Ask HN: Did Reddit ever end up giving equity to any of its users? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did Reddit ever end up giving equity to any of its users?

112 pointsjimhi51 comments

https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6874353/reddit-50-million-funding-give-users-10-percent-stock-equity

I always thought this was a bold idea and yet I never heard anything about it after was this one comment from Sam Altman's AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2hwr02/i_am_sam_altman_lead_investor_in_reddits_new/ckwqv8x/

Did it not pass regulation or did they just abandon the idea?

Gigster also made similar claims and I have not heard anything since: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/gigster-fund/

View on HN

They just announced the vault. Which uses what they call "community points"

https://www.reddit.com/vault/

Aaaand it forces you to use their bloody app on mobile...

Reddit just can't take a hint it seems.

That's been their priority since it was released and "hints" from users are just ignored as anyone can see if you go to the site with a browser and you have to close the banners reminding you to install the app.

What hint?

Mobile is growing and Reddit is a business.

The hint that we don’t need an app. What use is served by the app over the website? The only thing I can think of is that you can’t (easily) block ads on an app, but can in a browser (if it lets you).

Sure, they’re in the business to make money, but if enough users leave because of the app and ads being shoved in their face, Reddit will start to make less money than they did without the app. It’s not gonna happen anytime soon, but it’ll happen eventually. Reddit won’t last forever, just like Digg and /. didn’t. Sure, they still exist, but (last I heard) their active user numbers keep going down.

Boy, glad they missed the video is growing train.

Mobile is huge and most people will consume Reddit via mobile.

The flaw is that Reddit is also based upon content creation and these people don't use mobile to create or at least not their app.

I happen to create on mobile, on Reddit all the time.

Hate the app.

Chrome or Firefox works just fine.

At this point they should have enough datapoints to know whether their strategy works out. Them continuing indicates that the hints of the loud is just the whistling of a minority.

That makes the assumption that the user is both happy with the "reddit app" even though they are being railroaded into using it and that the interests of reddit and the user are coincident.

No, it just makes the assumption that most users (with value to reddit) will tolerate the practice in order to get to the site's content. Whether or not they're happy with the app or being railroaded is orthogonal.

Or they're just incompetently ploughing through with a strategy that's damaging them.

Their mobile website is so atrociously bad, and the mobile app is not much better. Personally I use the Apollo app; it's 100x better than either, and I know reddit is only tracking me insofar as the API requests Apollo sends to them.

I have an auto redirector that changes www. to old.

It links this URL to this post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IWantToLearn/comments/vault/iwtl_ho...

Very odd.

Odd? That post just got randomly assigned the short URL of "vault". These are usually short random alphanumeric ascii. Not so weird to me

They are not random. They are consecutive numbers in base36.

I recently saw it mentioned that another site's URL ids were consecutive numbers in base 52, and then base 36 here. I was previously only aware of the use of base 64, so my interest was piqued — why choose one over the other?

It looks like the reason is that in base 36 information can be encoded in the 26 characters of the alphabet plus 10 numeric characters. In base 52 you can use the same, but case-sensitive and possibly without vowels. This makes it work nicely in URLs.

I was going to ask the significance but thought I'd post what I found instead.

Oh so that is what they meant by odd! The base36 number is odd (52574321 in decimal). https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vault+base36+to+decimal&t=ffab&ia=...

I redirect www. to ns. And the same happened to me... That leads me to believe that old. and ns. won't be there for much longer.

I've read through the FAQ and still have no idea what this is?

Reddit has changed ownership structure significant since these comments were made. It is highly unlikely that Tencent would be willing to see their $300 million investment from last year diluted at all [1]. Tencent is also one of the largest companies in China, essentially a State Owned Enterprise (SOE). Such a move would clearly privilege American users, who have been on Reddit significantly longer, than it would Chinese citizens.

Keep in mind the telecom connections to add the internet to China were not made until 1994, and residential was not available even to Beijing until 1997.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/amp/

Tencent owns a portion of reddit? BRB deleting my account.

edit: done https://www.reddit.com/user/nsielicki

You know, on HN I at least expected some nuanced discussion about this idea more than typical Reddit threads, but even here it devolves into "Tencent has a stake in Reddit, everythings censored, China Bad." Think constructively here. I am not touting any of my points as facts that China isn't massively censoring Reddit media, but take these as you will.

1. Tencent's stake is only 10%. This is far less than other VC ownership, and it shows. Reddits board of directors are all placed by American VC firms, and of course the founders themselves [1]. The majority of Reddit's funding is from individual investors and AMERICAN VC funds.

2. Reddit is banned in China. If all these CCP posts get so many awards, which in turn provide (probably negligible) revenue for Reddit, it would make more sense to let all of them slide by instead of ban every single one of them. After all, these "revelations" never reach Chinese users anyway, because there are none.

And honestly, can't you use Occam's razor here? I know I am being very generous here about the CCP/Tencent, but don't you think that when Tencent makes foreign investments... they do it so that they can... wait for it... extract more value from them? This is all supposition, but Tencent will likely not invest in companies like Reddit on the basis of "Oh, a free speech platform, we can get money from this AND stifle their free speech, which is a literal selling point of Reddit in the first place!" I'm going to assume here that Tencent's goal is to make money first. If this is the case, it is in their benefit to maintain the integrity of Reddit, lest it receive the (ultimately meaningless) "wrath" of their "politically aware" userbase. Do these ideas 100% disprove that Tencent somehow influences Reddit to censor anti china posts? No. Am I at least making an attempt to think critically about the situation instead of falling on my crutch of "China involvement --> bad?" I think I am.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0893288D:US

I'm surprised by this too, and then again not really. The Trump strategy to blame China seems to work really well and fit right in with some of the knee-jerk reactions in the tech-world, which does have a strong libertarian tendency.

Censorship is the devil of tech world, and invoking the image of our Satan does not lead to cool and rational thinking. The West tends to want an outside scapegoat these days because things are getting ugly in it's backyard, and China is fit for purpose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com