Reddit seeks to hire advisers for U.S. IPO – sources

Really, sometimes I feel that there are designers that are just so out of touch, and engineers feel like they have to implement the designs they're given. Really nothing else explains this phenomenon.

Interestingly, Twitter went through a phase where they killed off any and all 3rd party enhancements but they just recently seem to be reversing policy to encourage more participation (within limits) with a new API V2 released in July.

But Reddit's value is in the huge long tail collection of micro-interest subs built up over the years so it would be a shame for wall street to come in and mess things up over a few short quarters as they tend to do. I'm not even annoyed by advertising - Reddit is one of the few places where super specific targeting may actually work - it's just their native user interfaces are so unusabley bad.

Maybe we will go back to Usenet Groups.

As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.

Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...

Reddit's funding rounds tells you everything you need to know about the company. Ballooning costs, growth at all costs mindset.

Partly because they are in effect one of the most unmoderated large scale sites on the internet, which results in the toxic people going there.

But if you know how to find subs well, Reddit emerges as one of the best content sources.

Or are we talking the bullshit SV-style possibilities where you monetize the living shit out of everyone and everything and give a big middle finger to your customers with a skeleton human support crew?

Removing privacy opt-outs to "reduce confusion"

Now you need to login or use the app to even read most threads unless you use old.reddit or a 3rd party site.

So they're going to get more and more aggressive here.

The website seems to encourage extremes of people screaming at each other and having fringe views from which dissension is forbidden.

It's a hellhole. Some of the smaller specialist subreddits are high quality though.

This seems like they're cashing out. They were never able to properly monetize the site for whatever reason, now they're pushing their shares off to anyone naive enough to buy into it. I'd stay far far away.

Look what happened to big subs that where playing cat and mouse with the mods, they all just scattered after trying other platforms like Voat or whatever.

1. pseudo-anonymity, gives people freedom to speak their minds

2. moderation ensures people know that they are in a controlled space

3. Ensures that spaces have a branding, shared identity between them but are not being controlled from without, but only within

Everyone is projecting their need for anonymity in response to this question, but ultimately it comes down to frequency of dopamine hits. Think TikTok but more formats than just video.

- actual communities centred around a topic, like knitting or a particular video game.

- just general memes and funny photos/videos

That second use case can be supplanted by basically anyone and anywhere.

To be brutally honest, I think HN has started to become similar in many ways. I've been around here for over 10 years and it's definitely different than the early days.

As an aside, Reddit is great if you're in the right subreddits and clear out the junk that appeals to the broad public or is frequently gamed by political actors.

I genuinely believe Reddit's real value proposition is manipulating the content shown to the masses. As a propaganda tool, it's incredibly powerful to saturate people's feeds with consistent and coordinated messaging.

At any given time, the feed of r/all and r/popular has several agenda-posts and submissions designed to be derisive and derisive. The nature of the subreddits themselves can also be co-opted, as r/facepalm, r/insanepeoplefacebook, and r/publicfreakout are basically used to mock conservative pundits and politicians. "Niche" criticism subreddits - made specifically to mock the other side - also pop up from time to time, like r/HermanCainAward and r/LeopardsAteMyFace. There are, of course, constantly submissions from obviously leftist subreddits like r/LateStageCapitalism, r/PoliticalHumor, and r/AntiWork. But screenshots of tweets posted there inevitably end up on both r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter.

That being said, I think r/pics has the most subtle manipulation. If Donald Trump was in the headlines for doing something bad, you would see pleasant photographs of Obama with tens of thousands of up votes. Something about Antifa in the news? Plenty of d-day and patriotic Nazi fighting images. Right now there is protest art against the Texas abortion decision. Lots of things on r/pics are harmless, of course. But you will also see odd things where the post has 50k point score, with a 50% approval score, and the comments are all overwhelmingly negative. I recently saw this on a post comparing Taliban forces in technical trucks with a bunch of rednecks in Toyotas with Trump flags. Make of that what you will.

I could go on and on, but if you wanted to persuade people on a near subconscious level, Reddit is nearly the perfect avenue to do so.

Reddit is ~16 years old and was in one of YC's first batches (first batch ever?). This is an absolute dinosaur in "startup" age. It's been acquired, traded, and recap'd multiple times for (presumably) sub-$1B value. For all intents and purposes it's a distressed asset in "enchanted forest" terms (note - this is not a criticism per se, many distressed assets can be very valuable).

I'm convinced (with limited evidence as an outsider) the following drives their valuation:

- Record valuations of FB, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. that have comparable features and "industry metrics" (DAU, MAU, etc.) that can be easily parsed by public analysts. The latest round of investors probably got a great insider deal so they could prep it for IPO and pass it off to the next sucker.

- Reddit started to receive more and more M&A attention when mobile biz models went public (Snap, Uber, etc.). The key to any financial success for Reddit is simply mobile. This an incredibly risky, because (1) reddit allows 3p mobile apps where they can't control ads/tracking and (2) their conversion to their own Reddit mobile app is extremely user hostile. But this is essentially it - you can track and sell ads on Reddit via it's native mobile apps. If somehow (I'm personally not convinced) they can get everyone on to their native mobile app, then sure, they will be as valuable as Snap/Twitter.

- It's essentially a "cost of doing business" for YC. If Reddit became essentially not valuable or not as valuable in the public eye it undermines YC's brand. This has become less and less an issue overtime as more successes have come out of YC, but during those time periods when it wasn't the value had to be continually projected as being valued (thereby creating steam that never fizzeld out). Think of this like saying one of your clients in the 90's was Bear Stearns, which gave you social proof to work with Goldman Sachs, etc. you'll hold on to that Bear Stearns logo on your sales deck until it ultimately fails, but now you have Goldman, Morgan, etc. to show your social proof.

That is why it's concerning that the modding and mod selection process on big subreddits like r/worldnews is so opaque.

That said reddit is a cesspool of woke and broke 15-25 year olds. If they has money to spend they wouldn't wasting time on reddit.

You are in a rock in a hard place with reddit as in order to monetize it, you need to fundamentally change how reddit works from the ground up and in doing that, you risk making the exact same mistake that digg made in alienating their users that lead them to reddit in the first place. Only in this case I don't think these millennials in reddits userbase are going to hop to another platform now that they are 10 years older with more complicated adult lives, and since there is no decent alternative to reddit (like reddit was to digg back in the day), they will probably just decide that maybe this is time that they cut ties with wasting so much time on the internet and focus on more fulfilling or pressing things, and half their customer base vanishes into thin air.

That's not bad though — They'd probably be something more like Gumroad — independent and run by a small team, and fairly profitable, but hard to grow and IPO.

How come services like Digg and Slashdot weren't able to make sustainable revenue off of membership fees?

Maybe ot but it seems like the federated services are doing a really good job of keeping the crazies away. Nobody will link with hate groups so they can't recruit from the wider user base. Meanwhile Facebook and Reddit just leave hate groups alone and allow them to game algorithmic feeds for rage-engagement such that they have no trouble pulling vulnerable people from the wider community and radicalizing them.

I'd actually love to see companies, especially ones in winner-take-all/network-effect types of tech start out with some sort of unbreakable guarantee of being cool forever. All young platform providers wants to appear open and free and interoperable and trustworthy, but incentives will have their way with them once the valuation gets high enough.

Is there a legal or moral vehicle that could prevent this? Has anyone tried it? Would the invisible hand get pissed and remove the magic that makes growth happen?