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Reddit acquires ML startup Spell
- aneil 4y agoMaybe if they can just focus on making their video servers work sometime in the next decade.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- n00bface 4y agoFor everyone nodding in agreement with this post I have a treat for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99cVnYY9Iqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99cVnYY9Iqs
- bombcar 4y agoThis is actually obscene wow. My bits and bytes are crying in pain and suddenly I'm against net neutrality for Reddit.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoThat music and linus hopping in is so great..
- aneil 4y agoWell that explains part of it. It does look like they plan to do something about it finally: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/v3frc1/what_were_working_on_this_year/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/v3frc1/what_were_wo... > Performant > One consistent message from redditors has been that performance on the site and native apps could be better. We agree. That’s why the Reddit engineering team is working on making the Reddit platform faster and more reliable. > A quick heads-up–this section is for engineers and robots. If you like a bit of nerdy tech talk, read on. If you don’t want to get lost in the technical details of what it takes to keep a site likeReddit running, you may want to skip ahead to the ‘Excellent’ section. > Improving platform stability > Last year, a major priority was improving feed load times (also known as Cold Start Latency) so that redditors could tap into their feeds and scroll through posts quickly, without waiting or watching little blue spinners tell them the page is loading. Because of those efforts, we saw drops in wait times across the board—iOS went down -11%, Android -19%, and the backend was down -25%. We also made improvements that reduced crashes and errors, resulting in a 64% reduction in downtime and a 97% reduction in background error rate.We’ll continue to invest in these sorts of latency and stability improvements, while also investing in a design system to componentize Reddit’s user interface (UI). > Making Reddit faster, faster, faster! > Another big factor in a webpage’s performance is how much stuff it loads. The number of requests for assets, the size of those assets, and how those assets are used are all good indicators of what sort of performance the site will generally have. Reddit’s current web platforms make a lot of requests and the payload sizes are high. This can make the site unwieldy and slow for redditors (especially in places that may already have slower internet service). > We’ve already begun work on unifying our web (what some of you call new Reddit) and mobile web clients to make them faster, clean up UX debt, and upgrade the underlying tech to a modern technology stack. (For those interested in such things, that stack is Lit element, Web Components, and Baseplate.js. And the core technology choice is server-side rendering using native web components, which allow for faster page loads.) Stay tuned, because we’ll be sharing more on these efforts later in the year, and there’s some exciting stuff on the way.
- minimaxir 4y agoThis acquisition is...unusual. I strongly suspect it's not a 10x exit. (last raised $15M in 2019: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spell https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spell ) Reddit obviously has the data for robust machine learning, but not sure how an experiments-management startup aligns with it unless it's an acquihire.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- phphphphp 4y agoAcquihire. "Our next challenge is to apply what we’ve built to improve the user experience for redditors" "we’ll no longer be signing up new commercial customers to the Spell service" https://spell.ml/blog/spell-joins-reddit-YqtKRhEAACMAgbU9 https://spell.ml/blog/spell-joins-reddit-YqtKRhEAACMAgbU9
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoDo the founders get any money out of it or not much.
- bombcar 4y agoDepends on the deal, but if the founders are in control and the company wasn't death-spiraling, they usually do decently well (but not so well that they immediately quit their new job).
- kvdveer 4y agoAssuming the founders are stock holders, they agreed to part with their share. Its unlikely that they were persuaded to do so without the promise of a significant payout.
- PhoenixReborn 4y agoDisclosure: former Reddit employee It's definitely an acquihire. MLOps has been one of Reddit's weaker areas historically, so this acquisition makes sense to get a talented team in with a clear understanding of the space.
- celim307 4y agoI thought the whole appeal of Reddit was community moderation and escape from algorithms.
- stagger87 4y agoPrimarily for ads I would guess.
- ptmcc 4y agoIt used to be, but the push for monetization has poisoned that well. I don't know what comes after reddit but I'm keeping my eyes and ears open. Had a reddit recruiter reach out to me recently looking for engineering leadership for their upcoming product road map. What's in: ads, influencers, crypto, NFTs. What's not in: improving the core feature set of reddit like community management, curation, search, or user interface/experience. Hard pass, and a bad sign of what's to come.
- chx 4y agoThe redesign and the complete stonewalling of it by most of the community is telling.
- ptmcc 4y agoThe moment they kill/break old.reddit.com is the moment I quit reddit for good Unless they magically release a not horrible new UI, which I'm not holding my breath for
- sockaddr 4y agoLikewise. It's probably the worst web UI I currently know of. Whatever team designed and implemented it should really feel bad about themselves and their work, it's unnecessarily bad, as if they were trying to make a shitty UI. I will happily stop using reddit if they kill old.reddit.com
- 4y ago
- jwilber 4y agoReddit should prioritize their site working on the browser. Clicking a nested thread seems to crash whatever browser I use 1/10th of the time, the videos never work, and the time it takes to open a thread is almost unbelievable in 2022. (Never mind the times it won’t let me view content without the app.)
- pier25 4y agoold.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit experience
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoYep. "This page looks better in the app" No reddit. It sure as shit doesn't.
- sonofhans 4y agoYes, that’s awful. It’s corporate gaslighting — the new page is user-hostile in nearly every way imaginable, but it helps product managers manipulate user attention to meet our quarterly KPIs, so we’ll happily lie to your face to get you to switch.
- pier25 4y agoDo people at Reddit still use old.reddit.com ?
- sumy23 4y agoReddit has an odd strategy. I have Apollo on my phone, which is a great Reddit app that doesn’t have ads. Sometimes, I go to Reddit in Safari out of habit. The experience is so terrible, that it forces me to go from the website, which has ads, to Apollo, which doesn’t. The performance of the mobile website is absolutely terrible as well. It’s like they’re trying to make a garbage website.
- 4y ago
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoI mean, when they dropped the tagline "The front page of the internet", for the committee engineered "Dive into anything", you knew it was going down. Reddit is a walking corpse and I'm happy to participate in the monthly "Reddit is shit" punching bag thread.
- jklinger410 4y agoRight now they are floating on viral momentum. They are a few stupid decisions and one neat alternative away from going the way of Digg.
- PhoenixReborn 4y agoI worked at Reddit for several years in the past - if anything, they have the exact opposite of viral momentum: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480?lang=en I do agree on the neat alternative piece, but all of the ones that have come up in the past had some sort of flaw (or in some cases deliberate slower growth) that caused them not to go viral (Voat, Tildes, etc)
- eterm 4y agoThat may be true, but here's some context to that: https://imgur.com/a/6le18xj https://imgur.com/a/6le18xj The blue line (reddit) does indeed keep going up. But it's barely noticable compared to the red (facebook).
- bombcar 4y agoI'm honestly flabbergasted that with all the nearly-free money flowing around, nobody tried to build a better Reddit without making it both worse and even MORE filled with spam and nazis. I suspect in general the entire "thing" that is Reddit is on its way out - just like how craigslist killed classified ads and itself may be slowly dying, Reddit killed forums and now is slowly dying, there may be no replacement.
- 4y ago
- ydnaclementine 4y agoImagine how easy it would be to sell ads on reddit, the users self select topics. If I subscribed to r/koreancosmetics and r/makeup, do you really need ML to figure out which ads to show?
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoI desperately wish they would have IPO'd last may so I could short the ever living shit out of them.
- bombcar 4y agoThere's an old saying goes something like this "if you go to the car dealership, and all they have are station wagons, they're gonna sell you a station wagon". The ads you see on Reddit say much more about who is willing to advertise with them than anything about you. And so if you're seeing low-value ads, it's because they can't sell any high-value ones.
- bko 4y agoWhy can't they sell ads? As somewhat of an aside, I've used google ads before (small money) and found the experience to be awful. Very confusing interface and I am almost positive I was doing things wrong. I've also used Facebook and found it much better. It's weird because that's google's cash cow. Does everyone who spend real money just go through a personal broker or something or does everyone use that interface? What drives ad spend?
- bombcar 4y ago> Why can't they sell ads? I suspect the real answer is "because ads on Reddit are less than worthless" - so you get ads trying to sell you ways to poo. I suspect Google is in a position of power so it is to their interest to make it hard to use their ad interface (or no reason to make it easier) because they don't want you to really work out exactly how useless the ads may be. > What drives ad spend? Momentum, likely, but I'm not in the business so I can't really talk to the values.
- 4y ago
- aerostable_slug 4y agoVideo player fixes? Nope. Search being an open joke? Not going to even look at it. Purchase a few ML people? Oh that will surely increase our valuation. Do something about toxic supermods? That's a feature.
- 0xBABAD00C 4y ago> Do something about toxic supermods I got banned for a year from Armenia sub for criticizing an Armenian politician from the ruling party (who has been involved in a bunch of corruption scandals, including fake companies winning tenders under his grandma's name). The country subs, especially in post-USSR space, are run by ruling party representatives who tolerate zero dissent.
- krono 4y agoShadowbanned (through automoderator) from all Dutch subs (same clique of moderators) for no apparent reason and mods won't even respond to my messages. Apparently I'm far from the only one this has happened to. If Reddit doesn't do itself in it'll be the moderators ruining their own communities.
- tetris11 4y agoBanned from GreenAndPleasant for hinting that trans charities weren't more important than regular charities
- barbecue_sauce 4y agoReddit is a private subsidiary of a large private company, so I'm not sure why their valuation matters.
- dharmab 4y agoReddit is in the process of going public. They began filing last year.
- stathibus 4y agoIt's plainly obvious that reddit does not need ML to do what it needs to do. Their investors are being taken on a wild ride.
- mountainriver 4y agoReddit should focus on making their community less toxic, it’s hands down one of the most toxic places on the internet. These problems don’t need ML
- meowtimemania 4y agoHow do you make it less toxic?
- colinmhayes 4y agothat's a feature
- memish 4y agoThe level of enforced groupthink there is unbearable.
- mountainriver 4y agoliterally unbearable, I think its fundamental to how the platform is designed. I have no idea why anyone would want that
- TameAntelope 4y agoIt must feel very good to sell your startup right now, congrats to the team.
- silicon2401 4y agoHaving been a long-time user of Wikia (now Fandom) as well as Reddit, it's been interesting to see Reddit go down the same path Wikia did. In my opinion, both websites started out similarly: somewhat simply designed, focused on content, and with room for communities to form themselves. Over time, both websites started pushing harder for monetization and in the process, made changes to prioritize advertising over content, and started pressuring communities to behave and interact in approved ways. It doesn't look like either website is struggling or likely to go under financially, but the charm and community of their younger iterations is definitely gone.
- qualudeheart 4y agoReddit needs a new way to monetize. I’d even put up with crypto bullshit if they just stopped the ads.
- april_22 4y agoWhatever they acquire, I just hope they make their search better