Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

cnn.com

175 pointspseudolus145 comments

Reddit is searching for something, but I don't think they've introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits. They've added and removed community chat rooms [0], they still have some other kind of chat that I don't know if anyone uses, when I happen to visit new Reddit there's some kind of streaming broadcasts that I don't see anyone liking. And of course the redesign, but I suspect that their metrics show that a majority of users like it, so it's just old users like med that are put off by it. Recently they introduced Topics [1], but it's not supported by the API, so you need to use their apps.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/kb99yk/introduci...

As sad as this is, this seems to be true. I am thinking hard about what reddit has introduced. Cannot come up with anything.

I do like their mobile app though

I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.

> forever

I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.

I expect features to just stop working on old.reddit as we get further away from the redesign, whether it be updates internally or full new features. This will continue until it gets unusable and then they'll kill it because 'nobody uses it!'

I noticed polls don't work on old reddit. Then don't even show in the feed. If you visit the poll directly it expands as some sort of embedded new reddit.

They've already started taking small steps in this direction. For example, about a year and a half ago they added the option for subreddit moderators to "lock" an individual comment to prevent others from replying to it (previously it was only possible to lock entire threads). They deliberately avoided exposing this functionality through the old Reddit UI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/brgr8i/moderators_...

On mobile they already limit how many comments you can view and force you to sign in otherwise.

Signing in doesn’t remove the limit. They want you to download their app.

With the recent new features they have been adding, I would consider old.reddit not supporting them as a feature rather than a bug.

As others have said, none of the new features they have added have been desirable.

https://i.reddit.com still lives

I think you're right. Part of the clue is in the name 'old' which in the IT world is often associated with something you'd want to remove, tech debt, baggage, staleness. What they'll be looking for is the right messaging to force a migration to new.

In a similar vein, there is Adobe Lightroom Classic. There are still people who aren't giving in to Adobe's predatory subscription model, but at some point the "Classic" will be deprecated in favor of "Cloud"

Exactly, when the cost outweighs the revenue benefits for the deprecated solution it is easy to justify killing it.

Indeed, and at which point, I stop using reddit. Perhaps as a search extension (ie, "site:reddit.com topic") every so often.

The day reddit drops old.reddit.com is the last day I ever visit. The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.

Reddit's video player more or less does not work

It works as a content rip-off machines, which is exactly what it was designed for...

but yeah in a vacuum it blows

Every now and then a play a video on Reddit to see if it works yet, and the answer is always no.

Sometimes the first second or two plays though.

It works, but the video restarts at least once, sometimes two or three times, before it finally plays correctly. Its very annoying

It makes me wonder what's going on at a technical level, that it's still broken after all this time. I would have figured that a dependable native video player is a solved problem.

> The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.

That's not entirely true... the redesign has some moderation and content submission improvements. But, if you don't mod or submit content then you might not notice those improvements.

That said, like digg, the redesign is also missing a lot of features that old.reddit has. So, if they don't want to digg v4 themselves (which is what made Reddit popular to begin with) then they have to at least keep old.reddit around until there is feature parity.

They will definitely shed a lot of users when they drop old.reddit but anyone who uses particular subreddits for their hobbies and interests may bite the bullet and get used to the redesign if they like the community enough. Hopefully Reddit Enhancement Suite makes a lot of improvements when that happens because RES makes reddit so much better.

> That said, like digg, the redesign is also missing a lot of features that old.reddit has. So, if they don't want to digg v4 themselves (which is what made Reddit popular to begin with) then they have to at least keep old.reddit around until there is feature parity.

It was less the features or lack there-of that drove Digg users away with v4, and more the change in culture around news websites being "official" and auto-submitting their stories.

I guess it probably varies by user then. Some of the features I used everyday were gone so I finally decided to have a serious look at reddit. I had never taken it seriously before because it looked awful by comparison. But, once you got past the poor design aesthetic, it was a much better community. So, as much as I like old.reddit, I don't blame them for improving the design, it is a turnoff for anyone who is design savvy.

>That's not entirely true... the redesign has some moderation and content submission improvements. But, if you don't mod or submit content then you might not notice those improvements.

But the only reason that is true is because they consciously left those new features out of the old interface. The improvements for moderators could be added to the original layout just the same.

For actually using the site the old design is about 100x better in every way except for mindless scrolling.

> they consciously left those new features out of the old interface

Sure. But to be fair, that is true with most new versions of any software... the developers could always commit resources to adding the new features to the old version too, but they're trying to migrate users to the new version so they don't have to commit resources to two versions.

To be frank, everyone complains about the design of new Reddit, but my biggest problem is just how incredibly slow it is.

Plus, it feels like I get CDN inaccessible or server busy errors daily.

I just tried loading both websites in private windows on firefox and ublock origin:

old reddit loads in 1.75 seconds, 77 requests, and 10 things blocked by uOrigin, and I can see 8 pieces of news on the page which take most (75+%) of the visual real estate

new reddit loads in 4.75 seconds, 177 requests(!), 13 things blocked by uOrigin, and I can see one(!) actual item, which takes roughly 20% of the visual real estate

The new design also leads to one error in the console as my browser blocked a font ("downloadable font: rejected by sanitizer"). I can't imagine using their new design at all, and I'm not sure how they can justify the gap in these metrics for a company worth billions, unless a complete lack of useful information taking 3 times longer to load is what's trending.

edit: and it's not just me, pretty much any online tool I found gives similar outcomes.

https://www.dareboost.com/en/comparison?reportIds=a_25fd7b3a...

Why not just use a 3rd party client?

If they’re going to deactivate old., I imagine they’ll kill the api too.

I wonder if there's an opportunity here for someone to snag a domain such as oldreadit.com (it's available right now) and set up shop, ready to offer disgruntled old.reddit.com users a new home when it's inevitably turned down/broken further -- or earlier.

Perhaps use Lemmy, which is trying to evolve into a distributed (federated) architecture:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

The gimmicky name would not be needed, of course, if somehow the old.reddit.com community could use some decision making tool to agree on which alternate reddit implementation/domain to settle upon. Is someone working on solving this coordination problem?

The absence of a reddit competitor on the open internet despite reddit's flaws suggests that the technically advanced users have already reassembled somewhere on an .onion domain. If the old.reddit.com users had the means to start something new, they would have done it a long time ago.

I very much doubt the conclusion that a lack of clearnet alternative means people have assembled on TOR. That's ludicrous honestly.

There have been a number of reddit alternatives over the years, typically the result of some act of over-moderation that drives angry people to alternatives. These always become cesspools of hate & racism because they advertise as 'free speech' alternatives (due to swinging too far in the opposite direction that drove people there in the first place).

I think most people who want to use the old interface are simply just using the old interface. Until they completely drop it I don't think that will change. Because anyone can start a reddit clone but it's useless until you can convince a mass amount of users to switch & stay there, which is extremely difficult.

I 100% understood that, which was in fact the background of my thesis: it looks like they are going to be forced ("relegated", even) to maintain old.reddit.com forever because, explicitly, so many people aren't upgrading and the new design isn't succeeding in motivating these people to upgrade (even years later!). I mean, someone else on this thread noted that the new design seems to only have twice as many page views as the new design?! LOL

They aren't forced to do anything, if a small enough minority of users goto old.reddit.com they will willingly deprecate it due to the cost reduction. Sometimes a small hit is beneficial even if it harms your customers because of the reduced operational cost. Simplifiers allow you to do a lot of things faster.

Recently learned about Teddit.net on HN. That's now my go-to... Better than old.Reddit.com

However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it

> However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it

Maybe a feature, not a limitation.

It's definitely a limitation. I subscribe and participate in a number of smaller/niche/hobby related subreddits. Not being able to participate makes it completely useless for people like me.

There are great places and discussions on reddit once you filter out all the popular subs.

I agree. I visit Reddit and HN to engage with other people.

If I just wanted to read, I'd directly subscribe to a select set of blogs.

The redesign was a massive success. The goal was to turn reddit into a typical social media property, and it worked. Real conversation was pushed aside into niche subreddits, and was replaced by typical social media filler crap, like r/funny and pics and wholesomememes, etc. It was bad before, but I just feel like the redesign made it 100x worse. Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens. The content on the front page is exactly what I would expect to see on my Facebook timeline or on the Instagram explore page, which I see now was Reddit's goal from the start.

It would be interesting to sort the highest rated comments and group them based on if they originated from old reddit or new.

I suspect all of the high quality content comes from old.reddit.com.

This has always been a thing; way before all of this, default subs had the same effect, to the point where subs that were getting big would actively jockey to not become default and get ruined by popularity.

> Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens.

This has nothing to do with the new design. If Reddit was ever a place for “serious, well thought discussion”, it hasn’t been that way for the past 10 years.

It really depends on the subreddits. The smaller and more engaged the community, the better the discussions. As subreddits scale in size, the discussions get proportionally worse.

Perhaps for you. I joined in 2013, and wouldn't know half of what I do if it weren't for conversations on r/webdev and r/web_design. Such topics would have been shut down on StackOverflow because it broke some cardinal rule that nobody except people that spend all day on SO would know about.

That's just for work related things. In terms of having conversations about relationships, or sports, or new phones and tablets, I wouldn't even think of having these anywhere but Reddit.

Granted, I don't spend time on r/pics, or r/teenagers or whatever is on the front page. But I don't click the "Trending" tab on Youtube either.

I learned Swedish by browsing r/sweden for about two years

>tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens.

I only recently started reading HN after many years on Reddit, and even though a portion of what gets posted here is too technical and techy for me, I truly appreciate the thoughtful nature of the comments. It's quite a relief just to communicate with people who seem basically sane, mature, and intelligent.

I think the redesign worked exactly as well as it was supposed to. Looking at this graph for a subreddit with approx. 4 million subscribers, the unique pageviews are quite high on the redesign. The official mobile app, however, blows them both out of the water.

https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png

Given how much they were pushing to convert everyone to the new design, and how undiscoverable the old design is to new users, I'm very surprised that the new design has only twice the unique pageviews of the old design.

Am I missing something here? old reddit on iphone is just unusable- need to pinch zoom for everything. I so much prefer the new one at least on mobile.

I don’t think Reddit needs any major feature other than search. When I search google, I basically append ‘Reddit’ to my query. It’s where all the real answers are, there are no more websites (who would have thought, the real rival to google is Reddit).

I don't either, but that's not how VC backed companies work. It's not good enough to stay usable for the current users, you need growth, and preferably as much as possible. I don't know what kind of service they're aiming for, but it's basically a meme feed now, with some political echo chambers thrown in.

I’ll address your last point. I think when you talk about scale, the fact will arise that a lot of the internet are just kids. Take a look at TikTok, at scale, you’re just going to get a lot of more kids using the thing. It’s probably one of the reasons we all gravitate to HN, because for better or worse, people here are working adults or on the cusp of it (college). I really cannot deal with a bunch of k-12/college kids discussing something. I have no clue how Reddit can solve this as they want growth (you need the kids).

On the opposite side of that, why should Reddit make their search better if everyone already knows not to use it?

Google works just fine.

Spending the money to improve and code a new search function doesn’t gain them anything. They’d just lose money on the implementation.

I’d disagree. I get my best answers with a ‘Reddit’ tacked on to Google, or searching YouTube for an answers video.

Their presentation would have to model the behavior in a way that feels fresh, but the raw value of their content is already validated. The situation right now is that people’s muscle memory is tied to the verb ‘googling’.

Pushing ‘search.reddit.com’ will not appear different enough to people. They’d have to brand and present it uniquely. It’s a lot more ambitious than pushing their mobile Reddit app, so it’ll never happen.

> Google works just fine.

How do you search by most recent on Google? What does that even mean in the context of searching for web-page content?

Google's search is severely lacking because it's targeting a platform that has no uniform index. This is part of what keeps the public misinformed.

I fairly regularly use the “search tools” option in google to filter results to within the past day, or month, or whatever.

Thats not the same as ordering by content posting/creation. Thats by indexing pass.

Eh, to be honest I don’t mind the broadcasting.

I’ve watched/listened to a few people for 10-20 minutes at a time. I know that’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve never been even the slightest bit interested in watching streams.

Multireddits is a good feature that has been introduced after subreddits, because there is a limit of how many different subreddits you get on your frontpage (wich goes up with gold IIRC).

On of the worst thing they did (excluding the new design obviously) was removing the upvote/downvote counter.

I think Reddit would be better if they removed the karma counters completely. They can still use votes as a signal for sorting, but having numbers attached to posts and comments seem to affect people's opinions on that content too much.

For sure. It's like going to interview someone with the previous interviewer telling you every has hated them so far.

Fun fact, multireddits existed very early on after publicly created subreddit launched, they just didn't have a UI for a very long time. But you could always do multiple reddits with a + between them. That's how we constructed your front page on the backend, we just didn't expose the URL.

Oh yeah I forgot about that, it still works!

The live thread feature is alright.

The stickers you can give out is a cool monetization.

RPAN is pretty cool.

Text only posts were launched after subreddits. That has lead to some of the best parts of reddit.

Don't forget very awkward video clip hosting.

> I don't think they've introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits

I think they've added plenty.

* Text only posts.

* Polls.

* Being able save individual posts instead of just threads.

* Friends. I use it to follow a few people who make stuff outside of Reddit but post intermittently on their respective subreddits. I don't use it at all for following my actual friends.

* Various features that prevent one subreddit from raiding others. np links are one, but there are others.

* Subreddit CSS.

* Mods being able to hide scores and the downvote button on their subreddit. It's a shame this isn't something done at the API level, as it means apps just ignore it.

* Suggested comment sorting. Can mitigate the natural tendency for a group to become an echochamber.

* Some of the features of reddit Gold are pretty good but considering you have to pay for them, they ought to be.

* Buying rewards is probably the least bad monetization scheme they could have come up with.

* While their image and video hosting is kinda crappy, it is there and it seems like imgur had to get less aggressive about forcing you to get an account.

I've been a Reddit user for about a decade and I really love RPAN, the streaming broadcast you refer to. I often find really interesting music made by talented artists, and I appreciate that the performances are done in a kind of off-the-cuff, low-key way.

Yes, I have never been much into the whole streaming thing, but for some reason, for now at least, RPAN seems to be hitting just the right amateurish tone to keep me engaged.

Though I dread the day when the people who made the new front page UI turn their attention to RPAN...

Reddit is an example of a product I'd pay for less of. Give me basic functionality, simple UI, and no growth hacks. I'll give you an annual subscription.

Well v.reddit isn't really working for them e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/fqbcat/i... or https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/8oa1ag/why_ar... ... what I wonder if whether that's a lack of engineering effort by reddit or more missing peering agreements or both?

"not working"? It usually works fine for me. The only thing I noticed is that during peak hours the videos would be low quality or would buffer.

The videos work fine for me in the mobile app but almost never work right on the desktop Reddit. I’m still using the old layout, so maybe the issue Is fixed on the slow new design.

The videos usually just don’t start playing. I have to tap a second or two into the video, then toggle play/pause a few times.

Personally I find their video player annoying from a UX perspective (although I only use browser, mostly via old.reddit) and the performance erratic (from Switzerland). I'm guessing peering is a factor for example this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/drf7na/vreddit... ... that means for some people v.reddit will be great and for others awful, depending where you are in the world.

You know, v.reddit has never worked for me but I chalked it up to noscript/firefox/old-reddit idiosyncrasies. Crazy that its actually a global issue and has been for over a year. I'd really like to know the behind-the-scenes on this one.

> v.reddit has never worked for me but I chalked it up to noscript/firefox/old-reddit idiosyncrasies.

same for me

Another obligatory "same here."

Even disabling it doesn't get it to work for some reason unless I clear all my history related to it or something.

works fine for me with firefox + old reddit + RES. breaking on noscript is probably expected because almost all web video players are js based. You might be able to mitigate that by navigating to the video file directly, eg. https://v.redd.it/1m6ye7yto4561 -> https://v.redd.it/1m6ye7yto4561/DASH_1080.mp4

v.redd.it (which is just a domain for hosting their own videos) works fine on the reddit app and reddit.com (even old.reddit.com + RES works fine for me).

It's mind-boggling. I can easily view videos on desktop or mobile hosted on youtube, streamable, clippuser, imgur, gfycat. All load and play really quickly even on an old, crummy phone. Meanwhile v.reddit.com is slow as hell, can't scrub, controls don't work in full-screen. And it's been that way for years with no improvement.

I don’t know why v.reddit doesn’t work, all I know is that if I get the hls address and stick it in a video tag, it’s pretty reliable.

This likely means that they’re doing something so badly that they break something that already works. Good job.

Any problems you see are likely on the video players side, not the CDN/hosting side. If you like working on this stuff, there's a job open!

https://boards.greenhouse.io/reddit/jobs/2168814

Reddit introduced image/video hosting to fix the problem of all Reddit submissions eventually linking to content that 404ed.

That it’s not the best experience doesn’t completely damn it. A slowly loading video is better than a 404ing video in Reddit’s trove of aging but still relevant topics.

Also, users complaining that it’s not as fast as Youtube (your evidence) doesn’t mean it’s “not working out for Reddit.” It has perf/UX issues but it’s a huge boon for the users that click in to a topic with a video that would have otherwise 404ed.

Hmm, Reddit seems purpose-built for very recent and fresh discussions compared to a forum, where a thread could be active for years and years. I'm not sure I'm buying the 404 thing.

That might be a dumb question but why all companies are trying to grow outside their core product? From what I see from the comments, all previous attempts from Reddit to extends to new domains have more or less failed. Shouldn't they just invest and focus into making their core product better, slicker, faster, instead of absolutely trying to conquer new territory?

The question is not dumb, but I suppose the answer is simply a qualified "no", as in "we can't reach our targets by relying solely on our main/single property, so we need to find a way in the next X years to leverage it to meet them or we will close / be sold for peanuts / get fired (the management, I mean)"

Platforms are terrified of being "deprecated" in the minds of consumers. The history of the web is littered with platforms that have come and gone.

If platforms are guaranteed to come and go, then maybe the concept of building a business model around a platform is what's wrong. It can usually work for a decade or two, but people move on. I'm sure some sizable group thought MySpace would be forever.

Because the core product doesn't make money.

It's easy to make fun of UI changes but... reddit on mobile without using their app is near unusable. You can't see all the comments and both the top and bottom of the screen is telling you to use their app.

I use it on the desktop too, but mobile is where old.reddit.com is actually a _requirement_ for me

For desktop I agree.

For mobile:

reddit.com/.compact

Realistically old.reddit.com on mobile is usable but you end up having to pan and zoom all the time.

This is my theory - Dubsmash buyout by Reddit could be purely a bet on short form video content in Indian market. After TikTok was vacated forcibly, Dubsmash and other homegrown alternatives grew 155% in just 3 weeks[1] and with 30.4M users India is likely the largest market for it.

Reddit might even be able to get its ROI on Dubsmash from just the Indian market.

[1]https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-alternatives-growth-indi...

Reddit has always been shit since the redesign: broken scroll, broken video hosting, dark patterns up the wazoo.

I wonder if/how soon we'll see a degradation to similar poor usability in dubsmash, or if the people working there can manage to hang on to their product as it is...

Its a terrible thing to see companies failing to compete or in this case fix their shit then arrive at the conclusion buying up smaller companies will solve their problems. The SV mindset with deep pockets is a problem.

Search has always been absolutely terrible... it's nearly 2021... how can a billion dollar outfit still have terrible search?

For a platform that drives revenue through continued engagement, clicks, views, and activity... could functioning search be considered an anti-feature?

If I can't find what I want, I'll start a new post, or reply to a comment… leading to people getting notifications, leading to clicks, more replies, …

Because they don't care if you can search. In fact, they probably don't want search too be tooo good.

* Good search means you could find stuff easily

* Bad search means you're more likely to post again and continue the re-engagement circle.

Also their pathetic attempts to get you to use the app are half-baked. The deep links are broken most of the time and just send you to the app store even if the iOS client is installed, where you press open and it takes you to /r/all regardless of where you came from.

it's so hard for me to contemplate how they can not fix this. You restrict everyone from viewing your website unless they install your app then a basic redirection to the said app doesn't happen.

The amount of dark patterns Reddit has introduced in their web app is ridiculous.

At first, they would prompt you to install the web app every other page load, and now they don't even let you expand comment threads.

Why spend so much time and resources on rebuilding your web app if you're gonna cripple the experience so much? The funny thing is it makes conversion rates on the web app even worse, so they have even more reason to push you onto the native version.

Yeah, I remember them randomly enabling it for years, basically gaslighting users whenever they would bring it up saying that “we shouldn’t ask you to login, if it is doing it that’s a bug”. But clearly they were just A/B testing it to the point where they could enable this all the time.

The general public are reddits audience now not "early internet adopters". I know from running a geographically based small niche subreddit that users and post volume have gone up dramatically in the past 1-2 years.

The people who hate new reddit are a tiny minority I'm afraid to say, the majority of users on the site probably never even saw the old reddit design.

I wonder if many of the new, non pc gaming users have seen either of the old or new site designs as opposed to one of the many mobile apps given how much interaction happens there and how strongly you’re pushed away to the official app.

The "old" Reddit we loved is precisely what kept a lot of people away - it was walls of text with basic, minimalist design language. I personally loved it (hence why HN appeals to me) but I understand why lots of folks wouldn't "get it".

I introduced my S/O to Reddit ~6 years ago. It took a long time for the site to stick. What finally did it was having the iOS application.

Even if some people actually like the new design it is bloated and dog slow even on modern computers.

Shit for you. Shit for me. Great for the Reddit bottom line and new user numbers.

Recently they added notifications saying "multiple people are typing" and "see new comments!" which appear on posts even when newest comments are old. It's absolutely infuriating. I didn't want to cure my reddit addiction but they are trying real hard to help me with that.

The fake upvote counter animations they recently introduced are pretty awkward.

Reddit's entire experience was always gonna be shit, it just takes a lot of users for that to become obvious.

Echo chambers, flame wars, brigading, etc. – all were inevitable results of the way the entire platform is structured, and are far worse than the UI having more whitespace.

Have any better sites you recommend? I initially joined Reddit because ideas appeared to be valued over individual users (no follow at that time).

Not really, unfortunately.

If I knew how to make a Reddit with all the positives but none of the negatives I'd probably do it myself haha.

Please don't make us install that app to view videos on Reddit, we deserve the best.

I hope the opposite. I haven’t installed Reddit’s app and never will. That only means that my engagement will drop (like it already happens when they want me to log in when opening a subreddit)

One can only hope.

Ironically that's one of their CTAs when they're nagging you to install the app. "Install the reddit app because you deserve the best"

Glad someone got it, I always found it ironic that their nag popups say we "deserve the best" when I would have thought "the best" was an optimized mobile site like i.reddit.com

I wonder if the thinking is to extend RPAN into a bigger aspect of the site?

I'm a fan of RPAN, but I do wish that Reddit would stop messing with the formula. They had a great thing, and over time have been eroding it with the various re-designs and awkward app and sign-in requirements.

Wasn't Reddit in severe money troubles, to the point where they were struggling to find good engineers?

I can believe the latter.

Also, struggling with retaining the good ones they managed to find.

I don't understand how a site with massive amounts of traffic for mostly text pages can end up having money troubles. There are so many ways both clean and dirty to monetize a site like that.

They programmed it in Python, so server costs are insane.

They underpay like crazy and don’t allow for any negotiations when it comes to comp.

Wouldn't that either save them money in the short term or be a result of their money troubles and not the cause?

I don't see how that connects to a wildly popular site that should take up minimal resources having problems with money. Even with text ads and terrible payouts they should have a lot of money to play with.

If all the people you hire are rubbish because no one good would accept your salary it’s very easy to see how you could fail to monetise.

That seems like a stretch, reddit is estimated to have around 4 to 8 billion page views per month. Even the slightest advertising should bring in 10s of millions of dollars per year.

They have Tencent money now.

Hopefully they keep it in new reddit.

I wonder how it can afford Dubsmash over the tech giants - who seemingly wanted to buy TikTok.

Probably because Dubsmash doesn't have a comparable user base. Fewer eyes -> fewer $$$

I'm honestly surprised Dubsmash is still around. I did a Dubsmash for a team-building thing four years ago and never looked at it again.

Indeed. The fact that CNN's article is titled "...TikTok rival..." highlights the difference in market penetration between the two.

Half of the internet-using world has heard of and is using TikTok, Dubsmash not so much

venture capital at work ... I hate that I have to click to old.reddit.com, it's like they try to force me with everything they have to use the new reddit which I hate.

there are extensions that force old.reddit.com that u could use on most of the browsers

Happy to see the Dubsmash founders take a huge deal, they've started pretty small back then! They are the real winners from the deal

This is a good move. The Reddit apps have a huge audience but the content creation tools are lacking especially for video.

Memes, the future is memes, Dad.

Maybe reddit is hoping for a digg-style migration of tiktok users to dubsmash.

Who?

reddit doesn't buy squat, it's conde nast. same people that wrote fluff pieces on a 'new wall street wonder boy' named jeffrey epstein.

Conde Nast spun out reddit as a separate entity almost a decade ago.

Just to follow up on this - Conde Nast's parent company, Advance Publications, still owns a majority stake in Reddit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications). Apparently they also own the Discovery Channel and Lycos.

This is true, but it would be like trying to correct someone and saying "No AirBnB didn't by Company X, Greylock did!"

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