accumulation of the knowledge and experiences of people from all over the world. Search has never worked reliably though they have had more than a decade to fix or improve it. That's all the evidence that I need to conclude that broken search is a feature intended to drive new content creation. Functional search would make many new posts and comments unnecessary.
  - villgax 6y ago
    Yeah, it embodies Shirky's principle- "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" This would apply similarly to google/TurboTax/Colleges Vs.MOOCs as well
villgax 6y ago
Anyone interested in using an exporter for saved posts on your reddit account? Mine has a goldmine of stuff from over the years.
williesleg 6y ago
Welcome to digg. That's what happened to them right before they went out. It's been fun.
jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago
Reddit is a leftist echo chamber
c7DJTLrn 6y ago
What is Reddit's value? There's no secret sauce, its popularity just comes from the network effect. The UI/UX post-redesign is horrible and slow, and the site is bombarded with politics and hatred. I've had a few Reddit accounts over the years and always deleted them after a few posts. Nobody is capable of having a decent debate without ad hominems, strawman arguments, and downvote bombing. Any opinion against the grain will be silenced and probably just banned. For this reason I actually think Reddit is one of the worse social media sites. I only use it to consume content now and try to stay away from the main subreddits.
- throwaway-8c93 6y ago
  How much value can you get our of Reddit heavily depends on which subreddits you subscribe to. r/news or r/politics is a cesspool. r/askhistorians is pure gold. Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable - discussions are polite, to the point, high-quality posts get consistently upvoted. r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US). r/nottheonion or r/gaming are often hilarious. There are three important steps to turn Reddit into a useful tool: - Unsubscribe from the subreddits you find toxic - Learn to use 'Sort by Top - this week/day' - On PC, visit old.reddit.com instead of reddit.com. On mobile, use a third-party client like RedReader or Appolo
  - jhedwards 6y ago
    > Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable I recently subscribed to r/AskElectronics and I have been amazed at the supportiveness of the community. Every time I've posted a picture of some stupid noob mistake I made, I get a deluge of responses helping me understand in detail what I did wrong, along with some good-natured stories of people remembering when they made the same mistake. It's lovely, I'd bake every one of them a pie if I could.
  - jcims 6y ago
    For really small subreddits that don't have much activity, you can access the most recent comments directly by tagging on /comments to the subreddit url, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/
Mindwipe 6y ago
I really hope Greg Isenburg is never given any power over any website I care about. These are all awful ideas.
felix1996 6y ago
I think Imgur is one of the first unbundling examples which I think at one point had alexa rank lower than reddit.
ElectricMind 6y ago
Any thing where people are product is not undervalued. Question should why they valued non-zero?
- dmos62 6y ago
  I really enjoyed how alien your phrasing seems. I understand it and I don't at the same time. It takes some time to realise that the order of words is non-standard and some filler words are missing. A very pleasant dissonance.
  - 4ggr0 6y ago
    Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.
    - dmos62 6y ago
      Why waste lot when few do. Why waste when do. Waste lot, few do. Why waste when trick. I'm loving this.
  - ElectricMind 6y ago
    Actually, I am alien aka non-English speaker. I hardly use any articles. I like Java. I also think English - needs version change. And other languages like Java 11 , 10...
wombatmobile 6y ago
This article tantalises with the last word of its headline, "undervalued", but never rises to the challenge that word screams out. After an entertaining George Carlin introduction, the section "r/Value" says boldy and starkly "$6 billion? That’s it?" Sounds like $6 billion is just chump change compared to the real value of Reddit, right? I can't wait to read more... If you make it to the last section, "r/GalaxyBrain", you come face to face with "The Galaxy Brain moves to take it to the next level" Are you ready to go to the next level? Here it is: "Reddit should make it easy for subreddits to pay-gate their community, sell merchandise (physical and digital), and post jobs." That's it? Did I miss something?
- dhagz 6y ago
  You missed the bits where Reddit should start trying to occupy the space of other content-hosting sites to generate more ad revenue and harvest more data from users. It comes down to the fact that Reddit isn't really a social media site - it's a link aggregator with the trappings of social media, or a slightly fancier network of forums (fora? fori? I forget the declension...). I think it is perfectly valued, and fits a niche that maybe only Pinterest comes close to filling. If it tries to expand its social media elements, it will be trying to be something it isn't and users will respond accordingly (one would hope).
  - Accujack 6y ago
    Reddit's main product at this point is their userbase... information on them, the ability to influence them via echo chambers and censorship, the ability to sell things to them...
  - moistbar 6y ago
    >fora? fori? I forget the declension... I think it'd be "fora" in this instance. I'm judging this from the word "medium/media" and I know how many linguistic exceptions Latin had, though, so I'm probably wrong.
    - naniwaduni 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
optimalsolver 6y ago
FYI, Reddit doesn't care if you complain about the site, as long as you still use it.
buttholesurfer 6y ago
It's a shame reddit has become an echo chamber for the far left. For example try posting anything right of extreme left on the wrongly named subreddit /r/politics. You will get banned instantly and if you don't get banned you'll be met with hundreds of downvotes in a matter of minutes. The sub /r/pics might as well be /r/liberalpropaganda, /r/news should be /r/leftnews. These are just a few examples. Let's not forget the part where the CEO changes users comments. Reddit should be avoided.
citizenpaul 6y ago
All social media sites except 4chan and Facebook die after a while being the #1 spot. I think the reality is that its not undervalued. Reddit is reaching its peak and inevitable collapse. Seems to me like either you become the #1 and stay there ie Facebook; or you make a complete disposable cluster'fk ie 4chan. There does not seem to be room for a middle ground.
lucideer 6y ago
> The mobile experience was improved This has already been said, but needs it's own dedicated comment. In isolation one might think this comment is sarcasm, but seeing it in context in the article it seems genuine enough. If so, the author has likely never used Reddit, so it's odd to be calling on them to write an article on it. A little bit of research shows the author seems to be known for selling a few companies I've never heard of pretty early on after they've been founded, so I guess their main expertise is exits. One would still think they would've used Reddit once or twice though...
- TACIXAT 6y ago
  Their mobile site is now a deluge of prompts trying to get you to download their app. They've broken the ability to easily view comment threads. It is seriously such trash. I find myself accidentally tapping something that either opens something new or closes what I was looking at. The back button behavior is bad with the post pop overs. The home page doesn't even preserve scroll position when going back from a post (Safari iOS)! It is not a website I visit regularly anymore. Someone should do a github1s equivalent for reddit, even if it is read only.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    I assume you must be talking about the mobile app, rather than the "mobile experience" of the Reddit website. And it's just occurred to me that the author may have been referring to the same. I've never used the app but I presume it is a lot better than the mobile website.
    - TACIXAT 6y ago
      I am definitely not talking about the mobile app. I explicitly say site. I talk about the prompts to try to get you to download the mobile app. I also reference a mobile OS and web browser. I have no idea how you could think I'm talking about the app.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    > Someone should do a github1s equivalent for reddit, even if it is read only https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/
vagrantJin 6y ago
It might not be undervalued if the mobile app wasn't trash.
seastonATccs 6y ago
buying stock in /r/wallstreetbets? Are we now approaching metameme stock?
estacado 6y ago
Though big subreddits are too big for their own good, it has its unique value. It's serves as a battleground for people with agendas and a bellwether to what topics are hot right now in. The big subs as a collective are similar to what Digg was, but on a larger scale. It's more about influencing people than engaging them. I remember when almost 90% of Digg's frontage was submitted by MrBabyMan and there were complaints about that. The one-man show is impossible now on reddit, but groups with the similar agendas where it's at now on reddit.
justapassenger 6y ago
Current internet model for products like that is ads revenue. Reddit ads are very irrelevant and most of the time straight out bad. Getting ads to work isn’t easy. It’s very competitive space, and barrier to entry is really high (you won’t get serious money spent with you, if you don’t deliver ROI). While Reddit does provide a lot of unique utility, as a business its is still questionable.
- romanovcode 6y ago
  > While Reddit does provide a lot of unique utility, as a business its is still questionable. With paid-off moderators, astrosurfing and propaganda I'd say it's unethical at best.
cwhiz 6y ago
No better place to build your own bubble and insulate yourself from any thoughts, opinions, or ideas that might make you uncomfortable. And don’t forget the massive astroturfing, corporate bots, paid off moderators, and karma system that is designed to be addictive. It’s definitely undervalued in terms of how great of a place it is to sow division and push people to more extreme political thoughts.
CMay 6y ago
Definitely agree with a few of the suggestions in the article. Personally, the mobile-first UI changes they made a long time ago with new Reddit were so tragically bad that you could almost consider them a canary. My Reddit usage dropped significantly after that change even with old.reddit.com hanging around. On a desktop or a laptop when you visit reddit.com it still resets to their card layout every time unless you login and you still have to click through twice to get to comments even if you explicitly click the comments link. Majority of my usage was logged out and that was not going to change. Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook are also bad about this. Being logged out is dissatisfying on those sites, so I rarely visit them and don't like when they're returned in search results. HN, Flickr, Pluto.TV, YouTube, Zoom and others don't punish you so much for that.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
I like Reddit, especially the wide variety of subreddits. There's literally a place for everyone. Having said that, Conde Nast is busy screwing it up just like they screw up everything they own. Time for a truly open distributed alternative.

122 points by hubraumhugo 6y ago

greg387 6y ago

Thanks for posting!

est 6y ago

China has an MAU just behind Germany? Is this a glitch in the Wall?

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

Another episode of soy chugger sucks reddit’s dick. You’re all such pathetic unimaginative faggots.

jonathanstrange 6y ago

Well, I spend most of my Internet time there but I'd say that forum web pages like that are generally overvalued, so perhaps Reddit isn't undervalued after all and other companies are overvalued. Also, their ads only work for limited type of content like software and web apps. I tried an ad for a book there once and it had zero effect. My girlfriend always receives ads for military drones by Lockheed Martin, which is strange since she's only interested in cats and r/food. I guess one of the reasons why reddit is so popular is that it doesn't really work for this commercial stuff too well (and their website also breaks down from time to time). It's as charming as the cat gifs we watch on it.

zeronine 6y ago

I'm sure George Carlin would love knowing one of his quotes prefaced an article about how a company can squeeze more advertising money out of it's user base. While I'm still complaining: "You now need an email to sign up..." You don't, you can just click 'next' without entering one. "The mobile experience was improved" It wasn't. It's designed to be so frustrating you just download the app.

Guthur 6y ago
+1 on the mobile, the constant push and underhanded tactics to get me to download app is exceedingly annoying. Reddit is not the only guilty one there, though feel more insistent than many.
- fumblebee 6y ago
  On the bright side, for me at least, the repulsive mobile web experience has meant I spend drastically less time on Reddit.
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  The situation with mobile reddit got out of control. It is impossible to browse anything without the app unless it is a post on r/popular or r/all. Out of spite I downloaded 'a' free reddit client and bought the full version. The constant stream of useless notifications of the official app is just disgusting.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    I've no idea what the official app is like, but they're pushing it so hard that I can't imagine it's for my benefit :)
    - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
      My cynicism backed hypothesis is that they want telemetry, location tracking and all that kind of stuff. Also knowing Tencent has a stake on Reddit [1], I am even more inclined to avoid it. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/08/tencent-invests-social-platform-reddit.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/08/tencent-invests-so...
    - trey-jones 6y ago
      I'm not a heavy reddit user - I don't subscribe to any subreddits or anything like that. But I do have an account and I occasionally post and comment. I had the mobile app installed for a few months and I thought it was pretty good. I uninstalled it because I was using it to kill time on my phone, and it was becoming habitual (nothing going on? open reddit app). My solution to those types of things is to cut the cord, and I don't ever miss them. I would call it an upside actually, that I don't even want to browse the site on my phone.

neuronic 6y ago

The subversive marketing and political astroturfing really annoy me as a long time reddit user. Nowadays there are companies which sport hundreds or thousands of alt accounts to drive marketing or political agendas. Posts like the Enchroma (scam) advertising on r/pics last week are just the obvious tip of the ice berg. Companies share post templates to just fill and spread in targeted subreddits. Many mods are paid for channeling the "right" content just like Instagram/YT influencers are paid for product placements. It's not some hobbyist forum for the more popular subs. It's a marketing engine.

surge 6y ago
Yeah, reddit has suffered it's Eternal September several times over. The astroturfing and low value content/commentary makes the default front page with the default sub-reddits like looking at a magazine rack at the check out counter. The niche sub-reddits (non-default) are sometimes worth going to but have their own issues with being echo chambers. In either case, I've reduced my usage of the site and been looking for other alternatives (besides this one) that I can kind of get in on the ground floor with.
- edrxty 6y ago
  And in the vein of Eternal September, they're accidentally created a moat to prevent anyone from creating a board with its own unique culture because: A) everyone assumes reddit culture is internet culture and will transplant it everywhere (see HN over the years) B) reddit is big enough to have captured a large portion of internet discourse and therefore people who are deemed unwelcome are a significant portion of those who aren't on the platform. If you attempt to start a board, you'll quickly find that those individuals will descend on it and destroy it with hate unless you have exceptional moderation capacity.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The real money is in capturing subreddit moderators. It’s an open secret in the PR industry that if you can get moderators of popular subreddits (for your market) on your side, then it’s easy to throw the conversation in your favor. Moderators are the invisible hand the sway the conversation on Reddit. They have immense power to remove posts and comments that they disagree with. PR companies are more than happy to arrange for subreddit moderators to receive free product, chats with company executives, even trips for office or factory tours. It makes the moderators feel like they’re “in” with the company, and they began moderating accordingly. In some cases, popular subreddit moderators simply start their own businesses selling to particular subreddits. Some of them truly are honest, but others are looking to make a quick buck selling courses, putting affiliate links in subreddit Wikis and other activities.

yunruse 6y ago

As interesting as these data are, I’m not sure if there’s necessarily anything wrong with the value of reddit’s MAU. As the post lays out, it has a liminal feel to it, but that sorta loses its punch if you put all thrusters into redesigning without any clear goal. As it stands, I find reddit’s award system nice in principle, but in practice it feels so obnoxious that, ironically, I paid for a third-party client that smooths over the UI weirdnesses and hides this layer. But it ultimately remains a layer on top of things that can be hidden. Change that up, and it becomes something the user can’t ignore, and you risk damaging community at the expense of profit.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago

Parts of reddit are of large negative value to the world. But I guess those are social externalities from the advertiser's point of view.

thundergolfer 6y ago

Unbundling the big subreddits is an interesting idea, but further meddling with the activity of a subreddit’s valuable core users is more likely to destroy the value of that community than unlock it. Reddit’s enduring quality comes from its supporting of a basic platform that allows continuous growth of some niche subreddits until they ‘fail’ and scare away its core users, having those core users found new niche subreddits which themselves go mainstream and ‘fail’. Rinse repeat. r/WallStreetBets was an enormous social media success story but I have huge doubts that Reddit could give a team the job of unbundling that sub without that team poisoning the magic. The “meaningful upgrades” I thought were pretty solid.

olivierestsage 6y ago

It's hard not to sense that Reddit's at the beginning of a (very long, slow) decline in relevance. Almost every day I see some comment by an "ex-Redditor," "Reddit refugee," etc. on HN and similar sites. Obviously this is not representative of The General Public, but it might be an indicator of where they're going.

optimalsolver 6y ago
According to Alexa, Reddit gets more visitors than Wikipedia. I doubt they're going anywhere.
hoseja 6y ago
I think they really want to turn it into more of a Pinterest and get rid of the opinionated techie.
tester34 6y ago
For every HNer that "leaves" Reddit there's probably hundreds of thousands people that just found about this site, they probably come from non-US. but I think they'd decline hard if they turned off old.reddit e.g now.
johannes1234321 6y ago
Some loud people will always leave, but reddit just this months got a lot of free ads (gamestop) which certainly will counter the leavers.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Yes. Beware the "vocal minority" and the tendency for their behavior to badly distort the signal to noise ratio and potentially even make it look like the opposite of what it really is.
  - sadgrip 6y ago
    I think in the case of Reddit though that vocal minority could account for some non negligible amount of the content the site relies on. The site needs its power users or it has nothing to deliver to the casual user.

villgax 6y ago

If only search on reddit was fixed...

doodlebugging 6y ago
Reddit's search being broken is a feature. If you make the search functionality work efficiently then it is easy to see that many common questions on hundreds of subreddits have already been answered in detail so that anyone who can find that post only needs to engage long enough to read one post and its comments. If search works, there is less need for anyone to become a redditor and to remain engaged with the site. It becomes like a blog post that gave you the information you needed but offered no incentive to read earlier entries or to subscribe for updates. So, if Search really worked a majority of the time, there would be less need for new posts and therefore less user engagement and fewer eyeballs on the ads they push. New users come because they heard that there is a subreddit where lots of knowledgeable people discuss the product, hobby, etc that they are interested in. Subreddits in general are that bomb pizza joint that everyone raves about where the pies are burned at 600* in a wood-fired oven to produce that awesome thin crusty goodness with just the right amount of char. Reddit itself is the soggy disappointment that you get when the middle of the slice slumps flaccidly on the way to your taste buds because the vegetable pieces were too thick and moist and under-cooked for that delicious thin crust to support. The highly focused subs are the crust, the main subs are the disappointment. EDIT: Downvoted. Pretty funny. I have been a redditor since 2006. Reddit today is a fantastic but disorganized accumulation of the knowledge and experiences of people from all over the world. Search has never worked reliably though they have had more than a decade to fix or improve it. That's all the evidence that I need to conclude that broken search is a feature intended to drive new content creation. Functional search would make many new posts and comments unnecessary.
- villgax 6y ago
  Yeah, it embodies Shirky's principle- "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" This would apply similarly to google/TurboTax/Colleges Vs.MOOCs as well

villgax 6y ago

Anyone interested in using an exporter for saved posts on your reddit account? Mine has a goldmine of stuff from over the years.

williesleg 6y ago

Welcome to digg. That's what happened to them right before they went out. It's been fun.

jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago

Reddit is a leftist echo chamber

c7DJTLrn 6y ago

What is Reddit's value? There's no secret sauce, its popularity just comes from the network effect. The UI/UX post-redesign is horrible and slow, and the site is bombarded with politics and hatred. I've had a few Reddit accounts over the years and always deleted them after a few posts. Nobody is capable of having a decent debate without ad hominems, strawman arguments, and downvote bombing. Any opinion against the grain will be silenced and probably just banned. For this reason I actually think Reddit is one of the worse social media sites. I only use it to consume content now and try to stay away from the main subreddits.

throwaway-8c93 6y ago
How much value can you get our of Reddit heavily depends on which subreddits you subscribe to. r/news or r/politics is a cesspool. r/askhistorians is pure gold. Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable - discussions are polite, to the point, high-quality posts get consistently upvoted. r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US). r/nottheonion or r/gaming are often hilarious. There are three important steps to turn Reddit into a useful tool: - Unsubscribe from the subreddits you find toxic - Learn to use 'Sort by Top - this week/day' - On PC, visit old.reddit.com instead of reddit.com. On mobile, use a third-party client like RedReader or Appolo
- jhedwards 6y ago
  > Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable I recently subscribed to r/AskElectronics and I have been amazed at the supportiveness of the community. Every time I've posted a picture of some stupid noob mistake I made, I get a deluge of responses helping me understand in detail what I did wrong, along with some good-natured stories of people remembering when they made the same mistake. It's lovely, I'd bake every one of them a pie if I could.
- jcims 6y ago
  For really small subreddits that don't have much activity, you can access the most recent comments directly by tagging on /comments to the subreddit url, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/

Mindwipe 6y ago

I really hope Greg Isenburg is never given any power over any website I care about. These are all awful ideas.

felix1996 6y ago

I think Imgur is one of the first unbundling examples which I think at one point had alexa rank lower than reddit.

ElectricMind 6y ago

Any thing where people are product is not undervalued. Question should why they valued non-zero?

dmos62 6y ago
I really enjoyed how alien your phrasing seems. I understand it and I don't at the same time. It takes some time to realise that the order of words is non-standard and some filler words are missing. A very pleasant dissonance.
- 4ggr0 6y ago
  Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.
  - dmos62 6y ago
    Why waste lot when few do. Why waste when do. Waste lot, few do. Why waste when trick. I'm loving this.
- ElectricMind 6y ago
  Actually, I am alien aka non-English speaker. I hardly use any articles. I like Java. I also think English - needs version change. And other languages like Java 11 , 10...

wombatmobile 6y ago

This article tantalises with the last word of its headline, "undervalued", but never rises to the challenge that word screams out. After an entertaining George Carlin introduction, the section "r/Value" says boldy and starkly "$6 billion? That’s it?" Sounds like $6 billion is just chump change compared to the real value of Reddit, right? I can't wait to read more... If you make it to the last section, "r/GalaxyBrain", you come face to face with "The Galaxy Brain moves to take it to the next level" Are you ready to go to the next level? Here it is: "Reddit should make it easy for subreddits to pay-gate their community, sell merchandise (physical and digital), and post jobs." That's it? Did I miss something?

dhagz 6y ago
You missed the bits where Reddit should start trying to occupy the space of other content-hosting sites to generate more ad revenue and harvest more data from users. It comes down to the fact that Reddit isn't really a social media site - it's a link aggregator with the trappings of social media, or a slightly fancier network of forums (fora? fori? I forget the declension...). I think it is perfectly valued, and fits a niche that maybe only Pinterest comes close to filling. If it tries to expand its social media elements, it will be trying to be something it isn't and users will respond accordingly (one would hope).
- Accujack 6y ago
  Reddit's main product at this point is their userbase... information on them, the ability to influence them via echo chambers and censorship, the ability to sell things to them...
- moistbar 6y ago
  >fora? fori? I forget the declension... I think it'd be "fora" in this instance. I'm judging this from the word "medium/media" and I know how many linguistic exceptions Latin had, though, so I'm probably wrong.
  - naniwaduni 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

optimalsolver 6y ago

FYI, Reddit doesn't care if you complain about the site, as long as you still use it.

buttholesurfer 6y ago

It's a shame reddit has become an echo chamber for the far left. For example try posting anything right of extreme left on the wrongly named subreddit /r/politics. You will get banned instantly and if you don't get banned you'll be met with hundreds of downvotes in a matter of minutes. The sub /r/pics might as well be /r/liberalpropaganda, /r/news should be /r/leftnews. These are just a few examples. Let's not forget the part where the CEO changes users comments. Reddit should be avoided.

citizenpaul 6y ago

All social media sites except 4chan and Facebook die after a while being the #1 spot. I think the reality is that its not undervalued. Reddit is reaching its peak and inevitable collapse. Seems to me like either you become the #1 and stay there ie Facebook; or you make a complete disposable cluster'fk ie 4chan. There does not seem to be room for a middle ground.

lucideer 6y ago

> The mobile experience was improved This has already been said, but needs it's own dedicated comment. In isolation one might think this comment is sarcasm, but seeing it in context in the article it seems genuine enough. If so, the author has likely never used Reddit, so it's odd to be calling on them to write an article on it. A little bit of research shows the author seems to be known for selling a few companies I've never heard of pretty early on after they've been founded, so I guess their main expertise is exits. One would still think they would've used Reddit once or twice though...

TACIXAT 6y ago
Their mobile site is now a deluge of prompts trying to get you to download their app. They've broken the ability to easily view comment threads. It is seriously such trash. I find myself accidentally tapping something that either opens something new or closes what I was looking at. The back button behavior is bad with the post pop overs. The home page doesn't even preserve scroll position when going back from a post (Safari iOS)! It is not a website I visit regularly anymore. Someone should do a github1s equivalent for reddit, even if it is read only.
- lucideer 6y ago
  I assume you must be talking about the mobile app, rather than the "mobile experience" of the Reddit website. And it's just occurred to me that the author may have been referring to the same. I've never used the app but I presume it is a lot better than the mobile website.
  - TACIXAT 6y ago
    I am definitely not talking about the mobile app. I explicitly say site. I talk about the prompts to try to get you to download the mobile app. I also reference a mobile OS and web browser. I have no idea how you could think I'm talking about the app.
- rakoo 6y ago
  > Someone should do a github1s equivalent for reddit, even if it is read only https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/

vagrantJin 6y ago

It might not be undervalued if the mobile app wasn't trash.

seastonATccs 6y ago

buying stock in /r/wallstreetbets? Are we now approaching metameme stock?

estacado 6y ago

Though big subreddits are too big for their own good, it has its unique value. It's serves as a battleground for people with agendas and a bellwether to what topics are hot right now in. The big subs as a collective are similar to what Digg was, but on a larger scale. It's more about influencing people than engaging them. I remember when almost 90% of Digg's frontage was submitted by MrBabyMan and there were complaints about that. The one-man show is impossible now on reddit, but groups with the similar agendas where it's at now on reddit.

justapassenger 6y ago

Current internet model for products like that is ads revenue. Reddit ads are very irrelevant and most of the time straight out bad. Getting ads to work isn’t easy. It’s very competitive space, and barrier to entry is really high (you won’t get serious money spent with you, if you don’t deliver ROI). While Reddit does provide a lot of unique utility, as a business its is still questionable.

romanovcode 6y ago
> While Reddit does provide a lot of unique utility, as a business its is still questionable. With paid-off moderators, astrosurfing and propaganda I'd say it's unethical at best.

cwhiz 6y ago

No better place to build your own bubble and insulate yourself from any thoughts, opinions, or ideas that might make you uncomfortable. And don’t forget the massive astroturfing, corporate bots, paid off moderators, and karma system that is designed to be addictive. It’s definitely undervalued in terms of how great of a place it is to sow division and push people to more extreme political thoughts.

CMay 6y ago

Definitely agree with a few of the suggestions in the article. Personally, the mobile-first UI changes they made a long time ago with new Reddit were so tragically bad that you could almost consider them a canary. My Reddit usage dropped significantly after that change even with old.reddit.com hanging around. On a desktop or a laptop when you visit reddit.com it still resets to their card layout every time unless you login and you still have to click through twice to get to comments even if you explicitly click the comments link. Majority of my usage was logged out and that was not going to change. Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook are also bad about this. Being logged out is dissatisfying on those sites, so I rarely visit them and don't like when they're returned in search results. HN, Flickr, Pluto.TV, YouTube, Zoom and others don't punish you so much for that.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

I like Reddit, especially the wide variety of subreddits. There's literally a place for everyone. Having said that, Conde Nast is busy screwing it up just like they screw up everything they own. Time for a truly open distributed alternative.