
Reddit confirms $300M Series D led by China’s Tencent at $3B value - theBashShell
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/
======
theNJR
Tencent has a meaningful ownership of American youth.

12% Snap 7.5% Spotify 40% Epic Games 100% Riot Games 100% Supercell 5% Reddit

Hollywood has also been moving in this direction, with a lot of Chinese
investment in the studios, and blockbusters adding special scenes with Chinese
actors and locations.

What does it mean for America when it's no longer the owner or creator of
culture? It's historically one of our largest (and most important) exports.
I'm not sure if that claim to fame is a net positive for the world, but the
changing of this guard will certainly have a local impact.

I'm just not yet totally sure what it means, broadly.

~~~
adventured
> What does it mean for America when it's no longer the owner or creator of
> culture?

That premise is no more valid today with China than it was at the height of
Japan-takes-over-the-world mania.

Japan via Sony accumulated a large ownership position in US music. Sony
acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 for $3.4 billion, a huge deal at the time.
Nintendo and Sega took over US video gaming from Atari. What did it mean?
Nothing as it turns out.

~~~
colordrops
It's very different this time. Japan was under the American umbrella of
influence when it was supposedly going to take over. China is a rival and a
resource-rich nuclear super power with orders of magnitude more leverage and a
very different set of cultural norms and behaviors.

I don't think it will go the way it did with Japan.

~~~
adventured
Japan had a larger GDP per capita than the US from 1987 until 2000.

Inflation adjusted their GDP was nearly as large in 1995 as China's is today.
They did that with 1/11th the population. China will never accomplish
something that dramatic economically.

Japan held a lot more influence over the US at the time precisely because we
were allies. China will never be allowed to acquire large numbers of important
US companies (and vice versa), because we're unlikely to ever be allies.
Japan's holdings of the US national debt back then as a % were also far
greater than China's position is today.

In 1991, it was Japanese billionaires dominating the global richest 50 list.
Taikichiro Mori and Yoshiaki Tsutsumi were the two richest people in the
world, at $15b and $14b. That's nothing like what is occurring today, American
billionaires are dominant.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the Japanese corporate giants that
ruled the global economy. Today it's American corporate giants by a large
margin. China's giants mostly can't leave their own borders and never will.
The regressive command economy straight-jacket - mixed with political
doctrine-based restraints - that their companies are permanently ruled by,
won't allow it.

China's leverage today is not orders of magnitude greater than Japan at its
economic peak. Asia as an example was far poorer across the board in 1985-1995
than it is today, Japan towered over Asia economically in a way China never
will. In 1985, South Korea's GDP per capita was 20% that of Japan; China was
2.5% that of Japan; and so on.

~~~
colordrops
China does not seem to be at its peak yet. It can't be compared to Japan at
its peak.

------
steve19
Waiting for the API to be turned off to force use of the official app. I am
subscribed to lots of niche subreddits and love browsing reddit from my app of
choice, but when the day comes that they force me to use the reddit app, I
will abandon ship.

They won't care, because they probably make no money off of me.

~~~
itake
They have almost made their mobile website un-usable. You have to click 3-4
buttons just to close out all of the popups. If you browse in Incognito mode,
you have to close everything every time.

~~~
flatline
The original desktop site on mobile works fine for me, it’s all I’ve ever
used. But it’s not the default and the redesign is unusable, so you have to
configure each new browser you visit the site on. My usage has definitely
dropped over the last few months due to usability alone.

~~~
ngold
Red reader is fantastic for mobile. Ad free and night mode looks the same as
hn version with night mode.

------
fermienrico
I've seen Reddit degrade painfully over last 8-10 years. It was full of
intelligent comments, insight and unique perspective from people all over the
world. Browsing the front page and reading the comments makes me sad that
instead of intellectual discourse, we have a 3 billion dollar meme making
machine.

I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader
perspective in the light of how things go with typical social networks. There
is no lack of funny things on the internet. Even witty jokes have no place
here because slowly and _surely_ it will erode away why HN is a gem of the
internet.

~~~
derefr
Reddit, like Usenet, or IRC, is just a collection of individual communities
that happen to share an identity system. Expecting the (not-logged-in) Reddit
front page to be “intellectual discourse” would be like expecting a random
selection of Usenet posts or IRC chat-lines to be “intellectual discourse.”

Try just visiting specific Reddit communities, rather than looking askew at
the entire menagerie as if there was value there.

Same goes for YouTube: just subscribe to specific channels based on out-of-
band recommendations. Or for Twitter, or Netflix, or anything else. These
platforms have good things; even curated collections of good things. But you
won’t find them by asking the platform to show you something good.

In short: ignore recommendation systems. They are very good at surfacing
content that the average “profitable” user that the business targets, wants to
see. They are horrible at surfacing the “best” (e.g. highest positive impact
on your life for having consumed it) content.

~~~
abnry
This is very good advice. One of my most upvoted Hacker News comments was
saying that creating an account and whitelisting the subreddits you want to
read is a tremendous improvement on reddit.

Funny thing to me is that it is really hard to isolate yourself in this way on
Twitter. I've spent a lot of time trying to do this but politics always seems
to leak through. One thing that has helped is by turning off retweets for as
many people as I can.

~~~
0xADEADBEE
I've a similar problem on Twitter. I don't follow anyone for their political
views, so I typically unfollow as soon as I read some but it's far from an
optimal solution.

I resisted setting an account up for years on Reddit, but you're absolutely
right - it's the only way to effectively filter things you don't want to see.

~~~
will_pseudonym
Same with Facebook. I usually just unfollow people who frequently post
political things, but at the cost of missing out on their posts about their
personal lives. I wish there was a "subject" filter that I could use to filter
out political posts.

~~~
0xADEADBEE
Twitter has one I learned recently, but it's pretty enfeebled. It's as far as
I can tell, exact matches only, which sounds fine perhaps in the design phase,
but was deeply frustrating in practice. There's a new political candidate in
America generating lots of buzz who has several permutations of their name
(abbreviations and hyphens were my undoing here), so I ended up having to add
several entries just to not hear about politics in a country I don't live in!

~~~
james_s_tayler
I put in so many things to filter out politics. Still inundated with it.

------
curiousDog
I'm probably a luddite but the new reddit ui is downright painful to use.

~~~
randlet
I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" FF add on which redirects all Reddit links to
old.reddit.com which still uses the nicer old UI.

~~~
hprotagonist
that, and apollo on iOS, and i forget that there is such a thing as the new UI
at all.

------
faleidel
For anyone interested, I'm making an open source clone of reddit that is
federated using activityPub. Everybody can host it's own server and each
server can talk to eachother so you can interact with threads and comment from
other servers.

The project is in very early stage, but it's usable and lind of cute.

[https://moontreeproject.org](https://moontreeproject.org)

~~~
colordrops
I think there are multiple projects of this sort. Is there an effort to make
sure they are all compatible with each other? Does that even make sense?

~~~
faleidel
The other one similar that I know of is prismo. If they all use activityPub
they will be compatible. They will also be compatible with mastodon (which is
like twitter), peertube (which is like youtube) and many others.

------
farresito
Maybe if they get another $300M round they will be able to afford some
designers to fix the abomination that the current design is.

~~~
adtac
I think a few DNS records can fix their UI, don't need 300MM for that. Just
make reddit.com the same as old.reddit.com.

~~~
brownkonas
The mobile app UI is fantastic IMHO. List is snappy, easy to perform upvote,
downvote, comment.

~~~
jakebasile
Their mobile app (on iOS) is pretty terrible in my opinion. I use Apollo. It's
fairly priced and the developer is responsive, and it feels like an iOS app
not a web app.

------
carboy
I’m done with Reddit. It was a nice ride, but now it’s officially over.
They’ve been trying to turn reddit into Facebook, a personal data vacuum, but
now it’s going to get ugly.

Considering the valuation, remaining as an unpaid moderator for a reddit sub,
is absolutely crazy. Hopefully all the mods up and leave, nothing like letting
others get rich from your free efforts.

~~~
movedx
My advice would be to treat it like a tool: look up what you need, ask
questions when you need to, but ignore it the rest of the time.

~~~
rchaud
It's not Stack Overflow; Reddit is designed to be visited daily and 'engaged'
with.

That said, I do go to Reddit first when I'm looking to answer questions like
HDD recommendations or things to do in my city. That's because searching
Google for it will give me nothing but awful content mill blog posts stuffed
with affiliate links and SEO-optimized keywords ("Best USD Hard Drives in
2019"). On Reddit you actually get the feeling that the question is trying to
be answered by actual people.

~~~
movedx
> It's not Stack Overflow; Reddit is designed to be visited daily and
> 'engaged' with.

I don't care how it's designed. It can be used as a tool.

------
scottydelta
Reddit was outraged when the users heard that Reddit was going to take $150M
from Tencent but now there is not a single mention of it on the frontpage even
after they took double the earlier reported amount.

I cannot help but think if it's the Reddit's censorship is in play here.

~~~
baby
Or people don't mind THAT much that a Chinese company has a stake in Reddit.
It is probably not going to change much, if not increase relationships between
the US and China.

------
fru2013
The amount of censorship on Reddit by moderators for arbitrary reasons,
completely defeats the purpose of having community-controlled content.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/)

~~~
LeoPanthera
See also:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete](https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete)

------
dirtylowprofile
Recently I've been asking more programming help on Reddit because I get more
friendly response there compared to Stackoverflow.

------
bluetwo
Where are the youth of this generation and why are they not creating the next
killer platform?

~~~
arman_ashrafian
Im a CS undergrad right now and in need of a side project... I'll start right
now :)

But for real, the idea of Reddit seems perfect to me its just way to popular
now. Maybe a platform where you need to pass some sort of quiz created by the
mods of the different communities in order to post/comment? I could see this
having lots of issues though.

Also I don't really mind reddit going to shit ever since I found HN a few
years ago.

~~~
rchaud
> Maybe a platform where you need to pass some sort of quiz created by the
> mods of the different communities in order to post/comment?

FB groups have had this ability for a while. I'm in one (a meme page for a
semi-popular TV show) and to keep the quality of conversation high, new
members have to answer 3 questions about stuff from the show correctly to
join.

------
syntaxing
Is there a good alternative to Reddit? I've been a pretty heavy user for
almost a decade but they have been disappointing these past couple of years. I
hate how their "principles" aren't consistent. They ban certain subreddit for
certain violation while keeping others that fit the same exact category. They
never provide an answer to the commuity either. Where do I go to now?! HN is
my only safe haven left...

~~~
anfilt
People used to host forums dedicated too a topic. Forums are still a thing...
Reddit, is just a forum of forums...

Why do we need centralized forums anyways?

~~~
atomicUpdate
Because they are a million times easier to browse when all on one site and
there (usually) aren’t any worries about cross-promoting different subreddits.
It also makes it a lot easier for knowledgeable people to poke their heads
into a random thread and offer an opinion compared to going to another site.

Unfortunately, all of that was a lot better 10 years ago.

~~~
rchaud
> It also makes it a lot easier for knowledgeable people to poke their heads
> into a random thread

That rarely happens in practice. Knowledgeable people's comments have to be
made at the right time in a post's popularity window (< 24h) for it to have
been upvoted early enough for other users to see. If you come across a thread
that's even a couple of days old, on a popular sub, you won't bother
commenting because you know no one will see it. Unlike a message board, new
replies to an existing topic do not take it to the top of the thread list
page.

It is usually the opposite situation that is true. A certain post hits the
Reddit front page (usually a meme or political post), and all of a sudden the
community is overwhelmed with new subscribers, who are either
trolling/brigading because they don't like the content, or simply bringing
down the quality of the conversation by posting more memes etc., because
that's what they think the sub is about.

------
jliptzin
As a site that derives the vast majority of its value from the contribution of
its users it is a shame that they didn't open at least some level of
participation in this round of funding to its users.

------
yumraj
It doesn't say if Tencent gets a board seat or not. Without a board seat the
impact should be less...

~~~
carboy
If they don’t get a Board seat it would be the dumbest $300m ever spent, but
if they don’t get a Board seat it means their interests are already protected
and represented.

~~~
jedberg
I think I read that Tencent only put in $100M of the $300M. Which means they
only bought 3% of the company. That wouldn't warrant a board seat.

------
peter_retief
Tencent is part owned by Naspers, originally a local South African media
company who by some accounts have played a big part in the Tencent's success
Quote from Reuters Founded in 1915, Naspers has transformed itself from an
apartheid-era newspaper publisher into a 1.5 trillion rand ($127 billion)
multinational with private equity-style investments in e-commerce platforms
that also include OLX, the biggest classified sites in India and Brazil, and
Russia’s Mail.ru.

------
puranjay
Maybe they'll use that money to finally teach their engineers some CSS media
queries and build a mobile website that isn't completely trash

~~~
rchaud
The only thing they're likely to be engineering is that nested div monstrosity
FB uses to obfuscate sponsored posts from adblockers.

------
stunt
Sorry but I don’t understand some of these arguments here! Not talking about
this particular case, but I saw the same arguments many times.

A lot of businesses in EU and Asia are owned or invested by US companies in
many different industries. Why are people so offensive when it is other way
around?

I’ve worked with Chinese! Let’s not blame all Chinese because of what their
government is doing.

------
samstave
What we need to see is if people like /u/gallowboob get any of this funding

~~~
doorbellguy
Who or what is that?

~~~
x3n0ph3n3
Go to /r/all and count how many posts are his.

~~~
doorbellguy
Wow. That is a lot of effort being put for internet points.

That person seems to moderate a lot of communities too!

~~~
rchaud
It's usually not one person. Reddit accounts with very high levels of karma
(upvotes gained from popular posts) are often bought an sold to companies
selling products. u/gallowboob is an example of a Reddit influencer, even if a
great deal of his posts are pics/gifs of animals being cute.

~~~
samstave
/u/karmanaut was the original proving ground for this. It was known that it
was a used account

------
zethraeus
This is a hilariously petulant article.

------
peteretep
I don’t know what it means for America, but what it apparently means for China
is no more Chinese villains in films for an international audience

~~~
throwaway46e21
Honestly, as an Asian American, I actually prefer the villain characters as
opposed to the new “sidekick/background” character trope.

Hollywood writers and producers still know how to marginalize these new
Chinese characters and unfortunately, it seems the Chinese audience is still
naive to it.

At least the villains had agency. These new Chinese sidekicks only purpose is
to serve the “American” hero.

~~~
pwaai
Same here, there is systematic and institutionalized racism in Hollywood, I'm
glad China is making their moves in Hollywood, maybe we will see more Korean
and Chinese celebrities appearing in these films.

Interesting since the first Japanese male actor was a sensation amongst white
women of the early 1900s silent film era, and thus Asian Americans were erased
from mainstream films.

The more I study American history, the Japanese interment camps, the racist
treatment of Asian Americans, the genocide against 50+ million Native
Americans, Opium war, Boxer rebellion, vietnam war, hiroshima, the more I'm
convinced that Nazi's escaped and helped build the Reich that they could've
had in a far away new land.

~~~
peteretep
> since the first Japanese male actor was a sensation amongst white women ...
> Asian Americans were erased from mainstream films

Where r/conspiracy and r/redpill meet... Presumably you're talking about
Sessue Hayakawa, and the same nonsense appears on his Wikipedia page,
supported by citations that don't actually support the assertions.

> The more I study American history, the Japanese interment camps, the racist
> treatment of Asian Americans, the genocide against 50+ million Native
> Americans, Opium war, Boxer rebellion, vietnam war, hiroshima

I would recommend studying some Chinese or Japanese history too if you think
American historical behaviour is in any way particularly notable, other than
an unusual willingness for Americans to want to atone to it, compared to most
other countries.

> I'm convinced that Nazi's escaped and helped build the Reich that they
> could've had

You appear to believe the Nazis were time-travelers, or simply have a
particularly weak understanding of the chronology of the items you've listed.

------
temp1928384
I hate websites that try too hard to get you to download the app...incredibly
annoying to open Reddit on mobile web

------
gesman
Redeadit. Made in China now.

------
wiggler00m
China now owns the front page of the internet.

~~~
steve19
Well 10% of the front page of the internet, and they do have 20% of the world
population.

There is no way China would allow Reddit to operation in China, and there is
no way China would allow a western company to own a significant percentage of
"the front page of China".

~~~
alexdumitru
Reddit's slogan is "the front page of the internet". I think he's referring to
that.

~~~
wiggler00m
Yeah was referring to the slogan. No shade.

