Exciting news. One thing I sincerely hope reddit will do with the new injection is to increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board. Often the advice given is "you've got to find the smaller subreddits" and while that's true, I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion is incredibly detrimental to both the site's image and new user experiences.<p>I know there's great content there, and great people having great discussions, but it's not terribly easy to find. I'm thoroughly convinced that reddit could be an incredibly valuable source of reliable news, discussion, and entertainment, but the way it's structured highlights its more juvenile aspects.<p>And if it can find a way to establish legitimacy, it'll be worth far more than it is today.
I like Reddit. I recently obtained a data dump of every single submission and comment so I could perform interesting data analysis and may just determine what make a post on Reddit viral.<p>The problem I have with Reddit is that I'm still unsure if it's a positive externality. There's a lot of good aspects of Reddit (discovery, community), but there's so much <i>bad</i> about Reddit that it's impossible to overlook it (abusive subreddits, abusive users, no administrator transparency, etc.)<p>There's free speech, and then there's the ethics of promoting and profiting off of abusive/illegal content.<p>My dream startup would be a Reddit-esque link aggregator, which favors the actual <i>quality</i> of submissions, instead of submissions which are lowest-common-denominator which are optimized for the hive mind.
As a long time Reddit user, I've been really disappointed lately with Reddits "battle" against content creators and the little recourse you have if you are marked as a spammer or shadow banned. See the recent /r/indiegaming debacle for example, where a subreddit where mainly indie devs would post about their games now allows very little self promotion ( <a href="http://redd.it/2fdwyv" rel="nofollow">http://redd.it/2fdwyv</a> ). Some of these rules are Reddit wide so theres nothing they can do but it essentially discourages content creators from being close to their audience on Reddit.<p>On top of that, if you are banned from a subreddit (even a default one) the moderators can basically choose to ignore you and you are SOL. There's the whole 90/10 rule where if you are posting something from the same source too often, you can be seen as a spammer and banned. It's very easy to break this rule. For example, if you make a few self posts, make tons of comments, post links to 5 different websites, then post 1 link to your website, you are breaking the rule and if a mod sees it you can be banned (comments/self posts don't count towards the 90/10 rule so your 5 posts to 1 self promotion post is breaking the rules). I wish they would just let the upvote/downvote system do its job and weed out content people don't want instead of forcing people to post a bunch of crap they wouldn't normally post just to make their profile look good so they can post about their own projects once in a while.
"It’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership."<p>This is awesome. Curious to see how this plays out. What's the approximate timing for announcing if reddit is able to do this or not?
Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR.<p>One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected.<p>A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information.<p>A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled.<p>I don't see a great future for reddit, honestly. I'll continue to use it until whoaverse or another alternative is populated enough.<p>[1]: <a href="https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=277352" rel="nofollow">https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=277352</a>
It's a good time to invest in reddit. Not because it will become cooler over the coming years, but because it will become more valuable as it monetizes itself and sells off it's goodwill/equity.<p>Reddit as a platform peaked in 2013- quantitatively[1] and qualitatively. It's mainstream now, and will soon be passe (something like SomethingAwful).<p>If reddit has any value as an investment, it's for advertising and personal (pseudonymous or not) data. Facebook peaked a few years ago in the way I've described, and since their IPO has grown in market value[2] but declined in cultural value[3] (even as its MAU continue to grow!). They are slowly selling off piece by piece, literally to the highest bidder, the equity, trust and attention that it has built up over the years. It's not a sustainable model, it's in a mature phase by now, and it generates a whole lot of cash while it lasts.<p>Wouldn't be surprised to watch reddit do the same.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.randalolson.com/2014/09/28/the-most-upvoted-post-on-reddit-every-day/" rel="nofollow">http://www.randalolson.com/2014/09/28/the-most-upvoted-post-...</a>
[2] <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FB&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=" rel="nofollow">http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FB&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook</a>
I keep asking this, but it never gets much attention - but why can't reddit put more effort in to a hierarchical structure.<p>As others have said some of the best contents is in the smaller sub-reddits, but they often struggle to get much content because people feel that to get any "attention" they have to post in a sub-reddit. I feel people would be encouraged to submit to smaller sub-reddits if there was a hierarchical structure whereby if a story did well in a sub-reddit, it would get to the front page of the next sub-reddit above it - so I might submit to /r/Dundee which leads to /r/Scotland which leans to /r/UnitedKingdom etc<p>I'm sure there would be some clever way to structure and control this. It would breathe life in to the smaller sub-reddits.
They are looking at using a crypto-currency backed by the shares.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2hwpmm/fundraising_for_reddit/ckwph30?context=3" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2hwpmm/fundraising_fo...</a>
"...are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community..."<p>How's that supposed to work? Reddit (the company) will own the shares? Some foundation? A bit more detail would be nice.
One simple way to improve the quality of posts is to remove default subreddits. Instead, have people pick from a list of common interests: programming, games, rap, etc. I think that by limiting interaction with trolls will, over time, reduce the total number of trolls. <i></i>It is my assumption that the majority of trolls tend to stay on the default subreddits. This would also allow for smaller subreddits to grow by in a sense linking interests into categories rather than the current method of community discovery.
I think it's time we re-invented Usenet by making the subreddits tree-structured. Or at the least, by making a tree-structured list of subreddits.<p>At the moment there are thousands of subreddits but the only way to find them is by playing with the 'random' button and hoping for a bit of serendipity.
Does anyone know of any precedent for granting equity to a community site's users? I'm curious to see what sort of dynamic this creates in the site.
Ok, Sam Altman, YC and reedit all just entered my personal mini-hero status for "we want to give 10% of shares to "the community"<p>It does more than bother me that community created value is captured by a few servers in SV - and it's going to take a lot of experimentation to get this right. I rather like the idea of licensing my location data to Google Traffic, and rather doubt giving equity to some but not all redditors will ever work out fairly, but hats off for actually acknowledging the problem publicly and trying <i>something</i>. I expect whatever the normal for community value will be in twenty years, none of the ideas on this thread even come close - in beginning to enjoy the ride though :-)
They allow shit like /r/greatapes and a entire super racist network of subreddits like /r/ferguson and shit, but hoo boy if you're Jennifer Lawrence they'll bend over backwords to shut down /r/TheFappening to get rid of your nudes... While simultaneously ignoring /r/Photoplunder, which does the same thing but to people who aren't famous.<p>And lets not even start on banning /r/creepshots but not /r/CandidFashionPolice, which is THE SAME FUCKING THING.
I mean shit, if you're going to have standards, at least be consistent.<p>And don't get me started on /r/netsec and it's shitty anti-disclosure philosophy.
The one downside (as I see it) of Reddit that Facebook, G+, and HN all don't have is the ability to downvote. Downvoting makes it so larger subreddits will only have material on their front page that the majority of that group agrees with. This leads to certain subreddits (like /r/politics/) being heavily dominated by one side of the subject area.<p>But I still use reddit daily myself. Getting off some of the default subreddits and subscribing to ones focused on a specific topic (a video game, programming language, city, etc...) has replaced specialized/focused forums for me. It's definitely a great communication platform.
Not a YC investment, but I'm interested in how this relates to YC's mitigation of signaling risk.<p>> So the new rule is that partners can only invest some amount of time after Demo Day (we’ll experiment a little to figure out exactly how long) or as part of a Series A.<p>Reddit seems to qualify under the "some amount of time after Demo Day" caveat. Does anyone know at what time period YC ended up setting?<p><a href="http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-investment-policy-and-email-list" rel="nofollow">http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-investment-policy-and-email-l...</a>
Quora looks like a nice iteration on Reddit. Reddit should just do a big rewrite to make it look and feel more like Quora. The data model should be able to remain mostly the same, with just some major interface changes, minor feature changes, and major backend updates. It could probably even be deployed in parallel to the existing implementation. Some items that'd be nice are email updates, weekly digests, topic suggestions, anonymous posts, related topics, etc.
Just wanted to say that this is a fascinating thread. It's eye opening to see just how differently I use reddit than others. I have numerous 6+ year accounts and I don't know what the hell most of this stuff means: subscribing, moderator tools, banning, All I know is nearly anything I want to learn about, there is some passionate group of people on reddit discussing it.<p>I just type in my address bar: site:reddit.com litecoin rig or site:reddit.com flask api, and open a half dozen tabs. Because of the compact layout, I can race through hundreds of comments really quickly and waste like milliseconds on trolls.<p>They've probably lost track of how many "How can this thing grow up, without becoming wack" discussions they've had. I think my answer remains, "it probably can't."
Actually the problem with Reddit are low-functioning people who join subreddits for the attention and trolling. Most of them a griefers and almost all of them are looking for porn and other stuff like that.<p>I have a few small subreddits I get on that seem to be free of that:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordianHumanism/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordianHumanism/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/OS2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/OS2/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/KindleFreebies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/KindleFreebies/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/ebookdeals/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/ebookdeals/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/</a><p>You will find better content on those Subreddits even if they don't have a lot of members on them like the others that are so popular that they get the low functioning trolls and attention seekers who cause only trouble.<p>The DiscordianHumanism subreddit was created because of the trolls on Atheism and SecurlarHumanism and sort of combines Discordianism with Humanism for a different take on the world, etc.<p>A lot of the subreddits where you ask for advice, you often get bad advice and a groupmind who votes up bad advice and votes down good advice. This is because the low functioning people outnumber the mid-functioning and high-functioning people. You will find a lot of the low-functioning people are under 18, and posting from their parent's basement with no supervision.
I´ts interesting, however the idea of Reddit to allocate 10% of their shares back to the Reddit community for me it´s more than something "cool" as Sam Altman said, and beyond the "a new way to think about community ownership".<p>From another perspective, It´s just a good strategy to do your own IPO (go public) without the legal/bureaucratic way. It´s creating your own NY Stock Exchange with the idea to increase your value based on what your users are doing now (because it will be possible to buy, sell and trade between users).<p>So, beyond the message that it´s for “giving back to the community”, Is it more a clever strategy to increase the company value, and even more the stockholders value? or I´m incorrect?
How do these people get time for reading reddit, twitter, FB and blogs? Just reading HN once in a while sips away pretty much all of my "free" time.
Just a interesting note: Currently (5PM EST) this news is #16 on the reddit front page with only 545 comments.<p>I figured it would have been higher given the gravity.
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time.<p>How do you prevent extrinsic motivation from undermining intrinsic motivation here?
The "giving equity to the community" is interesting -- I remember when VA Linux, Red Hat, etc. did something similar at IPO (to a much smaller number of developers, but still).<p>Seems like a great idea in principle, and hard to make it work, but hopefully they'll come up with a structure that does.
Not to be a prig, but I think Sam leading a VC round outside of Y Combinator while he's president of Y Combinator at the very least represents a conflict of interest* and at the worst is an abuse of power.<p>*conflict of interest is pretty much the standard way of doing biz in the Valley as I understand it.
I wonder if those community shares will benefit the people whose digital content is infringed upon for profit will be? Giving back to the community is interesting. Attempting to give back to the content creators upon whose backs Reddit is built would be even more interesting.
I agree that reddit drips in awesomeness. I talked with the co-founder Alexis Ohanian when he talked at Google last year: really interesting guy, not only with solid advice on entrepreneurship, but also he talked a lot about public service.
Does anybody know of a sub where stuff like this link would make the front page? And techmeme type stuff (fundraising etc)? I can't find anything like that. It certainly isn't /r/technology or /r/startups
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it.<p>If it bothered you that much, you would let users publish their contributions as cc-by-sa !
This is excellent! Reddit is closer to the kind of online community I like to see and I'm happy to see what they have planned. Weren't they also giving away 10% of profits to charity?
I'm intrigued by the final paragraph:<p>> Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out.<p>Has anyone seen him set out his big vision? I'm not sure that I have.
The giving back to community approach would, in my opinion, be more deserved by a community like StackOverflow. I always feel grateful to and am amazed by the SO community.
I'm still interested in how moderation really works on reddit...<p>the "reddit drama" always makes me curious but I don't really know the rules very well.
I get that there's a lot to like about Reddit - it's absolutely an impressive platform and it definitely deserves investment. And I get the libertarian ideals of the admins, I do.<p>But yeah, seeing the phrase "First, it’s always bothered me that users ..." <i>not</i> end in a discussion of the toxic parts of Reddit's culture and the various high-profile cases of Reddit's admins ignoring ongoing problems of their most horrifying sub-reddits... that was a bit jarring.
I wish that Reddit would actually copy HN's about box and remove the 10:1 rule for submissions. This include killing Anonymity Rules from /r/talesfrom*.
<i>Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out.</i><p>Wow, seriously? He's talking about the guy who spewed this nonsense[0]:<p><i>We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize.<p>Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.<p>The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community.</i><p>If Sam wants to hitch his wagon to this wash-your-hands-of-responsibility-while-reaping-the-profits attitude, that's his business, but's it's fucking reprehensible.<p>0: <a href="http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...</a>
I enjoy Sam's writing but I am wondering why is he doing this ? Of course, its his money and he has 100 % right to do with it whatever he wants but still --<p>1. Reddit is site which promotes hatred. Radical men hatred is quite common to find out.<p>2. Almost all mods are SJWs. It is almost impossible to find or carry out rational discussion on reddit.
This hatred is so strong that many FEMINAZIs recommend getting rid of men from planet.<p>3. Mods control everything. Free speech is illusion on reddit. #GamerGate proved that reddit collaborated with un-ethical journalists to promote hidden propoganda<p>4. Reddit ads are most useless things.<p>5. Reddit users are mostly illiterate or low wage earners or college students or BurgerLand workers or IT workers who are stuck at their job. Reddit will never achieve revenue it is expecting to achieve.<p>6. Reddit is owned by mainstream media powerhouse.<p>7. Reddit regularly participates in social experiments to modify user views and conducts social experiments.<p>If all such things are happening why a partner at YC, who in other posting talks about morals, ethics, equality would want to invest in something this filthy.<p>After all , Money changes everything, doesn't it ?<p>PS - You can downovote me as you wish, or moderate this post but it won't change fact that Reddit is shithole and you can't deny it.
All interested parties in Reddit wants to create rage, modify or alter people's opinion/view in US and outside countries and profit.
My money is on SageBump.<p>Ofcourse I built it, so I am biased.<p><a href="http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&intro" rel="nofollow">http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&intro</a>
We are in the process of raising first round of funds for <a href="http://whoaverse.com" rel="nofollow">http://whoaverse.com</a> and things are starting to get interesting. We have major plans for both enterprise and private use of the platform and when it comes to giving back to the community - we plan to use the same model big players like YouTube and Twitch have for rewarding content creation (actual money).<p>This will be a fun ride which currently feels like David vs Goliath, but boy is it fun :)
Reddit has got to be one of the ugliest popular websites on the internet. And idealistic, gosh. How can you look at a toilet magazine largely being contributed to by people on their toilets and think "I bet all those people want to own a part of it."<p>This article suggests that in a "couple of years" reddit "could have close to a billion users". Are all these numbers just being pulled out of thin air? This person is talking about investing in reddit, a site with so many pageviews for such a long time which last I heard still somehow was not turning a profit.<p>This person is investing in reddit and giving 10% of their investment to purportedly a billion people. Which is a valuation of 1e-8 percent of his investment per person.<p>I don't want that? Can I not have it somehow.