I love reddit, but I do fear bringing on lots of investors will seriously damage the site and the community. Just look at what appears to have happened with Quora in the scramble to satisfy stakeholders.
They've done an impeccable job of steering the site in the past. With their track record and the sheer sweat and grit they've put into the site, I'm confident that won't change just because they raise capital.
"Impeccable" in this case only means, "not as bad a job as Digg or Quora".
Reddit has clearly meddled with the site in the past for business reasons (e.g. the Sears thing, /r/jailbait), and the hands-off-unless-we-change-our-mind policy of the administration has led directly to extreme frustration among the site's biggest influences and moderators of larger subreddits.
The only thing that separates Reddit from Digg-2.0 at this point is that there is not yet another site for disgruntled users to migrate to.
-- Lost a lot of trust in the userbase when they did the ridiculous "Matt has viewed the following questions" stunt.
-- Kicked one of the 2 co-founders, Cheever off, rumour has it he didn't want to go as aggressively after growth as D'Angelo & other powers wanted.
-- Widely sneered at in SV as being the company to look at if you want to know what "taking it too far with forcing growth" means. Their "sign-on to view this content" is a joke. Especially if you combine with their "Our mission is to grow and spread the world's knowledge"
Personally:
-- Their site's JS is a fucking mess. Crashes both my Chrome _as well as_ my iPhone's Safari frequently.
This is the sole reason I'll never open an account there. Fortunately, if I really want to see some of their answers, I can just delete the overlay div in the developer console.
edit: It looks like they've fixed it so you can no longer just delete the overlay. Parts of the text are replaced by images of blurred text now. Oh well.
It never crashes my browser, but does stop reloading, or hangs, or whatever, so I have to reload the page. It's only been getting worse over the past 2 years.
Doesn't matter that much who thinks it is a good idea. It is still a straight sacrifice of user experience in the name of capturing more user details and monetization.
Quora does the dodgy 'Experts Exchange style' answer blurring crap when a google search links you to them. I've blocked them from my google results because of this nonsense.
Is domain blocking working for you or are you using some other extension? Domain blocking mysteriously disappeared for me a while ago. It was a real buzzkill when the likes of Experts Exchange, W3Schools and Quora started showing up in my search results again.
