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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Reddit, from a business perspective, baffles me. During the Yishan Wong/Ellen Pao era, we had Reddit-Made and Reddit TV, both of which bombed especially. Under Alexis Ohanian, we had Upvoted and Formative which as the article notes were killed silently.

Reddit released a native app and an image host years too late. (I just checked the data and it is not killing Imgur: Reddit image usage was 18% in the top image subreddits at beginning of June, today it is 25%).

The biggest fundamental change Reddit has made in the time since is...making self-posts count for karma. And tracking outbound links.

It really shouldn't be that impossible to have a successful business with hundreds of millions of users. Especially with the wealth of data available to Reddit.

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> I just checked the data and it is not killing Imgur: Reddit image usage was 18% in the top image subreddits at beginning of June, today it is 25%

that seems like a pretty significant rate-of-uptake to me - why would you say it's not killing imgur?

Here's the plot of the Imgur and Reddit pics market share on /r/pics and /r/gifs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cgoFF6njlyv1W0DQ3IF5...

There is growth in Reddit Pics and decline in Imgur, but it'll be a few months before the lines intersect. A cry from the Imgur killer everyone expected.

Unless at some point in the near future you turn off the imgur spout.

I would love to "fail" by steadily increasing growth, becoming #1 in a ~year.

It's not apples-to-apples to traditional startup analogies when there is a giant UPLOAD IMAGE button on the Reddit submission page.

Not sure how this proves your point. Reddit is about to overtake Imgur...

just how fast do you expect these things to happen? overtaking the overwhelmingly dominant reddit image sharing host in a matter of a few months sounds pretty damn dramatic to me.

I think it's that's a very good rate of growth for a new service. The scaling challenges alone are not obvious and slowly taking up market share is the safer thing to do. If I was an investor seeing these growth rates, I'd be really happy as long as it keeps up and only plateaus when the goal is reached.

I wonder how much of not evolving the site is due to legacy code. A few years ago I briefly read some of their code, since it is open source, and found it difficult to understand due to a lack of comments and descriptive function and variable names. And it is all Python. So basically any change to the code can be catastrophic because you have no guarantees everything will still work.

I tried doing some work with their code base around 5 or 6 years ago and at that time it basically didn't work out of the box and had no tests. Or at least their released code didn't.

Some of the problems were actual bugs that seemed odd in a production code base, and others were because they had stripped everything relating to some paid services they used for search or indexing or stuff that I don't remember.

In general it was a huge PITA to do anything with compared to what the leadership was hoping. (That it's be like the WordPress in terms of required investment was what they'd been hoping for.)

To have a successful business, there must be an underlying assumption one of your goals is to actually become a successful business. That would seem to be self-evident, but in the discussions I have seen regarding reddit ever turning a profit, their leadership says it is not a priority. I'm not sure why anyone would have expectations of business success in such a scenario.

It's not. Reddit could easily sell targeted ads based on subreddits (e.g. inking a deal with Uniqlo to advertise on /r/malefashionadvice or /r/femalefashionadvice).

It chooses to pursue other monetization means to preserve the Reddit experience.

We'll see if it's able to stumble onto another sustainable business model.

The problem is most high quality advertisers don't want to have their brand promoted along side user generated content. So while Reddit has a ton of traffic, much of that traffic is worthless to the most desirable advertisers.

Isn't that exactly Facebook's business model?

Sort of. Facebook also pours money into making its platform family-friendly through moderation teams, auto-detection of obscene/inappropriate content, etc. Not to mention all the analytics and targeting capabilities of their advertising programs. Being a household name, they're also so huge that it's impossible to ignore - grandma's not on Reddit but there's a pretty good chance she's on Facebook.

Exactly the same problem as Tumblr.

I could see ads if used sparingly and subtly. I applaud their effort to find alternate ways to finance.

They do this. http://reddit.com/advertise

> It's not. Reddit could easily sell targeted ads based on subreddits

Except Redditors are explicitly anti-advertising. You can't have both - the current community/culture and billions in revenue.

Ad-haters at quite capable of running adblockers, and they aren't all of Reddit. Most people tolerate tasteful ads

True, but you can't scale tasteful ads.

> It's not. Reddit could easily sell targeted ads based on subreddits (e.g. inking a deal with Uniqlo to advertise on /r/malefashionadvice or /r/femalefashionadvice).

I think they would love to do that, but for whatever reason Uniqlo and others won't buy in. Maybe someone will correct me, but I think they've been trying to sell more ads for many years with little success.

If the aim was to beat Imgr then it seems strange that the 'upload image to reddit' feature is only available on certain subreddits

Pao is thoroughly an MBA-type. Business schools teach that the way to wealth is to start a startup and have it acquired. Or, failing that, work your way into a nascent startup and get bought out. Every post from her that I saw simply oozed business-school sleaze. Pao's discourse was more appropriate for the boardroom than for the embodiment of alt-media that is Reddit. Gratingly so, and Yishan to a lesser extent. I honestly think they both were simply too "corporate" to succeed in an environment that resents big interests.

There simply hasn't been someone with vision and the skills to deliver at the helm.

Frankly I think it's because anyone competent is wise enough not to touch Reddit with a 10-foot pole.

I think Yishan Wong goes in the completely opposite direction. I think the opposite direction is better BTW. I really wish for example the restrictions can be reduced or removed so board of directors (like @pmarca) can tweet more on public companies.

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