Reddit files to go public

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/reddit-files-us-ipo-2021-12-16/

by stevemk14ebr • 5 years ago

541 780 5 years ago

reuters.com

multifasciatus• 5 years ago

What does it mean to confidentially file for an IPO? Is this a common process before filing an S-1?

gregorymichael• 5 years ago

It is. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/08/25/here...

financetechbro2• 5 years ago

It means that the company has started the review process with the SEC. The company is going to go back and forth with the agency to make sure their filings, audits, disclosures, etc. are up to par before the company files publicly in a few months. Once the filing is public the company will wait for 15 days before launching their roadshow.

And yes, this is how the process works with every company

_sword• 5 years ago

This is accurate. They have lead left for their syndicate selected if they’re going the traditional underwriter route. They’ll pick all the banks for their syndicate with help from their advisors, and then teach sell side research about the company and use this as a trial period for fielding questions while everyone is under NDA’s before the public flip. Once the roadshow is launched it’ll be something between 1-2 weeks before pricing, though that’s been compressed towards ~1 week since everyone is doing digital meetings now vs in person.

SQueeeeeL• 5 years ago

At least Reddit had it's massive downward spiral years ago, no one can blame their current website layout on this.

DaiPlusPlus• 5 years ago

Don't worry, we're next.

systemvoltage3• 5 years ago

Strongly agree. Those who are skeptical and have recently joined HN just need to rewind, read a few threads from 2015, let alone 2010. The quality of discussion, the disagreements, the back and forth, the deep respect for each other - all those are eroding away on HN, albeit slowly. Still there is good discussion, especially on deep technical topics (e.g. Semiconductors). It may not be the fault of HN - today's internet is full of toxicity and pretty much everything is politicized. I naturally like to play devil's advocate and it is basically impossible on HN without getting flagged or worse - called names and get insults thrown at you.

I would love to get Dang's perspective but it would be difficult for him to say anything.

beeskneecaps2• 5 years ago

old.reddit.com with redditenhancementsuite.com extension is still the best way to browse. I'm impressed that they've kept the old UI for so many years. The usage must be significant to keep it around.

foolfoolz• 5 years ago

it’s 10-15%. if you moderate a sub you see where people come from

thrwy_918• 5 years ago

I honestly don't understand how people use reddit using the new UI, or even using the old UI with custom subreddit styles enabled.

Morizero• 5 years ago

I'm still using .compact for mobile browsing

bmitc• 5 years ago

They keep it around, but I've noticed recently I just randomly get opted back into the new design. When I go to settings to opt back out, it shows that I'm already opted out. Then I just click it, which going by the button state would opt me in, but it opts me back out again. It's weird, and it seems clear that they're just auto opting me in on the back end and hoping I'll just deal with it, which I can't because the new design is impossible to navigate.

sillysaurusx• 5 years ago

How is Reddit IPO'ing after they were bought by Conde Nast?

I've never really looked into it. It's an interesting thing that they managed to get un-acquired somehow.

In fact, there are so many questions. Does YC get a payday out of this, or was their stock acquired during the acquisition? 2% of $5B is $100M, so it's a lot of money at stake.

riffic• 5 years ago

they were spun off a while ago

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/reddit-just-raised-a-new-r...

shmatt• 5 years ago

* keep the old.Reddit.com design for everyone

* spend 9 figures for a redesign

The choice was obvious

profmonocle• 5 years ago

The capital will be used to redesign Reddit’s famously cluttered homepage, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman tells Recode. The company also plans to pour more resources into user-uploaded video.

Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable.

I'm curious what happened behind the scenes here.

DevKoala2• 5 years ago

One of the best HN replies I've ever read was in this thread. I am so sad it was deleted.

shrimpx• 5 years ago

What did it say?

nine_k• 5 years ago

A strange choice of time, to me. With such intense market volatility, it's easy to both leave money on the table by setting the IPO price too low, or to have trouble selling stock by by setting it too high.

OTOH the freshly printed money look for returns, so the stock market is more likely to be bullish even in relatively near term; maybe they are trying to catch this trend?

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 5 years ago

Market volatility doesn't seem to be extraordinarily high right now:

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/VIX:INDEXCBOE?safe=off&...

iratewizard2• 5 years ago

Market predictability is at an extreme low. Rug pulls are happening on a regular basis, and spy is regularly being propped up by a few random, overvalued stocks.

sjg007• 5 years ago

It’s a great time given the current uncertainty in social networking.

beezle• 5 years ago

there's been a bit of back and forth in tech lately and there are some signs it is nearing or passing a peak valuation. Get the money while you can and don't look back. Reddit's getting old too

zdragnar• 5 years ago

My first thought was that the interest rate hikes coming next year may have spurred it, but I'm guessing this sort of thing has been in the works for quite awhile now.

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

I see that it is now or never. Markets are in all time high, there are dark clouds in future. Better to get money now than possibly never.

satellite23• 5 years ago

Now it makes sense why they implemented all those user hostile strategies recently. To grow the user count.

Hopefully, they'll be able to remove it after they go public.

VWWHFSfQ• 5 years ago

they're never removing any of that

satellite23• 5 years ago

They made a comment on that?

gruez• 5 years ago

"recently"? They were doing it for years.

satellite23• 5 years ago

I feel it started with the redesign. But yeah, it's been 3 years already.

lucasverra• 5 years ago

Are they declaring themselves a web3 company ?

zen_of_prog• 5 years ago

Nice, I hadn't heard of that [1]! I'm pretty indifferent towards owning a Blockchained micro-share of a publicly listed company, but I'd be very interested if reddit were to end up user-owned akin to the Packers

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/11/web3-explained-crypto-n...

12700180802• 5 years ago

It's a company with experienced software engineers and a real product, very unlikely.

worker767424• 5 years ago

They actually tried in the Yishan days. Someone was working on JS blockchain vaguely meant to be something like but not really an ICO. It was bizarre.

ferdowsi• 5 years ago

Congratulations folks! I'll say that Reddit has become one of my favorite sites to visit occasionally and I feel they've earned their success. I honestly feel it is a positive factor in my life, for the little I use it. There's really excellent content to be had, like well moderated educational content at subreddits like r/AskHistorians and r/COVID. I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking).

I also like that they've kept discussions text oriented, instead of allowing for embedded tweets, images, or videos to clog up comment threads (I like this about HN, as well). They might renege on this in the future, but I like the distinctly 2000s feel to discussions.

rtkwe• 5 years ago

I hope they have enough to point to from other instances to show that it's a bad idea.

Rendello• 5 years ago

Reddit already has embedded GIF comments, ie.

https://old.reddit.com/r/InsanePeopleQuora/comments/kip08x/w...

AussieWog933• 5 years ago

I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking).

I wish that was my experience too.

Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.

It's great for things I'm not interested in, though, as it's a quick way to get genuine information on what is considered a good brand of bike shorts or hair curling products.

naiwenwt• 5 years ago

Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.

Mind giving an example? I'm just curious because to me the high point of reddit is learning way more about interests I already love. For example I don't think I would've gotten nearly as into mechanical keyboards without /r/mechanicalkeyboards around.

silisili5• 5 years ago

Genuinely confused by this statement. You don't visit things you know about, because fake experts ruin it. Then you visit things you don't know about, because you believe the information to be genuine.

Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.

Karrot_Kream2• 5 years ago

Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.

This kind of gatekeeping was pretty common in the old days on niche-interest forums too btw. I don't know what a good solution for this is. You even see this kind of behavior in academia.

bogota4• 5 years ago

Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market.

Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

krzyk• 5 years ago

Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.

No, reddit has threads/subjects. Facebook posts organization almost does not exist, it is unusable to read anything there.

nonbirithm• 5 years ago

In general, this is what bothers me with a lot of modern online services. Some people might use the same platforms harmlessly to watch cooking videos or share family photos while remaining relatively free from neurosis, or they might be trapped in a rut of entirely different algorithmic content. The only unifying factor is that they both happen to be hosted on the same platform, and it is becoming harder to detach the content on the platform from the mechanisms driving viewership that come with the platform. The platforms encompass both the best and worst of us, attracting both the susceptible users and relatively ordinary persons, and that's why they have staying power.

Because these services are so all-encompassing, they are bound to have some amount of well-curated content, or at the very least content that holds one's interest. By virtue of that minuscule amount of content being hosted on the massive aggregate site, that predisposes some people to affirm or at least ignore the idea of the overarching site as a whole, along with the SEO mechanisms, influencers, etc. that always get so much flak in certain circles.

In other words, because the site is so massive there will always be a population of consumers in their own niches that never encounter any outrage or issues. There will also be a population exposed to the "rage generating" content. The subset of people aware of the toxicity and how it relates to the workings of the platform itself may or may not overlap with these groups. But in the end, because the site has become so massive that content creators have caused it to encompass literally everything that can be thought of as a topic of interest to general humanity, all of these groups, whether harmful or harmless, contribute to the site's continued growth and prosperity, and more and more people participate as a result.

discardable_dan8• 5 years ago

It is, frankly, _weaponized_ facebook. It literally shows you content that is the most-engaging and most-interacted, across the entire site (not just your friend group). Which is ironic, given how often users there was philosophical about the evils of facebook.

If you don't believe me, go browse /r/popular or some such and see how long it takes to see right-wing posts. The right-wing posts are usually heavily downvoted, so you'll see one with 100 upvotes between two posts with 20k upvotes; that's by design.

post_break• 5 years ago

Will they be banning porn like tumblr? I know they removed it from "All" and then I believe they hid it in other ways. Just wondering when the Digg 4.0 / Tumblr will happen to Reddit. So far it's been a slow burn but I'm waiting for the great purge to bring down the house. It always seems to happen around an IPO.

Trasmatta2• 5 years ago

The day they shut down old.reddit.com will be the day the site dies for me. I feel like it's inevitable that it will happen at some point.

lijogdfljk2• 5 years ago

Yup, agreed. I might use it on mobile, but on desktop "new" Reddit is such a massive degrade that i can't put up with it.

Kye3• 5 years ago

The new design gets worse every time I try it. There's always a new thing trying to lure me into a conversion funnel. Latest attempt: I had to ad block the little bouncing coin thing in the top right just to focus. Then I was hit with auto-playing ads on the main page. That was as far as I got.

Flankk• 5 years ago

I deleted my 14-year account when an admin suspended me for speaking my mind. Never had an issue up to that point. The content quality has declined dramatically over the years and the astroturfing is out of control. I just got sick of it.

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

Yeah I think people will have a diaspora to discord/matrix which only sorta fills the same itch with very limited history. The day they require emails is the day I quit.

plasticsoprano3• 5 years ago

The funny thing about the r/all porn removal is it's only gone if you ARE logged in. If you aren't logged in and hit r/all the porn will appear once you get to the 4th or 5th page. It isn't nearly as prevalent as it was and I haven't seen it hit the front page as it did years ago but it's certainly there, I suspect to entice people to make accounts.

gentleman11• 5 years ago

Didn’t they start requiring you to be logged in? I can’t imagine how awkward that must be. “Please log in to watch your embarrassing porn so we can track you and sell the data and connect it to your real identity”

tayo422• 5 years ago

It's not even really porn. Just free ads for only fans now lol

paxys2• 5 years ago

Content aside, Reddit is possibly the worst performing large commercial website I have ever seen. Like half of all page loads and requests end with “something went wrong”. Search has been unusable from day 1, and somehow getting worse. Their new video player makes me want to throw my computer across the room. I have been using it on and off for a decade now and I can’t think of one aspect of the site (whether in terms of performance, reliability, UI, usability, features) that hasn’t degraded in quality.

Happy about the IPO, but PLEASE invest in some engineering and infrastructure work.

(Edit: weird that this comment was sitting at the top of the page for an hour and then suddenly moved to the very bottom. Someone on the HN team must really like Reddit.)

fortylove• 5 years ago

The page loads ending in failure has not been my experience at all. Search is not great though, agreed.

kactus• 5 years ago

The redesign and video player issues finally convinced me to stop using Reddit and delete my account after 10 years, last year. Haven’t looked back.

thundergolfer• 5 years ago

I use Reddit daily, and for the last ~week their UI has added multiple things to click and be taken to my 'Reddit recap', which I think is supposed to be like Spotify's 'your year in review' feature.

Reddit's product managers very much want me to check out my 'Reddit Recap'.

Well I've navigated to my recap about 30 times now in the last week, from multiple links, in app and desktop, and it's still totally broken.

On desktop now, it doesn't show anything except a "retry" button which is incorrectly stuck to the left side of my screen (CSS fail).

I can understand things being broken, but its really bad form to funnel a user to a prominent feature, have that feature be broken, and then have a broken and terrible error state.

I do wonder what kind of engineering team bungles a big feature release like this.

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

The second old.reddit.com goes offline, I'll probably never visit the website again. I haven't used the new version once (what is it 4 years old now?) - they toyed with literally the perfect UX for what? For a PM to have something to do?

egypturnash• 5 years ago

Oh god the recap is hilariously broken. Doesn’t work on my iPad or my iPhone browser. Haven’t tried the app because fuck the app. Sorta works on my desktop browser. Kinda.

campital• 5 years ago

I experienced a somewhat comical bug where the Reddit recap chose my most downvoted comment as my "Comment to end all comments" (probably because its absolute value was greatest). Seems unlikely that this was an intentional easter egg (it was accompanied with "Out of all the comments you made in 2021, this one sure got a lot of upvotes").

Also, I just discovered that the built-in screenshot generator for Reddit recap is broken as it only captures the rendered portion of each card, leaving out the scrollable overflow.

This case alone offers a strong testament to the poor quality of most Reddit features.

sillycube• 5 years ago

The thing is I don't understand why I want to see the recap

edoceo• 5 years ago

This is all their attention grabbing tricks -- by MBA style middle managers to juke the stats for their OKRs and KPIs. Reddit is to that part of their life-cycle where the soul gets crushed out for the capital (it's a re-run, you've seen it before).

I'd wager $1 that over the next few years Reddit becomes even more of an Attention-Vampire (or tries to)

It's almost feeling Reddit, Facebook, Twitter -- these "social" echo chamber sites are all getting to the contempt phase of life -- the next disruptor cannot come soon enough.

protoax• 5 years ago

Completely agree – search is absurdly poor considering the resources available to any solo developer these days. The mobile app is generally usable, if all you want to do is doomscroll without interacting with a single piece of content. Even normal interface interactions induce ridiculous UI delays that I haven't seen in any level of software product for years.

vlunkr• 5 years ago

They've also made some (or most?) subreddits unavailable on the mobile site. It's obviously a hostile attempt to force people into the mobile app.

yannoninator• 5 years ago

After this exit, expect engineering to go way down.

enryu• 5 years ago

Why do you think that? Is there a record of engineering performance going down in other companies that had exits?

greenknight• 5 years ago

This is the thing, i hate their new ui... and if ever they get rid of their 'old' ui I would leave reddit. Their "New UI" was brought in in 2018, and to me was like a digg moment.

To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.

kingcharles4• 5 years ago

It's weird. I was a huge user of Reddit from its launch to 2013 when I fell off the Internet. I didn't use it again until 2021, so I had a big jump in UI. As a UX designer I really don't get all the hate about the current interface. It works great for me.

winternett2• 5 years ago

I'm beginning to see why they banned several subreddits and accounts, began forcing people to use the app, had tons of front page content re-upped as bootlegs from tiktok, and then turned the place into a Frankenstein of all the other social media sites.. Finally the truth comes to light... Whelp... Thanks for the fish, it was nice until it tanked about 2 years ago.

0x0nyandesu3• 5 years ago

If they get rid of old.reddit.com I won't be able to use it..just can't. It will die for me like digg.

GekkePrutser4• 5 years ago

And more than doubled the subscription price too.

scantron4• 5 years ago

At least you have the giant stickied Covid Misinformation comment on on every single post on .... r/funny. The place I go for all of my up to date covid information.

romwell4• 5 years ago

I don't know what you're talking about.

Reddit is lightning fast, and is very stable...

...oh. I got it! You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com

Ignore that, and head over to the actually functional Reddit at https://old.reddit.com

It's like HackerNews in terms of performance. You can still set it as default.

The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

I was thinking exactly the same thing, till you mentioned old reddit, and I remember I've never actually used new reddit. I just opted out in Preferences when it was first released and have been using old reddit ever since. It's still the same good reading/content experience it was 10yrs ago.

jolux2• 5 years ago

The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.

This would be reasonable if there weren’t subreddits that are totally broken on old.reddit.com and proclaim loudly in their sidebar that they no longer support it.

Spivak3• 5 years ago

And if you’re on iOS there’s an app called reddo which is basically old Reddit redirect.

toper-centage• 5 years ago

And at least for now, there's a multitude of third party parties with all the features one could care about, minus all the bloat. But who knows how long the api will last?

chii• 5 years ago

There's actually a mobile web view which works even better than old.reddit.com - it's i.reddit.com , and it's even faster, cleaner, and less javascript, with the added benefit that it doesn't display any of the custom CSS or customizations from the subreddit (like the header banners etc).

anoncow• 5 years ago

https://i.reddit.com is where it is at. I hope they don’t disable this.

tfehring• 5 years ago

I've used the old site exclusively since the rewrite (and for a long time before it), and https://old.reddit.com specifically is still the most unreliable large commercial website I can think of by a wide margin. It's fast when it works, but I get orders of magnitude more 5XX errors on https://old.reddit.com than on any other site I can think of.

naravara2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately old.Reddit is not actually a great experience on mobile.

wyldfire• 5 years ago

You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com

IMO this has dual meaning. Of course, the (new reddit) UI is not my preference for sure. But the content on (not logged in) reddit.com is just so unbelievably different from what I see when logged in (to old.reddit.com). Therein lies the dumpster fire. I've had thumbnails disabled since forever ago, and picked a handful of subreddits across a couple of multireddits. I never really understood why people would think Reddit was anything like Facebook or any such similar site. Until one day I saw what it looked like to everyone else.

Reddit for me looks a lot like it looked back in ~2004, but with comments :)

technion• 5 years ago

Aren't every one of those facts supposed to be the sort of thing that gets you downranked on Google? Slow pages, pages that don't load, pages appear in Google but when clicked present a logon wall?

I've posted on own blog on Reddit and found that a search for the exact title has, as the first hit, that reddit post. And my blog itself is on page three. It's infuriating.

pingsl• 5 years ago

I once ran some ads on Reddit to promote my website. What I found from the ad report was 99% of Reddit users were using the mobile app.

So I am afraid Reddit won't care about the web UI much now.

tzm• 5 years ago

At this point, I've learned to expect this type of criticism on HN.

VirusNewbie• 5 years ago

Does anyone know why reddit's engineering is such a shit show? It seems comically bad. MySpace was more reliable.

binwiederhier• 5 years ago

My first reaction was "Oh no, here comes the the paywalls and the ads and all that". I sincerely hope that my initial reaction is wrong here, but the constant desire to please investors is unlikely to have a positive impact on the communities, no?

Shadonototra• 5 years ago

i love reddit

i hate the CDN they use, it's slow af, you notice a lot on the gifts hosted on the reddit hostname

fourstar• 5 years ago

It's a shame that none of the subreddit creators that helped their success (made subreddits and grew/foster them) never were rewarded.

pyronik19• 5 years ago

They better get rid of the scores of woke power mods pushing users off onto alternate platforms.

brailsafe2• 5 years ago

I believe they codified their intention to keep doing exactly thta, into their terms of service.

kuhl• 5 years ago

At the very least delete u/maxwellhill

halfmatthalfcat2• 5 years ago

It's sad what Reddit has become and I only believe IPO-ing will accelerate that demise.

dmart• 5 years ago

Yes, despite how Reddit has gotten worse over the years, it will be a huge loss for the web once it finally fully jumps the shark. Already it’s pretty much the last place to find real human opinions in a sea of content marketing garbage.

disconcision• 5 years ago

yes, i only visit reddit directly a 1-2 times a day now as opposed to 100+ from maybe 2010-2017, but i still often append 'reddit' to certain searches with great effect.

plasticsoprano3• 5 years ago

Reddit has me on some sort of ban that causes accounts to be permanently suspended within 24 hours of account creation regardless of what I do with that account, even if it's just make it and leave it alone. Also, anyone that comes to my home and connects to my wifi and then their reddit account will find their account permanently suspended within 24 hours. I've reached out to them multiple times to see what is happening and what can be done about it but get a boilerplate "your ban will be upheld" message from them with a link to the content rules so I can "prevent future bans".

I had over 40k useless internet points on that site before the ban and an 11 year old account but they refuse to help. Oh well.

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Have your ISP cycle/release->renew your IP address. Don’t attempt to sign in to any of the previous accounts from the new IP. Should avoid their anti evil team’s tooling as long as you’re not causing trouble.

0x0nyandesu3• 5 years ago

This but also don't use any email previously associated with any account cause they will go and blacklist your new IP too.

plasticsoprano3• 5 years ago

That's a whole other can of worms. I assumed that and asked ATT to do so and got the phone support equivalent of blank stares. I miss the old cable modem days where you could change the MAC address of the primary device attached to the ethernet port and force a new IP but not so with this Fiber ONT they gave me.

GekkePrutser4• 5 years ago

Except it pushes the problem onto someone else :). Though yeah I'd probably do it too in the end. Not everyone uses Reddit anyway

ImTheMaddest• 5 years ago

You may want to consider looking for malware on your network.

whymauri• 5 years ago

Reddit routinely shadowbans me and roommates because we'll see a post on /r/all and comment on it. It was way worse when I lived in a dorm. My upvotes/downvotes and submissions were completely broken. Took months for whatever anti-abuse system they have to unflag me.

Their anti-abuse is really bad. I once reported a serious doxxing with a death threat towards another user and after three weeks received a canned message saying something along the lines of 'Sorry, there's nothing we can do about the post. It will stay up.' This was circa 2019, when they already had a formalized 'anti-abuse' team. What exactly they do, I have no idea.

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

If you think it's your IP you could try pulling the plug on your cable/DSL modem for several hours or over night and you might get a new IP address.

xanaxagoras• 5 years ago

You're better off my dude. Many ppl itt are rembering the ghost of reddit, it's dead and not coming back.

yalogin• 5 years ago

This is not good. The only reason I am still using Reddit is because of the old.reddit.com interface. Feels like an IPO will make them retire it at some point.

wussboy• 5 years ago

I’d actually welcome that. I spend exactly 15 minutes a day on it, and getting rid of the old site would be just enough to cut the cord forever.

the_duke• 5 years ago

There are a few alternative front ends tha uphold the spirit of the old UI. Both web based and mobile apps.

But they might of course try to shut them down as well.

Shared4043• 5 years ago

Part of the problem is that different front ends encourage different types and levels of discourse.

Being able to chose to use a different front end only solves part of the problem.

Duralias• 5 years ago

If they retired old.reddit then the only time I would browse reddit would be when I use my phone, which I only do when I have no computer to interact with or before bed.

If they then do the logical thing and block third party apps then I will just stop using reddit completely, because using the official app just isn't worth it.

Gareth3215• 5 years ago

Right there with you. There are a LOT of us. This is ostensibly why they've allowed old.reddit.com to live for so long despite almost no development and maintenance anymore. This IPO will probably be the catalyst for some "house cleaning." I imagine old.reddit.com is not long for this world.

BLKNSLVR• 5 years ago

I only use teddit.net to access reddit these days. On those odd occasions that I follow a link to the actual reddit site I'm reminded why I avoid it:

- Pop-up to download app

- Pop-up has been un-clearable on a number of occasions

- Having to click "read more" to see more than two posts

- Having to click a link to a new page to follow a thread more than two / three replies deep (and often finding that it's only a single, useless reply)

- Other progressively more trivial annoyances

phist_mcgee2• 5 years ago

I cyncially feel like your third point is to save them on egress data. Better to send two comments for a post that quite a few people will never read the comments of.

vultour• 5 years ago

The old interface actually solves all those issues. I used to be in disbelief how anybody could survive using the new design for more than 15 seconds but then realised that the way people use Reddit is completely different nowadays. It turned into some sort of 9gag/instagram amalgamation where people scroll through an endless feed of images, enabled by the instagram-like format that is the default with the new interface.

bgro2• 5 years ago

Among many bad features and bad coding, I somewhat recently found out the "new" reddit on desktop has a live chat option for some reason. I put in a 4/10 effort in looking to disable it but couldn't find it. It appears its only use is to receive real-time death threats, and to harass women from some of the screenshots I've seen.

bryans2• 5 years ago

Reddit is operating on the shakiest house of cards, and their investors are being swindled, along with their advertisers. For one of many examples, they're grossly inflating viewership numbers on Reddit Live by injecting the top broadcast into the front page of 25,000 users every ~30 seconds -- largely against their will[1] or without knowledge[2] -- and then selling those as "video views" to record labels, Adobe, League Of Legends and others. The administrators and moderators have repeatedly lied about this to the community, going as far as claiming they "don't even have the ability to manipulate the top broadcast mechanism," and yet they have a list of streamers who receive special treatment, along with the paid ads (which are not marked as ads, and instead offered as "user content.")

A year ago, they even implemented a follow mechanism so that streamers' fans could get push notifications when they went live. But when the admins decided to make manual manipulation of the top broadcast mechanism a priority, they removed the notifications for Reddit Live altogether because it was too easy for the Reddit community to upvote "riff raff" into the top spot. They changed their story about why bringing back notifications "was impossible, but we're working on it" a dozen times or more. In reality, they just need certain broadcasts to receive the most views to generate the most money through their awarding system.

On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this. They ban streamers who ask questions about how the ranking mechanism works, including an autistic streamer with a large following on the site, simply for making note of how certain streamers get special treatment. They even banned a user for making a notifications replacement and discussing why they made it.

In fact, if you get banned from the r/pan subreddit for asking any of these questions (which happens often), you have to be careful about the content you interact with on Reddit as a whole. Since they forcefully inject the Reddit Live top broadcast into every desktop page view (and most mobile ones) without actually labeling it as r/pan content, if you click on that broadcast and vote or make a comment, they ban you from the site.

It's completely out of control, and that's how every level of the site operates these days. The influxes of cash and IPO hyping paint a rosy picture, but peeling back just one layer of the Reddit onion quickly reveals a company which is flailing, and desperately grasping at anything that will help maintain the charade until crossing the IPO finish line.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/rejfsa/what_in_the_f_i...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/rcvi52/according_to_th...

zaptrem• 5 years ago

People actually use PAN? As a heavy Reddit user (and mod in large community) this is news to me.

bryans2• 5 years ago

Despite the fake viewership numbers, RPAN is actually the best marketing tool on the internet for content creators. It's the only site that gives you a built-in audience without any effort, and musicians in particular have used it to build massive followings outside of Reddit, on the order of tens (and even hundreds) of thousands of followers. There's honestly no better way to find an initial fanbase -- even if you never get top broadcast.

john_moscow• 5 years ago

You have just described the state of a massive chunk of the U.S. economy after 2008 when printing money to paper things over has become a norm.

na85• 5 years ago

On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this.

Reddit's been like that for at least a decade. I remember arguing with Huffman and later Pao about their awful corporate newspeak ("enabling authentic conversations") and how reddit is being actively gamed by advertisers and has been for years. The same goes for every user-hostile change they've made (and there have been many). It's always under some noble pretense but really it's about making reddit more palatable to advertisers. When confronted, the admins either avoid responding or else claim Big Tobacco-levels of ignorance.

It's all so patently obvious to anyone who chooses to look, and I think the blatant contempt the admins display towards their users (without whom, let's not forget, reddit would never have taken off) contributes to the toxicity on reddit, or at least it did years ago when reddit was smaller and the toxic culture is now self-perpetuating.

waffle_maniac• 5 years ago

The mods have really taken over. If you post this link on reddit you will be banned immediately. If you file an appeal it will be denied on the spot.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/theres-another-abusive-...

I wonder how investors will react to having horrible people moderating their investment.

stareblinkstare• 5 years ago

Congratulations to Aaron Swartz and the team.

Copernicron• 5 years ago

So Reddit is going to get even worse than it already is? Ugh, no thanks.

jyu• 5 years ago

If you thought site performance is bad now, wait a few quarters when there are grey beard investors pressuring leadership to wring out the last shekels from this carcass.

imgabe3• 5 years ago

Man, what a ride Reddit must have been. I wonder if any of the original team are still there, or if they still have any equity.

One of the first useful things I ever programmed was a Greasemonkey script to collapse comment threads on Reddit before they had the ability to do that. They implemented the collapse feature a few weeks or months later and made it useless. I still like the way my script worked better though, it left the top comment visible.

I wish I hadn't deleted my original Reddit account. It would probably be one of the older ones around by now.

I saw yesterday that gilding in /r/AskReddit have paid for 868 years of server time. It seems like they might be able to make a vanity payment model instead of just advertising. That would be nice. If they made the old.reddit.com interface available by subscribing to Reddit Gold only, they might make a fortune off of just that...

eljimmy3• 5 years ago

I can’t help but think this is the end for that site. It started off with a very old school minimalist designed forum vibe and has been devolving into dark patterns and advertisements as of late.

I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.

cyberge99• 5 years ago

I found reddit from the great digg.com exodus.

They didn’t learn.

agiacalone• 5 years ago

Slashdot did the same thing even before digg. I miss those days sometimes.

donio3• 5 years ago

The fact that old.reddit.com continues to be available suggests that they did.

Shared4043• 5 years ago

Which raises the question.

Where will people head from the reddit exodus?

int0x2e• 5 years ago

Well, they tried. For a very long time they asked people to donate. They even tried to gamify it with reddit gold and the like. I suspect it just didn't work.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

There is, Reddit gold. Not that I’d give them any money for the decisions they made, I don’t reward bad behavior and I paid with my data.

PhoenixReborn6• 5 years ago

Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018

Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.

How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.

ankit2196• 5 years ago

They have been touting MAUs and DAUs a lot over the last one year. Turns out their numbers are very very public.

Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.

The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.

Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.

TameAntelope2• 5 years ago

Yeah, “Reddit is going down because they only converted three million new users in the last month.” Is probably not the argument that will convince anyone who’s ever built a b2c of your point.

garbagetime2• 5 years ago

I don't use Wikipedia any more, they wouldn't leave me alone with their constant begging. I could just set up a block for the things, but I'd rather just be edgy and never use the site again. The content has been going downhill for years anyway. A lot more fun to find specific resources on cooler websites.

eljimmy3• 5 years ago

The repeated asking for donations is a bit much, I agree. I do still donate to Wikipedia though as I find it is an amazing resource to have available.

CamelCaseName2• 5 years ago

Half the comments in here boil down to "I would stop using Reddit if they discontinued old.reddit.com" and it really rubs me the wrong way.

It's like saying "Facebook will die if they start charging users to post to their wall".

Like, okay, sure. But Reddit has repeatedly said that they will not depreciate old.reddit.com. They have zero reason to, as many of their powerusers rely on it.

In fact, I don't think Reddit has a history of deprecating anything! Freaking. .compact is still around from god knows when!

https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact

forgotmyoldname• 5 years ago

But Reddit has repeatedly said that they will not depreciate old.reddit.com. They have zero reason to, as many of their powerusers rely on it.

Let’s be honest. Every company says this. Some actually try to stand by their statement. Public companies very often wipe those statements from existence because some MBA found a way to increase profits 27% this quarter (who cares if it the company borders on bankrupt in 2 years) or some intern found a way to double clicks.

If someone demonstrates that old Reddit results in fewer ad views, shutting it down is a matter of when and not if.

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

Reddit also used to say "We won't use your email address for anything except password resets", and we all know how that went.

They've basically stopped adding new features to the old UI, so a lot of account settings require you to go to the new UI if you want to change them (and of course the most annoying settings typically default to "on" when the toggle is added). The markdown handling has also changed. That's why on old Reddit you'll sometimes see broken URLs with superfluous escape characters.

the_doctah3• 5 years ago

Reddit used to support free speech on it's platform too...

stjohnswarts7• 5 years ago

Ouch, this could mean big changes for the site. Once they come under investor scrutiny the wild wild west activity will likely get banned.

doodlebugging• 5 years ago

I just logged in to my oldest Reddit account. It was opened in 2006. I have kept it around just to be able to read some of the posts I made over the years. I'll delete those now, close the account, and move along. I have had so much fun but I think the time is right for a change.

swyx• 5 years ago

never thought i would see the day. I guess congrats to YCombinator’s first golden child? They were first cohort of YC I believe?

really happy for them, for a long while they were languishing with no growth whatsoever. Their monetization strategy is still really unclear/unproven but clearly some investors saw enough to go ahead and bet big. good for them.

ipsin• 5 years ago

So does an IPO make their dark patterns ("download the app or we will annoy you forever") better or worse? It's either money for continued operations or the pressure to milk active users for cash.

bagels• 5 years ago

Unlikely to be better. Same or worse.

JamesAdir• 5 years ago

Reddit in the last 2-3 years was ruined by itself. The homepage became more and more polarized and I'm sure it's by tweaking the algorithm to create more traffic and clicks. The killing of Secret Santa and Reddit gifts showed that the company doesn't care about the community at all, but it's focused on maximizing revenue for the future IPO. Really sad about this as the site was being able to stay out of the toxic environment of the social media giants for a long time.

randmeerkat• 5 years ago

I keep wondering, why hasn’t someone made a new Reddit that’s pretty much just the old Reddit? It seems like there’s a ton of demand for it. Disrupt what Reddit has become by creating what it used to be.

gpm• 5 years ago

lemmy.ml is an example of this, and I'm pretty sure that it's far from the first. The hard part is attracting a crowd, network effects are real.

johnisgood2• 5 years ago

The font colors require some adjusting.

moreira• 5 years ago

Because network effects. Even if you clone Reddit you still need to convince people to come use your clone, that’s where the actual hard work is.

And “ton of demand”, there isn’t really. Just some loud critics, but nowhere near a big enough mass to make a difference. Just as Mastodon will never beat Twitter, despite fixing a lot of its shortcomings.

brailsafe2• 5 years ago

Because there's nothing intrinsically good or novel about it any longer. It's not the tech, it's just that people are there already.

nunez9• 5 years ago

voat.co tried. when the last reddit exodus happened in 2017, the site crashed all of the time. you need A LOTTTTTTTTTT of resources to run reddit, and reddit 10x’ed the “unified forum with image and video hosting” problem.

dt3ft2• 5 years ago

I built whoaverse during my studies which went on to become voat. You do not need a lot of resources to run such a site, but you do need a way to monetize it. We ran on donations and the ads that we ran were never profitable. Donations are not profit either, so it was working purely because we could afford some time off to work on it. This does not work in the long run, if you can no longer justify working for free. I am currently building 20-things.com, but I doubt that there is any interest for redittors to jump off at this point.

shitlord2• 5 years ago

It's too easy to end up with the types of people who are no longer welcome on reddit. See Voat, Ruqqus, the entire win network, etc. Nobody wants to post pictures of their dog next to memes complaining about the Jews.

You could make an incredibly niche website, but then you're effectively competing for users with reddit.

henning• 5 years ago

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

niij• 5 years ago

Which indexes? If they include US Large Cap then you already invest in FB and Twitter.

paxys2• 5 years ago

You are forgetting this other ad company fueled by clickbait and outrage that has a trillion dollar market cap. It is a winning business model.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

All the reason to give the people who don’t want that another place instead of being a crappier version of that site.

IgorPartola2• 5 years ago

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle?

For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.

gibbonsrcool• 5 years ago

Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 5 years ago

I personally think the fix is to let it be separate communities; kill/deemphasize the "all" feed, emphasize separate subreddits, and make it easy for users to curate what they see. The problem, of course, it that this runs counter to maximizing engagement.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

Split the site. Forums were good because they had culture. Reddit’s subreddits leak into other ones. They will split it to one that is NSFW and SFW soon for advertising reasons.

Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned.

Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts.

Bring back visible downvotes.

Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would significantly improve the site.

Ban abusive mods. If some no life power tripper is being an asshole or bans you for posting in another sub, fuck them.

hammock• 5 years ago

I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones.

Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.

dkdk82832• 5 years ago

Shut it down. It’s toxic and shouldn’t be fixed. It’s perpetuating a echo chamber, slippery slope. All echoed ideas are bad as they discourage critical independent thought.

JCharante2• 5 years ago

- Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough

- Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in

- fix the video player on the new site

- support the native video player on the old site & polls

- remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mods should not be able to invite new mods past a certain point but they'll just create sockpuppet accounts so

- remove more subreddits from the default list

- remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a subreddit.

- go back to reddit gold, get rid of the 50+ awards

- custom comment backgrounds from certain awards are fine, let people purchase colored borders or something

- go back to showing the progress bar for how close the site is to earning enough to pay for servers that day from gold purchases

- when you end up hiring extremely controversial staff, avoid auto deleting criticism about them

- don't edit other user's comments

- integrate more of RES's features into reddit

- bring back live threads

- RPAN is a fine way to try to introduce more social stuff (imagine r/games hosting a pov stream of blizzcon) but the current users are weird

- bring back AMAs with famous people, not B or C list actors that are promoting their new book (so bring back someone in Victoria's role)

- get rid of the moon currency feature

- encourage mods to delete threads with inaccurate titles / clickbait until a link is submitted with an accurate name

011000112• 5 years ago

My personal opinion is that large, impersonal online communities which use voting systems are doomed to become toxic echo chambers run by people who dedicate the time and resources to do so(and therefore participate less in the "real world"). I may be biased because I'm old and grew up with a large part of my social experience as a kid coming from BBSes.

shahar2k• 5 years ago

you know an odd realization I've had lately is that "discoverability" is a two edged sword, communities with their unique flavor built over time are great, however there comes a time when some place (in online or meat space) becomes too "popular" and the stories about the place start taking over the actual environment and behavior of the place, which then draws people expecting the story... basically a feedback loop.

there's a chance I think, that creating more "obscure" spaces might actually be the better option for preserving these kinds of communities, or at least letting them thrive more easily, reddit survived this long I think by being slightly difficult to navigate and having weird communities that could self police and there are still spots on there I enjoy, but none I really socialize in the way I originally did on finding the site.. anyways those are just musings and not really helpful to the question of how to fix it, just more of why I think it's broken...

perth3• 5 years ago

When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.

ItsMonkk3• 5 years ago

They messed up when they made sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are a harmful combination of community and content. Popular content becomes a huge community, and all of the issues based on Dunbar's number happen as a result, which includes abuse of powers from the admins. Instead of using sub-reddits for content you should have tags. Communities should never be bigger than 150 people, and should not be limited to a single idea, in much the same way that Hacker News is aligned generally towards hackers. You would then build up communities of communities, where you would be beholden to your own community and the communities could only moderate outside of their community at the community level.

From there you only have to do a decent job like TikTok has done of content discovery to allow new content to thrive, and from comments on that content allow people to find better communities.

briga• 5 years ago

some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize

Can’t block ads when they’re disguised as user content. Viral marketers have had a heyday hawking their products on Reddit

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

My app does it for me. :) But yes old.reddit.com/r/hailcorporate posts can’t be blocked.

Ilverin• 5 years ago

But do those marketers pay reddit?

142• 5 years ago

I recently noticed the same posts popping up and they contained the exact same comments but instead of the comment saying 1month old it would say like 3 hours. I asked and some suggested it is karma farmers and they use the same posts and same comments that generated a lot of likes in the past to get karma and once they have a lot of karma their posts are more likely to hit the front page. I wish I could block posts from reappearing but they just slap a new title and don’t show a proper thumbnail and trick users to watch it again.

perth3• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_marketing

colinmhayes2• 5 years ago

Reddit is being paid by these ads.

anyfactor2• 5 years ago

My personal last strands of hope for Reddit are - their API which is still available to public without hoops to jump through. The downvote button. And the usabillity of old.reddit. Some communities that are still well moderated and strikes a good balance between open to questions and not open to stupid questions.

Beyond that I stopped using mainstream reddit as a value source.

djrockstar1• 5 years ago

Yeah while all the big subreddits are nigh unusable, there's a lot of small/mid-sized communities that are an absolute delight to be a part of.

nunez9• 5 years ago

if facebook can maintain mbasic, then reddit can maintain old. the onboarding funnel is towards new reddit anyway, old is mature and _appears_ stable, and most folks new to the platform will use their official app.

i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.

molticrystal• 5 years ago

The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.

pithon• 5 years ago

I only last as long there as old.reddit.com does.

mdp20216• 5 years ago

API

I just checked: the API does not (seem to) allow to retrieve items by date. Which means that a major fault of the site cannot be fixed through the API: reading the post history through random access, e.g. the posts of a specific date in a section.

(Although, one could probably harvest through the API an index of "fullnames" (IDs) and associate them to their dates or use them directly for random access in the queries - "list starting with the newest, fill DB of IDs and give me the last; list from that last, fill DB of IDs and give me the new last; loop until end". Not really the most practical way to use a repository.)

downvote

The worst attack against civilization after - (I can't think of anything) - is an encouragement to vote according to "how does that make you feel".

majani• 5 years ago

old.reddit is destined to be nuked after the company goes public.

micromacrofoot• 5 years ago

that's like hoping for a time machine

quitit3• 5 years ago

Are you sure you don't want to veer into /r/popular.

/r/Askwomen: What are 100% effective ways at turning you on?

/r/Teenagers: Every1 who wears their PJs to bed, I'll tell you your favourite band.

/r/ <<literally every subreddit>>: I HAVE A CAT, NAME IT FOR ME.

/r/NoStupidQuestions: If a woman shakes my hand is that code for sex?

/r/Askmen: What's your one perfect way to get a girlfriend?

/r/Pics: Here's 10,000 photos of people being gross on airplanes, what's something passive aggressive that I can do instead of just asking them to stop?

/r/Antiwork: I donated my heart to my boss and he fired me

/r/TooAfraidtoask: How to get girlfriend????

/r/explainlikeimfive: Do girls get horny too? how?

camillomiller• 5 years ago

On top of that: reddit makes tons of traffic with porn or borderline porn subbreddits, like GirlsGoneWild. It’ll be fun to watch the investors-driven purge when that inevitably happens

gonzo41• 5 years ago

Remember Tumblr with yahoo, so funny. Took a month for a bunch a poor spin offs to cash in.

discardable_dan8• 5 years ago

Reddit said, not six months ago, that they weren't going to ban anti-vaccine rhetoric. The lead admin stated: "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy." [0]

When you combine this with the fact that moderation on the site is unpaid, it's literally a land mine: anything done on it is open to litigation, and all of the counter-measures are "we rely on unpaid volunteers." It's a nightmare for a public offering, really. It'd be like investing in Facebook, except if Facebook's stances were "well, vaccination is a choice" and "we can't pay people to remove inappropriate content; we just rely on unpaid volunteers for that."

Reddit has effectively monetized outrage in a way Facebook could only ever hope to: instead of primarily presenting your friend circles, and the outrage there, Reddit presents the outrage of the social media cloud itself, weaponized in the form of upvotes. The worst part of browsing Reddit is the level of smugness you see around its users: they act like Instagram/Facebook is the worst parts of humanity, while actively engaging with a different corporation selling the same thing but more effectively.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...

mdp20216• 5 years ago

About your example, some points are not clear, with relevance to the outcome of litigation land mine.

First of all, the part about the "right to dissent" I think was later retracted; and importantly, a witch hunt was in fact carried out - starting from r/aww ("the cute pets" or similar).

I have just red on The Coversation the article "Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly" (Julian Savulescu, MCRI, Uni Melbourne and Oxford), https://theconversation.com/shaming-unvaccinated-people-has-... , which reports that

a whole Reddit channel is devoted to mocking people who die after refusing the vaccine

Does "going to public" increase the liability for legal action?

Freskis4• 5 years ago

Reddit a grotesque toxic website, that makes money by creating conflict, divisiveness, fake news and the deliberate degradation of society. Like Facebook, but so so much worse. I hope that going public gives it the scrutiny it needs. In a few years time you won't be able to find anyone admitting to have ever worked for this company (in fact it's almost impossible to find people admitting it today). Some of the smaller sub-reddits are good though, but that's not what the website has been about for years.

Reddit divides US society into 2 halves and makes them scream divisive hate at each other, 24 hours a day. What can possibly go wrong?

themodelplumber• 5 years ago

What! Man I was just on there getting tips on fixing my shower.

silisili5• 5 years ago

I think people already don't want to admit to working there, but not for moral reasons, but for how awful the stability and product actually is. I can't say I'd blame them.

legulere• 5 years ago

I’m not sure if Reddit is so much worse. With Reddit you see toxic groups out in the open, with Facebook those groups are hidden and only Facebook knows the true size and content of all toxic groups.

dagurp3• 5 years ago

I think that's a very unfair assessment. Reddit is as diverse as the internet itself. There are plenty of good subreddits there and the toxic stuff is easy to avoid.

Do yourself a favour and unsubscribe to any subreddit that deals with the news or politics. Some subreddits have become too big to properly moderate, unsubscribe to them too.

emodendroket10• 5 years ago

They've cleaned it up a lot honestly. Kind of feels like the whole Ellen Pao thing was just like, her serving as a scapegoat for changes they wanted to make.

PickledHotdog6• 5 years ago

Can't wait for a Behind The Bastards episode on Spez

emodendroket10• 5 years ago

It's not really gone though. There are plenty of subreddits you can subscribe to if that's your interest. Or there are others to subscribe to for almost any interest you may have.

bawolff2• 5 years ago

If i was chosing something to invest in (as opposed to read) i would definitely pick clickbait memes over lisp tutorials.

ayngg2• 5 years ago

Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement.

Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago.

Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.

pea• 5 years ago

I agree with you in the context of ads, but I do wonder if they could monetise these communities in a more high-value way which plays into their primary purpose.

For instance, I am a member of /r/synthesizers, but all trading/buying happens on eBay or reverb.com. Can reddit provide the way for this community to transact in a more high-value/trusted way? Maybe I'm missing something and that is a terrible business.

nebula88046• 5 years ago

Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.

Where did the core demographic go?

INTPenis• 5 years ago

Those tutorials can still rocket to the top of YOUR homepage. That's the power of reddit. That everyone can craft their own experience by subscribing to subreddits. So subscribe to the lisp subreddit and you'll see the content you want.

Gareth3215• 5 years ago

This concept is not long for this world. I've been a daily user for for than a decade.

* [Your default sort and filter list no longer only contains content you are subscribed to.](https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/m1pb9u/comment/gqgh82...)

* They continually "improve" the default (and Hot, New, Top, and Rising) sort and filter algorithm(s). Every day it contains less relevant content for you, and more content peppered with ads and outrage. All of these options are slowly morphing into the same sort and filter set.

* They are aggressively shutting down interesting communities which don't fit their advertiser profile, and using the above algorithms to ensure no one ever sees them. These include, for example, discussion of covid or vaccines from a critical perspective; assisted suicide; Donald Trump; guns; trans controversies; etc.

* They are aggressively policing language. There is a growing list of words which, if used, will earn the user a ban.

* They stopped work on old.reddit.com, which gave users more transparent control over sort and filter. I predict they will kill it soon.

* They currently allow API access for third party aps. These aps don't serve ads and can employ their own sorting and filtering. I predict open APIs will be shut down, just like all the other major platforms have done.

Long story short, Reddit is going to turn into Facebook. They've made that intention clear. It's only a matter of time before they demand Facebook-like verification for users.

raffomania• 5 years ago

I've been following lemmy [0] for a while, a federated reddit alternative in the same spirit as mastodon. It's still very small, but I think as monetization pressure on reddit increases, people will look for other places to post and this might be one of them :)

edit: add the link [0] https://join-lemmy.org/

ephbit• 5 years ago

Their website mentions the Fediverse. lemmy is a federated network that is completely separate from the mastodon/diaspora/... network, right?

Since I already have an account on a mastodon instance I first thought I can just connect to lemmy instances using that but that is apparently not possible.

jiveturkey• 5 years ago

I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is.

Because of your own outrage? Or because of financials of the business model. If the former, how different are you than the stubborn anti-vaxxers? I believe the business model is a proven one. I'll withhold my judgement til when I see the first 10Q.

Your comment itself is designed to fuel outrage. What a scummy company!

jrootabega• 5 years ago

I think that's kind of like a cow in the 1800s saying that investing in cattle farming is a bad idea. Morally, you'd be correct...

quitit3• 5 years ago

I personally wouldn't invest in Reddit, those with a memory longer than a few weeks will note that they go from one self-induced crisis to the next. Their upper management is directionless and the result of battlefield promotions and they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no vision for the service.

Reddit exists in the same way that digg and slashdot before it has: it's the incumbent, the default choice. It could lose it all in a year and no one would be surprised - because it's happened multiple times already and the userbase is already highly cynical.

That wasn't helped by making the site unusable on mobile; a change made to entice (read: force) users to the more lucrative app. However this merely led people to alternatives such as Apollo, which remove the ads, the reddit value-generating nonsense and introduces useful features such as the ability to download video content. Perhaps counter-intuitively these kinds of apps are likely to keep users on reddit. However with an IPO I would not be surprised to see Reddit pull 'an Instagram' and invest efforts in preventing 3rd party apps from functioning correctly.

jayd16• 5 years ago

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone.

Edit your homepage.

CyanDeparture• 5 years ago

You can't really ad-block from astroturfed ads, for example a 'viral' video of Amazon delivery driver dancing on a Amazon Ring doorbell get to the top of a video subreddit. That can't be blocked against.

I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate".

What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.

TigeriusKirk• 5 years ago

What's Reddit need access to public capital for?

Of course they want to make some individuals rich, but other than that?

nowherebeen• 5 years ago

Moreover, who would buy that stock? What is the growth prospect of an Internet forum that has been around for 10 years. Not even advertisers use it because it so bad at targeting. I would rather put $1000 in Tesla or something more tangible.

mightyquacks• 5 years ago

Reddit used to be amazing

Now it's like a red flag in your resume if you worked for reddit

Then they made a whole mess on the homepage. This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers. Its like junior engineers who cant write code. Reddit mobile is not bad, but stop trying to make me install it. There are people who only wants to use web. But your web engineers are garbage

their ads is incredibly bad.

there are dark patterns everywhere. Now they're even trying to mess up the old.redit.com

The site always crashes.

It's like the early founders did a really good job, and the vultures who could barely pass as a PM or as an engineer took over.

I mean if they wanted to save this site, they would prob have to lay off all the fat and start rehiring.

I was excited for reddit back in the day, i thought they had a shot of saving the internet. now they're trying to get into everything, and can barely execute

So the trillion dollar question is, what's next to replace reddit

qbasic_forever• 5 years ago

It sounds like you're mad at explicit decisions made by product owners, like the content on the frontpage or dark patterns that push mobile app usage. I guarantee none of the rank and file engineers are responsible for those decisions, and they almost certainly detest them just as much as you. The problem is if they don't implement them then they don't get a paycheck and can't put food on the table. It's silly to paint them with blame.

teaearlgraycold• 5 years ago

They’re all Bay Area engineers. So switching jobs is an inconvenience with a raise on the other side. The changes aren’t their ideas but it’s not like they can’t refuse. They can just work anywhere else. They probably don’t care.

hetspookjee• 5 years ago

Your last argument can be applied to about anything regarding performing unethical tasks to stay afloat. I don’t find it convincing for engineers that work for Reddit. They can start work at any other tech company, too, so by absolving all the blame is a bit much, in the end they choose to implement it right?

sneak2• 5 years ago

now they're trying to get into everything, and can barely execute

I feel like this happens to a lot of organizations/products that start off being really neat.

Fast forward 10 years, and most/all of the people responsible for the good stuff have moved on. The brand ambles on like a relative with dementia. The lights are on, but you know nobody's home.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

Amazon is the only one I know that didn’t.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

Nice to see you on HN. ;)

It used to be written in lisp. It used to be good before eternal September. Being a redditor was a nerdy virtue signaler. Now? You can be seen as a white supremacist, a commie, a clout chasing loser trying to get upvotes, or an incel when you mention it.

throwaway17772• 5 years ago

Taking shots at the engineers is too far. Reddit is about a million times more stable than it used to be a few years ago. Also I don’t think Reddit or the Internet needs “saving”. They’re both more successful than ever by any common metric whether we like the direction they’re going or not.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

How do you quantify that it’s more stable?

akyoan• 5 years ago

Backend sure, it’s more stable.

What’s on the front is inexcusable though. This is not just dark patterns: shit straight up doesn’t work. Good engineers don’t ship that.

The video player has sucked for years so much that I built a service that fetches the raw hls URL and plays that directly in the browser. Night and day. How do you mess up something that works out of the box?

discardable_dan8• 5 years ago

I have a 10-year-old reddit account. When it was static pages served out of lisp, it was rock-solid. Their rewrite got to the instability you're describing, and it never really recovered.

gremlinsinc2• 5 years ago

I'm going on 2 months now, where I cannot login to my account on 3rd party android apps. I can using an alt account. I'm not banned, or anything. It's just a known problem -- probably dealing w/ a cookie, or setting, or variable...

I've tried turning on/off 2fa, resetting my password, etc... nothing works. i've contacted reddit and submitted to their help sub, crickets.

So yeah, taking shots at the engineers imho is fair game, this is a major issue. I can't even go to /user/prefs/apps to enable/disable apps attached to my account which seems like it could be a security vulnerability. I always get "You broke reddit"..

when I try logging in on Relay or ANY other 3rd party mobile app it hangs after I'm logged in and can't handle the token exchange part of the oauth flow where the data is passed back to the app.

If you call this stable.... I'd hate to see unstable. The mobile app is a no go... I like to be able to change views between small cards, gallery, and large-card depending on what I'm using reddit for...

anyfactor2• 5 years ago

(highly opinionated)

I always find it useful to compare reddit to imgur. IMO the future of reddit is the present of imgur. The value proposition of imgur in large parts is the same as reddit IF we ignore the part where imgur was hit with a deadly blow when reddit launched in-platform media hosting.

Imgur's push for mobile app and the desparate attempt (I will say plea) to form a loyal community around the product really shows how internet platforms fails to innovate and think community is the only to tool growth and survival.

On the other hand we see another example of Tumblr where communities get in the way of operating a business.

After everything I say I find Facebook and YouTube is successful because community driven platforms work in niches but to scale up you must establish yourself as a monopoly and focus on running a business while juggling all the negativity.

discardable_dan8• 5 years ago

I remember when Imgur was launched as a free image hoster for Reddit users. It was jarring to me, years later, to see it had attempted to become some weird Reddit/9gag mash-up. Not because it was a bad move, business-wise, but because it became clear how unmonetizable the plan was to start with.

That said, I agree with you: it feels like Imgur makes the Reddit move about twelve months before it, every time. From gif hosting to discovery to live feeds to requiring logins for NSFW content, Imgur basically leads Reddit. It honestly makes me wonder why I bother with Reddit at all...

axguscbklp• 5 years ago

I hope that no single organization replaces Reddit. Let a billion independent forums bloom. For the sake of discoverability, it would be nice if a decent subset of them implemented more or less the same API that search engines could call from the outside and that their UIs could expose to users so that users could easily move from forum to forum. But discoverability is double-edged - it builds size but it also brings Eternal September and homogeneity.

As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.

As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.

Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.

jgod• 5 years ago

Interesting idea. Tapatalk is the only thing I've seen that attempts to unify UX for different forums

SheinhardtWigCo• 5 years ago

Let a billion independent forums bloom.

They did. Your first paragraph describes Reddit perfectly.

it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with

Which website(s) are you thinking of?

danjac2• 5 years ago

This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers

Nope. It's the result of perverse incentives and poor management. I can imagine the developers (even the designers) had a good vision of what to build and how to build it, only to be overruled by management with ideas like "make it janky as hell so we can force all our users to our mobile app to track them better".

robbintt• 5 years ago

Ah the myth of the mediocre engineer. It’s always the other team at the other company, too. Those engineers sit in their open floor plans, designing reddit?

clavicat2• 5 years ago

I’ve been reading Reddit for fifteen years. (A sentence that should never be written.) Their engineering has always been terrible. Even when they were much smaller than they are now, their site constantly crashed. It’s remarkable how little improvement they’ve made in over a decade. There are quirks, like how you can only see a maximum of 1,000 results, whether on subreddits, searches, or user profiles. This limit is apparently unalterable because of legacy decisions.

colordrops2• 5 years ago

So the trillion dollar question is, what's next to replace reddit

Discord is taking some of their traffic. But it sucks as a replacement since the threading model doesn't match a true forum.

bgro2• 5 years ago

Reddit has possibly the worst mobile experience I've ever seen. I've never seen a company try to force its (awful, slow, buggy) app down people's throats harder if you try to use the mobile web version.

The entire mod culture needs to be reworked too. They need mods because more people brings more trolls, but aggressive banning and simultaneous muting so people can't ask why just leads to more trolling. Not to mention most mods just cite every ban in the coverall "read the rules / figure it out" so they have to spend no effort, even though those rules don't cover the actual ban reason.

I just can't believe how many consistently bad decisions are made there. The biggest of all was probably removing the separated and accurate upvote / downvote counters which is a massive feature to show the strength of otherwise downvoted comments.

Aside from these feature complaints, how does a company of this size and importance have such an astonishingly badly coded interface? I always have to use the Old site. It reminds me of an intern coming in and on day 1 marking all code as "legacy" and saying "Electron is the greatest thing ever made, because it's easy and just works. There's literally no reason to use anything except Electron for any project."

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

Removing downvotes is largely something advertisers demand. Advertising is still stuck in some old ways. I know some in corporate ad departments that feel the need to respond to every negative comment on the internet. That is implementing hell for anybody that has that task.

runnerup• 5 years ago

I've never seen a company try to force its (awful, slow, buggy) app down people's throats harder if you try to use the mobile web version.

Instagram and Twitter do this as well, FWIW.

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

Original creators of Reddit were great but now they seem to have shitty devs/management. Interviewed with them and wasn't impressed.

I have clone but it needs little more polish and timing :)

snwfog• 5 years ago

In case you dislike the "new" Reddit interface, check out https://rdddeck.com, it uses a tweetdeck-like compact layout thats optimized for desktop.

vesche• 5 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/

wilsonnb3• 5 years ago

teddit.net is also very nice

johnisgood2• 5 years ago

Excuse me for my ignorance, but what does it mean for Reddit and its users?

karmasimida• 5 years ago

How would they make money with such toxic audience/traffic?

jstx12• 5 years ago

I don't think the toxicity plays into profitability that much; if anything it might even help. Facebook is doing great financially.

DantesKite• 5 years ago

The larger subreddits have problems, but Reddit has done a remarkable job of collecting people with niche interests into one area.

I wouldn't discount their success and future success (as much as I'd like to).

What's odd is they haven't stopped growing. It's just been linear user growth.

They could literally do nothing and the site would still grow. It's closer to Wikipedia than a social network in some respects. And by that standard, we should try to judge it.

I look forward to the next forum site as much as the next person. But I don't know what it would look like. If anyone does, I definitely urge you to build it if you can.

Substack has every incentive to build a community. Discord as well. So there's definitely opportunities, but from where I sit, I don't have any insight as to what you could do to beat this behemoth.

GhettoComputers18• 5 years ago

Small ones have problems too (like raids and low amount of mods). They don’t stop growing because they ate all the small forums.

pyuser5832• 5 years ago

Reddit is my go to place for local news. There is so little coverage of local news outside big cities. The coffee-house atmosphere of the local sub I’d very refreshing and informative.

Sadly, many of the bigger subs have less and less quality.

There’s a post I remember from about 2010 that blew my mind in the /r/philosophy subreddit. Now /r/philosophy is all crap, and I can’t event find that article.

BbzzbB• 5 years ago

I don't know about r/philosophy, but if it's grown too large to be usable, as many do, look for subsets of philosophy (by genre, philosopher, etc). I'm sure there are more niche subs with decent communities.

ankit2196• 5 years ago

What's odd is they haven't stopped growing. It's just been linear user growth

Most growth is driven by Google Search. It accounts for almost half of their traffic. At this point, SEO is their moat. The problem they have had is that they cant get most of the traffic to convert ie. create accounts and engage in those subreddits. That is still done by a small fraction of the traffic.

As an experiment, if you create an account on Reddit, you see that you are automatically added to r/announcements. (It does not even offer you a choice). That sub has grown very slow compared to their DAUs and MAUs. It still has about 127M subscribers (lifetime)

emodendroket10• 5 years ago

The problem they have had is that they cant get most of the traffic to convert ie. create accounts and engage in those subreddits. That is still done by a small fraction of the traffic.

Is that really a problem? Any site like this is going to see the same dynamics. e.g., the vast majority of Stack Overflow users never make an account either.

initplus• 5 years ago

If I want to search reddit content on my phone, I use google search because reddit's search sucks. But then I look like a non-converted user because I'm only logged in on the app not the mobile site.

discardable_dan8• 5 years ago

You know what makes for a good user experience? Not using a website that hosts white supremacists, but staying in your little corner that doesn't deal with them (you hope).

Kye3• 5 years ago

Everything is moving to Discord. Even subreddits. I finally installed the app yesterday because the Minecraft server I hang out on is down while updating to 1.18.1 and it's the only place to get updates. I had a sense this was happening when I found out several forums I thought died off (while still being up) had just moved the bulk of activity to Discord, but it seems to have accelerated in the last year.

ggm2• 5 years ago

500 million users, 100,000 communities. Since I don't pay to use it, presumably the value proposition lies in the small cohort who do pay for ephemeral karma and style additions, value added services, and of course the advertising BI which fuels the internet at large.

Since I am not paying, and I am not bidding for shares, I must be the product. This is merely a statement of my value (1/500,000,000th) to them as a BI source.

on $6nm value: $1200 per user, $60,000 per community. Thats not annual, presuambly at a sane ROI its some sub-multiple of that as extracted/notional value, but I lack the fu to say what that is.

I have to say, I don't feel worth $1200 in reddit views. Gosh, I wonder if selling my read impressions is a breach of GDRP and/or CCPA

142• 5 years ago

There has been some recent changes to reddit and it is becoming aggressively annoying. Trying to make me look back on my top posts and comments and flashy buttons on the top. They are aiming for that dopamine hit by showing you your top posts so you can reminisce in all the likes you got that day. On top of that they have a banner across the bottom you can close but it forever comes back nagging you to verify your account. The whole reason I do kind of use reddit is because I am anonymous to others and can speak freely. I can create burner accounts and say one thing and never go back to it. It feels very facebooky with the big push for engagement happening right now but I guess this public offering is why the big push.

raytube2• 5 years ago

I land on Reddit, and never quite figure out how conversations and threading work. Always feels broken to me from a usability standpoint.

raytube2• 5 years ago

That's right, downvote my user experience why don't you.

andymoe• 5 years ago

If they don’t do a direct listing maybe they’ll let some old timers get in on the IPO like Airbnb did for hosts. Lurking for 16 years has to count for something right? :)

nunez9• 5 years ago

Good! I‘ll go long on them.

Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now.

Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content, but it’s a firehose that is very difficult to curate and keep up with. Reddit is democratizing in a sense, like riding the NYC subway.

An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.

Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days. Reddit posts, especially from smaller subs, tend to be higher quality and don’t have ulterior motives (ad revenue). If Reddit’s Lucene cluster were better, between that and SO, I’d use Google a handful of times a week. Maybe this IPO can help fund that.

If the ad revenue from the whale subs allow me to continue learning about interior design, supply chain logistics, the inner workings of car sales, finance and tax strategies if I become high net worth, and more, I’m here for it.

sombremesa• 5 years ago

Twitter has very high quality content

Can you give me an example? I have zero followers/following on Twitter and just use Tweetdeck so I'd like to know what I should be looking for.

mschuster913• 5 years ago

@foone is always a good bet, if you are interested in old technology.

eloisius2• 5 years ago

I have less rosy predictions about what this IPO will do. I doubt it will fund better search. In fact, I’m thinking it will push it more into the ‘relevancy’ territory where you get a slurry of slightly related results, incoherent reco sys content curation, and deviation from vote and time decay ranking in favor of inscrutable algorithmic content feed ordering. All these things will make Reddit more successful from a mass market perspective.

superfrank• 5 years ago

I doubt it will fund better search

While I think better search would be great for users, I'm convinced Reddit doesn't actually want better search.

Good search means I can easily find an old post with the answer to my questions. Bad search means I end up going to a subreddit and posting the same question that's been asked 15 times. Even if it's removed by the mods, it'll likely get one or two comments and votes before it does.

Bad search drives more engagement.

rvba• 5 years ago

It will probably be the death of i.reddit.com and old.reddit.com

aahortwwy5• 5 years ago

Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse

Why do people keep talking about the metaverse like it already exists and is a huge part of our future?

It's vaporware right now.

Are we all so susceptible to marketing that we've just accepted that if Meta is going all-in on a thing it must be both real and a guaranteed win?

dustymcp• 5 years ago

I have 1 Friend that has var goggles, and he does not like the chat funktion it just seems like its dead in the water unless var Prices come down hard..

makeitdouble2• 5 years ago

Meta has made a full announcement of vaporware, but the metaverse is specifically not Meta's property, nor do they get to define what the metaverse is/will become.

In that sense, I agree with you we should ignore the marketing, and I also think we should talk about the metaverse as we talk about the web, not as some rigid concept, but more a vague idea of a thing in VR.

bonestamp22• 5 years ago

There are some people that consider various aspects of the Oculus and Vive ecosystems to be the metaverse. Some people think The Sandbox and Decentrland are metaverses. There are others, and they're all here now. So, I guess it's a matter of opinion whether you believe any of these can be considered a metaverse.

qaq• 5 years ago

It does exist in the form of Roblox :)

yeahh8hjd• 5 years ago

You are being too literal.

Meta

Verse

Self referential artistic expression

Artistic abstraction of self; ones ideation, concepts; is not limited to Zoom with Mario64 heads.

Extracting the idea of a web of documents into web 1…

Any concept can be a metaverse. The creator outputs an abstraction arising within self.

Zuckerberg has a specific thing to sell. Don’t go coming up with your own metaverse to play in.

namrog84• 5 years ago

Whenever I hear the word metaverse. I just replace it with the word "internet".

Its nothing more than a way for a few companies to monetize a few extra things and become gate keepers to things that have neither on the internet.

The metaverse is basically what the internet would be if it was invented today

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

metaverse is whatever anyone wants it to be.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

It's a hip marketing term that caught on like Hyperloop did, suddenly every time public transit was mentioned, so was Hyperloop.

But don't be fooled. It's Facebook. Don't be fooled by its rename either, it's still Facebook.

andreilys2• 5 years ago

I suggest giving the oculus rift 2 a try. It is the farthest thing from vaporware.

Besides most people use a loose definition of metaverse that includes things like gaming (Minecraft, roblox), social media, our phones, etc. which are all multi-billion dollar industries already.

jonny_eh• 5 years ago

Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session.

Sounds similar to Twitter and YouTube.

ungamedplayer• 5 years ago

I have yet to find any quality content on twitter.

bonestamp22• 5 years ago

I love reddit as a user. But, I would not have considered investing in them since it seems like they've struggled to make money... but according to the article, Q2 ad revenue was $100 million (3x YoY).

silisili5• 5 years ago

Genuinely curious...are you old enough to remember Digg and what happened to it?

I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing.

It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.

hericium2• 5 years ago

It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.

Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_...

[2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...

skinnymuch6• 5 years ago

I’ve done posts before. As have others. The scope, popularity, and longevity of the fallen past top sites like Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Slashdot, Altavista, Excite. Or web builders like Geocities, Angelfire. Other social networks like Bebo, Hi5. Other messaging apps like Viber. Or older ones like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ.

Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense.

As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users.

Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays.

———————- Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment:

Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year

Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...

guareber• 5 years ago

I'll give one counterpoint:

When did you see anyone on TV mention Digg?

Reddit's become mainstream, it's quoted by serious news outlets, joked around on Last Week Tonight (and other politic joke shows), and I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Facebook. Which is to say, surely but very slowly.

PhoenixReborn6• 5 years ago

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Reddit but left in 2018)

While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make.

Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable.

Will Larson writes about it here: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

twelvechairs• 5 years ago

Problem with Reddit is being very replaceable. People don't want to lose their facebook/instagram/linkedin page because it has their content and also personal connections. Profiles on Reddit are more like Digg / Slashdot / Kuro5hin - few care about losing their post history and connections so when a competing site comes in with better features (fewer ads / different site-wide moderation approach / not looking so awful by default ) people will just move there.

dageshi3• 5 years ago

Nope, any competitor just becomes a dumping ground for all the nasty shit that reddit has banned. If it were that simple, it would've been done by now, it certainly has been tried multiple times.

throwaway17772• 5 years ago

Tiktok is not really based on your social graph. I think it’s kinda like Reddit in some ways but far less in depth content and actual interaction.

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

Tiktok is for a TV audience and that will bring them massive user numbers.

It can indeed be entertaining from time to time, but consumption of content is extremely passive.

nunez9• 5 years ago

You are correct in that it's not based on an explicit social graph (i.e. who I tag as my "friend"), but it is based on an implicit social graph (i.e. who I like watching/listening to).

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days.

Compared to platforms like Discord they have the advantage that their content is actually discoverable by search engines. I hate the push to Discord since that basically makes you invisible. I get that it is convenient, but it has a lot of negative side effects that aren't obvious at first.

iosonofuturista• 5 years ago

Which also one of the reasons I loathe the move from open BB forums to Facebook on the niche/ hobby communities.

That we are repeating the mistake with discord, is very unfortunate.

lordgrenville• 5 years ago

And in addition even if you're in the server and find what you're looking for, it's very hard to concentrate all the responses to a specific post, so you might find the question but need to scroll for ages to see if someone answered.

Not that either of these issues deterred people from using IRC.

nmaleki• 5 years ago

There are solutions to problems hidden in these chats that will never be found. Personally, I've been using Discord as a powerful search engine. Luckily, the search functionality works well enough to where I can often find what I'm looking for. But this might only be a short term solution to an issue that needs an archive.

naasking• 5 years ago

I hate the push to Discord since that basically makes you invisible.

That can also be a feature going forward given today's climate. Many people have lost jobs or not been hired after prospective employers did a simple Google search.

dataengineer562• 5 years ago

Reddit is democratizing in a sense

Apart from the bit where all of the main subreddits (and therefore the front page) are controlled by completely unvetted, unpaid moderators, who tend to be Extremely Online People.

I don't understand how Facebook are continuously attacked by politicians for not moderating content well enough when they have towers full of paid moderators, while Reddit continues unaffected.

Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse

Does anyone actually care about the metaverse? Everyone I know thinks it's some kind of joke. It seems like Silicon Valley nonsense.

dageshi3• 5 years ago

Facebook gets attacked because politicians believe it can be used to nudge peoples opinions en mass but in a way that's hard to detect.

Reddit doesn't because everyone can see what's going on. You might not like it, but you can see it.

andybak2• 5 years ago

Does anyone actually care about the metaverse? Everyone I know thinks it's some kind of joke. It seems like Silicon Valley nonsense.

I care about VR as a medium and I'm worried that another round of hype will drag the whole of VR/XR down with it when it slumps again.

Still. We've been through this cycle before and it's nice to see some more investment. Hopefully it will leave some residual benefit that outweighs the damage caused by the gold rush.

It's worse this time as the metaverse hype has thrown crypto into the mix so it's not just an investor gold rush - it's an crypto one too.

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

while Reddit continues unaffected.

Don't give them ideas. Content moderation in this form basically dumped down content to the most digestible level and that is some partisan whack because people are already addicted to being outraged. Most affected are somehow news and political subs as well as national subs. You will find nothing interesting there because you don't learn about the respective cultures, you learn about typical redditors.

Any government interference has without exception been pretty bad in my opinion. You won't find quality representatives that could develop protection for online platforms anymore. Don't know why statecraft has become so much more incompetent.

Does anyone actually care about the metaverse?

The what?

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

Good! I‘ll go long on them.

Nothing specific on Reddit, but I'd like to point out that when you go long on a stock, you should at least try to possess some specific knowledge that most people don't have about that company.

Reddit might be great; but if everyone knows about it, then the price is going to reflect that already.

snek_case• 5 years ago

Reddit might be great; but if everyone knows about it, then the price is going to reflect that already.

I think that's the wrong way to look at stocks. What you're describing goes along with the common belief that all known information is already "priced in". This is silly.

The price of a stock reflects the consensus/average estimation of the worth of the company. Your personal assessment is going to depend on what you personally believe in, but you could be holding a minority viewpoint. If 95% of investors believe that a company will have 10B in revenue in 5 years, but you interpret the facts differently and believe (correctly) that the company will make 50B in 5 years, then even though you are basing your estimation on the same facts as everyone else, if the majority interprets the facts incorrectly, then the information is not "priced in". As the company proves itself successful, the consensus estimate will shift. People will reassess their belief that certain outcomes are more or less likely. What matters isn't necessarily having information that other investors don't have, it's interpreting that information better than others, and making more accurate inferences.

When it comes to reddit, more specifically, you probably don't have access to any more information than every analyst on wall street, but there's a key difference, which is that most of these people probably have never used reddit, and have a very limited understanding of how it works or its potential. So, in some ways, your understanding of the functioning of reddit, as a reddit user, could actually give you an edge.

nunez9• 5 years ago

Having insider knowledge as an outsider is great, but you can also long a stock if you think the company has a strong vision and is executing on it.

Foobar8568• 5 years ago

I rarely Google without using site at first, reddit, SO/exchange, and two French forums (teaching related queries). Anything else from Google /search engine is garbage.

emptyfile• 5 years ago

Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse

what is the metaverse? what are you talking about?

smolder2• 5 years ago

Stop taking "the metaverse" seriously, please. It's a rich idiots dream, like a digital Fordlandia. I can hardly blame people for trying to follow trends, because following trends can be lucrative. "The metaverse" is just not the one to follow. It's nintendos virtualboy, vision getting ahead of substance, fixing problems we don't have. If it succeeds at all, it will be a testament to societies ability to bend to the whims of rich idiots. In Facebooks case, they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die before they try to expand on the whole reality thing.

loa_in_• 5 years ago

I'm getting really angry at companies squatting names that are basically common nouns. This practice should be banned. It's something I though was more cyberdystopian-esque not reality, but here we are in the future.

hdjjhhvvhga• 5 years ago

they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die

The problem is, the "idiot's metrics", that is the engagement time as the ultimate metric of financial success, clearly show that negative content that is bad for your well-being favors them. They literally earn money from your suffering. How could you expect them to give up on that?

zpeti2• 5 years ago

I used to think this but Ben Thompson changed my mind.

This meta verse thing really could be the way we work remotely soon. It works as a working space. It works for companies, it could create good work environments, and companies can afford expensive hardware to get people to work more effecively.

Think of the metaverse as a more advanced slack+zoom, not as a Minecraft/Roblox alternative.

wonderwonder3• 5 years ago

Zuckerberg has proven extremely effective at predicting future trends. Look at Instagram and Whatsapp, perfectly timed investments.

Zuck has taken long term bets on the metaverse starting with Occulus and now seemingly betting the whole company on it. He could very well be wrong but there are a lot of very smart people at Facebook and on their board I have to think they did some very intensive validation before doing so.

It could all go up in flames but I think they are going to take a very real run at it backed by billions and billions of dollars.

Don't get me wrong I very much dislike Facebook and the oxygen it provides to extreme and uninformed groups but to think that Zuckerberg is an idiot taking a stab in the dark with the fortunes of a publicly traded FAANG company is not a serious take.

"In Facebooks case, they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die before they try to expand on the whole reality thing." No arguments from me, there is a ton of moderation that needs to be added to Facebook.

3maj2• 5 years ago

As far as I'm concerned they're recreating Club Penguin.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

Hot take. You're comparing a video game company in the 90's vision and ability to deliver that vision to one of the largest companies in the world ability to deliver?

While you may not want the Metaverse, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "If it succeeds at all, it will be a testament to societies ability to bend to the whims of rich idiots.", plenty of people are happy to try new things. Facebook, the social network, is a estimate to massive amounts of people willing to get on board with an idea that is new, at least to them.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Frankly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Seems more like because you don’t like Metaverse you don’t want it taken seriously. But it will be serious business.

Hippocrates2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure you're wildly wrong about this. Comparing metaverse to virtualboy is a big mistake. Metaverse is not vision over substance. Substance is already there and driving technology to a more refined vision.

We’re already spending significant parts of our days working, playing, exploring and communicating digitally. Dating is online. Commerce has moved online. Art and creators are online. Entertainment is online. Exercise is an AR experience. Connecting with IRL and new virtual-only friends is online. What is left? Food, sleep, sex, and odors? Important things, but a relatively small portion of what we do during our awake hours.

The substance part of the metaverse is already here and proven. We are in a period of refinement which includes technological advancements in the ways we experience it. More compact wearables (e.g. AR/VR headsets), 3D audio, High res displays and better visuals/graphics and most importantly, bridging these different types of experiences in some way, which is a software problem. These are the areas in which tech is trying to gain control and offer the cohesive experience.

I highly recommend you listen to this podcast episode with Bill Gurley (second life creator): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/invest-like-the-best-w...

eric_cc• 5 years ago

Hot take but I think you are incredibly wrong. Remember that Today show clip from the 90's where they laugh off this new Internet thing? That's you. Ignorance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

nunez9• 5 years ago

Magic Leap keeps getting GIANT amounts of funding despite not having dropped anything that people can buy (I think they took a DOWN round of $500M this year.)

Apple is investing significant amounts of capital on ARkit and AI/ML optimizations at the die level. Google has been dabbling in this space for years and years.

Second Life, the non-AR version of the metaverse, was hugely popular back in the day despite the tech at the time (i.e. having to carve time to use it on your computer). Pokemon GO (a Google bet) is still wildly popular.

With Facebook doubling-down in this space, yes, I am going to take this very seriously.

askvictor• 5 years ago

Eventually, it will go the same way Facebook has gone, and email before that. Was once fun and useful, now, at best, a tool and a chore.

gremlinsinc2• 5 years ago

I feel like there's some of the most foul...obnoxious...people on Reddit...but at least they're not the same people in FB groups... which is to say they're my obnoxious sycophant people.

In other words...social media can really showcase the best/worst of people but Reddit kinda at least can give some intellectual content and discussion. I also kinda just 'get' the snark/culture of reddit as it were, and interestingly enough it doesn't matter my political persuasion as there's enough different corners of reddit to find where I fit in. People are also more willing to share their real thoughts when there's some measure of anonymity whether that's good or bad, who knows.

Reddit + HN is basically my source of news/new thoughts. Best part of reddit is that topics are generally single groups, where there's like 5 yard sale groups on FB JUST for my city in a county with 45k people in rural utah, on FB nothing's stopping there being 2 or 200 SLC groups, but on reddit - everyone just would go to the one w/ the most subscribers/content/activity....

FB is nothing but memes or people trying to sell something. Of course Reddit going public will probably make it incentivized to turn more of a profit and go that way as well.

My only real gripe w/ Reddit is that I can't use the login via Relay on Android because something's jacked w/ my main account... if I go to user/prefs I get an error after a long wait...and it's been reported for a few months and no fix...

kypro• 5 years ago

I'm so split on Reddit. While I agree with most of what you said the decline in quality of both content and comments, and the extreme moderation which has occurred over the last 4-5 years would really worry me if I was an investor. Presumably as a public company they would come under even more scrutiny for edgy content and feel the need to moderate content even more. And in general as the size of a social site's user base increases, the quality of the content drops as content starts to reflect the common denominator of its users.

I also feel like all social media the there are very toxic aspects to Reddit. I used to be very active on there, but after receiving constant abuse and very few constructive replies I now rarely participate in discussions there. Again with the company going public like Facebook and Twitter, Reddit could come under more scrutiny for this.

Assuming you buy for a fair valuation I don't think it's a bad investment per say, but I think there are a lot of risks there. I find myself wishing for an alternative to Reddit a lot these days because I really miss the high quality discussions I used to have there 10 or so years ago.

Valakas_• 5 years ago

I agree with you about the abuse aspect. That's one thing this could change. I would for example change the voting system to not allow a negative score. It doesn't happen often, but it still doesn't feel good that people disagree and not only do they not upvote, but they downvote until you get negative score.

In my opinion if you disagree don't upvote, or at least downvote until 0. So people know the overall sentiment is negative, but there's not need to show how negative it is. If it's so bad to be offesive or innacurate, then report it. But downvoting until it's negative feels really overkill and feels like at the moment everyone not only disagrees, but hates you.

The constructive replies you talk about depends on the subreddit. There are subreddits that are literally lifesavers. For example subreddits to overcome emotional abuse and abusive relationships, you'll find support there that is simply amazing and not abusive at all. Or subreddits about certain niches that people are passionate about.

Unfortunately toxic people are sadistic and get a kick out of abusing people, so it's bound to happen. Best way is to report it, so the moderators either warn the person or ban them.

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

I would want to take a closer look at their engagement metrics. Of course they will officially show rising engagement, but in what form? Because for niche subs the engagement (active users) is reducing in many subs. People run to discord mostly, which is only partially better, but doesn't suffer power mods yet.

Rising engagement could also come from content that got linked and from people just visiting the page.

Buying votes for reddit is allegedly quite cheap as well.

jasondozell• 5 years ago

Based on previous IPOs of internet giants I think Reddit is a good bet but obviously lots of dynamics about the inner workings of cash flow etc that a layperson is only guessing about.

One area that seems inevitably would have to change is Reddit’s linking to pirated video clips. I’m sure the clips won’t go away but would be altered in a way so that reddit has deals with copyright owners and unskippable ads are played.

Ultimately all these media funded platforms under-weight advertising to begin with to build a user-base so become worse to use once established.

StevePerkins• 5 years ago

Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse

I agree. But first they'll have to get on the blockchain, and then build up their autonomous vehicle division. No big deal, just use CRISPR.

SamuelAdams• 5 years ago

Agreed, one sub in particular is /r/lawncare. There is a very helpful post for beginners that puts together the whole process from spring through fall. This is the kind of non-paid for content shill that makes niche communities really interesting.

https://reddit.com/r/lawncare/comments/fb1gjj/a_beginners_gu...

intrasight2• 5 years ago

I had a Reddit account for five years but never logged in. Until about six months ago when I rediscovered Reddit. I now spend more time on Reddit than the rest of the internet combined. I have a personal account and a work account. For work stuff, it's catching up with Stackoverflow in my technical discussions. For personal stuff, I don't even know of a comparable site. I am a small BI consultancy and I would definitely spend ad money on Reddit once they get their shit together.

chartpath• 5 years ago

Whenever I need to query the hive mind I just search directly on Reddit now, after a long period of searching in google with the keyword "reddit" included.

If I am querying something technical for work or hobby development I use the HN Algolia search.

Twitter is the only other social network I keep an account on, but barely ever visit because of the firehose of noise despite having a painstakingly selected list of accounts followed. E.g. lots of journalists doing great work, but also posting a lot of personal life updates that are not relevant to me.

nebula88046• 5 years ago

Everything you described makes this public offering a potential bad thing. Whats going to happen when activist investors want a certain subreddit/post removed? What about ad companies not liking some content/subreddit? Moderation is going to get very strict. The relative anonymity of reddit may disappear. We have already seen the establishment supposedly co-opt the big subreddits like /r/politics. Now they will focus on snuffing out all the little guys on the platform. Everything you listed as a positive may disappear over time.

HN might become what Reddit is now. On the flip side the difficulty of removing posts here/simple upvote system/other limiting features may prevent that from ever happening. There have been attempts to clone Reddit, all have been terrible. Its clear that to create an equivalent, its going to take more than a weekend project.

foobarian• 5 years ago

Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session.

For now. Just watch what happens to it under constant pressure from Wall Street to grow and grow and grow...

BeFlatXIII• 5 years ago

An even wilder bet: Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse (as a news outlet of sorts, on steroids) and even potentially minimize the need for Google Search.

Doing so will first require the Reddit team to develop a competent search engine. Searching Google or DDG with site:reddit.com is far better than native Reddit search for topics. The Camas Reddit search is what you need for a power search to find that one post that you swear you've read five years ago. Neither use case is well-served by the current search implementation on Reddit itself.

pibechorro2• 5 years ago

Reddit has been steadily going to shit. They became incredibly trigger happy censoring anything and anyone outside of the echo chamber there. I still visit it, but I am short on them.

phkahler2• 5 years ago

> Anecdotally, a VERY LARGE percentage of my Google searches end in “site:reddit.com” these days.

That seems strange to me. Most of my search results don't lead there. This seems like something worth investigating on your part. Maybe google knows you like reddit, tend to follow links there, and hence puts them higher in your search rankings? Is that a thing with google? I think it may be based on my own past experience too.

Trasmatta2• 5 years ago

I think you misunderstand, OP is purposefully adding "site:reddit.com" to their search query, to only get results from Reddit. Google isn't adding it for them.

I do this sometimes too, because it's one of the ways to get actual opinions on something, and not just worthless blog spam.

cloverich• 5 years ago

OP is adding `site:reddit.com` to tell Google to find results from reddit instead of elsewhere. If their workflow is like mine, it goes 1. enter search, 2. get frustrated with spammy / marketing / ad results, 3. limit to reddit, 4. find thoughtful human with genuine answer / feedback.

rkuykendall-com• 5 years ago

I think it would be worth investigating on your part as well. Next time you do a Google search that will be heavily populated by blog spam and listicles, append “site:reddit.com” to instead get long user-rank-sorted discussions among actual human beings.

thomastjeffery2• 5 years ago

If Reddit were higher in their search rankings, they wouldn't need to add site:reddit.com to their search words.

I also find searching Reddit, especially for introductory advice, to be very commonly useful. Since Reddit's search sucks, I usually use duckduckgo or Google to search it.

pjc50• 5 years ago

I would certainly bet on them going up in the short term. However, going public carries more scrutiny, and that means their two existing problems will be catapulted into the public eye at some point, just as they have been for Facebook:

- political extremism

- very flimsy segregation of NSFW material (and usernames are basically not censored)

I doubt they would be dumb enough to do a Tumblr, but it can't be ruled out entirely.

barfingclouds2• 5 years ago

Yeah Reddit’s different because it’s not public. Fuck this news is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. The only thing I could imagine worse is if Wikipedia went public or got bought by saudi Arabian investors

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years ago

Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session.

But for how long I wonder. Those niche communities continue to use Reddit because they can circumvent the dark-patterns and ads usually with a custom client.

And those clients depend upon reddit API. We've seen in the past that once the community-focused Internet platforms get large, Especially when they go public then the API restrictions are soon to follow as advertiser's interest becomes primary and the majority users don't care as they're not in for those niche communities.

xenihn• 5 years ago

I'm done with reddit once old.reddit.com is gone. Guessing it won't be around much longer after the IPO.

jesprenj• 5 years ago

1) A nice clickbait title. 2) Just some general grammar problems that appear in many languages, including English.

I thought that reddit's source code (files) would be published and free again. By the way, reddit used to be open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Too bad.

siruncledrew• 5 years ago

Reddit has definitely had noticeable changes over the past 5+ years as they’ve gone through further VC rounds of funding that demand more ROI-centric changes.

I can’t imagine the ways it will change as a public company once numbers are public to scrutiny and the shareholder makeup shifts.

It seems the intrinsic problem with platforms like Reddit (at least from what’s been witnessed over the last 8 years) is that they will inevitably “hit a wall” in a way that will become incompatible with shareholder interests.

By that I mean at some point that hockey-stick growth is going to inevitably taper off and reach terminal velocity before declining as the platform reaches unsustainability. Then, Reddit is going to have to throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks to please investors, or grow by acquisition, which is like a Tylenol level solution. I just don’t see how an advertising and virtual badges driven social platform is ever going to be compatible with the expectations of running a public company to produce returns like in some other industry or sector.

colordrops2• 5 years ago

Good, reddit is a stagnant control-freak dinosaur that has monopolized forums and needs to be disrupted.

ausbah• 5 years ago

I'll go against the tide here and say Reddit I still think Reddit is great! sure I don't think the big subs, greater emphasis on monitization, and some of the other big changes they've made over the past few years are great - but I still love the smaller subs I participate in, and the I think the new UI quite nicer than the old one

fairity• 5 years ago

I wonder how the original founders of Reddit feel about selling out so early. They sold to Conde Naste for $20m. Now, it's worth 1000x more. I'm sure there are ways to rationalize it as a good decision -- i.e. $10m is a life changing sum of money. But, I wonder if, as a general rule, it's better to only sell half your stake to avoid upside regret.

busymom0• 5 years ago

I can see this as a bad thing in the following way:

1. They will most likely start making their API unusable similar to what Twitter did. Their Chat is already not available via the API and they are no longer open sourced.

2. They will most likely start banning porn or make it very hard to access (though Twitter seems to still allow porn accounts so maybe I am wrong here?).

3. MORE dark patterns in design. Their website is already super slow, tons of white space requiring extra scrolling (so more ads), needs extra clicks and too many ads which look like posts. Their site on mobile is useless and keeps asking to open in app. Ad blocker and 3rd party app solves this which gives them more incentive to break the API.

4. More censorship of anything remotely offensive.

garbagetime2• 5 years ago

That website is pure pain. Even the niche subreddits I used to enjoy are now repulsive.

yessirwhatever• 5 years ago

Well that explains their inexplicably stupid and horrible attempt to increase the number of their users. From the crappy new design to the fucking insistent push to use their app.

kristjank• 5 years ago

I can't imagine this change making Reddit any better. Things have been going downhill ever since Swartz's unfortunate demise. Maybe it will take some of the control away from the chinese investors, but that's about it. Problems like powermodding, censorship and curated approach to their public image (r/undelete). Whatever is needed to please the investors and advertisers.

koilke• 5 years ago

Could not help but understanding the title as Reddit (adj) files (noun) to go public.

donkarma• 5 years ago

I also thought this, glad I wasn't the only one

thinkingemote4• 5 years ago

Would this be the first public porn platform?

A flippant remark, but Reddit is a not insignificant facilitator of pornography alongside many great safe for work subreddits and we will probably see them trying to stop this before or after going public. That or changing the terms of use for users to be 18 from the current 13.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Would this be the first public porn platform?

Not even close.

Reddit is a huge publisher of pornography

No, they aren't. Section 230 says so.

thinkingemote4• 5 years ago

I changed the phrase to

"not insignificant facilitator of pornography" to be more relative.

What a publisher is, today, is a bit muddy imo.

throw_m239339• 5 years ago

Plenty of hardcore pornography on Twitter, and not just legal one, which got me wondering why their app is getting a pass on IOS when Tumbler didn't. At least Facebook does not permit any form of pornography.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

And mastercard doesn't require them to get a photo id of their users.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

Reddit is very old, with old unpaid moderators that moderate arbitrarily and a user base that has now been trained to devolve everything to their lowest common denominator which is politics. There are few niches that are useful as aggregators, but moderating those subreddits must be exhausting (e.g. covid19).

Looks like they really need to be disrupted but i guess investors don't think there s enough money in building another forum. And they may probably be right.

What is a reason to invest in reddit's future?

Havoc• 5 years ago

Who wants to invest in something that is one user revolt away from being digg on an endless list of edgy topics

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

The main data point from the success of reddit is that quality interactions in large scale online platforms require an interest based user interface.

Other than that it is almost guaranteed now that its buggy (feels like its held together with tape) and ad-ladden overall experience will be locked-in and get worse (like it happened with facebook)

People might want to hedge their bets and look into open source lemmy and federated versions of the reddit concept https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

danuker• 5 years ago

I use the old UI, which is lean, fast even on my old laptop, and not buggy.

Fortunately I still have a setting for my account to do so. I would stop using it without this setting.

GvS• 5 years ago

I can't use current Reddit without Reddit Enhancement Suite - https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

say_it_as_it_is• 5 years ago

Good luck explaining to shareholders that the most popular subreddits are occasionally held hostage by extreme left activists abusing their power by shutting down the subreddits as a political statement.

lvl100• 5 years ago

Reddit is more than 3/4 of my time on internet. It’s got more eye share than anything outside of Google landing page.

spinach• 5 years ago

Reddit has become so heavy-handed with censorship, especially towards feminism, I stopped using it a long time ago. Reddit is a great example of how awful the internet is for woman.

Porn subs can have content that is female only, but subs for women and lesbians have to include men who think they're women and feminist subs get banned. The biggest lesbian sub is so overrun by men it's a joke.

asquabventured• 5 years ago

Honest question, do you feel like the lgb community has been hijacked by the t? As an outsider it sure appears that way and seems like there is some low boiling resentment brewing

jpe-2102• 5 years ago

So long as they keep the API available for apps like Apollo then I'm fine. Honestly that's the only way I browse Reddit now, but I can't help but feel weird when the only way to enjoy a site is to use something else entirely to view its content.

anonu• 5 years ago

There's maybe one positive comment thread in here and all the rest are thoughtfully negative to borderline "hater", wishing for Reddits demise for some obscure reason.

I think we've seen this pattern play out. The HN crowd is really not the right crowd to source opinions when it comes to business matters.

And you can see it in the comments, it's mostly about how the UI sucks, the app is slow, the dark patterns, etc...

The reality being missed is there's a ton of value being created in the forums regardless, and MAUs are up like crazy. The bad UI and ads don't seem like they're getting in the way of that.

sexy_seedbox• 5 years ago

The HN crowd is really not the right crowd to source opinions when it comes to business matters.

Yep, there could've been so many HN Bitcoin bill/millionaires, but being so logical, many HN folks here are grumpy buttcoiners.

Freskis4• 5 years ago

You are spot-on about the HackerNews tech criticisms being irrelevant.

But I think the points about Reddit being toxic to advertisers because of the hate/porn/gore/mysogny are correct. It just takes one bad story and advertisers will flee the platform. There has been no mainstream examinination and investigation of what Reddit is. Once it starts, it's all over.

the_doctah3• 5 years ago

Have you been on Reddit lately? They purged all that crap and aggressively censor the entire platform now. The censorship has increased tenfold in the last couple of years.

PickledHotdog6• 5 years ago

Wonder what this might mean for third party apps that don't display Reddit's (overt) advertisements

I need BaconReader to stay alive

julbook• 5 years ago

I'll try to get a piece of this one as it is a great platform to watch diverse content. There's a lot of subreddits ranging from shitposts to high-value content that is available within the site's reach.

sebow• 5 years ago

A censorious echo-chamber going public, what else is new?I just find it funny how people migrated from FB/Twitter to a somewhat more usable website and reddit is anything else besides garbage.

Ironically enough, the vast majority of people never used the website pre-2014, so they don't have anything or comparison besides "it's a different community-building website, therefore it's better".

It's not: their website on mobile is cancer, forcing people to install an app is not an argument, censorship(!= moderation, though i'm sure people will start pointing out how it's privately owned) is probably higher than even on places like FB when you compare the last few years(mainly because FB in the west has been somewhat watched), and the core principle of system on which the website functions is polarizing, even more than FB/Twitter.You add on top of that the scandals of (quite literally) 'corruption' between community moderators, staff, etc and the socially-obedient karma system, you end up with a gamified social network, except it's worse because everyone wants to comfortably stay in their own bubble.

Then again this same downstream phenomenon started applying to HN, you already see the cracks, and bullshit is more and more frequent here, a place where people know you can't avoid talking politics as the discussion length increases, knew to remain civil and discuss even the touchy subjects, detached.

65• 5 years ago

I'm a big fan of their monetization strategy. Instead of relying on advanced advertising tracking they use micro-transactions to buy digital goods. It's a lot cleaner and doesn't ruin the experience of using the site.

boringg2• 5 years ago

What happens to all the work from the moderators once they realize they are working for a public traded company for free? Doesn't this break peoples willingness to build those communities once they realize their hard worked time is getting squeezed to investor dollars? I understand it was a private company beforehand but now it must really feel bad to know how much people are making off your goodwill. Totally effed up model.

FWIW I actually like reddit for the specific communities but tough to see how it isn't going to get further diluted and mods are increasingly going to be less interested is my take - further eroding its value proposition.

villasv• 5 years ago

Moderators have always been working for "free" (or for their own reasons, there are monetized subs).

The fact that Reddit is public or private doesn't change a thing. Why would working for free for a privately owned company would be easier on the mind? Do you prefer to be explored by a few wealthy individuals rather than the whole open market?

colinmhayes2• 5 years ago

I think a lot of moderators don't realize they're working for a multi billion dollar company atm. It's much harder to hide that when you can google reddit's stock price.

BitwiseFool5• 5 years ago

I think a substantial number of powermods are either paid by some influence agency, or they do it for free because they're activists who believe they're fighting for a righteous cause.

rexreed• 5 years ago

I am a fan of reddit, but I'm not a fan of what public markets do to companies. I want to be optimistic, but I'm realistic -- the sort of content that gets posted in many subreddits isn't often the sort of content lives long when faced with public market scrutiny. Then again I guess Twitter has become rife with that sort of content too. Maybe I should be cautiously optimistic.

quiet_cool• 5 years ago

reddit is probably the trashiest social media site around today(for it's size).

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

Reddit has come some ways as far as mainstream acceptance etc but man if I will die on the hill that it only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. It was on its deathbed before that happened. I know there are enough of us out there that remember this and tire of the having to remind of the history.

And it's nothing more than a large collection of forums basically. With all the mod challenges, UI/UX hurdles etc that come with that. Happy for it to exist/find it useful for niche communities etc but with freaking Alexis Ohanian would stop waltzing around like he had any genius foresight or any insight into anything social/web.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

Also for any of you non-lame-lurkers out there that never log in and insist on using old.reddit instead of setting prefs to use the old look, all the crap that is the default on the homepage of reddit, /r/popular etc whatever, you never have to see at all and can enjoy your niche subreddits without any exposure. I haven't looked at any of the main top level reddits/memes/incels/funny/pics in like 5 years

the_doctah3• 5 years ago

I'd use preferences if my accounts didn't keep getting banned from the ever-increasing censorship.

hnburnsy• 5 years ago

At least on Reddit, for now, you can sort by New and your setting sticks.

dobs_bob• 5 years ago

Shouldn't they get rid the white supremacy subreddits first?

barfingclouds2• 5 years ago

God dammit

rbt0424• 5 years ago

https://socialupvote.com

Reddit files to go public

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