I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem.<p>The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push users to the app: <a href="https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1086002848926593025</a> )<p>That said, it seems like the <i>really bad</i> dark patterns I reported 7 months ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446841</a>) no longer appear to be in place.
I actually hate Reddit these days. I've never really been into their various communities/subredits- and on occasion they're really useful spots of information or entertainment.<p>But...<p>Their current "force you into app" (which appears to leave you logged in, able to make account changes, even if you change your password) approach is fucking horrible. Their mobile navigation is broken by design and.... for what? What incentive do I have to sign up? Why should when its in such a hostile way. The incentive clearly is for them the organization to get new funding and not for me as a user since functionality has been reduced for NO reason. It's like Quora... that worked great for funding but has really done a lot to develop a mature business, eh?<p>... I'm gonna go pour out some coffee in memory of Digg.
The HackerNews community is more appreciative of these problems than Reddit's. But Reddit <i>will</i> suffer from the same problems that Facebook and Twitter suffer from, if not already. Reddit users are easily manipulated by engineered content and engineering content on Reddit is not hard if you know what you're doing. Evidently, there are power-users on Reddit (e.g. /u/GallowBoob) who know exactly how Reddit ticks and can get practically anything to the front page in front of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.<p>Reddit is huge -- I suspect they will be bigger than Facebook (maybe not in valuation, but usage) in the next 7 years and these problems will only be exacerbated. Facebook isn't what 12-13 year olds today are interested in. Reddit is a more apt model for online discourse and culture than Facebook ever was.
It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon:<p><a href="https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg" rel="nofollow">https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg</a><p>I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."<p>I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of the few platforms that would allow a crypto economy to develop and provide an alternative to the dominant money-making models.
I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit.<p>No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about.<p>I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.
It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is an unfair characterization fueled by my recent frustrations with the direction the site is going. I don't think it is unreasonable to point out that reddit is failing the expectations of their users, but I don't doubt for a minute that the individuals working at reddit are very talented)<p>10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out.<p>What has the focus been if not stabilizing their infrastructure? It appears to be the introduction of a single page application that feels clunky, conceals ads better, and implements all kinds of dark UX patterns.<p>Meanwhile, there are still bugs that have existed for years that still aren't fixed. There's even a redirect loop that you can get stuck in during authentication in certain scenarios that will completely break the site and bring you back to the same page until your session expires. It's been there for at least a year now.<p>Reddit has gone full digg v4<p>EDIT: After thinking about this more, I'm not sure that reddit going full digg v4 means that they'll share the same outcome as digg. The internet now seems to be a small set of companies so entrenched in their position due to swallowing mass amount of users and raising enough funds to optimize all the various little corners that can be optimized. Reddit might not actually be dead, but as they continue to optimize the weird and cool ways that people used to use the site, I know it will be for me.
Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): <a href="https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com</a><p>I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.
I know someone worked for reddit for a while last year (they don't anymore because they hated every second of it) and from what I understand the engineering teams there are a nightmare of groups that don't talk to each other, constantly write the same code in completely different ways, have no common style and just shoehorn in whatever they want. Everything breaks pretty much all the time.
All of that is aside from the fact that the workforce acted like a bunch of teens that just arrived at college and are going crazy due to lack of supervision (Every project had to be tiptoed around because of complicated interpersonal relationships).
Not to mention the CEO offering drugs to people in his cabin at camp Reddit (the yearly retreat they do)
Oh, and the fact that the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content.
Apparently last year Steve (ceo) told everyone to enact a hiring freeze while he figures some stuff out, and then after a month or two, when managers informed him of all the candidates they passed up, Steve freaks out and tells them that they should have hired them. During the hiring freeze. That he enacted.<p>The app also sucks. They try to make everything play embedded, so that if you want to share it, you pretty much have to share the reddit link, because the link to the actual content is hidden. That's bad enough but the embedded stuff also barely works. More often than not I have to go directly to the source for an embedded video or giphycat thing to play.<p>Every story I've heard about reddit sounds like a nightmare. It really sucks that it's become the defacto repository for so many hobbies.
Reddit has been raising money for almost 15 years! I wish I had the connections to VC's that reddit apparently does. I can definitely spend all the money a VC gives me, then raise more money, and then spend all that money, and never turn a profit for 15 or 20 years.
Fun, I deleted my 9 year old account last night. It's wasn't out of some high-minded thing about how they're turning more into Facebook or privacy or anything. That site just hits my dopamine so effectively I had to quit and block it in my /etc/hosts.<p>I am spending more time on HN though...
last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these things.
Reddit is still great if you take the time to curate subreddits that pertain to your interests and you use a 3rd party app (Apollo is really fantastic.)<p>I mostly spend my time moderating r/CrohnsDisease and making sure the people who post there get at least one thoughtful reply. I browse r/all most days but rarely do I post content or comments outside of my main subs because there’s just so much toxicity on the platform.<p>I wish Alexis had been able to influence the core values of the company before leaving the second time, he seems like one of the few genuinely good people at that level of major tech companies these days. It’s a shame he’s moved on to other things.
Reddit isn't worth $3B, and management trying to justify the validation and provide returns to the investors will kill it. Just a quick peek on `/r/beta` will show you the weird things Reddit is doing to maximize value and how it is alienating users.<p>Unobtrusive ads don't make investors enough money, Facebook has already shown that. To derive maximum revenue per user, you need to drive your users to the edge of not enjoying the site anymore. With these investments Reddit will be walking that line, and who knows if Reddit is too big to digg?
It amazes me that a fourteen year old company with a mature business model requires equity financing. I'll never really understand how tech companies work, I guess.
Interesting that most of the comments here are about Reddit itself (the product) and almost nothing about Tencent.<p>For reminder, Tencent owns<p>- Riot Games (League of Legends, one of the most played game in the west)<p>- Epic Games (Fortnite, another one of the most played game in the west)<p>- and now Reddit (one of the most visited social network in the west)
Must be .com bubble 2.0 if VCs will throw that much money at a company who can't monetize that many users after this many years.<p>Not my money, so I don't care, but I do really have to wonder what their plan is.<p>The way I see it, Google, Apple, and Facebook won't buy them because they're not competitors and they already have more users. And 99% of Reddit users probably use 1 or more of those 3 already anyway.<p>An IPO seems unlikely because they're not making enough money.<p>So maybe they're hoping for a buyout from a media company?
Reddit is the only social media I use. Never used any other services at all. The only annoyance is the redesign. It completely sucks. Very much reminds of the digg 4.0 redesign before it died. I don't know why all these aggregation sites go to that look and feel but its very bad to use. Hope they don't abandon supporting the old design. That would definitely make scale back my time on there significantly.
Something about Reddit that has been really irking me lately is the decline in quality of the comment threads, which is arguably one of the only reasons to visit the site nowadays since link aggregators are so common.<p>People seem to treat commenting like a game instead of a forum for discussion. I often see the same patterns from Twitter there (i.e., inciting outrage to get upvotes, virtue signaling, or just pointless jokes on serious articles). The introduction of Reddit Gold has made this substantially worse, as now there’s an additional point system which awards single comments instead of points of discussion.
Has Reddit ever had a profitable quarter, let alone year? I thought I saw that revenue had been rising but they also have significantly ramped up expenses, doubling employees and lots of new infrastructure (ex: their self-hosted video platform).<p>This sounds like greater fool theory if the investors in the latest round think they'll be able to peddle it for greater than $3 Billion without it ever bringing a dime of actual profits.
Is there an ActivityPub or similarly decentralized alternative? I don't want to get invested in reddit only for them to shut down their API (it'll happen, always does) and force me to use their garbage mobile client.
I've always felt that Reddit would work really well as a non-profit. This would remove the inherent conflict between keeping the focus on communities/shared-interests (what drew me to Reddit in the first place) and the financial incentive pushing towards profiles/gathering personal information for ads. I would definitely donate to Reddit monthly if it went that route.
Sadly I feel like Reddit has become like a Facebook news feed.<p>That and the fact that now so many comments keep getting deleted and posts locked makes me wonder who the target audience is these days.<p>Also the overzealous moderators are annoying.
I expect this raise to result in a number of enhancements to the user experience which make it a more pleasant and enjoyab[Open this link in the Reddit App?]le place to discourse.
This is a crazy revenue model. It is reminiscent of the dot com era when land grabs were a thing. But a lot has settled down since the fun days and it is not possible to get investors onboard with promises when there is a clear track record.<p>The track record does look okay:<p><a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit</a><p>There is continued growth in engagement. But still, shouldn't the actual product - the website - be built out by now with all the content coming from users, therefore not much of a business case for investment? How can they have this continually growing audience and not be making enough bucks to pay the bills and grow organically?
I would not be surprised. Reddit is easily my most visited internet community and go-to for many niche matters as well.<p>I use it through 3rd party apps or my PC, so have mostly avoided their dark patterns.<p>I love HN, but the limited scope of the discussions here (for obvious and good reasons) makes it far less frequented than reddit.<p>Reddit is like a slightly worse HN for everything else apart from CS/Tech.<p>I also love how everyone I meet in the US seems to feign ignorance about Reddit, despite it being the Alexa #5 website here (behind Google,Amazon,FB and YT)
It is almost as if people don't want to be called a redditor despite using the website a lot.<p>It is also the site with the 2nd greatest daily time per visitor (behind only salesforce), above YT, Facebook, Twitter or ...... pornhub ....
I've used Reddit since day 1.<p>The new website is a usability disaster, and one that they don't mind shoving down your throat at every turn.<p>Moderators are increasingly beating anyone who isn't politically correct enough over the head with their moronic code of conduct and banning users for simply disagreeing.<p>Most of the people who still hang around are very negative individuals who seem to be there more to project their hatred in general than to learn and/or share. Oppose their abuse and they'll invariable mob up on you and make sure your posts never see the light of day.<p>If I was Aaron Swartz, bless him; I would be turning in my grave by now.
It's weird to me to see more investment in reddit as it mostly feels like it's gone downhill. It could be my own interests but most of the subreddits who don't have an outside feed (around a game like overwatch, or primary/secondary major city sub) just have been withering away and it's those niches that makes reddit 'stick.' The new design/company focus seems to feel directly in contrast to the staying power that the niche-ness provides and I am not sure how far apart these two points are.
Reddit is worth more just for the political influencing alone. It's known within certain circles that they manipulate the voting system so that articles of their choice reach the front page.
The only problem I have with Reddit from a valuation perspective is that it doesn't really offer much 'secret sauce.' The tech itself is not great, and I don't really know of anyone who likes the redesign. Point being, the value is all in the users and content. Users are fickle, and as we saw from Digg (and lesser extent, StumbleUpon), can flee en masse at any moment. That's a tough pill for me to swallow as a potential investor.
The forthcoming Series D round is said to be led by Chinese tech giant Tencent.<p>150-300mln is probably small amount for Tencent and they are not looking for a quick return, I guess.
Hrm, this smells like another step towards the death of Reddit. The things they will have to due to justify that valuation will not be pleasant for the users.
It's spiraling down now. Too transparent that hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent to shape public opinion. Shills all over the place, in every single subreddit. And if they can take over a subreddit, they'll prop up a new one with the right people in charge by spamming it's content enough that it reaches /r/all.<p>The clocks ticking on reddit. It used to be such a different beast back in 2005.
Reddit is quite unknown in Brazil, India and several other countries where social media are used by millions of people.<p>This represents an opportunity, but also a risk. Opportunity to grow in these countries, or see another company offering similar service arise and gain momentum.<p>If @spez give me 10 horses with food for 20 days walk I could come back with more than 30 million users from Brazil alone.
Remember when reddit said they'd use the money to pay their users and then stopped talking about it completely? <a href="https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/reddit-notes-plan-paying-users.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/reddit-notes-plan-payi...</a>
Reddit will continue to face decisions between their community and business goals, often with the community goals being ethically green and the business goals being ethically grey. I have every faith they will choose the business goals with every matter of consequence, which is why I want to ween myself off it.
I have an idea for Reddit if they want to make money: I know your site is open source, but it is not an easy setup. The mixture between forum, customizable subreddits, and almost chat-like threading is tailor made for intra-company communication. We all feel the pain of ephemeral chat and closed-recipient email to do business. Employees need a way to show off, communicate, post neat things, customize their department's subreddit, etc. But you can't keep the Reddit branding because it is unprofessional.<p>So...take Reddit, make it easier to install on-prem, charge for this enterprise version, and change the name and default look of this on-prem version to distance itself from the traditional Reddit. Then watch the money roll in as I and others would pay to have more than just a forum (sorry discourse).
I will often scope google searches for product reviews or food/recipe/diet/fitness knowledge to reddit. This is not the sole research I do but it does tend to be pretty high quality data.<p>I would not be surprised if Reddit is an ML/AI dataset gold mine.
* valued roughly $10 per monthly active user<p>* Must make something like $0.01 - $0.007 ROI per active user per year to justify that valuation without growth.<p>* If user base grows, you can reduce those numbers accordingly<p>* If you take into account the risk that comes with new competition, valuation should go down. 20 years from now Reddit can be as valuable as Slashdot, Myspace or Usenet.<p>Personally I think Reddit has limited lifespan. $3B valuation is based on dot-com type hype. World changes and Reddit's is very basic technologically. When popularity goes away and next big social media innovation comes, Reddit's value plummets. It's never going to die completely off, of course.
I wonder if reddit would consider giving some sizable donations to the many open source projects (two of which I am the creator of) that have powered their software platform for many years which has brought them such prosperity.
How are they not profitable yet? Every third post seems to be an ad.<p>Their new design is hideous, but other than that it doesn't seem like they're doing anything tech-wise.<p>So is all the money just going into hosting fees? Or am I missing something?
3,000 millions. Not 3 million, not 30 or 300. 3 thousand millions dollars. Unbelievable. And they barely make and revenue. Think about this for a moment.. if internet would stay like this for the rest of your grand children life, then they would make that money back. Bu we are at the tip of an ice berg. 15 years ago nobody knew half of the world will be using Facebook, daily. To think that those giants survive in next 25 or 50 years and everyone will get their money back and then some more.. its staggering!
I'm confused why Reddit has gotten a free pass on the fake news thing when from my observations they're #1 in that department, ahead of Twitter and then Facebook. Reddit offers the easiest sign-up process making it a haven for vote-manipulation (and thought manipulation) bots. They only just started 'locking' compromised accounts, which just forces a password reset which bots totally can't do. Could it be that the fake news & bots on Reddit just support the correct side?
They've spent the last year fudging their metrics with the new design to make this happen. The infinite scroll and image first post layout has ruined the quality of the content.
> Reddit is raising $150 million to $300 million to keep the front page of the Internet running, multiple sources tell TechCrunch.<p>How much does it cost to run a website like Reddit per year?
Tencent, the giant tech company leading the funding round, owns Wechat and is helping to implement elements of the Chinese Social Credit System.<p>One such recent feature for the program they are trialing is nicknamed the "Deadbeat map". <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-24/new-wechat-app-maps-deadbeat-debtors-in-china/10739016" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-24/new-wechat-app-maps-d...</a>
I miss the days of uncensored content on Reddit. This is what drew me to using it in the first place. Nowadays it's the place I get my porn fix from sometimes.
With a raise that size seems like reddit will be at the mercy of investor best-interests and revenue generation will be priority one rather than the interests of the community.<p>It's easy to block ads on a browser but not as easy on a mobile app so they keep pushing these dark patterns to get to you to download the mobile app which personally am not a fan since there's an irrelevant 'promoted' post with every page scroll.
The single thing keeping me on Reddit is the existence of “old.reddit.com”.<p>There has not been one compelling change to the site in years. Quite the opposite, every change seems to be made by someone hell-bent on driving every potential visitor away, and frustrating the rest.<p>It’s frustrating, too, because <i>content</i> shouldn’t be hamstrung by the <i>way</i> you reach it but that’s the “modern” web. User interaction is a crucial part of any product.
I read the title wrong, that they were raising 3B. Still, raising $150m is large.<p>Reddit has changed so much over the years but I still like Reddit enough to do an auto-donation every month. I think I support Reddit more out of sentimental reasons because I don’t spend too much time anymore on their site but I enjoy it much more than, for example, Facebook that I only spend a few minutes a month on.
It's weird how I see this as a failure and their surviving so long without doing this was success. It feels to me like the only reason they could be pursuing this is because they've given up on their original mission and vision. I hope all the investors have a good think about Digg to remember how fickle and transient online communities like this can be.
Reddit is going to challenge Facebook.<p>I have started to lose interest in Reddit too. I never thought I'd say that but it's way more noise than signal these days too.<p>I have also grown to prefer reading books and time away from screens more and more.<p>A tech backlash is underway for millions of people in the developed world. A sense of burnout seems to be common among under 40 year olds.
For anyone in the know, what are reddit's big costs? Wikipedia has employees @ 230 in 2017, for whatever context/scale that contributes.<p>The article doesn't mention plans. Are they just getting while the going's good, or is there something expensive that they plan on doing?
For those commenting about the reddit redesign, I'll shamelessly plug my alternative web-ui:<p><a href="https://lurrker.com" rel="nofollow">https://lurrker.com</a><p>However, for those who prefer old.reddit you may still not enjoy this more modern approach.
I am actually surprised that Reddit is only valued at $3B. Given the amount of traffic and engagement, I thought the valuation would be fairly higher. Pinterest has a $10B valuation, Reddit definitely feels more popular than Pinterest.
I wouldn't mind so much if it was like a platform thing like email... Choose an app, then all Reddit links default to that. I'm not going to switch from relay anytime soon. At least then it wouldn't be so annoying.
On Paul Graham's topic of "unicorns hiding in plain sight", I think news aggregation/discussion along the lines of Reddit is today's MySpace opportunity: an incumbent that could easily be bested 10x.
It's still simultaneously a mystery to me that a company like reddit with all their years behind them and all the traffic still needs to raise rounds and a wonder that its possible to raise capital for such a company.
They've really fixed the effectiveness of their ads with the site redesign, so maybe the increased valuation is worth it. Not really something end consumers notice, but as an advertiser I definitely have.
I have a naive question.<p>All these moderators do spend considerable time and effort on reddit.<p>And now reddit is going public, do the moderators get paid going forward? why would someone want to volunteer for a profit making company?
Looking at some of my current favorite subreddits (usbchardware, manybaggers) there are interesting avenues of monetization -- group buys, affiliates etc. Reddit is not doing any of this.
That explains why they are being so aggressive about using the app. They are trying to up these numbers for investors. I feel less hatred towards them now that I understand that.
In an increasingly consolidated social media space, I'm so glad Reddit still exists as an independent entity. At this point I consider their independence patriotic.
I still can't understand how Reddit needs 150-300 million to keep functioning. Is there any information about how much money they spend and for what purposes?
If you want to fix Reddit, come build the replacement with us! Our team of 5 at Upstream is creating a social content platform that combines crowd-sourced curation with machine learning to map the web by topic and surface relevant content for your interests. We also provide content recommendations from friends/influencers and help people create playlists of their favorite finds. We've built an alpha and are moving toward a public beta.<p>Email me at chris_alder@berkeley.edu if you're interested in seeing a demo. We're looking for skilled devs to join the team.
GET NEW REDDIT<p>No thanks.<p>If old reddit ever gets taken away, I can only hope that they'll keep the APIs stable so that 3rd party clients can continue to live on.
Control-F: distributed (0 results)<p>Control-F: peer (0 results)<p>Control-F: p2p (1 result)<p>Can we seriously not come up with a way to make a distributed reddit?<p>I imagine running a client on sandstorm.io which is pulling content from subreddits that are each hosted in a sandstorm.io instance.<p>Is the problem with that that it becomes too easy to doxx someone? That we like having a centralized authority that we can "trust" for authentication / authorization / pseudo-anonymity?
OMG, the amount of hate in here, it's so disturbing! I know we're all entitled to our opinions, but this is quite depressing. Reddit has been such an incredible space for me to discover myself and adds tremendous value to my life. I for one celebrate that they are growing and look forward to a long future together.
Reddit's userbase quality has been in decline for years. The top 10 posts every day are something like:<p>[Some snarky oversimplified political tweet]<p>Top Comment:<p>"It's almost as if [some snarky oversimplified, edgy-teenager-take they stole from John Oliver]."<p>Seeing the news that reddit was bringing in more investors just now made me want to take a peek at what the competition was up to. I remember Voat.co being set up when Reddit started banning a bunch of subreddits, so I figured I'd go check that out...Don't do it. The content is just straight racist desires for ethno-states, and an extremely popular conspiracy that Democrats favor abortion because they drink the blood of children. I'm not kidding:
<a href="https://voat.co/v/news/3016128" rel="nofollow">https://voat.co/v/news/3016128</a>. The top comment is literally "Every article I've read on this has omitted WHERE THEY GET THE GODDAMN BLOOD FROM."<p>So, ya. Guess we're stuck with reddit for now...
Tencent is leading the round, Reddit is one of the best places to get news trending. Is it concerning the Communist Party might have some control over what information the public views? Tencent is less beholden to the CCP than perhaps any major Chinese company, so that’s good. I don’t think it should be an issue, but it’s good to know.
Reddit is awful. I used to absolutely love reddit in 2010, 2011. Back then, reddit was at a stage where it was just starting to be mainstream. Most of the people who had found reddit on their own or by word of mouth, and who had liked it, were cool and smart, so to speak. At the same time, reddit was becoming very popular and being seen more and more as a meme-ey social movement. As the importance of reddit became more apparent, it galvanized all those cool, smart people to work very hard to create excellent content and generally nurture the community. That was the key to the goodness of early reddit: a very high caliber subset of the user-base being driven to put tons of effort into content creation and community management — driven by the intoxicating idea that reddit was the next big thing more or less. I remember visiting a friend at UCSB in 2011, and everybody talking about <i>reddit</i>. One of his female roommates asked if I browsed reddit. It was just a very exciting thing back then. But now look at it.
What a great time to point out an example of Reddit behavior just today...<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/an6vek/video_from_the_lawyers_has_been_released_in_the/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/an6vek/video_from_t...</a><p>You have to be some special sort of special to think Reddit Inc isn't complicit in the censorship going on. That's not a long term sustainable position. They're far too obvious about it.