
Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation - snew
https://www.recode.net/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200-million-valuation-steve-huffman-alexis-ohanian
======
stevenj
>the company is literally re-writing all of its code

Wow.

>An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks
similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of
content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the
conversations hidden underneath.

>“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new
users come to Reddit they have a better sense of what’s there, what it’s for.”

I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. HN is designed similarly to
Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it
less. I keep coming back to it because of its stories, comments, and its
simplicity and minimalism. It has good content and is very easy to use and
navigate.

~~~
pmoriarty
I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site
better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse.

A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while
decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the
site down to a crawl.

I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a
good thing going now. It would be a real shame to ruin it.

~~~
apercu
I have no idea why I care about the NFL, but I have been going to
profootballtalk.com daily for years. NBC partnered with a bunch of independent
sports blogs like PFT a few years ago. They then rolled 'em all out on a new
redesign. I stopped visiting after the first couple tries, then PFT backed out
of the redesign and went back to their previous (crappy, old) layout. The
other blogs I used to go to (pro hockeytalk and pro basketball talk) didn't
and I've never returned.

What I like about reddit and HN (more so) is the minimal, fast, low overhead
experience. It's like the original slashdot.

I hate the new animated, ad heavy slow web.

~~~
cyxxon
I also never get why these sites don't change gradually. I mean, Slashdot
tried - their code was a mess, and it looked really old. But it took them ages
to rewrite this, and they did it all in one go. Bam! Community was pissed. Why
not move the broken old HTML to standard compliant one section at a time, and
clean up things here and there, and maybe introduce a new font, or section
images, ... instead of this huge explosion_ Sure it might be more work and
might also not be completely doable, but if you do it all at once, you are
almost guaranteed to alienate your users. And if you are Reddit or Slashdot,
that's what makes you.

(I somehow triggered a wrong keyboard layout while typing. I tried to find all
typos, but probably didn't get them all)

~~~
MrPatan
Most likely Left Alt + Left Shift, if you're on Windows. I use it on purpose
now, but man was it baffling when I didn't know what was going on.

------
t0mbstone
If you are going to re-design a site like reddit, your best bet is to keep the
old version in place, but allow people to also view all of the same content in
the "new" design.

For example, release the new design on new.reddit.com and let viewers migrate
over to it at their own pace.

Once you have a lot of people using the new reddit instead of the old design,
you can migrate the old reddit to old.reddit.com and put the new design up as
the default.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T GET RID OF THE CURRENT DESIGN, until you have adoption
for the new design. Period. If you simply replace the old with the new, reddit
is as good as dead.

~~~
snowcrshd
I understand your point, but wouldn't doing what you suggest lead to the
problem of maintaining two different code bases? This doesn't seem like a good
idea at all.

I think a better approach would be to commit to their new design, and do some
sort of A/B testing to hone down the new UI until it replaces the old one.

I don't think reddit will die because of the changes they propose. This is
just silly. For starters, there are Google Chrome plugins to make reddit more
Facebook feed-like.

I myself like the way reddit works right now and would not like it to change
much. That said, Reddit the company has to move towards what will make them
money. I don't have this data, but their user base might have changed in the
past years. People that really enjoy infinite feeds, for example.

~~~
virtualized
You don't have to A/B test whether a good product is better than a redesigned
crappy one.

------
koolba
> Still, he says making money is “not our top priority,” estimating the
> company spends only about 20 percent of its resources on its advertising
> business. Huffman declined to share revenue totals. The company is also not
> profitable.

I can't imagine giving $200M to a group of people who publicly say they're not
focused on ensuring I get it back. Is this a VC investment or a charity?

Also, have they not achieved profitability after 10+ years because they don't
know how to make enough money (i.e. ad sales team is weak), costs are too high
(i.e. bad code so lots of infra or too many employees), or is it just not
possible to be profitable in this space?

~~~
raldi
Brings to mind an article I read circa 2001 where a Google executive said,
"Look, we could be profitable next month if we covered the site with annoying
ads, but we're not going to do that. We're focusing on growth now."

Worked out okay for their investors.

~~~
nerfhammer
Search results pages turn out to be the most valuable possible place to put
ads.

Reddit might not be nearly so.

Then again Facebook initially seemed like it would have that problem but they
seem to have overcome it.

~~~
petra
But what if Reddit, which has tons of great content, blocks access to Google
search, focuses on building a really good search engine, and strongly
marketing it via sharing search results in their platform, could this become
popular ?

And while $200M doesn't fit a design change, search engines are expensive.

~~~
nerfhammer
If it were that simple Facebook would have tried it by now.

------
Chardok
I am of the opinion that trying to turn a profit on something like Reddit is a
catch 22.

The concept of Reddit, which is user generated content curated by users,
doesn't have a lot of need for a middleman, more of just a few moderators and
admins to keep everything running smoothly. The power of the website is solely
in its users and their content generation.

Unfortunately these slow changes have been eroding what was Reddit's strengths
of free speech and open dialogue by turning the site into "advertisement
friendly". That means killing all subreddits that could sour potential buyers
and altering vote-counts to favor specific messages.

Combine this with the fact that they are supplanting viral marketing disguised
as user posts (One from today even!
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6ql2tu/made_my_deli...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6ql2tu/made_my_delivery_drivers_night_by_showing_him_vr/)),
allowing blatant vote manipulations
([https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2016/12/14/how-
we-b...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2016/12/14/how-we-bought-
reddit-for-200/#d5f709044a83)) or allowing entire takeovers (/r/politics
during election cycle - hello CTR!) and you have a bloated replica of
something that used to be an amazing social powered website.

~~~
BLanen
Yea, man.

Subreddits like coontown, jailbait, fatpeoplehate & a bunch of nazi subreddits
really provided valuable debate and dialogue. Voat now has all that 'dialogue'
and I don't think anything of value was lost.

But complaining about CTR shows your colors when both sides spend similar
amounts.

~~~
symlinkk
the_donald is filtered out of /r/popular.

------
SirensOfTitan
Within the context of redesigns I think there exists some value in looking at
Facebook's failed card-based redesign back in 2013:

[https://dcurt.is/facebooks-predicament](https://dcurt.is/facebooks-
predicament)

Essentially this big, beautiful design driven redesign ultimately never
shipped because users spent less time on it. Certain design 'improvements'
like increased padding between stories reduces density and as a result tends
to reduce readership, for example. The internet as perceived by Engineers and
Designers is quite different from the masses (even with Reddit's demographic
differences from FB taken into account).

Reddit needs to be really careful with a redesign: data should lead the
rollout efforts, not design. I think they are due for some UX improvements,
perhaps around a gradual UI refresh; however, I have little faith in the
product leadership at Reddit to pull this off. Huffman and crew need to be
willing to can the entire redesign if user research and data come back
negative.

~~~
sloppycee
Beauty is subjective; Usability is not.

Good design _must_ be usable; otherwise we'd call it art.

That Facebook redesign for example, while very aesthetically pleasing it looks
horrible or confusing to use:

    
    
      * Search box doesn't look like an input control
      * Low contrast for top right nav (how do I change to any other page?)
      * Where did my groups and apps go?
      * Large pictures, great for mock ups, but it just means more scrolling when 80% of
        content I don't care or want to see;
        I really don't want to have a picture of a high school friend's baby take up the whole screen
      * etc.
    

It looks nice though.

~~~
dbbk
They later changed the search box, but I recall at the time their motivation
was "we want the title of the page to also be a search field, rather than just
a search field". It sort of made sense.

------
huebnerob
Frankly, I love Reddit. If you pick and choose the right communities, it can
be an amazing resource for everything from tech discussions, to local news, to
emotional support. However, I will strongly agree with the perception problem,
there's also a lot of bad on Reddit and its structure as a series of echo
chambers doesn't help.

~~~
mfoy_
They should invest in some PR to let people know it's a platform, not a
monolithic community. Although some people identify as "Redditors" which kind
of undermines that point...

~~~
pixelperfect
I agree. I've heard people say, "I don't understand why you use Reddit. I
visited the front page and it is total garbage." But I've never heard anyone
say the same thing about YouTube, even though its front page is just as bad.

~~~
SirensOfTitan
Something also to consider is that provided I’m logged in, YouTube’s front
page gives me pretty great recommendations based on what I’ve previously
watched.

On Reddit, however, there’s a huge amount of great content I’m unlikely to
stumble upon unless I’m seeking. This makes behavior based recommendations
difficult. I think a combination of curated views (software eng front,
political junkie, counter culture, etc) and machine based recommendation like
YouTube could do great things for reddit.

------
rdtsc
I don't understand this. Anyone remember a time when companies used their
developers to update their site without having to raise hundreds of millions
of dollars?

> An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks
> similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline:

So they will look like Facebook. Because nothing says cool and trendy like the
social site your parents and aunts and uncles use. Now nothing wrong with
aunts and uncles using the site, it's just that "fresh" and "cool" aren't
exactly the first things that come to mind there.

> The company has about 230 employees, up from around 140 at the beginning of
> the year. Huffman would like to end 2017 with around 300 full-time staff.

That sounds odd too me as well, maybe I am not versed in startup culture.
Having a goal of going from 230 to 300 people seems like a pointless metric
(and wasteful). It's like saying "I want to write 1000 lines of code today".

I haven't seen much mentioned about moderation and admins and how they censor
and manipulate content and talk about fostering better communities and so on.

> Eventually, though, Altman and Reddit’s other investors will want their
> money back and then some. Huffman says there are lots of ways for Reddit to
> exit, none of which he’s focused on at the moment.

Well there is the answer. They are trying to sell it. "Hey, Psst! Wanna buy
this cool site for $2B. It looks fresh like Facebook, and we just grew by 30%
(230 to 300 employees) in the last few months. Close your eyes and imagine
that hockey stick graph going up, and the value you'd be getting out of it".

~~~
justinzollars
Once I was fortunate enough to work at a company that did not take VC money. I
was very very lucky. It was a combination of luck, and ethical founders.

On the other hand, a VC funded company I worked for (Hampton Creek) seemed
like a ponzi scheme. When I quit the options strike price was so expensive I
couldn't afford to pay for the options nor the taxes to "gain", the alleged
hundreds of thousands of dollars in value it was "worth". What a joke. I think
in the end we will see a lot of these companies are loaded with red ink and
offer very little value.

I venture to say a majority of these unicorns are pump-and-dump schemes.

Your intuition seems right. I remember a time when companies used their
developers to update their site without having to raise hundreds of millions
of dollars.

~~~
NumberCruncher
Once you understand what a pump-and-dump scheme is and how it works, you see
the word with different eyes.

~~~
feelix
Do you have any links or a succinct explanation of how it works, then?

~~~
merijnv
Pump & dump is roughly the following:

1) Be rich/famous enough for people to pay attention to what you do

2) Pump a bunch of resources into something (company, stocks, whatever)

3) Everyone concludes there must be value, because you're investing your own
cash

4) Others start investing, increasing the value further

5) You sell (dump) your stake at the new price before everyone realises
they've invested in something worthless.

Say you invest $1 million in $1 shares and the extra investment/interest from
others raises the share price to $1.20, you sell everything and get $200k
profit for no work. Everyone else is left holding shares which turn out to be
worthless.

------
arca_vorago
Good. Its about time for reddit to wither enough for a more user focused
platform yo take it place.

Its the ol model I see time and time again. Site pulls in users by being
generally awesome and doing things like not advertising, not censoring, etc.
Then the site grows. Businesses start astroturfing because they can't
advertise. Then the company slowly starts walking back on everything that made
it special, for example, advertising, all while rapidly expanding the
personell while hardly doing anything to improve the site for users. Aaaand
right when advertising dollars are the best, try to capitalize or take public,
followed by a big sale/buyout, and finally within finite time users feel
betrayed and it withers and dies, but not until a competitor starts where they
did, and usually follows the same path.

I stopped participating in reddit about the time sockpuppetry really started
killing my favorite sub's, and personally I think the first and most greiveous
mistake was moving away from text only.

The problem as it stands is none of the competitors stand out. I think hn is
best, but scope is limited, /. does something's interesting but failed and
lost its user base. Voat is too much of a reddit clone, and I just don't get
the appeal of steemit etc.

Personally, we need to sit down and figure a better way to measure user worth.
Right now I am leaning to a Slashdot style moderation/tagging system, along
with a limited input per user at varying thresholds. Something that really
interests be is automating logical maps of comments too.

------
annexrichmond
> Huffman’s plan for the new funding includes a redesign of reddit.com — the
> company is literally re-writing all of its code, some of which is more than
> a decade old. An early version of the new design, which we saw during our
> interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A
> never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to
> lure people into the conversations hidden underneath.

this sounds risky for a couple reasons. I hope this is a bit hyperbolic and
they are only referring to the frontend. But anyway: rewriting everything from
scratch is a monumental undertaking and can delay other important
enhancements. Rewriting everything partially contributed to Netscape falling
behind its competitors[1] and eventually to its irrelevance. The other reason
it is risky is that maybe the site's simple and functional design is what made
them so successful in the first place?

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-
do-part-i/)

------
asb
The announcement on Reddit also says they are changing their privacy policy to
remove support for 'Do Not Track'
[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_so_much_going_on_in_the_world_i_thought_id/)

~~~
artursapek
That seems pretty evil, especially given the justification:

> DNT is a nice idea, but without buy-in from the entire ecosystem, its impact
> is limited. In place of DNT, we're adding in new, more granular privacy
> controls that give you control over how Reddit uses any data we collect
> about you.

What does it hurt to keep supporting it? It's actually pretty ironic: "DNT
doesn't have total support across ecosystems, so we stopped supporting it".

~~~
robryan
Twitter did the same thing recently.

------
wiremine
Seen a few comments focus on the "redesign" and comparisons to Digg, and
wanted to add a few comments:

1\. People may forget, but Reddit was a (the?) major winner in the Digg
exodus.

2\. I don't think Digg every got the subreddit style discussion boards down. I
think the reddit "homepage experience" vs. the typical subreddit experience to
be very different. Should be interesting to see which way they slide for the
redesign.

3\. The influx of new capital and the focus on the redesign sort of telegraphs
that they want to grow reddit, which is a very large but idiosyncratic
community.

If they do it right, the change will be very transparent and very incremental,
ala the ebay background color change [1].

Should be an interesting thing to watch!

[1]
[https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/](https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/)

~~~
root_axis
There is a common misconception that Digg's failure was what pushed Reddit
into the mainstream, but the truth is that Digg was on the decline and reddit
on the rise long before the redesign.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202011-06-30&q=digg,reddit)

~~~
wiremine
True, but your data also supports the view that the redesign hastened Digg's
death, and seems to correlate with increased growth at Reddit.

I.e., Reddit was doing something right, and Digg was shrinking. The Digg
redesign fiasco accelerated both trends.

~~~
root_axis
I won't argue that, but I think the trend data makes a convincing case that
Reddit's rise and Digg's demise were inevitable, regardless of Digg's redesign
failure.

~~~
wiremine
Perhaps. Had they handled the redesign correctly, things may have turned out
differently. It was a perfect storm of design, technology and technology
failure...

------
virtualized
But.. but I began to like Reddit. Now they want to take it away from me by
destroying it.

> It’s going on a hiring spree

Ouch.

> redesigning its website

For no reason other than giving the unnecessary people from the hiring spree
something to do.

> Huffman would like to end 2017 with around 300 full-time staff

The current number of 230 employees is already about ten times too many. What
the hell do they need the additional staff for?

> The company is also not profitable.

Doesn't need to be because it could be run by ten people living off of
donations.

~~~
dcole2929
For a site with the kind of traffic Reddit has from as many locales as reddit
has, 10 people wouldn't even be enough to comfortably cover basic SRE
requirements. Forget new features, they would literally spend all of their
time just barely keeping the damn thing working. Their would be no admins. No
Secret Santa, nor any of the various many things Reddit currently has that
requires the support, and more importantly trust, that comes with a full time
employee/contact.

Sure, could they do it? Absolutely. But I'd bet a large sum on money that
they'd do so poorly.

Also it's important to note that whether you like it or not Reddit is and
always has been a business. Being profitable isn't the most important thing
right now for reasons, but somehow i doubt investors would be ok with them
just punting on the issue forever. They rightly expect a return.

~~~
virtualized
I assumed that 10-20 people would not include anyone who ever physically
touches a server. Now that I think about it, it might make sense to not
outsource hardware issues at Reddit's scale. I don't know how many people you
need to keep Reddit running, but more than a hundred sounds wrong for such a
basic web site.

I don't need Secret Santa and no support. What kind of trust do you mean?

~~~
bkanber
> basic web site

... basic web site with a hundred thousand communities, gigabytes of images
uploaded daily, millions of votes a day, 1.5 billion pageviews a month...

Also, reddit is a business, not just a website. They don't only hire
engineers.

------
cleansy
I would love to see reddit being more like a wikipedia than a facebook. If
they cut the sales team out and ask for donations like WP does, they would do
just fine. I was on reddit before I was registered on FB and quite frankly I
love reddit.com way more than FB for many reasons. It's a shame that they go
down the hypergrowth-unicorn model.

~~~
jahabrewer
> ask for donations like WP does

Isn't that what reddit gold is?

~~~
virtualized
I usually like to pay for a premium account on other sites even if I wouldn't
have to, but for some reason I don't do it on Reddit. In hindsight, my gut
feeling was right, because they are in fact backstabbing butts in seats who
sell out to greedy investors at first opportunity. Rich assholes who think
they can make another Facebook are the easy way to get a "hiring spree". Gold
was the slow and horribly marketed way.

------
spike021
>An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks
similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of
content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the
conversations hidden underneath.

Not sure why this UX concept needs to be applied to every kind of interface
nowadays.

I think Reddit's current interface could be updated visually without changing
its simplicity.

~~~
xiaoma
>content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people

The reasons I left Digg for Reddit were the information density and the ease
of rapid browsing. Eliminating those in favor of "cards" is incredibly short-
sighted.

~~~
dageshi
I would not be surprised if they shift everyone to the new view but allow
users to switch back to the old style via preferences.

~~~
spike021
I would be.

It sounds like they're rewriting the whole front end. Why would they want to
spend time and effort doing that and then, in addition to continually
tweaking/adding to it, also maintaining a legacy interface?

------
bionoid
Looking past the visual design, I think a more pressing question is what will
happen to the API? From my perspective, it is Reddit's saving grace. It
bridges the gap between available functionality and what moderators and users
actually need. I personally run about ~30kloc of Python code against reddit
24/7, mostly to aid moderation of subreddits. This codebase has grown
organically over the years, and truth be told, a major API change will require
a major investment in my end. That is my own fault, for sure, but I know
several other developers in the same boat.

Breaking the API will take away essential functionality from a _very_ wide
range of communities, moderators and users alike. Can they do a complete
front- and back-end rewrite and still maintain a backwards-compatible API? If
not, I am out, because a rewrite is simply way too much work.

edit: typo

------
Invictus0
I couldn't imagine a more futile investment. Reddit users are notoriously
combatant. Ads on reddit have extraordinarily low CTRs. After bumbling around
for the last ten years, reddit still doesn't know dollars from doge and is
burning cash on ridiculous side projects like its gift exchange and its
(already discontinued) entrepreneurship mini-series.

------
naturalgradient
I hope this redesign does not turn into a LinkedIn style disaster. Sometimes I
wonder if these redesigns happen not for some well-argued business purpose but
for overinflated departments having to justify their existence (which I
strongly suspected in the case of LinkedIn's redesign which made the site
unusable for months).

------
throw2016
I am not sure discussion sites like Slashdot, Reddit can run or scale as
businesses. And retain credibility with the majority of their users.

As founder run sites with income to sustain the site it works but the moment
founders become 'distant' and obsessed with commercial objectives the site
sort of loses its focus and there is a slow decline.

Reddit only took off because it as seen an low key non-commercial alternative
to the 'over commercial' Digg. Now it doesn't have that feel anymore and this
can only end badly.

Even HN is not a profit making site, but delivers value to ycombinator outside
of that.

------
strgrd
Reddit, after the great Digg exodus:

> You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken
> some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new
> version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from
> more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give
> the power back to the people.”

------
vlunkr
Honestly, how do you monetize Reddit? I'm curious what ideas they supposedly
have. The crowd is too tech savvy to just throw more ads on it. They run ad
blockers, and if you get aggressive like news sites do, the exodus will begin.
It just seems like a community with little loyalty to the site itself, and
distrust of obvious commercialization.

~~~
Nition
Feels like a large general discussion service like Reddit isn't the sort of
thing that should be a for-profit company at all. And the same with other
community-centric sites like GitHub.

These sorts of massive Internet community-curated stores of information would
in an ideal world be community supported as well, like Wikipedia. And they
also wouldn't (in an ideal world) be under threat of changing radically or
disappearing entirely at any moment.

Maybe we need something like the UK's television tax. An Internet tax that
pays for public service sites with no advertising and no corporate interest.
Add that to the TODO list after world peace.

------
lettergram
For reference, I feel the reddit post is significantly better:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_so_much_going_on_in_the_world_i_thought_id/)

------
rocky1138
A company as old as Reddit should be profitable.

~~~
ryanmerket
They were ran by a skeleton crew for a few years after they were initially
acquired by Advanced.

------
aerovistae
This is what this makes me think of...

[https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-
valuation-...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation-
tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-
investment-c221d8f86ad7?gi=e8919e817fa0#.9lqnwvrs6)

------
mevile
I think Reddit is on track to becoming hugely successful and completely
irrelevant.

------
scierama
I don't get why a company who keeps the entire Internet talking on a daily
basis is only worth less than $2B but a company that lets teens take snaphots
and share them is worth many billions.

~~~
danielharrison
You don't understand? It's like this: valuation is based off how many users x
how much each user is worth (in terms of targeted advertising).

Reddit has a lot of users but it's hard to build user profiles for targeted
advertising as there's a lot of anonymity and shot posting.

Teen snapshot sites are worth more because because its real people, posting
real things. That data is valuable.

~~~
quantumwannabe
I feel that reddit has enough data to effectively target ads. If I subscribe
to /r/cars, chances are I like cars (if I make a post asking "What is the best
car to buy for $X?" I'm probably in the market for a new car). If I post in a
city subreddit, chances are I live there. If I post in /r/programming, I'm
probably a programmer. There are also third-party analyzers that can take a
reddit user's data and give a pretty good guess of their demographics based on
their public post history as well.

I feel that if someone were to target ads to me based on the subreddits that I
subscribe to, they'd be far more relevant to my interests than Facebook ads.
Facebook shows me clickbait spam that my friends liked; I almost never see any
interesting ads there. Reddit certainly has more advertiser friendly
information than Snap does. On Snapchat, you share photos with your friends
and Snap knows nothing about you other than your location. Reddit on the other
hand has confirmed interests.

------
jumpkickhit
That's seems like a very low valuation for a site that heavily trafficked.

What is their average time-on-site statistic I wonder, i'd expect it to be
much higher than most other websites.

------
idlewords
Can anybody name a successful ground-up redesign of a popular website? Or a
successful from-scratch rewrite of a heavily used codebase?

~~~
RickS
I recall twitter's early rewrite going pretty well. The "fail whale" was a
real big deal before that. They went from notoriously poor uptime to being on
par with facebook.

~~~
mrkrabo
But that was a rewrite of the backend which was very needed. The design didn't
change.

Although I agree, Reddit desperately needs a rewrite of its backend.

------
ErikVandeWater
A lot of comments have dealt with the general idea of a redesign - but I
haven't seen much on the specifics.

I would like to point out the twitter/facebook feed style as described is
difficult to replicate, because with reddit, seeing the title of the post
helps contextualize it so much. Without the title, many posts become
meaningless because you can't guess the subreddit that the post is from - and
a meme/gif in one subreddit can mean something much different than a meme in
another.

------
iamleppert
Oh god. I had the pleasure of seeing one of their new executives speak. An ex-
Microsoft guy.

I won't be surprised at all when they alienate their userbase with a pointless
redesign that adds nothing of substance.

The kinds of people that are working at Reddit now are the kinds of people who
are not creative and incapable of creating something original. They are the
kinds of people who join a tech company solely to ride off the coat tails of
those who came before them with original ideas and substance.

Naturally, since they don't understand the original desire and intent they are
not able to contribute anything new or original. So how they contribute is
instead by a route redesign of something that already exists.

Redesigns are generally not about improving upon something that was there
before. They are a political process for who can get control over something
popular that someone already made.

------
lettergram
Interesting. Im super worried a redesign will kill the site.

However, at the same time (after thinking about it), I can see it as a
necessary step.

Without a redesign it'll be hard for them to implement a way to make money. I
assume, that is also how they increased the valuation; by promising increased
profits.

------
ThomPete
I hope reddit have a strategy for implementing that change gracefully and how
to deal with the most noisy opponents. I have helped a lot of companies
redesign their communnities/forums/products. Its a serious minefield as a lot
of people will protest (but most wil cope). even small changes can throw
people into revolution mode. And its most often not the actual design which
will get people complaining but the change itself. going to be very
interesting to see how this will play out.

------
zitterbewegung
Others have commented "they are doing a Digg" and asking whats the new Reddit.
The better question is do you want to be the next site to replace Reddit? I
don't think social news sites are sustainable at all. Reddit used to play the
game to avoid becoming Digg and keeping its user base happy. It didn't seem to
be profitable or profitable enough for their investors so they are forced to
broaden the user base by any means possible.

------
dcf_freak
I don't know if this is commonplace but i'm intrigued by these valuations.
Anybody have link to the actual valuation? What method was used?

------
mark_l_watson
When I talked with Alexis Ohanian (after his talk at Google), I asked him
about the switch from Common Lisp years ago. I assume the rewrite will not be
in CL! He is a very nice guy and his feelings for social responsibility came
through nicely in his talk.

I find Reddit one of the most valuable web sites I use, covering news and tech
interests. I wish them well on the infrastructure refresh.

------
romanovcode
>An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks
similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of
content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the
conversations hidden underneath.

So they are doing same mistakes as Digg. Interesting.

------
hydromet
>>the company is literally re-writing all of its code > > Wow.

Good to know they are "literally" re-writing code instead of "figuratively".
Why is the adverb "literally" overused so often?

~~~
dmux
Emphasis.

------
fasteddie
I'm really curious at what their cap table looks like at this point in time.
With the various ownership rejiggerings by Conde Nast, and this and Sam's last
round, wonder who has the power here

------
rottyguy
surprised the valuation is so low for a top 5 destination (per alexa).

~~~
giarc
Likely because of their lack of profit despite being so highly ranked.

Personally, other than FB I can't think of a site I visit more often than
reddit. Whether at home, on the bus or just sitting on the couch, it's the
site I know I can open and find some useful content.

With the amount of engagement they have, they should be making more money.

------
dlwdlw
Ugh, trying to fix marketing issues with more engineering....

------
neuigkeiten
Wow, complete redesign? Sounds dangerous. Why dont they make incremental
changes and ab-test the impact?

------
toephu2
Anyone know what Reddit's DAU is? This will help us give more context as to
revenue potential.

------
payne92
Is all of the money going to the company, or is some of it going to cash out
existing shareholders?

------
free2rhyme214
I'm way more interested if they create their own digital asset than the money
they raised.

------
DrScump
I want Usenet newsgroups back.

------
ijafri
Either you die Young as a Digg, or live long enough to become Reddit.

~~~
ihuman
But according to that statement, Digg lived long enough to become a Reddit?

~~~
ijafri
Digg wasn't Batman. Point. On topic Digg didn't survive the wrath of voting
rings. They stopped using it. That irioncally killed it.

~~~
ijafri
By voting rings I meant that were promoting real 'amusing' stuff to pile up
banner ads CPM revenue. They invested a lot in 'amusing stuff' and as well as
keeping Digg alive.

~~~
ijafri
Also Reddit is alive because of them, they play by the rules, who is gonna
invest billions of hours to keep Reddit active without any kind of reward in
return ... Rewaeds could be depending on the sub Reddit you run.

------
Shikadi
Reminds me of digg.com Gl hf reddit execs.

------
god_bless_texas
Why does it take $200M to do these things?

------
Entangled
I came here to say something about Digg but there are already 70 references to
Digg in the comments.

------
pinaceae
well, good news for the HN community!

start your engines, reddit will do what so many user-driven content sites have
done - light themselves on fire. slashdot, digg, they never learn.

yes, the network effect is a huge moat. but then you actively alienate your
users and then it goes FAST.

good luck to the aspiring entrepreneurs going after this opportunity.

don't even need a strong business plan, not like you can make any real money -
but you'll get funding for years to come :)

------
fundabulousrIII
Reddit or 4chan, decisions, decisions.

