[HN Gopher] Reddit raises $410M in new funding
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit raises $410M in new funding
Author : infodocket
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-08-12 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| barbazoo wrote:
| What the hell does a site like Reddit do with almost half a
| billion dollars?! That's insane.
| gkoberger wrote:
| It's not easy to run a company with as many users as they have.
|
| As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging
| trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to
| do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and
| trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
|
| They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content
| in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I
| imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward
| creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their
| ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how
| anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I
| think is good for everyone.)
|
| Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen
| marketing, paid moderation, etc).
| setr wrote:
| >Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks,
| given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to
| innovate, which I think is good for everyone
|
| The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in
| fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests
| are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do
| any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right
| target audience.
|
| It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better
| job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool
| ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement
| over the current setup.
| gkoberger wrote:
| My quick Google-ing shows that they make about $100M/year
| on ads. So they do this and it works decently well.
|
| However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past
| this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my
| opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so
| much about not just your likes but the people you're
| friends with and how much your income is and what stores
| you've been to and what you do on Instagram and what your
| age is and what state you're in and... the list goes on.
|
| I think most subreddits are tough to monetize. What do you
| sell to r/funny or r/politics or r/sanfrancisco? What does
| r/choosingbeggars want to buy? There's a few obvious ones
| (diets, hobbies), but I think eeking out $100M from that is
| already impressive.
|
| Plus, Reddit's audience is way more against ads than
| Instgram/Facebook/etc.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Reddit knows all the subs you subscribe to though. They
| don't have to give all users of a sub the same ad, just
| give everyone ads based off their most valuable
| interests.
| hinkley wrote:
| Figure out how to make two thirds of a billion dollars off its
| users, that's what.
| michaelt wrote:
| Well you see, they desperately need the runway to give them
| time to figure out how to pay back half a billion dollars.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Launder it.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| So they're taking financing under scrutiny from the SEC, in a
| round lead by Fidelity. Where's the elicit money that they're
| trying to turn legitimate?
| lomereiter wrote:
| For example, they could provide a hidden (and very expensive)
| API for hedge funds, so that they could manipulate stock prices
| more conveniently.
| muttantt wrote:
| Gotta pay the team of people that wholesale censor information
| there
| paulpauper wrote:
| the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for
| popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or
| not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and
| even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines
| pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff.
| Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get
| involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.
| kiba wrote:
| That's what make reddit great. Certain reddit are heavily
| moderated and you get great content.
|
| If you don't like how moderation done, go start your own
| reddit.
| bserge wrote:
| No no no, first you need to find several admins. Otherwise
| you'll get banned along with your subreddit lmao
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> go start your own reddit._
|
| _This_ is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone
| can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want,
| and compete with all the others based on the merits of its
| own content, community and moderation style.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Yes and no. That's great for niches but not for general,
| high profile topics, a country subreddit for instance.
| pageandrew wrote:
| Untrue... reddit pushes some subreddits to the front page
| and bans other subreddits on the basis of spreading
| "disinformation".
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| However the platform lacks namespaces.
|
| It is impossible to compete with the first one that
| claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say
| r/startrek
|
| The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is
| that one can now choose what particular opinions one
| can't express.
|
| Competing on the merits of moderation style is
| insignificant compared to having the most straightforward
| name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with
| such name will always be the largest.
| pageandrew wrote:
| "Great content" === what are you referring to exactly? The
| left-wing propaganda that dominates the front page, passed
| off as "news" or "science"?
| buu700 wrote:
| Offhand, /r/legaladvice, /r/AskHistorians, and
| /r/AskScience stand out as being heavily moderated to the
| benefit of overall content quality. I don't see how any
| of those would be political propaganda (left-wing or
| otherwise).
| sireat wrote:
| I stopped going to /r/AskHistorians because often the
| only allowed answers were badly sourced.
|
| This is especially prevalent on events that are still
| relatively recent (last 40-50 years).
|
| Second, it really is /r/AskHistorians ONLY, you are not
| allowed to mention any personal anecdata (ie
| participating in the fall of Berlin Wall etc.)
|
| Even worse you are not allowed to attempt to provide
| official primary sources.
|
| There was a question on WW2 Soviet tank production and
| German preparedness. I was not allowed to link in
| secondary comment Hitler-Mannerheim talks where they
| talked about this very issue!
|
| Mod reasoning: not enough context...
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I have never tried the latter two, but the first one is a
| very good example of a notoriously bad advice subreddit
| that almost all lawyers dislike for spreading constant
| misinformation, and often even seeing people that say the
| correct thing be banned by the moderators.
|
| There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for
| two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see
| compensation for their expertise; B) in many
| jurisdictions, lawyers are not allowed to give legal
| advice without establishing a formal attorney-client
| relationship.
| buu700 wrote:
| Interesting, this is the first I'm hearing about that.
| Typically users will state whether or not they're
| lawyers, and if so the degree to which they're familiar
| with the OP's jurisdiction, and threads will often be
| locked and/or littered with removed comments for the
| reason "bad advice". Often, the only advice users will
| receive is to go see a lawyer.
|
| Based on all that, it seemed pretty solid to me. I'm not
| saying you're wrong, but if I had to guess it's probably
| more a case of being hit-or-miss than entirely bad. Even
| a minority of bad advice would stand out to a lawyer in
| the same way that >=1% of wrong information in a tech
| publication would stand out to most of us here,
| particularly if the victims of said bad advice were in
| serious situations.
|
| (IANAL or an active user of /r/legaladvice. I just pop in
| every so often when an interesting thread hits my front
| page, so whatever I'm exposed to is presumably better
| quality and more actively moderated than what's average
| for the sub.)
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| The latter two subreddits really do have excellent
| content, they are worth checking out.
|
| /r/legaladvice is so bad there is actually a subreddit
| dedicated to discussing what's posted there,
| /r/bestoflegaladvice. There's more attorneys in that sub
| than the actual legal advice sub, where a surprising
| amount of advice is either blatantly wrong or essentially
| "just tell the police everything, they'll help."
|
| /r/audiophile and /r/wine are two other well moderated
| subreddits, where the discussion has remained relatively
| focused and high quality even as the communities have
| grown, because the moderators aggressively prune low-
| effort and unrelated content. There was big drama, once
| upon a time, when /r/audiophile banned anything headphone
| related.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I mod a surfing video sub, and I censor the heck out of
| wakeboarding videos! Oh, the power I wield! Mwahahaha!
| emodendroket wrote:
| So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like
| better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow
| everything?
| paulpauper wrote:
| The problem is winner-take-all effects and inherent
| difficulty of getting traffic to new subs.
| pageandrew wrote:
| Reddit pushes certain communities to the front page and
| suggests them to users, and quarantines/bans other
| communities.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers,
| it's unethical to block certain conversations.
|
| For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to
| control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people.
| And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be
| posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
| marcinzm wrote:
| >I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of
| readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.
|
| Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a
| different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's
| unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they
| agree with. People like communities of like minded
| people.
|
| By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers,
| magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even
| if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
| pageandrew wrote:
| I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID
| related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like
| the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown
| sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well.
|
| I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run
| communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there
| are a couple problems with this:
|
| 1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and
| promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page
| rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications.
| Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the
| flow of information to those who believe they're interacting
| with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed
| their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this,
| despite the profit they receive from it.
|
| 2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with
| subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for
| spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively
| applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown
| subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid
| subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay,
| say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation,
| but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
| bserge wrote:
| I wrote my suicide note on my own subreddit and got banned
| (site wide) for threatening violence. Err, OK, gotta find a
| safer place for that.
|
| Sadly, as you might be able to tell, I wasn't able to do
| it. It's terrifying. Also why should I die while worse
| people live? Gotta do something about them before going
| myself, d'uh.
| lovich wrote:
| Was the front page of anything ever not curated?
| pageandrew wrote:
| Theres a difference between curating the best recipes or
| cutest cat pics, and censoring certain ideas about
| pressing global health crises because they don't fit a
| certain narrative.
| underwater wrote:
| Giving fringe viewpoints a megaphone and that kind of
| validation is a terrible idea. We have seen it be abused
| and fail us consistently over the last decade in both
| mainstream and social media.
| pageandrew wrote:
| I don't trust large corporations to decide what is fringe
| and what is not, because not only is it a slippery slope,
| it has been abused consistently especially over the last
| few years.
|
| Look no further than Facebook's handling of COVID
| "misinformation". From the start of the pandemic, they
| have enshrined the current statements of the CDC as
| "information" and everything else as "misinformation".
| For example, when the supposed "scientific consensus" was
| that COVID-19 100% came from nature, anyone who suggested
| it could have been manmade was called a conspiracy
| theorist and banned from the platform. Now, a year later,
| those scientists are backtracking, and some are even
| admitting that they took the natural-origin stance simply
| to not be associated with Trump, who was taking the other
| side. That's not science.
|
| It was never a crazy idea. Anyone who could think for
| themselves knew that. But Facebook declared themselves
| the arbiter of truth, and decided that anything that
| wasn't said by the CDC needed to be censored.
|
| When reasonable, logical ideas about important global
| health challenges are considered "fringe" simply because
| the authorities have declared them to be fringe, we have
| a serious problem.
| xfitm3 wrote:
| Reddit was a bastion of free speech but it's suffered a
| steep decline in quality and content. It's a toxic place
| with heavy handed dark UI patterns: they've lost their
| minds over there.
| zpeti wrote:
| This seems more like a Silicon Valley issue than a Reddit
| one. And Silicon Valley generally doesn't have much
| motivation to get people doing actual stuff, people sitting
| at home is where the cash is.
| iammisc wrote:
| The nice thing is as alternative tech platforms rise up
| (communities.win, ovarit.com, ruqqus, rumble, etc) we
| will see a more decentralized web and these tech giants
| will soon be forgotten. Hopefully, they'll take their
| toxic VCs with them, but I think that may be a pipe
| dream.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I was going to say, there are plenty of subs for pedaling
| that kind of content, but looks like the major one,
| r/NoNewNormal was just quarantined (ironic) today, which is
| often the first step towards a total ban. Reddit's a
| private company, and if they don't want that kind of
| content on their site, shouldn't that be their choice?
| pageandrew wrote:
| The problem with the "private company" line that, yes,
| they're a private company, but censorship is definitely
| still bad!
|
| Free speech is a fundamentally protected right in the US.
| From the Founder's perspective, the greatest threat to
| that right was clearly and obviously government, because
| what other entity could possibly have that much reach
| into one's life? Up until the internet age, no one could
| imagine a private company or a private individual having
| the capacity to infringe upon free speech at scale.
|
| So, we have a Constitutional right to free speech,
| protected against infringement by the government, which
| is great, but there is another threat to the free flow of
| information and ideas, and that is private corporations
| who can now infringe upon this right at scale. And we
| don't have the tools or framework to defend it, because
| private companies can do what they want? Thats not good
| enough for me. The situation is dire when private
| companies appoint themselves to be the arbiters of truth,
| because even with the best intentions, there are bound to
| be mistakes, as we've already seen. And they don't all
| have the best intentions.
| [deleted]
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| > Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and
| even words.
|
| This is the most pathetic slam against mods I have ever seen
| and shows that you haven't spent two seconds considering what
| you're criticizing.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Ironically, your comment itself also lacks any detail of
| countering or clarifying information, and is itself just a
| content-free slam on the person you replied to.
|
| Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists
| (including of words), or that the mods do have the
| blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod
| system working well, in your opinion?
| emodendroket wrote:
| If you try moderating one you'll see quickly why these
| tools are necessary.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| > Is your point that the mods don't have all these
| blacklists (including of words),
|
| Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases
| / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now)
| built in function called "Automoderator".
|
| User blacklists are done through the built in ban
| function.
|
| In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation.
| Something a moderator would be expected to do.
|
| > the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and
| expected to?
|
| They are built into the site. It would logically follow
| that it is both allowed and expected.
|
| Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum,
| any forum, to survive without moderation.
|
| > Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
|
| This is really impossible to answer.
|
| From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are
| growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation.
| A stunning success.
|
| From a lurker perspective, they never interact with
| moderators and generally get content that has been
| reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though
| this may vary by subreddit.
|
| From an active user perspective, the system may work
| well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you
| frequent and how you use the platform. There are many
| subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make
| your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those
| subreddits.
|
| However, the number of active users, according to the
| 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those
| that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even
| a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than
| that.
|
| So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
| buu700 wrote:
| I get where you're coming from, as I created
| /r/relationship_advice. The existence of such blacklists,
| even "enormous" ones, isn't inherently bad; it's just a
| reality of dealing with an enormous flood of spam on a $0
| budget.
|
| That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been
| abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should
| be used for mitigating spam -- e.g. we'll often block a
| specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or
| regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false
| positives by hand -- not generally for censoring ideas or
| "offensive" words.
|
| Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in
| /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub
| is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case
| for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common
| curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum
| like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself"_
|
| Even that will often lead to the _scunthorpe problem_.
|
| I remember well once scouring through a post that was
| rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it
| contained the phrase "tardive dyskinesia" which contained
| "tard" which alone was enough to deny the post,
| apparently.
| buu700 wrote:
| FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term
| "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the
| term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I
| personally understand it to be.
|
| In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch,
| though, it's such an extreme case with potentially
| disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly
| problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a
| small price to pay.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually
| help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is
| trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to
| push an agenda).
| [deleted]
| leereeves wrote:
| What makes you think reddit wouldn't just take the third
| party's money to push the agenda themselves, like many media
| companies do?
| paxys wrote:
| They would, but at least in that case they get paid for it.
| screye wrote:
| Reddit is simultaneously the most usable and most incompetently
| run (now that tumblr is dead) social media website on the
| internet. My hunch is that both phenomena are connected.
|
| ___________
|
| The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue
| staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset.
| This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner
| of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly
| late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly
| superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit
| motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads
| are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of
| advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine
| having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst
| ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated
| bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor
| being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story)
| makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking
| point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically
| user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be
| fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central
| purpose of their platform _cough_ tumblr _cough_.
|
| Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-
| defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't
| sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for
| monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality
| and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can
| get away with 'better' content.
|
| Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video
| hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous
| user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.
|
| _________
|
| Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not
| broken' rule.
|
| Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been
| unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they
| never fixed what was not broken.
|
| Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings.
| Most successful social media websites have figured out how to
| guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can
| maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know
| how to do either.
|
| With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start
| making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will
| be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized
| platform.
| uDontKnowMe wrote:
| I think it's a common misconception that old.reddit.com is
| still extremely popular. As a mod of a medium-large sub which
| should skew highly towards old.reddit.com (developer-focussed
| content, created at around the beginning of reddit itself), the
| percent of pageviews on old.reddit.com is right now around 8%.
| screye wrote:
| That is really interesting.
|
| Is it 8% of all users, or 8% of PC users ?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Reddit is such an amazing platform. It is the practice of freedom
| made real. Don't like the mods? Make your own subreddit. Don't
| like someone? Block them and you'll never see them. Universal SSO
| across thousands of communities makes it a trusted source for
| reviews.
|
| It is akin to social networking what Craigslist is to
| marketplaces.
|
| A magical magical place.
|
| I would have liked if it was easy to federate, I.e. make a new
| subreddit that is just like this other subreddit and posts show
| up in both. You can make multireddits with plus signs but you
| can't create a new one that is just like the old one except you
| don't censor the word "pumpkin" or whatever.
|
| Would be interesting but maybe a bad idea since it fragments the
| user base.
| civilized wrote:
| Reddit is the only major social media company that gives you the
| tools to build something resembling a human community online, yet
| it seems dwarfed in popularity and clout by products like
| Facebook and Twitter, which seem to me much less capable.
|
| But to be honest, even I don't use Reddit, although I do
| sometimes search "reddit X" when I want detailed opinions on
| product/service/business X. Their UX doesn't draw me in at all,
| especially on mobile
| 01100011 wrote:
| Is it just me, or is Reddit broken in some way about 10% of the
| time now?
|
| Overall, the site just seems janky. It used to be reliable and
| fast, say 3 years ago, but now it seems to choke on the higher
| load. I frequently encounter issues with comments not loading,
| karma not displaying, etc.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Try using old.reddit.com?
| fnord77 wrote:
| yet reddit feels like it is dying.
|
| non-political subs with very obvious political agendas.
|
| The illusion of popularity-based ranking of articles when in
| reality it is mostly curated
|
| Zero transparency on the moderators the big news and political
| subs
|
| Control freak moderators on special interest subs.
|
| Some big investors don't seem to be able to accurately gauge what
| an internet property is worth. Look at Verizon buying tumblr for
| $1 billion
| ausbah wrote:
| reddit has always been dying to people who have been using
| reddit for a long time, but don't see how that's even remotely
| true
|
| as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is
| definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has
| only continued to grow in terms of users
| okasaki wrote:
| But it does feel like it's dying.
|
| For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to
| the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in
| the past day.
|
| New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There
| are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts
| go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma
| to post where they want.
| iammisc wrote:
| > but it has only continued to grow in terms of users
|
| That's because I make a new account everytime I'm doxxed,
| banned, or censored.
|
| Now that you mention it, I realize that the reddit blocking,
| censoring and quarantining system basically is a free way to
| drive up their 'new user' count.
|
| What a joke of a website and a company. Cannot wait til it
| dies.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > it has only continued to grow in terms of users
|
| accounts, yes - but how many of those are users? versus bots
| and marketeers?
| mFixman wrote:
| Every website or internet community that I've used for over a
| year feels to me like it's dying, including HN.
|
| It's a natural reaction to change.
|
| I've been on Reddit for 11 years, and all your comments could
| apply to 2010 Reddit as well as they apply to 2021 Reddit. At
| least edgy memes on /r/atheism aren't a core part of the site
| anymore.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| As a reddit user for more than a decade: Reddit has always been
| dying (for me personally, it was the digg exodus). Everything
| you describe has been around for at least 5 years.
|
| Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user
| experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better
| general-purpose forum alternative.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Reddit has always been dying
|
| I feel the choice of Ellen Pao as interim CEO revealed what
| direction reddit was headed. Moves towards a more sanitised,
| advertiser friendly Reddit - but with slap-dash choice of how
| to apply the new era of censorship.
|
| 2014 Nov - Pao became interim CEO
|
| 2015 July 2nd - large sections of Reddit were set to private
| to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's
| director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me
| Anything interviews
|
| 2015 Jun/July - Pao was the subject of criticism and
| harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities
| (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director
| of talent was fired
|
| 2015 Aug 13th - "Watch reddit Die" was Created
|
| I can't help feel that there is a trend of selling of online
| communities as "assets" to commercial buyers that have
| opposite incentive to the members of that community - just
| look at StackOverflow. The problem is that websites come to
| own the "commons" they inspire, and then sell it off as if
| the community are happy to work for free. We need stronger
| community data-rights; like a GPL for website content.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The gems on Reddit are almost all small subreddits with a
| community feel. I'd be virtually certain that its high user
| engagement is primarily driven by users who've matched into
| smaller subreddits that closely align with their interests. The
| big, default subreddits are largely wastelands.
|
| But Reddit the platform seems to entirely ignore this dynamic.
| New users are dropped into the default subreddits, and there's
| very little tooling or onramps to help them find small
| interest-matching subs.
| mdoms wrote:
| I hear this a lot but I've never found a good small subreddit
| either. Perhaps there's a discoverability problem but I'll be
| damned if I can find one of these mythical small subreddits
| with a great community I keep hearing about.
|
| For example I love Formula 1. But the /r/formula1 subreddit
| (1.6 million subscribers) is absolute unmitigated trash.
| There are decent articles posted there, but the comments are
| a total wasteland of low-effort memes, regurgitated jokes and
| total morons with zero understanding of the sport. So where
| do I go for F1 content? How do I find one of these supposed
| small subs with good communities?
| feudalism wrote:
| reddit should just be killed off at this point. The only good
| thing about it are the smaller subreddits. The self-proclaimed
| "front page of the internet" has become the "cesspool of the
| internet" catering to the lowest common denominator of people
| out there. Tiktoks, tweets, fabricated AITA posts and more of
| the low brow variety abound.
|
| reddit (in general) has a clear and obvious political/social
| agenda apparent to anybody with a functioning brain.
| pm90 wrote:
| > The company will use the new funds to improve product features,
| focusing on how to make it easier for newcomers to explore and
| quickly understand the site, Mr. Huffman said. Reddit is also
| enhancing its video products with an eye toward more advertising.
| And the company is building its self-service advertising system,
| which could help appeal to small and medium-size business
| marketers.
|
| > Reddit is also focused on expanding internationally. Most of
| the site is U.S.-centric, Mr. Huffman said -- something he hopes
| to change.
|
| When it comes to advertising, other platforms offer a much more
| lucrative user base. Reddit users aren't worth very much to
| advertisers. International users will probably be worth even
| less. And there is no guarantee that Reddit would hit it off with
| an international audience.
|
| In short, I just don't see them doing well if they go public.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Reddit is a marketeers dream. Every corporation, product, game,
| movie studio and consumer device has a big team dedicated to
| using Reddit for free. Submissions memes and comments are posted
| by the teams, often out in the open. Reddit gets no income from
| this advertising.
|
| If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the
| platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| The more Reddit gets infected by ads, the less value the
| content will provide. Advertising is diametrically opposed to
| information sharing.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| I was done with Reddit 3 years ago. I was on Reddit the first
| week they existed. No longer of any value!
| weavie wrote:
| So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at
| Reddit. What would you spend it on?
|
| From my amateur perspective I've got,
|
| 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very
| generously and that's $1.2 million spent.
|
| I have no idea what I would do with the rest..
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Three devops to run a website in the top 25 globally? That
| would be very impressive!
| weavie wrote:
| I'm assuming they already have a load working for them, in my
| game I'm just thinking about what they could do on top of
| what they already have...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Instagram and Whatsapp had very small teams even with
| hundreds of millions of users. Reddit has more features but
| honestly the amount of money pumped in is crazy given that
| it's well, basically a collection of web forums.
|
| Remember the point of a company is to make money for the
| people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally
| doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in
| cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for
| a tech company.
| [deleted]
| useful wrote:
| Free food to keep people in the office and a giant building in
| the tenderloin with just enough security gaurds to keep your
| developers safe inside but unable to safely leave.
|
| also money for rubber ducks
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You need a mobile team, you need a spam team (or 10), you need
| people working on a portal for advertisers and the analytics
| they need, need more than 3 devops for full 24/7 coverage, etc.
| keanebean86 wrote:
| Maybe they finally upgrade the 486sx based server everything
| runs on?
|
| But seriously they could invest in some content
| discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of
| small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check
| /all or /popular.
|
| Their video player needs some major work.
|
| They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some
| category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of
| the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still
| reach some shards.
|
| Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With
| a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run
| directly off cash for a few years.
| davewritescode wrote:
| As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to know,
| but what you see on a superficial level of the product is
| probably about < 10% of the total engineering effort.
|
| Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+
| engineers right there without even talking about the core
| experience, mobile app and security folks.
|
| The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of
| redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
| weavie wrote:
| > As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to
| know,
|
| For sure, hence my question!
| covercash wrote:
| Maybe a Reddit coin? Use that money to mine it and then seed
| the Reddit ecosystem at first with coin upvotes/awards, build a
| merch market for subreddit specific merch, allow advertisers to
| list items on the marketplace funneling sales there from Reddit
| ads/promoted posts, original content -> NFT...
|
| I don't know the details but I think the core base of Reddit
| would be into a project like that.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| They actually tried that in the past and it wasn't going
| anywhere, so they nixed it.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Reddit Coins are still a thing - I have a Gold subscription
| as well.
| kristofferR wrote:
| https://www.coindesk.com/reddit-rolls-with-arbitrum-to-
| scale...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| PR and sales. Always PR and sales.
| okprod wrote:
| They've also been hiring ML
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The biggest problem is that their revenue per user is
| atrociously low compared to other social platforms. That money
| should be thrown at poaching as much ads talent as possible
| from Facebook or Twitter.
| blagie wrote:
| The problem is that throwing money rarely leads to the
| outcome desired.
|
| I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year,
| and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a
| high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
|
| The term is 'overcapitalized.'
|
| At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders
| over the core business, on pet projects, and communications
| becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows
| as a square law with the number of people).
|
| The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A
| car requires an army to engineer and produce.
|
| Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can
| holistically understand the whole system, and everyone
| involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| They need more than that for the sole purpose of making the
| mobile website experience as horrible as possible (and
| constantly iterating to make it worse and worse)
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| How else are you going to get people to download the app?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Ironically it just made me use Boost (a third party app).
| So I see absolutely zero Reddit ads unlike if I was using
| their mobile site...
| screye wrote:
| Outside of what you listed: (not all will enhance the
| experience. Dark patterns also make money)
|
| Data Scientist who can use seasonal and news virality patterns
| to predict hourly load and load balancing
|
| Data Scientist for Ads targeting by subreddit
|
| CDN person to improve content delivery and caching
|
| A person to build a half-decent video player and native
| integration of widgets/content from commonly linked websites
|
| Data Scientist that provides a more curated experience to first
| time visitors. Shadow profiles exist. Or just a 1st visit 10
| sec poll.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I would invest in B2B. Reddit should have just as much of an
| easy-to-use marketing suite like Facebook or Google have. A
| team of 10 engineers can do that in a year, then the rest of
| the money goes to sales.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I'm 60% you're joking, but on the chance you're not.
|
| You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the
| tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust &
| Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Basically this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157551
|
| Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with
| Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later
| (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly
| simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
|
| There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of
| niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen
| elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that
| yet.
| xeonoex wrote:
| Employees cost more than just their salary, but I see your
| point. So far, their attempts to make reddit more profitable
| have made the user experience terrible. "New" reddit is way
| worse than old, and is full of nagging you to use the app on
| mobile, to the point where you can't even view the content.
| I've never used the official reddit app because I've heard it's
| terrible, and there are many great alternatives.
|
| I really don't know what they should do with the money other
| than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The
| value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a
| modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many
| clones.
| hbosch wrote:
| >So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars
| at Reddit. What would you spend it on?
|
| Most of it probably goes straight to AWS.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Does reddit really use aws for hosting, cds?
| imnotreallynew wrote:
| Something that hasn't been brought up in this thread is the
| massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.
|
| Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely
| poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to
| stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in
| real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).
|
| Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably
| the worst offenders. Here's an example I just came across in
| /r/miami:
| https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see....
| The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more
| troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or
| who is controlling those networks.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has
| extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms.
|
| Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs
| anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first
| time thread + first time direct message?
| handmodel wrote:
| I wouldn't say this isn't a problem at all but the fact that
| subs have mods which have a lot of power seems to be very
| effective.
|
| I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but
| frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly
| medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And
| I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site
| I interact with the most.
| teslaberry wrote:
| in 10 years time reddit will barely exist if at all. people
| forget myspace and other garbage like it.
|
| reddit's financial structure is a giant black hole that exists to
| push stealth advertising that gets less and less competitive with
| youtube and facebook every hour.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| How do they come up with this?
|
| Is the long death of reddit, really the TikTok-isation of reddit
| into yet another vapid commercial meh-space?
|
| Will this actually succeed, or is this the pump before the dump?
| gruez wrote:
| > How do they come up with this?
|
| You mean the valuation? It's a simple formula of ([money
| raised] / [shares issued]) * [total shares outstanding]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Just a linear regress on what they raised so far?
|
| Ok, fair enough. feels overvalued though.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| No, gruez was talking about how to take the new cash
| infusion and turn it into market cap. Literally just price
| of new share times share outstanding. You wanted to know
| how they decided on the market cap to accept money for.
| It's a totally different, complex, and non-public process.
| themanmaran wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised to learn that Reddit is still VC
| dependant.
|
| Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self
| sustaining.
| closeparen wrote:
| Reddit's user base is poor and disaffected young men. Those
| might be valuable eyeballs to a warlord or a revolutionary but
| corporate America isn't buying.
| allochthon wrote:
| I used to have a similar impression. Gradually my view has
| changed. I now see it as one of the best sources of
| information on the internet on specific topics.
| closeparen wrote:
| The question for an advertising business is how much do the
| people interested in those topics spend, and how hard are
| they to reach elsewhere.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Anonymity really hurts profits.
| xtracto wrote:
| Now that they are setting up Cryptocurrencies in some
| subreddits (donuts in r/ethtrader and a couple of others that I
| don't recall right now) they should experiment with reddits
| where you initially "pay" for posting, commenting, up/down
| voting. Then somehow if your post gets upvoted or is heavily
| commented on, you get some of those tokens (shared revenue) as
| well as moderators in the subreddits that adopt that dynamic.
|
| It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam
| prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time,
| which would deter spammers and make people think twice before
| commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.
|
| It would be an interesting experiment.
| majormajor wrote:
| The cost is fascinating. Is the value of a single place for all
| these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of
| independent forums scattered across the web? For users, there's
| a high discovery value... but at the cost of apparently far
| more expense running the site than has been able to be recouped
| yet.
|
| Curious to see that even where centralization _hasn 't_
| financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money
| at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Is the value of a single place for all these conversations
| that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums
| scattered across the web?
|
| The problem with "independent forums scattered across the
| web" is that they make discovery (of users and service
| instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the
| Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like
| forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.
| adventured wrote:
| It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem
| was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network,
| and they should have done that more than a decade ago.
|
| Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was
| built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking
| advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types
| of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have
| built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space
| over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have
| eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also
| lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via
| transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying
| and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out
| to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also
| piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social
| network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in
| the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Reddit even has communities where sales are made like
| r/MechanicalKeyboards and those communities use karma and
| transaction tracking to rank sellers - the communities have
| done the proof of concept for them.
| screye wrote:
| > build a marketplace into the foundation of the network
|
| I love this.
| hbosch wrote:
| Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a
| daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement
| Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical
| ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up
| (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide
| bans rare) _and_ the tacit allowance of "objectionable"
| content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you
| don't really have fertile ground for meaningful engagement from
| an advertiser perspective.
|
| Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or
| all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone
| the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain
| communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as
| quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user
| experience...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit
| Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination
| with typical ad-blockers.
|
| Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks
| should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps
| towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers,
| and target most of their monetization towards that kind of
| user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual
| content directly from the app. Who cares about
| "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat
| pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.
| hinkley wrote:
| But every time you take more money you have to make more
| money. It's like they're trying to give themselves permission
| to do things they haven't dared to do so far.
| trts wrote:
| > if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above
| we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-
| host
|
| this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary
| threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this
| point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated
| but the value is all in the content it generated.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Maybe that points to a way they could make $: curate and
| make anthologies of the actually valuable content.
| /r/askhistorians content could be turned into a few history
| books.
|
| Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that
| they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return
| for access to a simple forum site...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| There are plenty of Reddit archiving and mirroring
| services. Pay one of those for a database dump and you're
| off to the races (copyright issues be damned)
| [deleted]
| swarnie_ wrote:
| Not sure how Reddit is worth that much... Are the 50 power mods
| in charge of 90% of the top subs selling access to state
| propaganda departments? Actually don't answer that, its painfully
| obvious.
|
| $ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media
| platforms.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| As someone who tried to advertise on reddit (though it was > 1-2
| years ago, so things may have changed)-- Reddit, along with
| Twitter, is very advertiser unfriendly. And Im not just talking
| about the users.
|
| I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a
| specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3
| months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all
| technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of
| ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise.
|
| The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to
| mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was
| shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit
| considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole
| purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures,
| just so I could run my ads.
|
| Never again.
|
| I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a
| new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want
| the hassle.
|
| Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
|
| Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big.
| Most users were indifferent.
|
| Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
|
| Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega
| valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites
| like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit
| corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech
| here - why do they need to be such money makers??
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| If they were making money, they wouldn't have to keep taking VC
| money, and further diluting their ownership.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| I tried it recently (< 2 months ago) and the experience wasn't
| too bad. This was the first real ad "campaign" I had ever set
| up. The targeted group was pretty niche and while Reddit
| suggested going broader, I was able to stick with the
| subreddits that I considered relevant.
|
| The most annoying part was the rather opaque period between
| launching, approving, and actually running the ad. The first
| real confirmation I had that things were working was a bill.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50%
| or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of
| Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen
| indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit
| compared to the other social platforms.
|
| The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is
| horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So
| the real question an investor should ask is whether this is
| fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that
| makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be
| throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl
| Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing
| monetization.
|
| [1]https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-
| daily... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-
| least-v...
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| User Engagement is inversely correlated to monetization.
| PEJOE wrote:
| Can you please provide more evidence to support this claim?
| From where I'm sitting, TikTok's and Instagram's businesses
| would disagree strongly.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| That wasn't a scientific statement. Just a theory about
| Reddit. I personally like Reddit because it's not shoving
| ad's in your face constantly and I think others do as well.
| Apologies for presenting it without labelling it as a
| theory. I would edit it now if I could.
| thefounder wrote:
| If you use digg as reference the long term outlook of reddit is
| not that bright.
| Graffur wrote:
| Digg closed before it was defeated really. I can't remember
| if it was the v3 or v4 that caused the migration but they
| didn't even try to roll back... or just stick with their new
| plan. They just gave up it seems.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Is the latest iteration of Digg a totally different entity or
| something? I have coworkers who use digg a ton - doesn't seem
| dead to me.
| ruined wrote:
| digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and
| the mistakes that killed digg have not been made.
|
| and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style
| fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of
| ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is
| already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space
| to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure.
| and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every
| mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it
| will dominate for the foreseeable future.
| lovich wrote:
| whats lemmy? Googling around all I found was articles about
| the motorhead singer and some weird dead forum from the
| 2000s about lemmy koopa
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Probably https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
| Shorel wrote:
| The new HTML layout and the obnoxious mobile website are
| worse than what killed Digg, IMO.
|
| The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes,
| Reddit was there for the taking.
|
| Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new
| sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned
| from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.
| saisundar wrote:
| Reddit currently supports many third party freemium clients (
| Ala Twitter 2012). These third party apps offer a no ad
| experience too. Unsure how much revenue reddit shares with
| these apps though.
|
| It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) ,
| but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.
| SaltySolomon wrote:
| Thats less than 0.5% of traffic tho, most of it is from the
| official apps nowerdays.
| snuxoll wrote:
| I think this is likely why Reddit has heavily pushed direct
| revenue with an expansion of awards available (cheapest ones
| are 50 coins now), in addition to the continued ad-free
| option with a premium subscription.
| brianwawok wrote:
| They will eventually shut these down to increase ad views,
| just like twitter
| edoceo wrote:
| > higher user engagement
|
| It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple
| times to finally see the content.
|
| > and time on site
|
| Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get
| their dopamine hit
|
| The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| If I'm wrong GP can correct me, but I think "engagement"
| means commenting/posting/voting, just viewing a page doesn't
| count as engagement.
| edoceo wrote:
| View page: Something went wrong, refresh, refresh, scrolls,
| clicks load more, scroll, upvote.
|
| Results: longer time and the user will now actually engage,
| because they had to "work" to get there.
|
| Complete dark-pattern to "juke the stats". And it's too
| complicated for their stupid investors to understand why
| the numbers are bullshit.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Do you have any data to suggest that a more frustrating
| viewing experience boosts engagement? Intuitively it
| should do the opposite.
| dilap wrote:
| And of course the site will just get worse and worse, but
| continue onward, because its value is in the audience, and it
| takes a lot to screw up that momentum.
|
| (What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more
| block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly,
| they have less information on their audience for targeting,
| etc.
|
| Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get
| creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for
| them might be to try and get more older users who don't care
| about ads so much and have lots of money
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Reddit is more forum than social network
|
| Reddit is mostly cat pictures and funny memes at scale, even
| calling it a "forum" is a stretch. More like a glorified
| image board.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Two specific feeds, /r/popular and /r/all, are a lot of
| this.
|
| There are a lot of good niche communities that have deep,
| meaningful conversation on Reddit.
| s5300 wrote:
| He is clearly unaware of /r/cannedsardines
| 13415 wrote:
| I've started to add +Reddit in Google searches to obtain
| useful information when I need to know something. With all
| those fake top 10 list sites and paid reviews showing up in
| searches, Reddit is pretty much the only place left for
| getting reliable product information, for example. There
| are friendly and knowledgeable subreddits about all kinds
| of topics.
| timdev2 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your taxonomy. In my mind, an
| image board is a type of forum (generally anonymous and
| ephemeral). Reddit is more like a forum than a typical
| forum than popular imageboards, since users have long-lived
| identities and posts are permanent by default.
|
| As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by
| volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of
| more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the
| site.
| leereeves wrote:
| > Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more
| older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of
| money
|
| Won't be easy getting older users on a site where "boomer" is
| a slur.
| xkjkls wrote:
| Also reddit itself gives a huge number of ways for
| advertisers to access the reddit audience without paying for
| it.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think this is reddit's biggest issue. Astroturfing is
| more effective than advertising and it's cheaper too.
| gruez wrote:
| >Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older
| users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
|
| Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they
| have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income
| drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
| wil421 wrote:
| Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in
| spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and
| somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked
| through college). I'm in the 30-40 range with kids and I
| spend much more than my twenties.
|
| Lots of college students are spending their parents money
| for these kinds of things.
|
| [1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-
| equif...
| nradov wrote:
| While older consumers do have more money to spend, most
| advertisers prefer to target younger consumers. The
| thinking is that boomers already have established brand
| preferences and spending patterns so it's much harder to
| convert them into new customers.
| xkjkls wrote:
| This is only really true for television advertising,
| since most of it is brand building, instead of "click
| here and buy now" online.
| spfzero wrote:
| That demographic is most sought-after by advertisers
| because it is the easiest to influence. The ads work better
| on them.
|
| For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more
| ads, older demographics are harder to reach.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Is it actually true that online ads work better (more
| conversions?) on that demographic? How do you separate
| the confounding factor of the effect of age and income on
| preferences?
| paulpauper wrote:
| I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like
| Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes
| due to subs becoming too crowded.
| setr wrote:
| The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-
| correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision
| it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts
| reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and
| more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and
| leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original
| sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created
| in that instant, a few survive with healthy populations.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I have been on reddit a long time and I have never seen a
| popular sub ever die unless it gets banned by admins.
| Splinter subs emerge but the original one remains popular
| too
| spfzero wrote:
| The long-tail subs will never get too crowded. If you have
| found a niche where like-minded people hang out, there will
| never be a whole lot more of them, and however many more
| there are, it's a positive.
|
| I'm thinking vintageaudio, lv426, subs like that.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that
| Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough
| "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| The only information I could find claims that about 22% of
| reddit is NSFW. They calculated the percentage of NSFW
| subreddits with >100k subscribers. [1]
|
| That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's
| around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My
| intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a
| whole pretty well.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/
| oc_...
| listenallyall wrote:
| Doesn't matter the percentage of subreddits (i.e. counting
| every qualifying subreddit equally), what is the percentage
| of eyeballs? And don't you think lots of people view porn
| subreddits without subscribing?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Well, just for the record, that doesn't invalidate what I
| said. I'm not concerned with what PERCENTAGE is porn. It
| still is the largest, most-easily-accessible, most
| searchable, free porn site. And also for the record, yes, I
| HATE that Reddit (and Twitter, et. al.) allow full-on NSFW
| content along with all the rest.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic
| that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes,
| they're far less invasive than the other platforms you
| mentioned.
|
| Just at a very high level:
|
| - no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you
| around the internet ads)
|
| - no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show
| up on 3rd party sites)
|
| - limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit
| but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity)
|
| - no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to
| males 18-35)
|
| - no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major
| metro areas of millions of people)
| subpixel wrote:
| This seems likely to change.
| underwater wrote:
| And now they're taking huge amounts of money, which means
| they need to succeed as an advertising company, which means
| they'll start doing many of those things.
| initplus wrote:
| One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is
| how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed
| for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a
| user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to
| what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an
| advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of.
|
| If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems
| like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera
| retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware -
| advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche
| interest on the site.
|
| They should be able to enable advertisers to do really
| effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with
| their current ad tools, or are they not selling the
| capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not
| actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in
| generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?
| [deleted]
| shuntress wrote:
| If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology,
| you are describing "placements". A placement with an ad in it
| shown to a user is called an "impression".
|
| I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad
| space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen
| automatically.
|
| Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some
| third party ad network and probably use fairly generic
| targeting information. The cost in time and money to either
| deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad
| network is probably significant.
| bwship wrote:
| Well they have the money part of that equation solved, at
| least for a while. How quickly can one blow through $410
| million? 18 months?
| yissp wrote:
| I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the
| three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel
| vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all
| seem at least reasonably relevant.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant.
| Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being
| interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would
| make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those
| who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time
| I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in
| /r/linux.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Agreed, Adobe creative cloud doesn't even run on Linux!
| cwkoss wrote:
| Reddit should charge for all commercial posts. It would clean
| up spam and generate revenue.
|
| Make a special class of commercial account, include some
| 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all
| commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open
| (for commercial-specific subs).
|
| Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the
| moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is
| no longer the case)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "And fix the moderator system so "first to register
| controls the sub" is no longer the case"
|
| Suggestions?
|
| This is a complex proplem.
| NortySpock wrote:
| "the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within
| the last year, with the user having more than X posts per
| year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than
| 1000 characters per post, are invited to become
| moderators"
|
| Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess
| it's not going to get you far on image or other media-
| based subreddits...
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to prod those specialized communities
| to bail to the next diggredditetc.
|
| People are going to those specialized communities to get real
| information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads
| and marketing).
| paulcole wrote:
| >People are going to those specialized communities to get
| real information from real users, not lies and
| misinformation (ads and marketing).
|
| Those specialized communities will cease to exist without
| something funding them.
|
| Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used
| to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and
| misinformation). And more importantly remember it's
| Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators
| currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are
| that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users
| to a competing service if the community is un happy with
| the monetization scheme.
| warning26 wrote:
| Eh, I'd say most of the hardcore Reddit users have both
| old.reddit as well as an Ad Blocker, so I'm guessing that
| slightly better ad configuration tools wouldn't adversely
| impact the longtime users too much.
|
| As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly
| random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed
| ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO
| (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
| tootie wrote:
| I think the problem is that reddit culture is virulently
| anti-consumerist and throw a fit every time they see an ad.
| I'll bet they get terrible conversion rates.
| l72 wrote:
| I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on
| reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and
| advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit.
|
| For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the
| 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low
| volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to
| show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.
|
| Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did
| convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high
| there, since you can only specify more general interests. It
| seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually
| worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Yes, this. Google and Facebook make it super easy to
| advertise. Whenever I've tried to advertise on Reddit,
| nothing shows up, I have no idea why, and the advertising
| UI gives me no clues.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Those publicly traded social media sites are valued at that
| rate by the public. It's possible that VC's are:
|
| 1) Valuing the company in the hopes of making a profit on the
| IPO 2) More conservative than public markets
| heywintermute wrote:
| >Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes
| it difficult to monetize?
|
| Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw
| content in general which probably hurts this. They only just
| started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from
| appearing on r/all six months ago[0]
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
| f6v wrote:
| It's not going to be Tumblr all over again if they choose to
| ban it. But I wonder how many people use Reddit just for
| nsfw.
| NationalPark wrote:
| I wonder if their problem is that the majority of their
| traffic is unregistered users looking at NSFW subreddits.
| So they may not actually have that many users they could
| monetize in the first place.
| vmception wrote:
| to me, this seems like an opportunity for new advertisers
| that don't care about "their brand showing up next to porn"
|
| is there a market rational reason why this hasn't occurred,
| or are the primary places that happen to also have adult
| content just assuming advertisers won't use their platform
|
| sure, big fortune 500 ad spends are lucrative, but so is the
| aggregate of every single half baked idea that has to test
| the waters with targeted ads
| paxys wrote:
| There is a LOT standing in the way of monetization for Reddit:
|
| - younger user base (so less disposable income)
|
| - loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads
|
| - more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away
| due to the nature of the community and content shared
|
| - primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps
|
| All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so
| without alienating their use base.
| math-dev wrote:
| I agree with most of what you say, but I thought most of the
| usage was now on the mobile app?
|
| By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and
| need to comment and confirm my understanding)
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Reddit is increasingly forcing mobile users into the app, or to
| at least make an account. Presumably to improve monetization.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And tracking/notifications. Which is of course why I don't
| install it.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Tracking and driving engagement via notifications are some
| of the most important reasons why app users can be
| monetized better than anonymous web users (user sees more
| ads if they're spending more time, and tracking allows
| better targeted and thus higher paying ads)
| kjax wrote:
| There's another big factor with mobile app users: it's
| much harder to block ads in a mobile app.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Don't most users already use mobile browsers (e.g.
| chrome) which don't support extensions and thus ad
| blockers?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Firefox on iOS supports strict ad blocking. It's not as
| good as some of the purpose-built extensions on desktop,
| but it mostly does the job.
| mateo411 wrote:
| It's easier to track in the app because of the mobile
| advertising identifier.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| That doesn't seem to be the case any more, as nearly
| everybody opts out of that on iOS.
| ska wrote:
| > And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user
| engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other
| social platforms.
|
| >The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is
| horrible.
|
| It's possible that these two things are pretty tightly linked.
| Allower wrote:
| And then you would see a mass exodus of users..
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Perhaps traffic has a reciprocal relationship with monetization
| and until Reddits management are ready to bite the bullet there
| is a tendency to focus on vanity metrics such as traffic rather
| than $.
| thisisnico wrote:
| I feel like extraordinary monetization of reddit would ruin
| reddit, and the reason why people actually like reddit.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It's already happening with the profile pages being
| implemented.
|
| I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages
| and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not
| attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and
| encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up
| without providing an email address.
|
| Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that
| encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have
| an ever more annoying culture.
|
| It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on.
| It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were
| as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes
| every other user is from the U.S.A..
| allochthon wrote:
| Reddit is one of the sites I use the most. I hope they can
| figure out a financially sustainable model without becoming
| obnoxious or, eventually, being bought up by a private equity
| firm.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| If they do ruin Reddit with monetization, I hope it also
| ruins a few people's investment portfolios along the way.
| mdoms wrote:
| I suspect (without proof) that Reddit's unique user count is
| far smaller than its actual user count. People proudly use
| multiple alts and such behaviour is tacitly encouraged by the
| platform. It's not at all unusual for a user to have alts for
| gaming, porn and other things. Obvious this phenomenon exists
| on other platforms but my gut tells me it's far more prevalent
| on Reddit.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique
| visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the
| stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time
| on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms.
|
| Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two
| Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the _norm_ on Reddit (as
| well as HN), which means Reddit 's user count is inflated by
| quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has _large_ nsfw communities
| that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with
| separate accounts!), and these can 't be reasonably monetized
| at all.
| Cipater wrote:
| >Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of
| money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a
| track record of juicing monetization.
|
| You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on
| ruining Reddit.
| spike021 wrote:
| Yet routinely their service still has incredibly poor performance
| and there are bugs in their iOS app that have been around for
| months.
|
| Crazy.
| sushid wrote:
| It was also down for a few hours this week. Can't think of many
| 11 figure companies that go down as often as Reddit does.
| vntok wrote:
| Shows that in the real world, users don't actually really
| care about having a five nines availability for a forum.
| marcusverus wrote:
| As all social media companies likely know, addicts make for
| a loyal clientele.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Reddit is 16 years old. It's one of the largest sites on the
| internet by views, users, time on site, any metric you would care
| about. They have something like 500 FTE's, which is tiny compared
| to lots of other sites with far less traffic.
|
| It's basically the perfect combination of high traffic and low
| costs, and they have raised close to a billion dollars in
| funding. If they aren't profitable now, they are very unlikely to
| ever be profitable. I think it's likely they will sell to one of
| the big players (I would guess FB) in the next 5 years or so. If
| that goes the 'usual way', whoever acquires them will immediately
| let the site fall apart and eventually shut it down, and in the
| meantime a new hot reddit/digg/slashdot like site will emerge to
| take it's place almost overnight.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Valuation was $10B per linked article for those curious (I was).
| Shorel wrote:
| More money for more censorship. Great.
|
| And for more propaganda. I still don't know which one is worse.
|
| Long gone are the days when it was a better tech site than HN.
| marketingtech wrote:
| I would imagine most of these investments will go to three
| places:
|
| * Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs,
| leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way
| more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough
| revenue to justify a $10b valuation
|
| * Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale
| user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to
| subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though
| you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may
| scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to
| avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane
| content
|
| * Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out
| unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights.
| this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal
| sense
| baud147258 wrote:
| so more money so they do another UI redesign that's again going
| to reduce usability and push mobile users towards their app?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/2kQBG
| sergiotapia wrote:
| In the hn tiktok thread, I saw a salient comment that said: "When
| I visit reddit I just leave angry".
|
| Tiktok doesn't have this problem. I always have fun on that app,
| and leave feeling like it was a good time. Reddit is the total
| opposite. Nothing but people screaming and mods power-tripping,
| forever.
|
| Never experienced a website that objectively has such terrible
| impact on peoples lives. Are they going to use this money to turn
| it around?
| barbazoo wrote:
| I found that if you stick to very specific subreddits there is
| a way to use the site without getting angry.
| iammisc wrote:
| I don't think i've ever been to reddit.com without an /r/
| after the name.
| post_break wrote:
| That's all dependent on the subs you visit. I have learned so
| much on reddit. News and leaks before it breaks anywhere else.
| How to 3D print stuff. Extremely complicated laws and how to
| avoid going to prison for stuff I knew nothing about.
|
| Reddit is the ultimate "it is what you make of it" website. If
| you spend your time in the subs that make you angry then yeah,
| but if you narrow it down to only things you like you'll have a
| great time.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| That has not been my experience, and I've browsed some
| _really_ niche subreddits for a "famous" group of
| bodybuilders in Delray beach if you catch my drift.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| The front page is a perfected outrage machine. I don't think
| even Twitter comes close to it.
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