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Reddit seeks to hire advisers for U.S. IPO – sources

145 points by hi5eyes 5y ago

Koraza 5y ago
Interesting, interesting. I wonder how WallStreetBets and all the Apes would treat Reddit's stock. This could be quite a ride.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Markets are at an all time high.
- vmception 5y ago
  SPACtacular
travoc 5y ago
The risk within the “internet chat” sector is huge. Many popular discussion platforms disappear almost overnight. Slashdot, Digg, MySpace. I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment.
- CerealFounder 5y ago
  The fact that Reddit let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
  - kryptn 5y ago
    How are reddit and discord related?
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Not GP, but I assume because 'subreddits' so frequently have an associated Discord 'server'. You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
      - Dwolb 5y ago
        This is the same for marketplace features across gear-related subreddits. Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
    - treis 5y ago
      They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
      - netr0ute 5y ago
        They have totally different formats though, with Big Red being slower and Discord being realtime.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example. The difference is purely branding.
        Talanes 5y ago
        >The difference is purely branding. If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you. If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
        Talanes 5y ago
        But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen. I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
    - mintplant 5y ago
      When you get down to it, many Discord channels are shared topic-based streams of links/media interspersed with commentary.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.
    - mbesto 5y ago
      People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there. Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
  - jorblumesea 5y ago
    Fairly different apps/use cases.
  - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    The fact that (insert anything here) let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
  - zer0-c00l 5y ago
    I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.
    - dimmke 5y ago
      Reddit ended up adding a corny chat feature that is exclusively used for spam as their answer to it. Pretty awful. But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
      - edoceo 5y ago
        Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
        crazy_horse 5y ago
        Does Huffman have no say? How did they go form lisp to this?
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        The Faustian bargain of venture capital. You get access to easy money early on, at the price of your (company's) soul.
        dimmke 5y ago
        Reddit literally destroyed independent forums. That's such a huge swath of the internet and they effectively have a monopoly. Additionally, they top Google results for so many different subjects. I don't understand why they can't monetize that more. They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at. Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
  - tyrfing 5y ago
    I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way. 2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction. Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people." I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord. Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.
- eshack94 5y ago
  Serious question - why so much risk and instability in this "internet chat" sector?
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Switching cost for users is near zero.
    - sk5t 5y ago
      And perhaps a "fresh start" for would-be moderators and tone-setters? i.e. the power users of reddit seem more than a bit ensconced.
      - chippy 5y ago
        Moderators have the most to lose by moving, it will be the people who don't post who have nothing to lose. We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control. These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times! I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
    - hncurious 5y ago
      Except users don't switch because of network effects. None of the twitter, reddit, youtube alternatives have managed to put even a dent in them.
- wombatpm 5y ago
  Slashdot is still around, but their previous tone deaf management killed it through neglect and stupidity. It will never regain its lost glory.
- slg 5y ago
  >I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment. As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
  - patentatt 5y ago
    I’d say it’s because they have kept the core platform unchanged. In other words, they haven’t really done anything. Heading on over to old.reddit.com is pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago (more or less). As soon as it’s actually impossible to avoid their push to their terrible ‘new’ site and app, I’m jumping ship. Classic Reddit is like Craigslist, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.
    - slg 5y ago
      > Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
      - unethical_ban 5y ago
        You skipped the context of the rest of the quoted message, which was referring to features and UI, not moderation.
        slg 5y ago
        They are intermingled. Mods are often asking for new tools to help them moderate their own communities.
- RivieraKid 5y ago
  Reddit is not internet chat. It's a collection of online communities.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - millzlane 5y ago
    It's forum software 3.0
    - DoItToMe81 5y ago
      Forum software (worse edition EXTREME)
  - tempest_ 5y ago
    That did not stop them from trying to strap a chat to it. I remember when I got the first "Chat", I was confused then immediately went to figure out how to disable it. I wonder if it ever got traction.
- trident5000 5y ago
  I used to be a hard core Reddit user for probably 10 years. I havent used it in maybe 2 years; I have no interest. People like me are probably showing up in their user data and the writing is on the wall internally. Thats when you go public to dump the bag. Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    > People dont like information platforms with information gaps. Is there evidence of this? I want to believe this is true but the era of cancel culture and deplatforming suggests people want information gaps and echo chambers.
    - tjs8rj 5y ago
      A fraction of people participate in and encourage cancel culture
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  And the Reddit redesigns are all awful and not what the users actually want.
Analemma_ 5y ago
Get ready for the degradation of Reddit to accelerate when this happens. Right now Reddit is almost still usable if you use third-party apps on mobile and Old Reddit Redirect on the desktop; both of those are going to be cut off for a quick jolt to revenue when the market demands it.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Not just the format; if they go public, no more nsfw/politically ambivalent content. Which means pretty much most of reddit doing a tumblr
- e40 5y ago
  The "res" extension for FF and Chrome saved it for me.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  With what reddit has become, both from a leadership and a userbase standpoint, its fall can't happen soon enough. It is so toxic and manipulated nowadays that I won't mourn for it.
  - e40 5y ago
    That is true about large parts, but for me I can easily avoid those. There are truly good communities there that are great resources for various problems (technical and not).
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    Isn't it largely user-moderated? Do you believe that model is no longer reasonable for the platform it is trying to be?
    - Freskis 5y ago
      Probably. The evidence speaks for itself. Most of the reddit homepage is a hatefest of [ingroup] screaming hate at [outgroup]. It's so toxic as to beggar belief. Facebook and Twitter seems like prim decorum in comparison.
Scoundreller 5y ago
Lemme guess, zero profits and zero prospect of profitability?
- cyberge99 5y ago
  The article states $100 million last quarter just from advertising.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - koolba 5y ago
    The article says revenue, not profit. Though you’d think it wouldn’t cost $100M per quarter to run an HN clone with little to no first party moderation.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      That's because they've been busy adding features nobody asked for, all of which don't apply to many because they're only on New Reddit.
      - Scoundreller 5y ago
        If they go public, what will it take to get “kill New Reddit” onto a shareholder vote?
        colinmhayes 5y ago
        Hostile takeover?
        Scoundreller 5y ago
        I don’t expect it to pass, but I see some weird proposals sometimes that have no chance of passing, like human rights obligations for a defence contractor.
yosito 5y ago
Apart from the HN audience, what is the rest of the internet going to turn to when Reddit goes belly up?
- pvarangot 5y ago
  Honestly I think nowhere that is that big. I think it will federate a bit again into Discord/forums. It's kind of a last bastion of sorts for Alexandria type news and content aggregators with pseudonymous social features. Look what happened to big subs that where playing cat and mouse with the mods, they all just scattered after trying other platforms like Voat or whatever.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Some kind of dark-horse platform will emerge and catch on like wildfire. I do not think a mere reddit clone will pull anyone away. There would have to be something new about it's UX.
  - conductr 5y ago
    > There would have to be something new about it's UX Mobile first would be enough. I'm a little bit older and still do not understand the appeal of snapchat, tiktok, etc. I understand FB/twitter/instagram (I just don't like using it). But making a mobile version of a small feature fuel the hype storm needed
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Reddit is absolutely a mobile first company. Most of their users use adblock, so having a desktop site is just a way for them to gain mobile users. Their mobile app being awful is pretty hilarious given all this, but they're certainly trying very hard to improve the experience on mobile(while also showing as many ads as possible).
      - cwkoss 5y ago
        Reddit is trying to be a mobile first company. I don't think they are successful. I know many people who use reddit, almost always either on desktop browsers or using 3rd party apps for mobile, because their first party one is so clunky.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
this_user 5y ago
This should be interesting as it will inevitably increase pressure on reddit's leadership to monetise their users better. But it has always been part of that site's DNA to avoid the kind of extreme data mining that Google and FB are performing. This, on the other hand, has led to a situation where reddit, despite its size, is consistently underperforming financially relative to what would be possible. How are they going to balance that?
- tomc1985 5y ago
  What would be possible with less monetization of users and a decent-sized support staff? Or are we talking the bullshit SV-style possibilities where you monetize the living shit out of everyone and everything and give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew?
  - rodgerd 5y ago
    > give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew? I mean that describes the situation today. The management involvement in Reddit is for the CEO to support ivermectin conspiracy and GamerGate subs.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      'Management involvement' has always been heavily free-speech at all costs. Reddit is one of the last bastions of this style of management and have yet to succumb to zoomers' whimsical emotional fragility. They were ground zero for The Fappening, remember? And all sorts of other nasty stuff that they only cracked down on because of intense pressure. People need to remember that they are calling for CENSORSHIP, and reddit's policy for the longest time was to avoid that at all costs. If there's one thing I respected about Reddit it was their ability to stand up to those whiners. I am so ashamed of the latest generation -- for all our differences that I have no choice but to accept, the one thing I cannot forgive is how they seem to have forgotten what free speech means.
      - 5y ago
ManBlanket 5y ago
I clearly have no idea what is going on or how business works because the only question plaguing my mind is how on earth reddit manages to be valued at $10B. Does low-key shilling and banner ads really make that much money? I know it doesn't work this way but they'd have to collect $192 from their 52M daily users to earn that kind of cash. Honestly I got the impression reddit stopped being cool like 5 years ago and other than this year's entertaining stock market shenanigans it's largely a novelty. Even when I was using it I could hardly imagine my eyes were worth $192 to anybody. Not to mention last time I looked at reddit the incel and children under 18 vibes were intense. What do I know? FB somehow manages to be relevant. Am I missing something or are we just printing monopoly money based on increasingly loose pretexts nowadays? Do you even need a business model to make money anymore, or is it all based on speculative user counts and growth?
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  reddit is essential to google, adding it as a keyword in searches increases google's value by billions
  - hmmokidk 5y ago
    If it weren't for reddit google would be damn near useless to me.
    - handrous 5y ago
      This isn't even a joke, it's just true. "reddit [my actual search]" is the only way I know to sort of get at all kinds of info that Google is no longer any good whatsoever at finding. I guess if that stops being useful, for some reason, I'll have to resort to one of those long queries that tries to limit searches to independent forums (which used to be visible without that kind of thing, when they were relevant, but are now nearly impossible to find otherwise). Twitter might be a partial replacement, but they seem dedicated to making searching their site, by any means, as useless as possible.
      - 5y ago
edgefield 5y ago
We desperately need news aggregators and social media services like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, that are NOT run by for profit enterprises. There are a lot of terrific open source platforms out there and saddened that none of them have gained much traction.
- yawnxyz 5y ago
  At least, not venture-scale businesses. I can see some community and membership-driven Hacker News clones for niches being possibly sustainable (isn't that kind of what Reddit started out as, anyway?), but can't see any VCs wanting to back that. That's not bad though — They'd probably be something more like Gumroad — independent and run by a small team, and fairly profitable, but hard to grow and IPO. How come services like Digg and Slashdot weren't able to make sustainable revenue off of membership fees?
- edrxty 5y ago
  Agreed, I really wish Lemmy and similar would get more love. There are so many awesome federated projects. Maybe ot but it seems like the federated services are doing a really good job of keeping the crazies away. Nobody will link with hate groups so they can't recruit from the wider user base. Meanwhile Facebook and Reddit just leave hate groups alone and allow them to game algorithmic feeds for rage-engagement such that they have no trouble pulling vulnerable people from the wider community and radicalizing them.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  And how do you stop them being bought? I'd actually love to see companies, especially ones in winner-take-all/network-effect types of tech start out with some sort of unbreakable guarantee of being cool forever. All young platform providers wants to appear open and free and interoperable and trustworthy, but incentives will have their way with them once the valuation gets high enough. Is there a legal or moral vehicle that could prevent this? Has anyone tried it? Would the invisible hand get pissed and remove the magic that makes growth happen?
  - chrononaut 5y ago
tomc1985 5y ago
I am so tired of everyone always thinking they can take over the world. News flash: you can't. R.I.P. to what's left of reddit
- sen 5y ago
  Reddit (at least the version of it that created its popularity today) died ages ago, and now it's just being propped up weekend-at-Bernie's style while the owners suck out every possible cent they can before losing the final remaining iota of user-devotion.
codetrotter 5y ago
Does YC still own part of Reddit by the way? And if so, how much of it? Is that known/will it be known?
blobbers 5y ago
Reddit goes public, WSB moderator conspiracies are about to go up by 1000% This is gonna be interesting! And yeah, would be nice to see one of the SPACs get in on it!
crazy_horse 5y ago
Reddit is toxic. They can't please anyone. You'll either find people upset because they banned covid alternative information subs or upset they didn't do it sooner. hen there are subs that celebrate people dying. Reddit has a long, long history of denying that they have an issue and then once the media shines a light on it, realizes jailbait is yikes. Then they reverse course. Reddit is a bunch of hatred and disinformation today. What happened SPEZ? Your tech is even worse than the disinfo. I thought you were about more than money. https://teddit.net/r/news/comments/pg0jv4/reddit_bans_active_covid_misinformation_subreddit/hb969jp https://teddit.net/r/news/comments/pg0jv4/reddit_bans_active... https://teddit.net/r/HermanCainAward https://teddit.net/r/HermanCainAward This last sub is not something Reddit wants people to find in a few years.
- tmp_anon_22 5y ago
  > I thought you were about more than money. Reddit's funding rounds tells you everything you need to know about the company. Ballooning costs, growth at all costs mindset.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Partisans use reddit as a platform for vitriolic hate-mongering.
- usaar333 5y ago
  > Reddit is a bunch of hatred and disinformation today Partly because they are in effect one of the most unmoderated large scale sites on the internet, which results in the toxic people going there. But if you know how to find subs well, Reddit emerges as one of the best content sources.
  - undersuit 5y ago
    Fun fact, Reddit admins are very light on the moderation, allowing you to make these genuine comments, while the volunteer moderators run the subreddits how ever they like, most of the subreddits censor extensively.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
The scam by which reddit's remaining founders reacquired itself out from under conde-nast is pretty hilarious if it isn't illegal (I have no idea if it was illegal). https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/ellen-pao-part-of-a-long-con-at-reddit https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/ellen-pao-part-of-a-long...
- manquer 5y ago
  In this hypothetical scenario, It would only be illegal if the founders/ management knowingly gave false information to the board and investors.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  You realize that whole story is made up, right?
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  lol. As if anyone wants to be in charge of reddit. Steve can barely hold onto the rudder [1] [2]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covid_denialism_and_policy_clarifications/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...
sonicggg 5y ago
I see a lot of bag holders in the near future. According to CNBC, Reddit users are the least valuable among social media: 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... How many reddit users are actually clicking on those dumb ads they display?
- asdff 5y ago
  As more old people use it reddit will probably honestly get more valuable per user. These people tend to click that junk and give their social security number to random people on the phone and other such scams. Very lucrative population in some peoples eyes.
mdoms 5y ago
Why did this post almost instantly drop off the front page despite huge engagement?
- tracyhenry 5y ago
  more comments than upvotes is seen as a sign of flame war by the algos
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    They should factor length of comments and speed of replies into that. Flame wars generally have a different shape than productive discussions.
Smashure 5y ago
If you have found Reddit policies have been unpopular lately, they’re gonna get much worse when investors want increasing value.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Reddit already has investors, Chinese censorship champion Tencent among others. I don't see what public ownership could do that would make things worse than they already are. See for example: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev... This seems like they're cashing out. They were never able to properly monetize the site for whatever reason, now they're pushing their shares off to anyone naive enough to buy into it. I'd stay far far away.
  - Smashure 5y ago
    I’m very late to this reply, but, a private investor is not the same as being a public company.
treme 5y ago
I got banned from /r/korea few months ago, for using the term "moonies"(President Moon has a cult-like following in Korea, celebrity-power based politics) in a cheeky, teasing manner to call out pro-gov dudes that try to continue to advocate for Mayor of Seoul that committed suicide to prevent from being investigated after being accused of sexual harassment by his secretary. Basically all evidence points to him admitting his guilt more or less by his action, but Pro gov/ Pro president Moon people continue to frame the accuser as someone with a political agenda, and continue to advocate for Mr. Park's innocence due to...you can't be guilty if you're dead before courts. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/asia/south-korea-mayor-sexual-harassment-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/asia/south-korea-mayor-sexual... The mods applied "No overly inflammatory, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or offensive language." to ban my account, and when I protested, the ban stayed, as they got to define what that meant exactly. I made a new account to circumvent the ban when Korean Gov recently came out with new media censorship law, akin to the one passed in Japan few years ago that grants gov much power to censor media for "security" reasons. The pro-gov mods nuked the new account within a day, ironically for this post. https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/perv0j/south_korean_journalists_fear_new_laws_will/hazx26h?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/perv0j/south_korean_... edit: can't link direct to the comment, so I linked parent comment, following was the actual comment that they flagged me for "I have 0 interest in proving anything to you, as you clearly have your bias. I'm just replying for others to hear what the recommendations of one of the most prestigious newspapers to ever be founded are, and one of the best non-partial media rights organizations has to say on the topic." now my ip is shadowbanned for circumventing the reddit policy of not creating new account to post on subs you are banned from. Definitely 1984 vibes.
- sedatk 5y ago
  That's an epidemic among other subreddits too. My banning story from r/Conservative is similar. I got banned for reminding a Trump quote, that was about it. I also got the same "we owe you nothing more than that" attitude when I objected. https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1432377896903925760 https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1432377896903925760
- chrisseaton 5y ago
farmerstan 5y ago
I find it hilarious that the ones who do all the real work to make Reddit what it is, ie the mods and the communities, make zilch from this. The mods are doing their best to make their subreddits the best it can be, for free. Meanwhile the engineers and the execs and investors at Reddit make billions.
- sedatk 5y ago
  Mods get a lot from moderation other than money, maybe money too in some cases. If it was truly without any returns, nobody would do it. They have disproportionate power to ban anyone immediately. They can strut around with their pinned posts, "warnings" to the communities, content deletion. They get to play the community lead despite having unknown credentials for it. Because of that, the quality of moderation is very low, unbalanced, and disproportionate. I think Reddit's moderation structure is cost efficient but suffers from quality and consistency.
  - grp000 5y ago
    Is there even a viable way to compensate mods financially? It seems like it'd be far too expensive, excepting a few major subreddits, which doesn't even get into other issues. You'd have to eventually evaluate and manage mods, which is difficult since the evaluators would have to be good enough subject matter experts to evaluate a mod, then you'd have the problem of communities getting split because they don't like the "man" policing them, even if they are doing a good job. There are also so many subreddits already that look like tribal echo chambers utilizing a "you're either with us or against us" frame of mind that you'd just have to shut them down.
baby 5y ago
I'm willing to bet that the biggest threat to reddit is facebook groups. If you check facebook groups, it's slowly becoming reddit. The only things they're doing wrong is: - Discoverability. It's hard to find groups on Facebook, whereas reddit puts a lot of effort into this. It's also somewhat of a culture on reddit to mention other subreddits. - UI. Facebook is copying the news feed UI for its groups instead of going with more customizable (or perhaps closer to reddit) UIs. - Discussions. Comments in a FB group still suck massively compared to reddit comments. - Curation. You still can't upvote, or see what posts are trending, etc. on FB Groups. They need to give more options to group moderators for creating different kind of spaces. I'm convinced that if FB would allow group admins to make their group look like reddit, reddit would die overnight.
- sedatk 5y ago
  Reddit does a good job curating the content from its groups to its front page. Facebook no such facility, no r/all. Also, there are too many duplicate groups on Reddit, causing a lot of noise. Reddit managed to keep mostly one sub per topic which adds to the curation quality.
  - baby 5y ago
    Good point, r/all is a good gateway to discovering more subreddits. I think FB could emulate that by showing you a default frontpage based on your location. They really ought to have a separation between a "friends" newsfeed and a "local" newsfeed.
  - sedatk 5y ago
    EDIT: there too many duplicate groups on FACEBOOK not Reddit.
- usaar333 5y ago
  Is Facebook willing to allow pseudonyms? Unless they are, they are barely in the same market.
  - baby 5y ago
mrfusion 5y ago
Try going to the front page when you’re not signed in. There are several posts focusing on the woke cause of the week (usually attacking the out group). Then the rest are things you’d imagine would pander to the typical redditor but they’re oddly trying too hard.
mrfusion 5y ago
The idea of reddit is amazing and we had a great fifteen years! Sadly it’s now a swamp of censorship and intolerance to opposing viewpoints. Constant virtue signaling by attacking the other side. It wouldn’t be surprised if it was 95% bots right now. (I was just told I’m not allowed to have opinions on any subjects I don’t have a PhD in.)
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  Accusing "the other side" of virtue signaling is attacking the other side. You must know you're not the only person who actually believes in things.
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    I do see your point but I’d accuse any side of virtue signaling. Both sides do it for sure but it’s just been really in your face on reddit and reddit is pretty one sided at this point.
- Freskis 5y ago
  Yes, Reddit surely has the worst community of all the big websites, it is magnitudes worse than Facebook/Twitter etc. The website seems to encourage extremes of people screaming at each other and having fringe views from which dissension is forbidden. It's a hellhole. Some of the smaller specialist subreddits are high quality though.
anonu 5y ago
GitHub repos are the new subreddits. If they're not, they should be.
modshatereality 5y ago
LOL, they had a good run at least but the writing is on the wall.
binkHN 5y ago
Get ready for a large swath of ad-less Reddit clones as Reddit will soon become an ad-laden cesspool in the name of increasing "shareholder value."
trevor-e 5y ago
I'm curious why people continue to write off Reddit when Twitter has been fairly successful. Reddit's recent funding round puts them at a 10 billion valuation vs Twitter's ~50 billion market cap. Yes, Reddit has been slowly getting worse as it has grown, but it's still a good product and seems fairly well-positioned in the race to monetize content creators.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Honest question, if Reddit ever becomes a profitable business how much longer are moderators going to be willing to work for free? That said reddit is a cesspool of woke and broke 15-25 year olds. If they has money to spend they wouldn't wasting time on reddit.
- stemlord 5y ago
  I think what a lot of people hate about new reddit is what it has sacrificed wrt user experience in favor of monetization
- asdff 5y ago
  If it hasn't made much money in the last 15 years of existence what is going to be the catalyst for it to become Twitter in the next 15 years? Twitter had commercial buy in from the start. People literally follow megabrands and celebrities on twitter directly and consume ads willingly from the horses mouth. It's a brand manager's dream in terms of a social network. How many reddit users are going to subscribe to /r/PepsiCo or /r/Tesla_official and willingly consume overtly sponsored posts? This is the population of internet users that abandoned digg for doing just that. You are in a rock in a hard place with reddit as in order to monetize it, you need to fundamentally change how reddit works from the ground up and in doing that, you risk making the exact same mistake that digg made in alienating their users that lead them to reddit in the first place. Only in this case I don't think these millennials in reddits userbase are going to hop to another platform now that they are 10 years older with more complicated adult lives, and since there is no decent alternative to reddit (like reddit was to digg back in the day), they will probably just decide that maybe this is time that they cut ties with wasting so much time on the internet and focus on more fulfilling or pressing things, and half their customer base vanishes into thin air.
sidcool 5y ago
I have to thank Reddit to enforce login on mobile site subreddits. It has reduced my overall addiction to reddit. Now if HN does that, I will be able to reduce my internet usage by at least 30%.
redorb 5y ago
If they ever kill off the old.reddit.com site I'll be done, most users prefer the alternative mobile app -- They are a bit broken - but have taken so much capital - they have to IPO, thus is life.
- jftuga 5y ago
  Which alternative mobile app are you referring to? There are several in the Apple app store.
  - ra7 5y ago
    Apollo is one that’s excellent. Narwhal is pretty popular too.
  - Brendinooo 5y ago
    Apollo is exactly how I want Reddit to work on iOS. Can't imagine it being any other way (though I admit I haven't put much imagination into the matter).
- amw-zero 5y ago
  See I loved the official Reddit app until about 3-4 months ago. They changed the UI for viewing a post, and it's really annoying now. Really, sometimes I feel that there are designers that are just so out of touch, and engineers feel like they have to implement the designs they're given. Really nothing else explains this phenomenon.
  - lantry 5y ago
    > Really nothing else explains this phenomenon. Or maybe your tastes are different from the majority of users? fwiw I don't like the new UI either, but two datapoints is hardly a comprehensive survey
    - flycaliguy 5y ago
      Yeah, this attitude is as much totally correct as it is a cliche for coders.
b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
The IPO better reolace all their moderators. Watching what has happened to Reddit over the last few weeks and years shows how remarkably out of touch they are. IPO launch is many peoples exit strategy ..
hiram112 5y ago
Everyone is wondering how Reddit can be valued this high despite the fact they don't data mine as much as Google or Facebook, and a good amount of their users aren't even using the official site or app, and instead use alternative apps that don't serve ads. My guess, based on just how horribly censored and astroturfed their subs have become over the last 5 years, is that the targeting of banner ads and stealing personal data for "analytics and sharing with data partners" is not their business model. Instead, they're paid big money to push narratives to the masses of 16-30 year olds that flock to the site religiously. The group-think on Reddit is far greater than any other site I've ever seen on the internet, including very partisan forums and "media" outlets. And even the tiniest bit of disagreement from accepted narratives - e.g. small subs that wouldn't have even been noticed ten years ago - are crushed and removed without mercy. What's more insidious is that it isn't just the typical corporate "sponsors" who are pushing sneakers or phones or mobile games. I'd imagine it's deep-pocketed NGOs, state controlled PR and propaganda agencies, and worse.
- kilroy123 5y ago
  I agree and personally I gave up on Reddit and stopped going to the site. To be brutally honest, I think HN has started to become similar in many ways. I've been around here for over 10 years and it's definitely different than the early days.
  - HumanReadable 5y ago
    In what ways do you think it's similar? I only started reading hackernews a few years back, so I don't know what it was like in the past so I'm quite curious to hear how hackernews used to be and how it has changed.
aussiegreenie 5y ago
How many people have been around when PG gave away the t-shirts when it was sold for $30 million?
rohitkaul 5y ago
From what I see, Reddit is terribly undervalued. It's chasing advertising dollars in a game that it cannot win (FB has much larger scale and ads inventory to sell). Take a look at this before thinking of investing in the IPO--> https://www.readthehypothesis.com/p/reddit-valuation-monetization-ipo https://www.readthehypothesis.com/p/reddit-valuation-monetiz...

145 points by hi5eyes 5y ago

Interesting, interesting. I wonder how WallStreetBets and all the Apes would treat Reddit's stock. This could be quite a ride.

LatteLazy 5y ago

Markets are at an all time high.

vmception 5y ago
SPACtacular

travoc 5y ago

The risk within the “internet chat” sector is huge. Many popular discussion platforms disappear almost overnight. Slashdot, Digg, MySpace. I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment.

CerealFounder 5y ago
The fact that Reddit let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
- kryptn 5y ago
  How are reddit and discord related?
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Not GP, but I assume because 'subreddits' so frequently have an associated Discord 'server'. You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
    - Dwolb 5y ago
      This is the same for marketplace features across gear-related subreddits. Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
  - treis 5y ago
    They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      They have totally different formats though, with Big Red being slower and Discord being realtime.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example. The difference is purely branding.
        Talanes 5y ago
        >The difference is purely branding. If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you. If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
        Talanes 5y ago
        But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen. I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
  - mintplant 5y ago
    When you get down to it, many Discord channels are shared topic-based streams of links/media interspersed with commentary.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.
  - mbesto 5y ago
    People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there. Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
- jorblumesea 5y ago
  Fairly different apps/use cases.
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
  The fact that (insert anything here) let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
- zer0-c00l 5y ago
  I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.
  - dimmke 5y ago
    Reddit ended up adding a corny chat feature that is exclusively used for spam as their answer to it. Pretty awful. But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
      - crazy_horse 5y ago
        Does Huffman have no say? How did they go form lisp to this?
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        The Faustian bargain of venture capital. You get access to easy money early on, at the price of your (company's) soul.
      - dimmke 5y ago
        Reddit literally destroyed independent forums. That's such a huge swath of the internet and they effectively have a monopoly. Additionally, they top Google results for so many different subjects. I don't understand why they can't monetize that more. They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at. Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
- tyrfing 5y ago
  I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way. 2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction. Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people." I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord. Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.
eshack94 5y ago
Serious question - why so much risk and instability in this "internet chat" sector?
- edoceo 5y ago
  Switching cost for users is near zero.
  - sk5t 5y ago
    And perhaps a "fresh start" for would-be moderators and tone-setters? i.e. the power users of reddit seem more than a bit ensconced.
    - chippy 5y ago
      Moderators have the most to lose by moving, it will be the people who don't post who have nothing to lose. We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control. These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times! I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
  - hncurious 5y ago
    Except users don't switch because of network effects. None of the twitter, reddit, youtube alternatives have managed to put even a dent in them.
wombatpm 5y ago
Slashdot is still around, but their previous tone deaf management killed it through neglect and stupidity. It will never regain its lost glory.
slg 5y ago
>I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment. As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
- patentatt 5y ago
  I’d say it’s because they have kept the core platform unchanged. In other words, they haven’t really done anything. Heading on over to old.reddit.com is pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago (more or less). As soon as it’s actually impossible to avoid their push to their terrible ‘new’ site and app, I’m jumping ship. Classic Reddit is like Craigslist, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.
  - slg 5y ago
    > Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      You skipped the context of the rest of the quoted message, which was referring to features and UI, not moderation.
      - slg 5y ago
        They are intermingled. Mods are often asking for new tools to help them moderate their own communities.
RivieraKid 5y ago
Reddit is not internet chat. It's a collection of online communities.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- millzlane 5y ago
  It's forum software 3.0
  - DoItToMe81 5y ago
    Forum software (worse edition EXTREME)
- tempest_ 5y ago
  That did not stop them from trying to strap a chat to it. I remember when I got the first "Chat", I was confused then immediately went to figure out how to disable it. I wonder if it ever got traction.
trident5000 5y ago
I used to be a hard core Reddit user for probably 10 years. I havent used it in maybe 2 years; I have no interest. People like me are probably showing up in their user data and the writing is on the wall internally. Thats when you go public to dump the bag. Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  > People dont like information platforms with information gaps. Is there evidence of this? I want to believe this is true but the era of cancel culture and deplatforming suggests people want information gaps and echo chambers.
  - tjs8rj 5y ago
    A fraction of people participate in and encourage cancel culture
diogenescynic 5y ago
And the Reddit redesigns are all awful and not what the users actually want.

Analemma_ 5y ago

Get ready for the degradation of Reddit to accelerate when this happens. Right now Reddit is almost still usable if you use third-party apps on mobile and Old Reddit Redirect on the desktop; both of those are going to be cut off for a quick jolt to revenue when the market demands it.

cblconfederate 5y ago
Not just the format; if they go public, no more nsfw/politically ambivalent content. Which means pretty much most of reddit doing a tumblr
e40 5y ago
The "res" extension for FF and Chrome saved it for me.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
With what reddit has become, both from a leadership and a userbase standpoint, its fall can't happen soon enough. It is so toxic and manipulated nowadays that I won't mourn for it.
- e40 5y ago
  That is true about large parts, but for me I can easily avoid those. There are truly good communities there that are great resources for various problems (technical and not).
- chrononaut 5y ago
  Isn't it largely user-moderated? Do you believe that model is no longer reasonable for the platform it is trying to be?
  - Freskis 5y ago
    Probably. The evidence speaks for itself. Most of the reddit homepage is a hatefest of [ingroup] screaming hate at [outgroup]. It's so toxic as to beggar belief. Facebook and Twitter seems like prim decorum in comparison.

Scoundreller 5y ago

Lemme guess, zero profits and zero prospect of profitability?

cyberge99 5y ago
The article states $100 million last quarter just from advertising.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- koolba 5y ago
  The article says revenue, not profit. Though you’d think it wouldn’t cost $100M per quarter to run an HN clone with little to no first party moderation.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    That's because they've been busy adding features nobody asked for, all of which don't apply to many because they're only on New Reddit.
    - Scoundreller 5y ago
      If they go public, what will it take to get “kill New Reddit” onto a shareholder vote?
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        Hostile takeover?
        Scoundreller 5y ago
        I don’t expect it to pass, but I see some weird proposals sometimes that have no chance of passing, like human rights obligations for a defence contractor.

yosito 5y ago

Apart from the HN audience, what is the rest of the internet going to turn to when Reddit goes belly up?

pvarangot 5y ago
Honestly I think nowhere that is that big. I think it will federate a bit again into Discord/forums. It's kind of a last bastion of sorts for Alexandria type news and content aggregators with pseudonymous social features. Look what happened to big subs that where playing cat and mouse with the mods, they all just scattered after trying other platforms like Voat or whatever.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Some kind of dark-horse platform will emerge and catch on like wildfire. I do not think a mere reddit clone will pull anyone away. There would have to be something new about it's UX.
- conductr 5y ago
  > There would have to be something new about it's UX Mobile first would be enough. I'm a little bit older and still do not understand the appeal of snapchat, tiktok, etc. I understand FB/twitter/instagram (I just don't like using it). But making a mobile version of a small feature fuel the hype storm needed
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Reddit is absolutely a mobile first company. Most of their users use adblock, so having a desktop site is just a way for them to gain mobile users. Their mobile app being awful is pretty hilarious given all this, but they're certainly trying very hard to improve the experience on mobile(while also showing as many ads as possible).
    - cwkoss 5y ago
      Reddit is trying to be a mobile first company. I don't think they are successful. I know many people who use reddit, almost always either on desktop browsers or using 3rd party apps for mobile, because their first party one is so clunky.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

this_user 5y ago

This should be interesting as it will inevitably increase pressure on reddit's leadership to monetise their users better. But it has always been part of that site's DNA to avoid the kind of extreme data mining that Google and FB are performing. This, on the other hand, has led to a situation where reddit, despite its size, is consistently underperforming financially relative to what would be possible. How are they going to balance that?

tomc1985 5y ago
What would be possible with less monetization of users and a decent-sized support staff? Or are we talking the bullshit SV-style possibilities where you monetize the living shit out of everyone and everything and give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew?
- rodgerd 5y ago
  > give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew? I mean that describes the situation today. The management involvement in Reddit is for the CEO to support ivermectin conspiracy and GamerGate subs.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    'Management involvement' has always been heavily free-speech at all costs. Reddit is one of the last bastions of this style of management and have yet to succumb to zoomers' whimsical emotional fragility. They were ground zero for The Fappening, remember? And all sorts of other nasty stuff that they only cracked down on because of intense pressure. People need to remember that they are calling for CENSORSHIP, and reddit's policy for the longest time was to avoid that at all costs. If there's one thing I respected about Reddit it was their ability to stand up to those whiners. I am so ashamed of the latest generation -- for all our differences that I have no choice but to accept, the one thing I cannot forgive is how they seem to have forgotten what free speech means.
    - 5y ago

ManBlanket 5y ago

I clearly have no idea what is going on or how business works because the only question plaguing my mind is how on earth reddit manages to be valued at $10B. Does low-key shilling and banner ads really make that much money? I know it doesn't work this way but they'd have to collect $192 from their 52M daily users to earn that kind of cash. Honestly I got the impression reddit stopped being cool like 5 years ago and other than this year's entertaining stock market shenanigans it's largely a novelty. Even when I was using it I could hardly imagine my eyes were worth $192 to anybody. Not to mention last time I looked at reddit the incel and children under 18 vibes were intense. What do I know? FB somehow manages to be relevant. Am I missing something or are we just printing monopoly money based on increasingly loose pretexts nowadays? Do you even need a business model to make money anymore, or is it all based on speculative user counts and growth?

cblconfederate 5y ago
reddit is essential to google, adding it as a keyword in searches increases google's value by billions
- hmmokidk 5y ago
  If it weren't for reddit google would be damn near useless to me.
  - handrous 5y ago
    This isn't even a joke, it's just true. "reddit [my actual search]" is the only way I know to sort of get at all kinds of info that Google is no longer any good whatsoever at finding. I guess if that stops being useful, for some reason, I'll have to resort to one of those long queries that tries to limit searches to independent forums (which used to be visible without that kind of thing, when they were relevant, but are now nearly impossible to find otherwise). Twitter might be a partial replacement, but they seem dedicated to making searching their site, by any means, as useless as possible.
    - 5y ago

edgefield 5y ago

We desperately need news aggregators and social media services like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, that are NOT run by for profit enterprises. There are a lot of terrific open source platforms out there and saddened that none of them have gained much traction.

yawnxyz 5y ago
At least, not venture-scale businesses. I can see some community and membership-driven Hacker News clones for niches being possibly sustainable (isn't that kind of what Reddit started out as, anyway?), but can't see any VCs wanting to back that. That's not bad though — They'd probably be something more like Gumroad — independent and run by a small team, and fairly profitable, but hard to grow and IPO. How come services like Digg and Slashdot weren't able to make sustainable revenue off of membership fees?
edrxty 5y ago
Agreed, I really wish Lemmy and similar would get more love. There are so many awesome federated projects. Maybe ot but it seems like the federated services are doing a really good job of keeping the crazies away. Nobody will link with hate groups so they can't recruit from the wider user base. Meanwhile Facebook and Reddit just leave hate groups alone and allow them to game algorithmic feeds for rage-engagement such that they have no trouble pulling vulnerable people from the wider community and radicalizing them.
Y_Y 5y ago
And how do you stop them being bought? I'd actually love to see companies, especially ones in winner-take-all/network-effect types of tech start out with some sort of unbreakable guarantee of being cool forever. All young platform providers wants to appear open and free and interoperable and trustworthy, but incentives will have their way with them once the valuation gets high enough. Is there a legal or moral vehicle that could prevent this? Has anyone tried it? Would the invisible hand get pissed and remove the magic that makes growth happen?
- chrononaut 5y ago

tomc1985 5y ago

I am so tired of everyone always thinking they can take over the world. News flash: you can't. R.I.P. to what's left of reddit

sen 5y ago
Reddit (at least the version of it that created its popularity today) died ages ago, and now it's just being propped up weekend-at-Bernie's style while the owners suck out every possible cent they can before losing the final remaining iota of user-devotion.

codetrotter 5y ago

Does YC still own part of Reddit by the way? And if so, how much of it? Is that known/will it be known?

blobbers 5y ago

Reddit goes public, WSB moderator conspiracies are about to go up by 1000% This is gonna be interesting! And yeah, would be nice to see one of the SPACs get in on it!

crazy_horse 5y ago

Reddit is toxic. They can't please anyone. You'll either find people upset because they banned covid alternative information subs or upset they didn't do it sooner. hen there are subs that celebrate people dying. Reddit has a long, long history of denying that they have an issue and then once the media shines a light on it, realizes jailbait is yikes. Then they reverse course. Reddit is a bunch of hatred and disinformation today. What happened SPEZ? Your tech is even worse than the disinfo. I thought you were about more than money. https://teddit.net/r/news/comments/pg0jv4/reddit_bans_active_covid_misinformation_subreddit/hb969jp https://teddit.net/r/news/comments/pg0jv4/reddit_bans_active... https://teddit.net/r/HermanCainAward https://teddit.net/r/HermanCainAward This last sub is not something Reddit wants people to find in a few years.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago
> I thought you were about more than money. Reddit's funding rounds tells you everything you need to know about the company. Ballooning costs, growth at all costs mindset.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Partisans use reddit as a platform for vitriolic hate-mongering.
usaar333 5y ago
> Reddit is a bunch of hatred and disinformation today Partly because they are in effect one of the most unmoderated large scale sites on the internet, which results in the toxic people going there. But if you know how to find subs well, Reddit emerges as one of the best content sources.
- undersuit 5y ago
  Fun fact, Reddit admins are very light on the moderation, allowing you to make these genuine comments, while the volunteer moderators run the subreddits how ever they like, most of the subreddits censor extensively.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

The scam by which reddit's remaining founders reacquired itself out from under conde-nast is pretty hilarious if it isn't illegal (I have no idea if it was illegal). https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/ellen-pao-part-of-a-long-con-at-reddit https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/ellen-pao-part-of-a-long...

manquer 5y ago
In this hypothetical scenario, It would only be illegal if the founders/ management knowingly gave false information to the board and investors.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NelsonMinar 5y ago
You realize that whole story is made up, right?
unityByFreedom 5y ago
lol. As if anyone wants to be in charge of reddit. Steve can barely hold onto the rudder [1] [2]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debate_dissent_and_protest_on_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covid_denialism_and_policy_clarifications/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...

sonicggg 5y ago

I see a lot of bag holders in the near future. According to CNBC, Reddit users are the least valuable among social media: 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... How many reddit users are actually clicking on those dumb ads they display?

asdff 5y ago
As more old people use it reddit will probably honestly get more valuable per user. These people tend to click that junk and give their social security number to random people on the phone and other such scams. Very lucrative population in some peoples eyes.

mdoms 5y ago

Why did this post almost instantly drop off the front page despite huge engagement?

tracyhenry 5y ago
more comments than upvotes is seen as a sign of flame war by the algos
- rpmisms 5y ago
  They should factor length of comments and speed of replies into that. Flame wars generally have a different shape than productive discussions.

Smashure 5y ago

If you have found Reddit policies have been unpopular lately, they’re gonna get much worse when investors want increasing value.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Reddit already has investors, Chinese censorship champion Tencent among others. I don't see what public ownership could do that would make things worse than they already are. See for example: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev... This seems like they're cashing out. They were never able to properly monetize the site for whatever reason, now they're pushing their shares off to anyone naive enough to buy into it. I'd stay far far away.
- Smashure 5y ago
  I’m very late to this reply, but, a private investor is not the same as being a public company.

treme 5y ago

I got banned from /r/korea few months ago, for using the term "moonies"(President Moon has a cult-like following in Korea, celebrity-power based politics) in a cheeky, teasing manner to call out pro-gov dudes that try to continue to advocate for Mayor of Seoul that committed suicide to prevent from being investigated after being accused of sexual harassment by his secretary. Basically all evidence points to him admitting his guilt more or less by his action, but Pro gov/ Pro president Moon people continue to frame the accuser as someone with a political agenda, and continue to advocate for Mr. Park's innocence due to...you can't be guilty if you're dead before courts. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/asia/south-korea-mayor-sexual-harassment-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/asia/south-korea-mayor-sexual... The mods applied "No overly inflammatory, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or offensive language." to ban my account, and when I protested, the ban stayed, as they got to define what that meant exactly. I made a new account to circumvent the ban when Korean Gov recently came out with new media censorship law, akin to the one passed in Japan few years ago that grants gov much power to censor media for "security" reasons. The pro-gov mods nuked the new account within a day, ironically for this post. https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/perv0j/south_korean_journalists_fear_new_laws_will/hazx26h?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/perv0j/south_korean_... edit: can't link direct to the comment, so I linked parent comment, following was the actual comment that they flagged me for "I have 0 interest in proving anything to you, as you clearly have your bias. I'm just replying for others to hear what the recommendations of one of the most prestigious newspapers to ever be founded are, and one of the best non-partial media rights organizations has to say on the topic." now my ip is shadowbanned for circumventing the reddit policy of not creating new account to post on subs you are banned from. Definitely 1984 vibes.

sedatk 5y ago
That's an epidemic among other subreddits too. My banning story from r/Conservative is similar. I got banned for reminding a Trump quote, that was about it. I also got the same "we owe you nothing more than that" attitude when I objected. https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1432377896903925760 https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1432377896903925760
chrisseaton 5y ago

farmerstan 5y ago

I find it hilarious that the ones who do all the real work to make Reddit what it is, ie the mods and the communities, make zilch from this. The mods are doing their best to make their subreddits the best it can be, for free. Meanwhile the engineers and the execs and investors at Reddit make billions.

sedatk 5y ago
Mods get a lot from moderation other than money, maybe money too in some cases. If it was truly without any returns, nobody would do it. They have disproportionate power to ban anyone immediately. They can strut around with their pinned posts, "warnings" to the communities, content deletion. They get to play the community lead despite having unknown credentials for it. Because of that, the quality of moderation is very low, unbalanced, and disproportionate. I think Reddit's moderation structure is cost efficient but suffers from quality and consistency.
- grp000 5y ago
  Is there even a viable way to compensate mods financially? It seems like it'd be far too expensive, excepting a few major subreddits, which doesn't even get into other issues. You'd have to eventually evaluate and manage mods, which is difficult since the evaluators would have to be good enough subject matter experts to evaluate a mod, then you'd have the problem of communities getting split because they don't like the "man" policing them, even if they are doing a good job. There are also so many subreddits already that look like tribal echo chambers utilizing a "you're either with us or against us" frame of mind that you'd just have to shut them down.

baby 5y ago

I'm willing to bet that the biggest threat to reddit is facebook groups. If you check facebook groups, it's slowly becoming reddit. The only things they're doing wrong is: - Discoverability. It's hard to find groups on Facebook, whereas reddit puts a lot of effort into this. It's also somewhat of a culture on reddit to mention other subreddits. - UI. Facebook is copying the news feed UI for its groups instead of going with more customizable (or perhaps closer to reddit) UIs. - Discussions. Comments in a FB group still suck massively compared to reddit comments. - Curation. You still can't upvote, or see what posts are trending, etc. on FB Groups. They need to give more options to group moderators for creating different kind of spaces. I'm convinced that if FB would allow group admins to make their group look like reddit, reddit would die overnight.

sedatk 5y ago
Reddit does a good job curating the content from its groups to its front page. Facebook no such facility, no r/all. Also, there are too many duplicate groups on Reddit, causing a lot of noise. Reddit managed to keep mostly one sub per topic which adds to the curation quality.
- baby 5y ago
  Good point, r/all is a good gateway to discovering more subreddits. I think FB could emulate that by showing you a default frontpage based on your location. They really ought to have a separation between a "friends" newsfeed and a "local" newsfeed.
- sedatk 5y ago
  EDIT: there too many duplicate groups on FACEBOOK not Reddit.
usaar333 5y ago
Is Facebook willing to allow pseudonyms? Unless they are, they are barely in the same market.
- baby 5y ago

mrfusion 5y ago

Try going to the front page when you’re not signed in. There are several posts focusing on the woke cause of the week (usually attacking the out group). Then the rest are things you’d imagine would pander to the typical redditor but they’re oddly trying too hard.

mrfusion 5y ago

The idea of reddit is amazing and we had a great fifteen years! Sadly it’s now a swamp of censorship and intolerance to opposing viewpoints. Constant virtue signaling by attacking the other side. It wouldn’t be surprised if it was 95% bots right now. (I was just told I’m not allowed to have opinions on any subjects I don’t have a PhD in.)

mkr-hn 5y ago
Accusing "the other side" of virtue signaling is attacking the other side. You must know you're not the only person who actually believes in things.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  I do see your point but I’d accuse any side of virtue signaling. Both sides do it for sure but it’s just been really in your face on reddit and reddit is pretty one sided at this point.
Freskis 5y ago
Yes, Reddit surely has the worst community of all the big websites, it is magnitudes worse than Facebook/Twitter etc. The website seems to encourage extremes of people screaming at each other and having fringe views from which dissension is forbidden. It's a hellhole. Some of the smaller specialist subreddits are high quality though.

anonu 5y ago

GitHub repos are the new subreddits. If they're not, they should be.

modshatereality 5y ago

LOL, they had a good run at least but the writing is on the wall.

binkHN 5y ago

Get ready for a large swath of ad-less Reddit clones as Reddit will soon become an ad-laden cesspool in the name of increasing "shareholder value."

trevor-e 5y ago

I'm curious why people continue to write off Reddit when Twitter has been fairly successful. Reddit's recent funding round puts them at a 10 billion valuation vs Twitter's ~50 billion market cap. Yes, Reddit has been slowly getting worse as it has grown, but it's still a good product and seems fairly well-positioned in the race to monetize content creators.

morpheos137 5y ago
Honest question, if Reddit ever becomes a profitable business how much longer are moderators going to be willing to work for free? That said reddit is a cesspool of woke and broke 15-25 year olds. If they has money to spend they wouldn't wasting time on reddit.
stemlord 5y ago
I think what a lot of people hate about new reddit is what it has sacrificed wrt user experience in favor of monetization
asdff 5y ago
If it hasn't made much money in the last 15 years of existence what is going to be the catalyst for it to become Twitter in the next 15 years? Twitter had commercial buy in from the start. People literally follow megabrands and celebrities on twitter directly and consume ads willingly from the horses mouth. It's a brand manager's dream in terms of a social network. How many reddit users are going to subscribe to /r/PepsiCo or /r/Tesla_official and willingly consume overtly sponsored posts? This is the population of internet users that abandoned digg for doing just that. You are in a rock in a hard place with reddit as in order to monetize it, you need to fundamentally change how reddit works from the ground up and in doing that, you risk making the exact same mistake that digg made in alienating their users that lead them to reddit in the first place. Only in this case I don't think these millennials in reddits userbase are going to hop to another platform now that they are 10 years older with more complicated adult lives, and since there is no decent alternative to reddit (like reddit was to digg back in the day), they will probably just decide that maybe this is time that they cut ties with wasting so much time on the internet and focus on more fulfilling or pressing things, and half their customer base vanishes into thin air.

sidcool 5y ago

I have to thank Reddit to enforce login on mobile site subreddits. It has reduced my overall addiction to reddit. Now if HN does that, I will be able to reduce my internet usage by at least 30%.

redorb 5y ago

If they ever kill off the old.reddit.com site I'll be done, most users prefer the alternative mobile app -- They are a bit broken - but have taken so much capital - they have to IPO, thus is life.

jftuga 5y ago
Which alternative mobile app are you referring to? There are several in the Apple app store.
- ra7 5y ago
  Apollo is one that’s excellent. Narwhal is pretty popular too.
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  Apollo is exactly how I want Reddit to work on iOS. Can't imagine it being any other way (though I admit I haven't put much imagination into the matter).
amw-zero 5y ago
See I loved the official Reddit app until about 3-4 months ago. They changed the UI for viewing a post, and it's really annoying now. Really, sometimes I feel that there are designers that are just so out of touch, and engineers feel like they have to implement the designs they're given. Really nothing else explains this phenomenon.
- lantry 5y ago
  > Really nothing else explains this phenomenon. Or maybe your tastes are different from the majority of users? fwiw I don't like the new UI either, but two datapoints is hardly a comprehensive survey
  - flycaliguy 5y ago
    Yeah, this attitude is as much totally correct as it is a cliche for coders.

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago

The IPO better reolace all their moderators. Watching what has happened to Reddit over the last few weeks and years shows how remarkably out of touch they are. IPO launch is many peoples exit strategy ..

hiram112 5y ago

Everyone is wondering how Reddit can be valued this high despite the fact they don't data mine as much as Google or Facebook, and a good amount of their users aren't even using the official site or app, and instead use alternative apps that don't serve ads. My guess, based on just how horribly censored and astroturfed their subs have become over the last 5 years, is that the targeting of banner ads and stealing personal data for "analytics and sharing with data partners" is not their business model. Instead, they're paid big money to push narratives to the masses of 16-30 year olds that flock to the site religiously. The group-think on Reddit is far greater than any other site I've ever seen on the internet, including very partisan forums and "media" outlets. And even the tiniest bit of disagreement from accepted narratives - e.g. small subs that wouldn't have even been noticed ten years ago - are crushed and removed without mercy. What's more insidious is that it isn't just the typical corporate "sponsors" who are pushing sneakers or phones or mobile games. I'd imagine it's deep-pocketed NGOs, state controlled PR and propaganda agencies, and worse.

kilroy123 5y ago
I agree and personally I gave up on Reddit and stopped going to the site. To be brutally honest, I think HN has started to become similar in many ways. I've been around here for over 10 years and it's definitely different than the early days.
- HumanReadable 5y ago
  In what ways do you think it's similar? I only started reading hackernews a few years back, so I don't know what it was like in the past so I'm quite curious to hear how hackernews used to be and how it has changed.

aussiegreenie 5y ago

How many people have been around when PG gave away the t-shirts when it was sold for $30 million?

rohitkaul 5y ago

From what I see, Reddit is terribly undervalued. It's chasing advertising dollars in a game that it cannot win (FB has much larger scale and ads inventory to sell). Take a look at this before thinking of investing in the IPO--> https://www.readthehypothesis.com/p/reddit-valuation-monetization-ipo https://www.readthehypothesis.com/p/reddit-valuation-monetiz...