Reddit has an opportunity to do right everything that Twitter has done (and continues to do) wrong.
It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).
Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.
For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...
A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.
* They're launching new user profiles that center around the user; see the Washington post's Reddit account
* Reddit's model of communities is fundamentally broken. Each sub, unless STRONGLY curated like AskHistorians, develops its own hivemind. Post against the grain and receive downvotes, then take the downvote train as people LOVE to pile on downvotes.
* Reddit's upvote / downvote system is fundamentally broken. Easy to parse, light content or quips / jokes get hundreds of upvotes while actual, informational but boring responses get buried way below.
* Reddit has BLATANT advertising masquerading as user posts to big subs like Pics or MildyInteresting, or TodayILearned. Perfect usage of brand names, convenient brand symbol or product positioned perfectly, etc. And somehow posts that are straight up advertising get thousands of upvotes quickly.
* Reddit has done nothing about certain subreddits automatically banning people who post in X Y Z other subreddits, regardless of the content of their response.
* Their CEO, Spez, shadow edited people's comments in the_donald without telling anyone. Ellen Pao even commented on this and nothing fucking happened.
Etc. there are plus sides to reddit, but very few subs worth commenting in unless you have the popular opinion.
Regarding the third point, although it might be fundamentally misaligned with what you want to read, the Reddit system does do a very good job at highlighting what most people want to read (for better or worse.)
> What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities.
I think they've been trying to change that recently; they've been focusing more on content creators - people like Shitty_Watercolour who are known Reddit-wide for the original content they post. As you noted, they launched a new type of profile which basically turns it into a subreddit, which they're pushing as a way for content creators to post their works easily.[0] The feature is still being developed but is now available to more people.
To be clear, the feature is a good one in concept, but I think the fact that they chose to market the feature this way as opposed to marketing it as "bringing old-school link blogs back" or similar says a lot about how Reddit wants to change its image.
I think they've been trying to change that recently; they've been focusing more on content creators - people like Shitty_Watercolour who are known Reddit-wide for the original content they post. As you noted, they launched a new type of profile which basically turns it into a subreddit, which they're pushing as a way for content creators to post their works easily.[0] The feature is still being developed but is now available to more people.
To me that feature just looks like a way to add RSS/ RSS-like functionality to links a user wants to share or posts a user has participated in... it can be used for self-promotional purposes, but it doesn't have to be.
Plus, it's pretty similar to registering r/username, which is something that a lot of these "power users" already do.
My biggest complaint (and something I worry about when they talk about redesigning/reimplementing the site) is that the page just isn't all that great.
It's slow to load (where the old overview page was pretty much instantaneous), lacks features (though two more clicks will get you back to the superior overview page), and at least to my eyes, it's even uglier than normal reddit (though admittedly this is mostly subjective).
If this is what happens when they roll out new features, I worry that the rest of the site will wind up like it once they do their redesign.
Not that it has any impact on the validity of your statement but it's a funny coincidence that shitty_watercolour retired from reddit only a couple weeks ago.
> It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool.
Reddit has similar problems
> What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities.
This is an advantage for twitter in many ways, people want to follow and interact with other credible people not with a bunch of random people with no credible experience discussing a topic on reddit
That's what Reddit has been, in my humble opinion, since I've started using it - since 2005.
Country subs, most of the most famous subs, pretty much everywhere - it's just a lot of nonsensical quips, flame wars, karma hoarding (Reddit has a different unparliamentary word for that starting with "w"), the ubiquitous herd-mentality - one comment (mostly a "quip" reply) that came early gets bigger and bigger and everything else takes naturally a back seat, your very genuine doubts, points getting downvotted to oblivion sometimes for no apparent reason. It's a big list I believe.
Yes, there are subs which are good and can actually mean some meaningful interaction but it's not very proper to always call reddit right or better than Twitter or any other medium by referring to those few subs like /r/TrueFilm [0], then there's /r/DepthHub and /r/TrueReddit which are supposed to be "good" reddit but there are just no interactive discussions there they usually connect to popular comments usually highly gilded and popular ones.
Initially /r/ImAA seemed promising but that's just a PR board or been reduced to it. No, candid conversation (and I don't mean masala and gossip and scandal) is as rare as it gets. Places like /r/AskHistorians are as difficult to start participating that you just give up in the first go - it doesn't at all encourage participation; you don't know who you will flare up with your seemingly innocuous comment. At many places Reddit makes being a newbie almomst a crime and then there's instant justive too.
Reddit, for me, is mostly about what I have mentioned above and mod ego, monopoloy and knee jerk reactions and botached interventions by admins if at all they do. Abuse goes unchecked which is compounded by the herd-mentality. Like really unchecked and it's a hell for female users. The famous Reddit saying goes like "There are no girls on the Internet" and whenever a user is indentified as one it's almost unlivable there for them. And then there's doxxing.
Reddit sometimes works for just a lurker whenever I need something and it has it. Or a casual browsing for few minutes here and there.
Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.
Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.
Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. They haven't been hiding that they're gearing up for a major redesign.
From what I've seen so far, I'm not at all excited for it. They launched user profiles recently, and it's an uninspired blocky design with way too much unnecessary whitespace for a desktop site. Also, even on desktop there is noticeable Javascript induced lag and content pop in. Although the rest of the profile page tries to look like a standard reddit page, it's actually entirely done with react and the subreddit/notification bar at the top has the same lag and content pop in. They're also hiring mainly for React frontend/Node.js backend, so I'm worried the entire redesign is going to be low density and slow.
I'm in a weird position there. I've recently decided on react for most of our frontend in the future because of all the technical advantages this offers and the productivity benefits I see, but I still harbor reservations against react because in practice I've rarely seen react pages that feel snappy and fast, rather than choppy and slow.
Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that?
If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.
>Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that?
That has been shown to not hold in actual benchmarks. The real DOM is plenty fast if you do it right.
Here's Facebook's Dan Abramov (of Redux fame): "Myth: React is “faster than DOM”. Reality: it helps create maintainable applications, and is fast enough for most use cases."
React's virtual dom/diffing is certainly not "slow". It's not the tool that's the problem, but how it's used. There's also more to perceived slowness than how fast your library reconciles the DOM, e.g. I too often encounter pages that will "preload" all their assets behind stupid loading screens, ill-timed CSS animations, modals on top of modals, React Components that badly wrap jQuery plugins, leaked callbacks, …
Yea, I would say so... I guess from a developer standpoint it makes it easy to just have a "Post" component with various elements. I did this for a Reddit clone using Angular and ng-repeat and whatnot. I don't think it's performance beneficial though.
Most of the performance loss is due to using a frontend framework at all. Differences in such frameworks is then little. You need two round-trips at each page-load because you need the base HTML page then the data and rendering in the browser is orders of magnitude slower than rendering server-side with a good rendering engine.
I understand the point of frontend frameworks for SPA, not so much for Reddit profile pages which are literally single, static, pages.
You can render React server-side on first page load, though, and there will be no lag waiting for the page to render and initialize. I think that most people don't do it because there is extra work involved, but IMO if you're a huge site like Reddit, there's no excuse for not doing so, it seems like laziness.
Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.
Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment threads quickly and see good content easily while avoiding the chaff.
Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.
Reddit is actually facing a lot of flak for their plan of disabling CSS. This has made several of the subreddits announce themselves as Pro-CSS - sort of a rebel against the admins.
I've been following some of that. It's difficult to call, but I don't think it's a serious problem for Reddit, if they do it right.
Situations like this are extremely difficult to predict accurately. It could become a big problem. But it has a decent chance of blowing over.
The main issue is to harness the energy that the moderators currently put into their subreddit. They're not sad that CSS is going away. They're sad their toys are being taken away from them. That's not to trivialize it, not at all -- people like to tinker, and playing with your subreddit and putting your markings on it is a toy for adults. It's a game. It's necessary to replace that with something that feels equally deep and immersive.
Or, you know, just don't mess with the status quo. But if you're going to do it, I think that's why people are rebelling. Not because the functionality is gone, but because they're losing a creative outlet.
I can't even use their mobile website, I have to just use the desktop one (which has a delayed popup banner that shifts the page a second after load telling me to download their app).
You can use https://i.reddit.com. it is so much faster than m.reddit.com, it's unbelievable. Really shows how those JavaScript frameworks slow down everything and have a severe impact on my browsing experience. When reddit closes down i.reddit.com, I will not use Reddit on mobile anymore; maybe not even on desktop.
Thanks I had no idea that i.reddit existed. It's so much better than the standard mobile version. I don't understand why they don't focus on making reddit fast and reliable.
Making it beautiful with nice animations should come second and the mobile version still crash a few times a day for me.
They've been dicking about with it making it harder to choose the mobile version. One time, earlier this year, I got a "use the app" screen with no option to continue - you could block the overlay though.
Recently they added a useless interstitial.
It's interesting to me they say the app is faster; presumably they're artificially slowing the mobile site just to push app installs.
Besides spoiler tags, check out any of the sports subs: r/cfb, r/NFL, r/NBA have team flair, schedules, and scoreboards. Without those and the inline images, those communities would lose a lot of their fun.
r/soccer would most probably become half-dead over-night if the team flairs were to disappear. Almost each and every time when I'm reading a comment on there I first look at the flair of the redditor who had made the comment, so that I know who am I answering to. Sports-related discussions are a lot more heated and personal compared to what usually happens on sites like HN or how r/programming was at the beginning. I've actually seen grown people cry with real tears because of a football match, I'm yet to see a programmer cry because some other programmer has used spaces instead of tabs or vice-versa.
r/rust used CSS on April Fool's day to add overenthusiastic Rust Evangelism Strike Force-type exclamations to the end of everyone's posts. That was pretty funny. FEARLESS CONCURRENCY!
I agree! It feels like a good portion of the time when I see a new feature on a website it seems like it only exists because all the people needed to create it are employed at the company and we can't have them just sitting around all day.
Yes! Slack is dangerously close to the point of "every new feature makes it worse", while basic features that should work (scrolling to earlier in a channel that reloads history feels like a roulette wheel) stay broken.
.compact is still my preferred way of browsing Reddit on my phone. It seems to be slowly losing functionality (e.g., can no longer submit links or text posts), but the compactness of content is a big plus for me...
When linking to other parts of the site I notice I'll get bounced to the mobile version of Reddit even when I'm on .compact. The mobile version is so space-inefficient which is worse because I'm on a small mobile screen.
Digg and Reddit kind of came out of the lack of change at Slashdot. Slashdot had many problems with obvious solutions and originally digg was just slashdot where users could submit stories.
They understand they exist because people go there. V3 Digg will alaways be burned in their minds. Replace them and that lesson is lost. And another Voat will replace them. Hopefully without being taken over by a bunch of broke Nazis
Ages ago an admin said "yeah it would make sense for post titles to be edited within the first x minutes of making one", an incredibly low-hanging fruit that has been requested since forever.
I can think of a few problems with this just off the top of my head:
The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam)
For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time
Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job
The reddit button for submitting a post still says "save". I brought it up to a reddit designer last year and apparently there's some mountain of technical debt that would make changing the label a week long task so its languished at the bottom of the priority queue for many years now.
Might make sense to make it optional per subreddit. Some communities are far less filled with trolls than others. Locked after N hours or minutes is also a potential solution elaboration that could give subreddits flexibility (on/off, if on then lock after N time options). Default it to locked. One more layer would be to enable only for established accounts and or based on the account behavior historically, and so on.
Please no. We've seen how much mods can be trusted when given toys. Any true Scotsman redditor will express their hatred for how often posts on /r/all are summarily locked by a mod. Often the justification is "lol no" or "I'm not spending my saturday policing the modqueue." Which is valid, but sucks for the 300k people that have to deal with it.
I'm sorry, but this reason for not having title editing (and post editing on other sites like Twitter and GameFAQs) always bothered me to hell and back.
Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused.
It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all.
I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.
To be fair, doing so would require a bunch of cache invalidations and they've always barely had enough money to limp on to the next investor. It would also likely be abused.
Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.
I'd prefer a different approach: a true draft / submission cycle for more substantive works.
This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same.
Under this model:
* An item would be submitted.
* If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue.
* A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub).
* The item is then submitted.
This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind).
For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).
Recently Reddit introduced a new kind of user profile where you can make text posts to your own profile. It got a huge amount of negative feedback (although I'm coming around to it, personally), and many obvious features, such as being able to mix a user's posts and comments together like on the old profile page, were missing. They claimed they were all-hands-on-deck adding these highly requested features, and even now, over a month later, the only thing that's changed is a slightly bigger hyperlink to the comments page. That to me sounds like fixing what's not broken while ignoring what is.
It (rightfully) copped a lot of flack because it is a terrible idea: Reddit users don't want another user-driven/user focused Facebook clone, they want a community and topic driven platform.
I'm hoping that, like some of Reddit's other weird ideas, it kind of just gets abandoned and left to die.
1. Reddit's internecine subreddit wars required constant admin intervention and mediation. Reddit only has so many hands on deck, so more of than not, they pulled engineers in to help moderate.[1]
2. Reddit is unprofitable, so they have trouble affording top talent. [2]
3. Finally, Reddit's vision for the future has been hazy for the last decade. If the navigators can't chart a course, all the rowing in the world won't move the ship in the right direction. I suspect the overdone April Fools experiments are a result of engineering not being given technically compelling, or perhaps meaningful features to labor over.
There's only so much moderation a single person can handle in a day. The NY Times moderation team posted some stats a ways back, it worked out to about 800 items/person/day. Which, in an 8-hour day works out to an item every 35 seconds. Sustained. Throughout the entire day.
Techs can leverage patterns, even if it means a lot of ad hoc code.
Building training systems is even better.
Considering what Reddit's been through in the past couple of years by way of direct information attacks (even not counting any systems-level attacks), involving coloured tablets and giant orange peaches, I don't find the story that dev time has been accounted for particularly unreasonable.
1. I agree that it shouldn't, but they did so. Updated post with link. In another post, he emphasized the "war" part much more, but I think he deleted it. It was fairly angry.
2. I'm having trouble finding their burn rate; the linked article at least hints that they'll use this money to attract talent.
1. Yeah but no engineer should have to get their hands dirty in community moderation.
2. Come on, it's Reddit. I feel like many many developers would be interested on brand alone. I was, for a time.
3. Possible. But there's a difference between adding random directionless features (which they haven't really done), and not doing anything at all (which they have).
3. I worked recently at a startup where the product was a shambling, swelling mass of features, implicitly designed to obscure its missing core value proposition to both investors and to the founders. There is definitely a difference in the process; perhaps not a meaningful difference in the outcome, which for those invested in the company is impotence, toxicity, despair, etc.
With zero inside knowledge, it appears to me that they have a very brittle legacy feature set due to scale concerns, tolerated integrations/extensions, and being held hostage by the community. There is new product feature development happening but it appears disjointed from the legacy, which could indicate leadership conflicts on priority, an inability to marry the old and new, or an inability to devote time to anything but upkeep of the legacy.
Previous large-scale changes have been presented to their community and generally have been panned by the community, and often unreasonably so.
Reddit is very different from other social/consumer tech companies in that they are a very small company. Last I heard, they are somewhere around 200 employees. Compare that to how many employees twitter has and you'll notice that actually reddit is evolving their product at a pretty fast pace for the size of the company.
Additionally, from the various threads on reddit that I've seen people post about the company. They've done a lot of work on the background to reduce spam, which isn't something that is super obvious to someone not specifically looking to spam the site.
I was replying to the above comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation for the source of the number of employees. Your comment is more useless than mine since it does not provide any information and just a bland opinion out of nowhere.
> Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow?
I read through the front page of each of the top 5,000 subreddits (by subscribers) over the last few weeks, and a lot of the subreddits are adding hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per week. They seem to have gone into hypergrowth recently without anyone really noticing.
The other interesting thing of note is that of the 125,000ish posts I read through, there are only a few dozen submissions from independent blogs on the front page of all of these subreddits put together at any given time.
Can you clarify what you mean by submissions from independent blogs? You seem to be saying that the new users are bots or something from media/marketing ? Or am i reading too much iwmto this...
I.e. submissions not from YouTube, Imgur, nytimes, etc. submissions from actual people with a point of view, where you can subscribe if you want to learn more. Think Fred Wilson, Seth Godin, Venkatesh Rao, Gwern, etc. writing on their own domain, or at least on their own subdomain where they pay for hosting.
Every time they introduce any changes, the userbase revolts. The outrage that happened when they announced they were going to let people put a bio and photo on their profile pages made it sound like the world was ending.
From hanging around in r/redditdev I got an impression there was an exodus of much of the experienced backend team about a year ago when there was so much drama (Kemitche and at least two more people I think). Maybe it has taken some time to get a new one up to speed. Also, A lot of resources seems to be focused lately on developing clients for android and ios.
I get the impression that Reddit has a lot of technical debt that makes developing new features difficult, and would take some major effort to refactor themselves out of
Could be wrong, but I'd assume some of it is related to scale of features. For example, when they started hosting images - they started at pretty extreme scale, so that would likely slow down feature delivery.
Having said that, not all features would be _that_ intensive on systems.
I don't get the need for all these tech companies to prove their "wit" by trying to out do each other on 4/1. Then the tech blogs all rush to cover the various 4/1 "jokes"
With the immense and demographically diverse userbase, I imagine keeping the site running smoothly and user analytics is their chief focus. Their strategy probably is to introduce changes slowly so as not to alienate or confuse people (I'm looking at you Facebook).
Also, they expose their data via an API that developers have used to make all sorts of features, giving them the luxury of being able to basically test features without actually implementing them.
Isn't the modern approach to that problem simply limiting new features to a subset of users then analyzing the result and deciding whether or not to release it to the full user base? As a heavy user of Reddit there is an argument to be made that it is (mostly) feature complete to the average user, and they have certainly made significant strides in scalability (though not without a decade of hiccups).
I'd really like to hear from a reddit volunteer moderator, a group who essentially keeps the site running for free and who have voiced their concerns over lack of tooling for... again a decade.
Finally we're only a year or two out from major PR issues at the company. I would not be surprised if it alienated engineering talent (that and presumably a smaller budget for compensation due to the revenue, profitability, time since last raise, etc.).
> Isn't the modern approach to that problem simply limiting new features to a subset of users then analyzing the result and deciding whether or not to release it to the full user base?
For most companies it is. But sites like reddit get people to do it for free. Basic A/B testing takes a not insignificant amount of resources, usually consisting of at least a marketing/analytics person, a developer, a designer, qa resources and a project manager.
well, they are developing quite a bit, but they test out the features among subsets of their user base long before the features are available to everyone. And in most cases they probably turn out to not be as good as they seemed they would be, and are tabled. They are pretty careful about changing things... I mean, if it ain't broke.
Personally I prefer it far, far more than the constant changes some startups seem to feel is necessary to justify their existence.
I know for a long time the engineering team was not very big, certainly not the "usual" size of a team with that much traffic (Instagram not withstanding). My guess is the team was simply keeping up with the normal expansion of complexity that comes with scale.
That said, I believe they are heavily recruiting at all levels so if you want to work for Reddit, apply now.
I don't know about the website, but I was really impressed at how fast they released a new iOS app (right after buying Alien Blue) which looks pretty awesome as well.
Vaguely off-topic: the day that app was released, I stumbled into 111 Minna (a bar in downtown SF) and saw a bunch of signs for Reddit. Assuming it was a reddit meetup, I talked up this one dude about the new app, how ugly it was, how I was never going to stop using Baconreader if this was the shit the reddit team was gonna put out, etc. Later a girl said "man, Steve thought it was hilarious how you just shit all over our new app. You know this is our launch party, right?"
The CEO Steve Huffman recently admitted to editing his political opponent's posts. Maybe they can't get anything done because they're redditing all day.
I just mean the filters can't be applied together. eg. show me upvoted threads from X subreddit. I thought perhaps that's what you were interested in, so I made a note of it.
At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election)
And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:
#standardSQL
SELECT DATE_TRUNC(DATE(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc)), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions
FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*`
WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN "2015_12" AND "2017_04" OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = "full_corpus_201512")
GROUP BY mon
ORDER BY mon
If not bots then shills. There was a massive increase in obvious shills/bots in the various political subs leading up to the election and through today (although less so than before the election).
Let's get some engagement stats on those user counts.
I wish there was a way to exclude rss-like subreddits with loads of automated submissions and almost no comments/votes, like /r/willis7737_news/, /r/AutoNewspaper/, /r/Raytheon/, /r/TheColorIsBlue/ (they come and go each year, these are the ones I see around recently).
Reddit has a huge value I think which has not been mentioned - that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free.
Sometimes they do that under the covers, so to speak, and some users don't like it (e.g. hailcorporate) but often they will promote their products transparently, and often normal users don't mind. The most obvious example is Netflix on /r/movies. Multiple employees were observed continuously posting things to the site, via submissions, comments etc and users liked it.
By introducing a charge for these corporate users they can reap in a substantial income. Whether it would make sense for them to label these corp users as such is another option, but they certainly know about them. I find it interesting that most normal users find that they don't mind interacting with paid marketing employees and that they consider it organic and natural, very interesting. I also find it worrying.
>that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free.
Another phenomenon I've been seeing more of is a company that gets in early to a niche gaining control of the subreddit around that niche, tilting the scales in their favor.
Two examples I can think of are /r/nootropics, whose mod team is led by the owner of nootropics supplier Ceretropic, and /r/amazonmerch, whose sole mod is the owner of MerchInformer, a SaaS Amazon Merch research product.
They're each careful to never moderate in an overtly heavy-handed way that would cause a user revolt, but nonetheless, their companies are mentioned in the each subreddit far more often than their competitors. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and one that will only worsen as these niches grow in popularity.
Video game subreddits have this happen a lot. A new game will hit the market, and the company will already have set up a subreddit with all of their staff in control. It's an "official" subreddit, but that means it's no better than any other official forums and lacks any ability to hold counter opinions.
Isn't reddit already successful? Why are they raising money? Shouldn't they be generating profits and returning those profits back to their shareholder(s)?
Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?
As a user, I fear it is increased monetization in the form of more aggressive tracking and advertising.
Their pushes for email registration and the feed-based ads in the mobile app make that direction pretty well telegraphed.
But I'd draw an interesting parallel here with the fact that, like Snapchat, many Reddit users do it with some expectation of anonymity/privacy. It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users. Reddit has a comment and engagement data goldmine at their fingertips, but they need to burn through a heck of a lot of user trust to leverage it to its full potential.
It's pretty clear, to me at least, that they'll become one of the biggest websites of any kind, and with a massive amount of data around what people like and are interested in.
Pretty simple to imagine that being worth far more than $1 billion. Their user growth recently has been astounding.
Why are users worth money if they're barely being monetized? Considering how big (and old) reddit already is, they should already be profitable, and hence shouldn't need to raise money - unless they're planning something radical and expensive. Reddit is a cool site and wildly popular, but that doesn't mean it's going to make billions of dollars.
Also I suspect the site is increasingly populated with bots, not real users. I'd actually imagine the site is less popular this year in terms of real users than it was a year ago, although I have no way to know that and could be wrong. I'd need to see hard evidence to believe it hasn't had a rapidly growing bot population though.
Because they have the potential to be monetized. I have wild success with Reddit ads even though you can tell the ads products never receive much love (or maybe that's just Reddit generally).
Companies are valued based on discounted future cash flow. In other words, investors are betting that at some point in time Reddit will generate billions, even when adjusted for a discount for time. That's not crazy at all to me to see that happening.
I agree with the first bit and the last bit. The bit that makes no sense to me is that their value should be predicated on them making at least that much in either profits or some kind of exit.
Since almost all attempts to really monetize Reddit in the past have failed because of massive backlash from the users I wonder what the plan is. There has to be some kind of major change to either Reddit or to the audience to warrant the valuation.
Could be Advertising. Reddit could do a lot better in helping advertisers spend money with them.
I've been comparing Facebook's Advertiser tools and options with Reddit's. Reddit is miles behind, in terms of making it easy to try different campaigns, different headlines, different messages.
Pandering to advertiser's inevitably leads to them having too much say (which they don't deserve), and trying to implement ever more tracking and insidious advertising methods.
I for enjoy the fact that Reddit's approach/attitude to advertising seems to be: here's your box-stay in your box, and you'll have these basic tools and you'll fucking like it".
I'm considering that taking this funding at a very high valuation will force them to change Reddit in a way that results in its ultimate demise. What's wrong with a good stable community and business, as it is?
Cracks me up why Reddit is the way it is questions. Ask kevin Rose fron tech tv. As soon as Reddit drops its bbs style it is dead. For those complaining about Css RES.
Reddit is only a thing because people feel safe there. What other site of its user base does that?
Last I heard Reddit was doing less than $10 mn / year in revenues. It's highly under-monetized, but it looks difficult to grow in 5 to 10 years to generating $150 million in annual profits to justify this valuation.
I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).
Especially since there will always be another group of investors that are currently on Step 1.
If Reddit's experience starts sucking once they try to monetize, there will be no shortage of people who are going to offer a superior (i.e. non-monetized) experience with the intent of somehow monetizing The Right Way in the future. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Because actual money making things are very hard to come by? They typically involve either huge amounts of unforseeable luck, or a time machine to go back to before some monopoly was achieved. Or they're borderline illegal, which takes a long time to achieve too because you need to grow the capacity to pay off the politicians. By contrast "look, tons of eyeballs" is much easier to find and hype.
reddit is about to suffer the same mass exodus Digg did if they keep up the shit brigade.. That site has gone to hell since the election.. ruined by shills and bots in every subreddit.. can't be bothered w/ it anymore.. sick of reading about Trump and Hillary.
/r/Austin is toxic beyond words. There are sometimes great gems though, which still makes it worthwhile to comb through the piles of racist trolling and other muck but it gets to be a harder job every week. The mods just don't give a flipping flip. It is sad.
you can unsubscribe from the toxic communities and subscribe to the wholesome/uplifting ones. seriously i dont know why so many people complain about stuff entirely within their control
As others have mentioned development of reddit has been slow for the fact that their Engineering teams were performing Administrative tasks to the point that they could only maintain the site. Since they have cleared that hurdle by instituting more straightforward moderation and administration.
The only exception to this is when a reddit admin actively modified a thread by users being hostile. This creates irreparable problems because users can't trust the administration to not tamper with their comments. They have on record stated that they will not do this in the future but you can't undo the removal of trust of their users. I have been a reddit user for almost 11 years and I am not associated of the group in question and it has made me loose faith in reddit.
Their struggles with advertisement is something they can actively address now. Before when they were smaller than digg once digg made a huge mister and alienated their users this allowed to flourish into the site it is today. Due to the fear of what occurred to Digg their advertising was less aggressive their advertisements have been less aggressive and attempt to be targeted. But, since reddit is so large now the risk of alienation is much less. Also, other condenders like imgur and voat have tried to take the throne from reddit without success. Also, they have made great strides in making it accessible to everyone and you can get anyone from any political spectrum. If reddit wants to make money they have to broaden their appeal greatly and I believe thats the purpose of the $150m. Hopefully when they do this they won't turn out like digg because they are a much larger network now.
One thing I thought was interesting about the admin-editing-comments fiasco was how a large portion of users expressed surprise that an admin editing comments was even possible, and suggested it shouldn't be.
Others had to come in and explain that yes, in fact Mark Zuckerburg could edit your Facebook comments if he really wanted to, and admins could edit your comments on other forums and so on. It's just usually they choose not to.
Eh, this wasn't all that surprising to me. It reminds of the time my sister was shocked to discover that her car had a battery. You don't have to know shit about how a web site works to use one.
Ugh I had a long argument with someone in college about why their car wouldn't start... it couldn't possibly be a dead battery, they didn't drive an electric car.
Online communities die within months. Reddit isn't worth anything. This is insane - this community can disappear. Look at Digg, myspace, friendster. One wrong TOS update all the users will rebel and look towards the next cheaply made forum.
Reddit has a lot of distinctly separate sub communities that grow, start new, and die out individually, and some which even hate others. So I think that helps to protect from "community death" effect. For the other websites you mentioned, they all feel like "one community" each.
really - myspace was one community? Forums don't have 'topics'? wtf. This is insane. This is nuts. Reddit wont be around in 4 years. It will be a total joke like all the other online communities.
If reddit founders and investors make bank out of content generated for free, the content creators will get pissed off there's nothing for them. And they'll move on.
YouTube is the only one I see who is really trying to make it work. Instagram worked it out by placed ads for the most popular models.
And a key sin of all these sites is they think the content is theirs. It's not. Stop trying to regulate it to be what you want. It is what it is and you should be thankful, very thankful, they chose your site to host it. But this doesn't seem the case. The reddit admins in particular seems to hate a large part of their content-creating user base.
I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the browser's sandbox?
I'm (obviously) not the target market, but I absolutely detest disingenuous behaviour like this.
Reddit's mobile site is designed to be a bad experience to such a degree that it's comical. I use it everyday and still get confused wrt to basic functionality like what to click. It's also suspiciously slow in a way that Reddit proper never is.
I very rarely load up reddit on mobile but did so this morning and noticed the exact same message and couldn't believe it. The selling feature they use for the mobile app on that message was that it was faster than the mobile site. I don't see why that needs to be the case - it seems the reason the mobile site is slow is because they force it to do client side rendering. Or at the very least, just that it's Javascript heavy. I'm not sure why reddit needs to be like that given the content.
OT: but I feel the same about imgur. You can't use their mobile site to upload pictures anymore. You have to request the desktop site or install their app.
Really? I don't know if Reddit has been AB testing, but they seem pretty reasonable to me with their app ads. It's always been easy to clear and stays cleared for a while for me.
They absolutely have been A/B testing it for a curiously long time. Sometimes it's dismissable, sometimes it's not. IIRC it's even more hassle if you aren't logged in.
I sort of believe that the push to mobile is to utilize technologies like GPS, and for tracking purposes / more information points. To get to know the [s]customer[/s] mark better than they know themself. Also, the ISPs may help this push since mobile data is more costly to the consumer than regular ethernet cable type data. wired > wifi
I don't know the reasons, but it is getting really annoying. I book a flight in Delta, from a browser on my laptop and it kept saying "Download our apps, it will be such a better experience!"
I do not want to have to download a different apps for each vendor, that's why we invented browsers. If the your browser experience sucks, fix it, don't push your mobile apps on people!
Reddit has the worst mobile site i've ever seen, with constant pop-ups that make the site basically unusable. Sometimes a good idea and first to the market is better than good execution.
Yeah, their mobile website isn't very good, neither is their app.
IMHO the only way to use Reddit on a mobile device is to request the desktop site. However, I recently opted into their new user profile thing which is completely broken on mobile (and you can't opt-out).
Sometimes I wonder whether some sites intentionally downgrade their mobile site to push people to download their app. Certainly seems that way with reddit. Anyway, at least i.reddit.com still exists, albeit in the background like some kind of insider rumor.
It did seem a bit low to me too considering how much other social networking apps are getting valued at.
Reddit has been around for over 11 years. It's something to say about the loyalty of their community.
Their ability to target advertisements towards specific subreddits could become a large source of revenue. Especially since advertisers can easily target those with those interests.
I think it's different than facebook groups because subreddits are at the heart of the reddit ecosystem.
1. They have some weird policies about how they want their employees to work. At one point of time they were ok with being remote, then they moved everyone to SFO or told them to pound sand.
2. Scaling issues: Seems like that's an after thought and only gets addressed "when it happens"* (Never thought put in after the fact)
3. The Modmail.. it's bad when you're dealing with lots of it. There are features completely lacking. (Like searching, or a CRM for users and how they contacted the mods)
4. The non-obvious spam.. it's gotten worse now that they took down r/spam.
Please explain to me in simple terms why a website property is worth so much.
Keeping in mind this has remained a mystery to me ever since Facebook didn't sell for a million dollars an eon ago. Facebook's founder is today worth some ridiculous sum of money. Why is that? I'd have sold Facebook for a million dollars and then just made another website. What am I missing. YouTube sold for some amazing sum ages ago to Google, who has from my understanding still not turned a profit with it.
Since I am clearly so out of touch please make the explanation easy to understand.
The value of Facebook and Youtube is their amazing ability to reach huge potential audiences for advertisers as well as their ability (esp Facebook) to collect large sums of valuable personal information.
Reddit being the fourth most visited website in the US has the potential for people and companies to reach huge audiences. I can see where people are stuck in the mentality that places like this are just "another website". But the point is now these places are reaching unprecedented scales on an order of magnitude higher than the traditional webpages of the late 90's early 2000's that they can be huge businesses themselves.
It's simple, eyeballs, ads, and data. They can directly measure the value created through ads posted on those properties - and that scales up with the amount of potential ads. Then you have future value of the data being generated (personal habits, info on Facebook, watching patterns by demographic etc on YouTube).
For Reddit, it's one of the biggest communities online (maybe the world?) - there are many ways to leverage and monetize that even if they haven't figured out all the optimal ways to do that yet, the perceived value is enough to convince investors in its future.
These website properties have (hundreds of) millions of engaged users. Investors are betting on the ability of Facebook, Reddit, et al to monetize those users. Facebook has demonstrated a great proficiency at doing this, mostly through targeted advertising. Reddit, so far at least, has struggled but still has potential to turn their audience into a profit center.
They're not websites. They're social graphs and they are very powerful sources of information that can be used in too many ways to list. Facebook revenues alone are $8B per quarter. You'd sell that for $1M?
Excuse me, Facebook revenues were not that high at a 1m valuation. Nobody would sell something that earns $32B/yr for 1m, I'm dubious that it earns that much money and I'm curious about why, if so, that is.
Facebook wasn't first and had all the momentum. MySpace sold for $580M in 2005 and I'm sure Zuckerberg would have seen that as relevant to Facebook's potential value.
To answer your question as to why, Facebook is an advertising company. People pay to publish ads, they pay more for highly targeted ads which is what Facebook offers.
They're one of the most visited websites on the planet and unlike Facebook terribly mismanaged so that the amount of advertising revenue they bring in per visitor is a pittance.
If someone were to straighten out Reddit not only would they be profitable but they'd be Facebook level profitable.
And if you're having a hard time understanding why that is, look at it this way: imagine a newspaper that was read by 10% of the US population as well as a huge amount of people overseas. They'd be the most valuable property in news by far. Especially because they demographics skew heavily towards 18-35-year-old men.
It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.
This would work out horribly for Reddit because it would make them vulnerable to any competitor that markets itself as "Free Reddit". Like most social media, Reddit's moat is its user base not its feature set. Anything that would drive away users would be tantamount to suicide.
I don't think that would work out for very, for a number of reasons:
1. Reddit already has competitors, and lots of them. By putting a 'pay to join' barrier up, they just send said competitors more users which gives sites like Voat a huge boost in popularity.
2. It's also competing with online forums and community sites, the vast majority of which are free. Will people really spend money to talk about say, video games or R/Gaming or R/Games when tens of thousands of forums for the same topic exist and are open to join for free? Perhaps not, which would give the likes of IGN, Gamespot and NeoGAF a huge boost among many others.
3. $12 is a lot of money for some Reddit users. For example, people in poorer countries/where the local wages are lower, people without a steady job or career and kids/teens in general.
4. Reddit's entire popularity is dependent on the work of its users. If they can't afford it or leave, then the site will lose out on future popular content, and likely enter a popularity death spiral.
I think paywalling reddit would kill it. It's not like Reddit Gold is very expensive ($30 a year). But I do think that simple friction (needing to hand over one's credit card information) is a barrier, combined with the fact that the Gold benefits are far from essential.
Maybe an interesting time to point out a site I just ran across which is reddit-like, but (as far as I can figure) uses cryptocurrency to fund itself and pay contributors.
Of all the supposed reddit-killers that have been put forward, this is notable because of the funding mechanism, and because everyone there seems so damn excited. However, a lot of the most popular articles seem to be about... Steemit itself.
There's a caveat with that revenue figure in that they very specifically quote how much Ad Revenue Reddit earns, not total revenue. They sell branded products and Reddit gold which definitely increases that number.
You jest.. t shirts sales can be huge in sports . For ex some soccer teams like manchester united or real madrid make enough to justify a valuation not much different based on the t-shirts sales alone...
I love Reddit, but remind me what's their business model? I've never seen an ad using Relay For Reddit. Free content is great but how do they keep the lights on much less justify $1.7 billion? (Also, HN. Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?)
They run sponsored posts on the HTML version of reddit, not sure about their mobile app tho. I've actually paid to run some ads on reddit and would recommend them. Their ads are cheap and they'll definitely send traffic your way if that's what you're looking for.
Relay For Reddit is not normal - most Reddit users see ads occasionally.
Apparently 6 percent of internet users in the United States use Reddit in their spare time [1]. It is probably the same in Canada, Australia and the UK.
If we assume $0.25 in revenue per month per user and 20 million users, that's revenue of $60 million per year.
I can believe your statistics are at least somewhere in the ballpark. Thus, I still have no idea how you get to a $1.7 billion valuation on $60 million in revenue, nevermind profit.
Actually, I'm not so confident about the ballpark. My link also says there are about 1.3 billion unique visitors per month. So in addition to 20 million Reddit 'addicts' there could be 1.28 billion less-frequent users. If they are worth on average $0.01 per month that would be an additional $150 million per year in revenue.
> Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?
They don't have to pay dang for that I'll be happy to oblige, this is a toxic comment because of that last bit, essentially you are just stirring the pot and baiting the moderators.
As for the value of HN to YC: it's a recruiting and marketing machine the likes of which you'll rarely find for any kind of money, I suspect that no matter what Dan and Scott are paid it is well worth it to YC.
This seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Your interests are the subreddits that you're subscribed to. They don't need to do any "tracking" because that's just how the site works by default.
Steve's tone here is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek.
I know reddit gets a lot of flak for shit-posting content, especially during and after the recent US elections, but it has huge potential to become a consistent part of a users media consumption & participation diet.
It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).
Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.
For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...
A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.