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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental answer to what changed with Reddit over the last 3-5 years – an IPO became the main goal of the company[1](2017):

> Reddit may go public by 2020, said CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman during a keynote conversation at the Internet Association’s Virtuous Circle Summit on Monday. “The time frame is pretty far out,” he admitted. However, he also argued that going public was inevitable for Reddit to both reward employees and investors, calling it “the only responsible choice” for the company.

[1] https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/reddit-ipo-1202613811/

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Are there any other tech companies that have IPOed with the same amount of pornography content as reddit has?

Reddit tries ridiculously hard to hide its porn, even though it's 5% of the posts on rising and more than 20% of the posts on new.

Twitter

Netscape

What does that have to do with using their web site versus their app

It increases engagement metrics, which is the most important thing for an ad company looking to raise more money in the future.

"Apps increase engagement metrics" seems dubious to me. Maybe for certain companies and products it is true, but the norm is to have a website and app experience. It is not necessarily the norm to have the website aggressively drive people to the app to the extent Reddit.com does.

I imagine Reddit's website gets tons of traffic from "non users" coming in on shares and searches who will never consider installing a Reddit app no matter how many modals they put up but nevertheless driving ad impressions.

> "Apps increase engagement metrics" seems dubious to me. Maybe for certain companies and products it is true, but the norm is to have a website and app experience.

A product that is entirely based on user generated content is exactly the type of thing that requires active rather than passive users.

Mobile websites are generally optimized for passive consumption, and mobile apps – for active creation.

you put it so simply i almost missed it: they are an ad company

Interesting that this was before the most recent Chinese funding round. I wonder if an IPO is still 3 years away.

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