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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

• fnord77 5y ago
  yet reddit feels like it is dying. non-political subs with very obvious political agendas. The illusion of popularity-based ranking of articles when in reality it is mostly curated Zero transparency on the moderators the big news and political subs Control freak moderators on special interest subs. Some big investors don't seem to be able to accurately gauge what an internet property is worth. Look at Verizon buying tumblr for $1 billion
  • ausbah 5y ago
    reddit has always been dying to people who have been using reddit for a long time, but don't see how that's even remotely true as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
    • okasaki 5y ago
      But it does feel like it's dying. For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in the past day. New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma to post where they want.
    • Chris2048 5y ago
      > it has only continued to grow in terms of users accounts, yes - but how many of those are users? versus bots and marketeers?
    • iammisc 5y ago
      > but it has only continued to grow in terms of users That's because I make a new account everytime I'm doxxed, banned, or censored. Now that you mention it, I realize that the reddit blocking, censoring and quarantining system basically is a free way to drive up their 'new user' count. What a joke of a website and a company. Cannot wait til it dies.
  • dcolkitt 5y ago
    The gems on Reddit are almost all small subreddits with a community feel. I'd be virtually certain that its high user engagement is primarily driven by users who've matched into smaller subreddits that closely align with their interests. The big, default subreddits are largely wastelands. But Reddit the platform seems to entirely ignore this dynamic. New users are dropped into the default subreddits, and there's very little tooling or onramps to help them find small interest-matching subs.
    • mdoms 5y ago
      I hear this a lot but I've never found a good small subreddit either. Perhaps there's a discoverability problem but I'll be damned if I can find one of these mythical small subreddits with a great community I keep hearing about. For example I love Formula 1. But the /r/formula1 subreddit (1.6 million subscribers) is absolute unmitigated trash. There are decent articles posted there, but the comments are a total wasteland of low-effort memes, regurgitated jokes and total morons with zero understanding of the sport. So where do I go for F1 content? How do I find one of these supposed small subs with good communities?
      • trophycase 5y ago
        Discord lol. If you want quality discussion you're not going to find it on reddit. Mostly the same regurgitated ideas said a thousand times on every post.
  • DocTomoe 5y ago
    As a reddit user for more than a decade: Reddit has always been dying (for me personally, it was the digg exodus). Everything you describe has been around for at least 5 years. Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better general-purpose forum alternative.
    • Chris2048 5y ago
      > Reddit has always been dying I feel the choice of Ellen Pao as interim CEO revealed what direction reddit was headed. Moves towards a more sanitised, advertiser friendly Reddit - but with slap-dash choice of how to apply the new era of censorship. 2014 Nov - Pao became interim CEO 2015 July 2nd - large sections of Reddit were set to private to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me Anything interviews 2015 Jun/July - Pao was the subject of criticism and harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director of talent was fired 2015 Aug 13th - "Watch reddit Die" was Created I can't help feel that there is a trend of selling of online communities as "assets" to commercial buyers that have opposite incentive to the members of that community - just look at StackOverflow. The problem is that websites come to own the "commons" they inspire, and then sell it off as if the community are happy to work for free. We need stronger community data-rights; like a GPL for website content.
  • feudalism 5y ago
    reddit should just be killed off at this point. The only good thing about it are the smaller subreddits. The self-proclaimed "front page of the internet" has become the "cesspool of the internet" catering to the lowest common denominator of people out there. Tiktoks, tweets, fabricated AITA posts and more of the low brow variety abound. reddit (in general) has a clear and obvious political/social agenda apparent to anybody with a functioning brain.
  • mFixman 5y ago
    Every website or internet community that I've used for over a year feels to me like it's dying, including HN. It's a natural reaction to change. I've been on Reddit for 11 years, and all your comments could apply to 2010 Reddit as well as they apply to 2021 Reddit. At least edgy memes on /r/atheism aren't a core part of the site anymore.
• pm90 5y ago
  > The company will use the new funds to improve product features, focusing on how to make it easier for newcomers to explore and quickly understand the site, Mr. Huffman said. Reddit is also enhancing its video products with an eye toward more advertising. And the company is building its self-service advertising system, which could help appeal to small and medium-size business marketers. > Reddit is also focused on expanding internationally. Most of the site is U.S.-centric, Mr. Huffman said — something he hopes to change. When it comes to advertising, other platforms offer a much more lucrative user base. Reddit users aren’t worth very much to advertisers. International users will probably be worth even less. And there is no guarantee that Reddit would hit it off with an international audience. In short, I just don’t see them doing well if they go public.
  • 5etho 5y ago
    no guarantee? look at r/de biggest community of german people I've ever heard. r/europe gigantic subreddit, all national subreddits r/italy r/polska r/belarus (known for international protests) r/hongkong also oh look at: r/norway and their users are even more wealthy than average us redditors
• weavie 5y ago
  So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    You need a mobile team, you need a spam team (or 10), you need people working on a portal for advertisers and the analytics they need, need more than 3 devops for full 24/7 coverage, etc.
  • keanebean86 5y ago
    Maybe they finally upgrade the 486sx based server everything runs on? But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular. Their video player needs some major work. They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards. Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
  • Chris2048 5y ago
    PR and sales. Always PR and sales.
    • okprod 5y ago
      They've also been hiring ML
  • dcolkitt 5y ago
    The biggest problem is that their revenue per user is atrociously low compared to other social platforms. That money should be thrown at poaching as much ads talent as possible from Facebook or Twitter.
• Chris2048 5y ago
  How do they come up with this? Is the long death of reddit, really the TikTok-isation of reddit into yet another vapid commercial meh-space? Will this actually succeed, or is this the pump before the dump?
  • gruez 5y ago
    > How do they come up with this? You mean the valuation? It's a simple formula of ([money raised] / [shares issued]) * [total shares outstanding]
    • Chris2048 5y ago
      Just a linear regress on what they raised so far? Ok, fair enough. feels overvalued though.
      • HWR_14 5y ago
        No, gruez was talking about how to take the new cash infusion and turn it into market cap. Literally just price of new share times share outstanding. You wanted to know how they decided on the market cap to accept money for. It's a totally different, complex, and non-public process.
• themanmaran 5y ago
  I'm honestly surprised to learn that Reddit is still VC dependant. Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Anonymity really hurts profits.
  • majormajor 5y ago
    The cost is fascinating. Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web? For users, there's a high discovery value... but at the cost of apparently far more expense running the site than has been able to be recouped yet. Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      > Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web? The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
    • RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
      Reddit should just shift to a paid model where there are no adds across the entire site and the subs you sub to get a portion of your revenue to manage the sub.
  • adventured 5y ago
    It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network, and they should have done that more than a decade ago. Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
• dcolkitt 5y ago
  On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization. [1]https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily-users-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-valuable-of-any-social-network.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
  • paxys 5y ago
    There is a LOT standing in the way of monetization for Reddit: - younger user base (so less disposable income) - loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads - more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away due to the nature of the community and content shared - primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so without alienating their use base.
    • math-dev 5y ago
      I agree with most of what you say, but I thought most of the usage was now on the mobile app? By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and need to comment and confirm my understanding)
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Can't tailor ads? Loose concept of user identity? I would think having a list of every subreddit a user subscribes to would give you a good indication of what interests they have! But from reading this thread it sounds like Reddit makes it difficult to choose which subreddits you want to advertise to.
• swarnie_ 5y ago
  Not sure how Reddit is worth that much... Are the 50 power mods in charge of 90% of the top subs selling access to state propaganda departments? Actually don't answer that, its painfully obvious. $ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media platforms.
• spike021 5y ago
  Yet routinely their service still has incredibly poor performance and there are bugs in their iOS app that have been around for months. Crazy.
  • sushid 5y ago
    It was also down for a few hours this week. Can't think of many 11 figure companies that go down as often as Reddit does.
    • vntok 5y ago
      Shows that in the real world, users don't actually really care about having a five nines availability for a forum.
      • marcusverus 5y ago
        As all social media companies likely know, addicts make for a loyal clientele.
    • SilverRed 5y ago
      The reddit outage yesterday was the worst one I have seen in years. Reddit used to go down multiple times a day 3+ years ago but it seems pretty solid now. They also used to shut the site down for hours at a time to run updates.
• marketingtech 5y ago
  I would imagine most of these investments will go to three places: * Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs, leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough revenue to justify a $10b valuation * Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane content * Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights. this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal sense
• deleted 5y ago
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• thinkingemote 5y ago
  Reddit is a marketeers dream. Every corporation, product, game, movie studio and consumer device has a big team dedicated to using Reddit for free. Submissions memes and comments are posted by the teams, often out in the open. Reddit gets no income from this advertising. If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.
  • wintermutestwin 5y ago
    The more Reddit gets infected by ads, the less value the content will provide. Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.
    • SilverRed 5y ago
      Reddit is already packed to the brim with product shilling and yet it keeps getting bigger. I doubt the majority of users will be turned off from this. The reddit user base has changed as well. Most users of reddit probably never used the old design at this point.
  • Seattle3503 5y ago
    In many ways Reddit is the "social media infrastructure" many other sites pretend to be.
• shantnutiwari 5y ago
  As someone who tried to advertise on reddit (though it was > 1-2 years ago, so things may have changed)-- Reddit, along with Twitter, is very advertiser unfriendly. And Im not just talking about the users. I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3 months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise. The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures, just so I could run my ads. Never again. I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want the hassle. Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money. Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big. Most users were indifferent. Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.
  • entangledqubit 5y ago
    I tried it recently (< 2 months ago) and the experience wasn't too bad. This was the first real ad "campaign" I had ever set up. The targeted group was pretty niche and while Reddit suggested going broader, I was able to stick with the subreddits that I considered relevant. The most annoying part was the rather opaque period between launching, approving, and actually running the ad. The first real confirmation I had that things were working was a bill.
  • wintermutestwin 5y ago
    >Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money. Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
    • qeternity 5y ago
      > These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers?? You’re thinking of the user facing element as being the thing they’re selling. That’s not what they’re selling. They give that away for free so they can sell extremely sophisticated data and targeting. You’re the product they’re selling. And the access is definitely cutting edge.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  I was done with Reddit 3 years ago. I was on Reddit the first week they existed. No longer of any value!
  • nperez 5y ago
    It's been going downhill. There's not enough talk about its decline of original content. That's what it was known for in its earlier days. Now it's mostly recycled old memes, reposts of Tiktoks, and reposts of tweets.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/2kQBG https://archive.is/2kQBG
• muttantt 5y ago
  Gotta pay the team of people that wholesale censor information there
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.
    • CamelCaseName 5y ago
      > Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. This is the most pathetic slam against mods I have ever seen and shows that you haven't spent two seconds considering what you're criticizing.
      • khazhoux 5y ago
        Ironically, your comment itself also lacks any detail of countering or clarifying information, and is itself just a content-free slam on the person you replied to. Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
        • emodendroket 5y ago
          If you try moderating one you'll see quickly why these tools are necessary.
        • CamelCaseName 5y ago
          > Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator". User blacklists are done through the built in ban function. In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do. > the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected. Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation. > Is the mod system working well, in your opinion? This is really impossible to answer. From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success. From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit. From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits. However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that. So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
• teslaberry 5y ago
  in 10 years time reddit will barely exist if at all. people forget myspace and other garbage like it. reddit's financial structure is a giant black hole that exists to push stealth advertising that gets less and less competitive with youtube and facebook every hour.
• sergiotapia 5y ago
  In the hn tiktok thread, I saw a salient comment that said: "When I visit reddit I just leave angry". Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app, and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping, forever. Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn it around?
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    I found that if you stick to very specific subreddits there is a way to use the site without getting angry.
    • iammisc 5y ago
      I don't think i've ever been to reddit.com without an /r/ after the name.
  • post_break 5y ago
    That's all dependent on the subs you visit. I have learned so much on reddit. News and leaks before it breaks anywhere else. How to 3D print stuff. Extremely complicated laws and how to avoid going to prison for stuff I knew nothing about. Reddit is the ultimate "it is what you make of it" website. If you spend your time in the subs that make you angry then yeah, but if you narrow it down to only things you like you'll have a great time.
    • sergiotapia 5y ago
      That has not been my experience, and I've browsed some _really_ niche subreddits for a "famous" group of bodybuilders in Delray beach if you catch my drift.
  • c7DJTLrn 5y ago
    The front page is a perfected outrage machine. I don't think even Twitter comes close to it.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  What the hell does a site like Reddit do with almost half a billion dollars?! That's insane.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    Figure out how to make two thirds of a billion dollars off its users, that’s what.
  • ryanSrich 5y ago
    Launder it.
    • ch4s3 5y ago
      So they're taking financing under scrutiny from the SEC, in a round lead by Fidelity. Where's the elicit money that they're trying to turn legitimate?
  • lomereiter 5y ago
    For example, they could provide a hidden (and very expensive) API for hedge funds, so that they could manipulate stock prices more conveniently.
  • gkoberger 5y ago
    It's not easy to run a company with as many users as they have. As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall. They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.) Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
    • setr 5y ago
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Reddit is such an amazing platform. It is the practice of freedom made real. Don’t like the mods? Make your own subreddit. Don’t like someone? Block them and you’ll never see them. Universal SSO across thousands of communities makes it a trusted source for reviews. It is akin to social networking what Craigslist is to marketplaces. A magical magical place. I would have liked if it was easy to federate, I.e. make a new subreddit that is just like this other subreddit and posts show up in both. You can make multireddits with plus signs but you can’t create a new one that is just like the old one except you don’t censor the word “pumpkin” or whatever. Would be interesting but maybe a bad idea since it fragments the user base.
• slownews45 5y ago
  Valuation was $10B per linked article for those curious (I was).
• baud147258 5y ago
  so more money so they do another UI redesign that's again going to reduce usability and push mobile users towards their app?
• screye 5y ago
  Reddit is simultaneously the most usable and most incompetently run (now that tumblr is dead) social media website on the internet. My hunch is that both phenomena are connected. ___________ The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough. Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content. Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity. _________ Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule. Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken. Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either. With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.
  • uDontKnowMe 5y ago
    I think it's a common misconception that old.reddit.com is still extremely popular. As a mod of a medium-large sub which should skew highly towards old.reddit.com (developer-focussed content, created at around the beginning of reddit itself), the percent of pageviews on old.reddit.com is right now around 8%.
• 01100011 5y ago
  Is it just me, or is Reddit broken in some way about 10% of the time now? Overall, the site just seems janky. It used to be reliable and fast, say 3 years ago, but now it seems to choke on the higher load. I frequently encounter issues with comments not loading, karma not displaying, etc.
  • secondcoming 5y ago
    Try using old.reddit.com?
• imnotreallynew 5y ago
  Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks. Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python). Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably the worst offenders. Here’s an example I just came across in /r/miami: https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_seen_this_stuff_is_the_mayor_of https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see.... The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or who is controlling those networks.
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    > Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first time thread + first time direct message?
    • syrrim 5y ago
      Of course they do. That merely slows the rate at which you can create accounts.
  • handmodel 5y ago
    I wouldn't say this isn't a problem at all but the fact that subs have mods which have a lot of power seems to be very effective. I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site I interact with the most.
  • Havoc 5y ago
    > Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python). Chunks of it. Don’t think praw and the api can do all live
• ltbarcly3 5y ago
  Reddit is 16 years old. It's one of the largest sites on the internet by views, users, time on site, any metric you would care about. They have something like 500 FTE's, which is tiny compared to lots of other sites with far less traffic. It's basically the perfect combination of high traffic and low costs, and they have raised close to a billion dollars in funding. If they aren't profitable now, they are very unlikely to ever be profitable. I think it's likely they will sell to one of the big players (I would guess FB) in the next 5 years or so. If that goes the 'usual way', whoever acquires them will immediately let the site fall apart and eventually shut it down, and in the meantime a new hot reddit/digg/slashdot like site will emerge to take it's place almost overnight.
  • CheezeIt 5y ago
    My instinct is that Reddit as an organization and as a set of employees are B players, and for that reason a place like Facebook would not want to acquire them. We’ve seen Reddit “execute” a new site design, we see people complaining about being unable to buy ads, and we’ve seen the board’s competence level in finding CEO’s. For the acquisition to break even, you would have to burn down the organization you just acquired, and fix it with your own people. It’s like a bar of gold wrapped in poop. Do you really want to clean off the poop? It might be fool’s gold.
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• civilized 5y ago
  Reddit is the only major social media company that gives you the tools to build something resembling a human community online, yet it seems dwarfed in popularity and clout by products like Facebook and Twitter, which seem to me much less capable. But to be honest, even I don't use Reddit, although I do sometimes search "reddit X" when I want detailed opinions on product/service/business X. Their UX doesn't draw me in at all, especially on mobile. Hope they do something about this with all the cash. They seem to have a lot of unrealized potential.
• moneywoes 5y ago
  Why don't they ipo?
• dillondoyle 5y ago
  Key line for me: "Reddit is also enhancing its video products with an eye toward more advertising." They are already moving videos to their awful self-hosted solution. Adding pre-roll definitely makes sense. If they can guarantee premium brands 0% play on porn....
  • Havoc 5y ago
    Maybe they’ll fix video in the process too! Seems to work about 60% of the time. If it has ads in it the advertisers won’t find that acceptable
• sjg007 5y ago
  Cool. I remember when Reddit launched and everyone was trying to figure out how they would make money. It looks like they made $100m last year so as long as they keep engagement up and optimize I think things will go well. I was surprised at only 50m DAUs.. that means there is a lot of growth left especially internationally. One thing to ask is, what problem does Reddit solve? And to stretch an anthropomorphism: if Reddit was a person, I would ask them, who is Reddit? Also just to ponder for a minute, what makes reddit and say facebook so different?
  • kupopuffs 5y ago
    Well, do you use reddit? Seems like a good place for finding discussion on broad topics (news) and niche ones (small indie games, etc).
  • emodendroket 5y ago
    Reddit communities are similar to Facebook groups, I guess, but pseudonymy gives things a different feel.
    • babelfish 5y ago
      Thread-based comments also lend themselves to much more conversation IMO - Facebook hasn’t nailed threaded comments with a depth greater than 1 yet
      • fy20 5y ago
        This is my biggest gripe with Facebook Groups, along with finding old content, but it seems that Facebook is much more niche than Reddit. For some topics, say a speific car model, I've found that Reddit may have a general subreddit for the manufacturer, or maybe a specific subreddit with a few posts a week, but on Facebook there's a group that has 50 or so posts a day. And then there's often even more specific groups, for say modding or regional groups.
  • mistermann 5y ago
    > One thing to ask is, what problem does Reddit solve? Possibly more interesting to ask: what problems might Reddit plausibly create? My first instinct for answers: social polarization and mass distortion of reality perception.
• jasondigitized 5y ago
  Why does Reddit need funding? Legitimate question. What are they going to spend this money on? A direct ad sales team? I would assume it takes a somewhat small engineering and DevOps team to keep it running. Is there a huge roadmap of features that requiring $100m in engineering?
  • easytiger 5y ago
    Pockets
  • arthurcolle 5y ago
    Avocado toast, caramel macchiatos and AWS charges. Maybe legal costs too
    • mathattack 5y ago
      Don’t forget the coconut water and sales President’s Club trip.
  • tech_tuna 5y ago
    Hiring, they are on a hiring tear.
    • Clewza313 5y ago
      But that's precisely the question: why are they hiring?
      • koolba 5y ago
        So they can raise more VC. Seriously, what part of this don’t you understand?
        • ultimoo 5y ago
          indeed the virtuous cycle of our times
        • 5y ago
• vondur 5y ago
  If they can’t turn a profit now, I fail to see how extra funds will make that possible.
• stereoradonc 5y ago
  Congrats Reddit! They will buy servers for better uptime :)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 1024core 5y ago
  Reddit is on its way down. It's been overrun by power-tripping mods, and there's no way to appeal a perma-ban! I've been banned from /r/india for just commenting on another sub (/r/chodi, which was recommended by the app itself!); banned from /r/worldnews for disagreeing with the herd. The moment a decent, democratic discussion forum comes along, I'll jump ship to it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • uDontKnowMe 5y ago
    What do you mean by democratic? Are you thinking of some kind of election system to replace mods, and if so have you seen such a mechanism work anywhere else on forums?
    • josephcsible 5y ago
      Stack Exchange isn't quite a forum, but doesn't its system fit that description and work well?
      • echelon 5y ago
        Slashdot also had a great moderation system. Way ahead of its time. ----- Edit: I was going to respond to [1], but I'm rate limited. Below is my comment: > Anonymity really hurts profits. That's what killed YikYak and continues to beleaguer anonymous message board monetization (well, maybe it's the content). Reddit at least has an interest graph going for it. If they can figure out how to boost subreddit discovery and encourage users pick the things they'll spend money on, then they'll be golden. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157448
      • SavantIdiot 5y ago
        StackOverflow is HEAVILY moderated. And still has lots of garbage. I have questions constantly taken down for being too vague, offtopic, not the right stackexchange, or not technical enough. I've even responded to takdowns with links to questions with hundreds of points that were almost the same, and ... nope. At least mark it redundant.
• tarr11 5y ago
  Every time I hit the back button on Reddit i get an error that says “something went wrong with this page” Every time i watch a video there it flashes and reloads at least two times before playing.
  • ndesaulniers 5y ago
    Don't try to scrub forward in a video in their player. In my experience, the video never loads.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      I've never been able to get a video to play a second time with the 'replay' icon. So the rule seems to be, "don't touch it" Not to mention its excellent habit of downgrading the sample rate just as the video gets interesting.
    • SilverRed 5y ago
      Building a functional video player seems to be one of the hardest problems in web tech. Youtube and maybe Vimeo seem to be the only sites that have an actual functioning video player. I guess you could use the browser built in one but you likely lose features like dynamically switching video quality.
      • ndesaulniers 5y ago
        > I guess you could use the browser built in one but you likely lose features like dynamically switching video quality. But that's not true; the browser has built in support for Media Source Extensions! Did you mean the ability to choose the quality, perhaps? https://nickdesaulniers.github.io/netfix/#/ https://nickdesaulniers.github.io/netfix/#/
• jm20 5y ago
  I'm so worried about what Reddit is doing to the world. Online communities like that only lend themselves to toxicity and echo chambers as they grow, and with most of us stuck at home during the pandemic those communities have become a primary source of human interaction - and not in any sort of healthy way. I sincerely think it is one of the top three factors (along with CNN and Fox News) in the dangerous level of polarization we're seeing between people in the United States. Reddit develops it's own narratives, and those narratives end up being all that gets visibility (because of the comment upvote model). Ideas like 'all conservatives are MAGA losers, look at the idiots on /r/conservative', 'AOC and Bernie are God's gift to Earth' and 'minimum wage should be $45 and all student debt should be forgiven' are the only opinions upvoted. This directly leads to reactionary places like /r/The_Donald getting created. Then, when those communities get banned, it creates even more hostility and resentment. The best part of Donald Trump losing the election was that 80% of the front page wasn't articles shitting on him anymore. I have to constantly remind myself that the people commenting on reddit are not an accurate representation of the real world, but I worry most people don't do that and legitimately believe people on the other side hate them. They react to this (inaccurate) belief with their own hostility and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I had to put my conspiracy hat on - I think nurturing this hostility between ideologies would be the best way for a foreign power to destabilize the US; they're probably already doing it to some extent. Honestly, I'd like to give it up entirely but it still remains one of the best resources of really useful, non-marketing knowledge on the internet.
• awad 5y ago
  For as popular as Reddit is traffic wise, it's weirdly not a big player in monetization internally or as a platform. That is, Reddit themselves aren't monetizing much compared to their traffic and peers (who are some of the biggest publishers in the world) but also there are not many, if any, third parties openly monetizing off of Reddit, either. Google, Facebook, Twitter have an entire ecosystem built around them of ad-tech companies, agencies, marketing-tech integrations all involved in driving more revenue or traffic their way so long as the participants get a cut too. This strikes me as a still yet-to-be-tapped market opportunity.
• solarkraft 5y ago
  > The first priority on the product is just making Reddit awesome > We want to build what is best for new users, because over time it will be best for everyone. I wonder if they’re ashamed of lying like that or just doing it naturally. They’ve been doubling down on user hostile bullshit recently. I don’t man new Reddit (it’s not great but a redesign was long overdue), I mean pictures with silly bars on the bottom and not easily being able to save videos, the stupid app/browser popup on every damn page on mobile, not being able to browse or even view comments without an account anymore. I sure wonder what Aaron Swartz would think about that.
• fungiblecog 5y ago
  Perhaps they can spend some of that money making the app not completely suck
• darthrupert 5y ago
  That's highly disturbing. What new revenue streams could they have that doesn't completely screw their users?
  • geoduck14 5y ago
    THIS is the question. My guess is that leadership has been working on something that isn't public - but VCs saw it and liked it. All comments I've seen on here assume they "keep doing things the same way" - but the fact is that they need to PIVOT to something new to make real money, and that pivot could be mostly a secret. Ads are not their future - stop complaining about the user interface and poor targeting. That isn't their path to success.
• stalkingvictim 5y ago
  reddit was leveraged to maliciously target me multiple times over the years. ycombinator benefitted from reddit's success. As only hn admins can see my responses, allow me to say: you know full well there's a huge conflict of interest regarding investigating such a claim, even if that means privately defaming/discrediting me. The incentive structure is such that reddit has zero reason to ever even address such a claim unless pushed to do so legally, which is despicable and dishonorable. I was a member of a successful musical act, the fact of which was used to maliciously target me multiple times over the years on the reddit.com property. This had a very real and significant negative impact on me. Prior to this, back in 2007, long before cyber hygiene was a thing, a link from reddit that I visited caused a MS network to be compromised. I was subsequently blamed for "hacking" their network -- defamed behind my back -- due to this. This false accusation snowballed likely into the scenario from the previous paragraph (combine with assumptions re: S6E12M19 - ask FBI to clarify) to justify above targeting. Other incidents on reddit occurred in 2014 (two times) and also December 2018. I don't anticipate that anyone at yc nor reddit will have any incentive to do the honorable thing and invesigate my claims.. ffs, give me a bit of dignity please after my life has been thoroughly destroyed in no small part due to the web property from which your org foundationally benefitted. Email is on my profile accessible to admins. I don't anticipate any response at all, now or in the future. Deny, deflect, accuse. Or, better yet: ignore. Rules of social hierarchy thusly applicable. Now you have an idea why I am so cynical -- there's little to no accountability nor honor amongst the ruling class (you, the entity that benefitted from reddit) when it comes to the grievances of a commoner (me, the victim who was targeted over a multi-decade timeframe, via a web property -- reddit -- from which you benefitted). Yes, the first time I was maliciously cybergaslighted by reddit was the reason for I founded HiCapacity - Omidyar's Civil Beat techie Mr. Kanno showed up to my initial two meetings in HNL, and never gave me a chance to even address my intentions for the hackerspace. (ironically, my intent was actually in line with the teachings from snowden's subsequent tor talk.) Snowden used HiCapacity years later, after I had disconnected, but while I was living with my half Russian gf at the time whose Belorussian best friend ran operations for a Russian Honolulu tour company that catered to "wealthy" (euphemism) Russians. Snowden may or may not have excluded the fact that his December 10, 2012 cryptoparty occurred at the hackerspace I founded, from "Permanent Record" (ironic given the name of his book). Instead, he commented, IIRC, on the location of the meetup (Box Jelly) -- thus deflecting away from the appearance of an odd, coincidental causality loop re: Omidyar subsequently purchasing Snowden's classified cache for $250,000,000.00, pertinent to Omidyar's connection to Bitcoin quasi-billionaire Mr. Kanno. I've been through too much -- see my first comment -- this targeting against me had origins in reddit in some form or fashion -- perhaps by entities who simply used the site and controlled the content. I don't know how it happened, because I can't investigate, but you can. Please do the right thing and help a commoner with a legitimate complaint, so I don't have to include a narrative in my autobiography based on loosely speculating from the facts I've documented since 1996/1997 (ask @FBINewark about the list on which they placed me back then - I am still on it at least as of spring 2020 due to Facebook's fuck up showing me a list of NJ/Essex sheriffs and a "Sammy the Bull" fan account, in succession, on "people you may know", right when S6E12M19 was scheduled to be released from Federal Prison.)
• stormdennis 5y ago
  I hate reddit with a passion though I still visit it. Largely a consequence of despite having clicked a thousand times on the greyed-out 'continue in browser' button I still get the "see reddit in" dialog take up half my screen every damn day I visit.
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Tokenized karma in Reddit communities is going to change everything. It started with r/EthTrader and DONUT (which you can currently use to rent the banner space in the subreddit to display your ad), and extended to r/CryptoCurrency and /r/FortNiteBR, with MOON and BRICK, respectively. The latter two are part of Reddit's official tokenized community points project, which is going to expand to more communities, and which will be adopting Ethereum L2 solution, Arbitrum, for scalability: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/opi5rg/scaling_reddits_community_points_with_arbitrum/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/opi5rg/scaling_re... In all three communities, you can purchase special monthly membership with the community tokens, and use them to vote on polls that can also be used for governance decisions. As the community points are on the blockchain, and map to user contributions in each community, they give Reddit communities the ability to migrate to other platforms, or leverage their karma reputation for other purposes (e.g. voting on other platforms). This decoupling of reputation from the platform will go a long way to making social media more open and geared toward the end user. It'll also distribute economic power, by giving ordinary people, all over the world, a new means to earn income: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9dye7/i_sold_my_78k_moons_to_pay_off_my_debt_i_am_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9dye7/i_so... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kqrikd/sold_my_moons_to_pay_rent_thank_you_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kqrikd/sold... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/n371id/how_moons_can_change_lives_a_first_person/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/n371id/how_... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ly79uw/as_an_iranian_crypto_has_changed_the_life_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ly79uw/as_a... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9bdtn/guys_you_just_gave_me_the_best_gift_i_could/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9bdtn/guys...
• indigodaddy 5y ago
  Why would any company supposedly worth 10B, need 400M in funding? Is there really that much massive growth going on with Reddit?
  • corobo 5y ago
    I figured the "made us an offer we couldn't refuse" was "they offered money even though we're killing the site off so we cashed in just in case, my salary is a cool milly a month now"
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  Reddit CFO sold the idea to investors that the business of promoting toxic ideological warfare to keep users engaged with the platform is big business.
• aiisjustanif 5y ago
  I find it puzzling that most comments in here don’t even reference the original premise of Reddit. > Reddit is largely a community of anonymous users that provide web content for each other. The communities and the anonymous bit is totally the draw for most users. Most technical suggestions for monetization I read in here seem to completely ignore that (outside of marketing to a subreddit instead of directly to users, which some subreddits don’t even allow because that’s not the point of Reddit). Suggestions I’ve read like not allowing multiple accounts, no anonymous users, etc. seem like suggestions that would kill the platform.
• crawsome 5y ago
  cool, 50 copies of crap like /r/mildlyinteresting and a thumbnail-prioritized default feed, I never want to go back.