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Comment by ManBlanket | Hacker News Reader

I clearly have no idea what is going on or how business works because the only question plaguing my mind is how on earth reddit manages to be valued at $10B. Does low-key shilling and banner ads really make that much money? I know it doesn't work this way but they'd have to collect $192 from their 52M daily users to earn that kind of cash. Honestly I got the impression reddit stopped being cool like 5 years ago and other than this year's entertaining stock market shenanigans it's largely a novelty. Even when I was using it I could hardly imagine my eyes were worth $192 to anybody. Not to mention last time I looked at reddit the incel and children under 18 vibes were intense. What do I know? FB somehow manages to be relevant. Am I missing something or are we just printing monopoly money based on increasingly loose pretexts nowadays? Do you even need a business model to make money anymore, or is it all based on speculative user counts and growth?

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> how on earth reddit manages to be valued at $10B

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.

It's crazy to me that Reddit isn't a mark on YC's brand. I can't think of a worse site to use today. It makes it clear to me that YC's business model doesn't really care about quality because Reddit has only degraded year by year.

I mean if you want to make money, cool, but if your startup is based out of YC, I don't trust you.

YC sells social signaling and a network (and some good advice of course), and the wins weigh more heavily than the losses.

It isn't really worth $192 per user. It's worth, say, $40 per user if there was an absolute certainty that they wouldn't grow their user base and just stay at fifty million users for the next hundred years. But with tech, there is a non-trival chance (say 5%) that they 10x their user base and 5x the amount of income they receive per user per year. You never know how these things will go, but the downside of a stock is limited. The upside isn't.

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.

> 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 disagree. To me, going hyperbolic to make a point, this is like saying there were some really great bars in 1930s Germany.

It kinda doesn’t mean much if you bury your head in the sand here. It’s a bad company that does bad things. That’s cool you like some people who agree with you, but these people would be cool elsewhere too.

Control over media platforms is basically control over the agenda in democracies. It is worth a lot of money.

But does it make media platforms themselves worth lot of money? Then again, I don't really understand valuation of most "tech" companies...

There are so many sleights of hand type maneuvers you can pull to moderate sitewide. Tiktok, for example, bans LBTQ content not outright but just sets some flag in their database that ascertains the posts never go viral.

Control the medium, control the message.

The social aspect of Reddit is a massive enhancement of this. It's one thing to see a headline on WaPo or NYT. It's another to see that on Reddit, with dozens of commenters all posting takes that advance the same frame or line of reasoning, upvoting each other, congratulating each other on how smart they are, etc. What you don't see are the interlocking moderators on all the top subs or the fact that people are frequently banned from completely unrelated subs for political reasons based on their posting history. The result is an echo-chamber that is a 90% match for the editorial stance of WaPo or NYT at all times, except it looks social and organic, and therefore extremely convincing to onlookers.

It's an interesting study in human self-organizing behavior. We like to see our opinions confirmed, so we like sites like reddit, which breeds this exact behavior. This leads to the groupthink or hivemind as reddit users call it.

reddit is essential to google, adding it as a keyword in searches increases google's value by billions

If it weren't for reddit google would be damn near useless to me.

This isn't even a joke, it's just true. "reddit [my actual search]" is the only way I know to sort of get at all kinds of info that Google is no longer any good whatsoever at finding. I guess if that stops being useful, for some reason, I'll have to resort to one of those long queries that tries to limit searches to independent forums (which used to be visible without that kind of thing, when they were relevant, but are now nearly impossible to find otherwise). Twitter might be a partial replacement, but they seem dedicated to making searching their site, by any means, as useless as possible.

I've had good luck on finding results in forums just by adding the word "forum" to the search. Not every result will be a forum but some should pop up

Switched browsers, ended up using bing for a while... It was even worse. SEO has destroyed the Internet, it's pretty hard to find anything relevant anymore... Outside a very few sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. And each of those has it own host of issue. Somethings kinda still work like technical information. Now to think might it be that some engineers at Google actually try to keep that section somewhat usable?

I yearn for a curated search engine that only looks at a small section of the internet and completely omits notorious SEO abusing sites. Most of the time, I am not trying to search through the corpus of human knowledge (google's old goal), but rather, to perform a very specific kind of search in a specific problem domain.

I'm working on something like this for code search (https://ask.moe/search/code), which currently consist of about 150 sites that I will continue to expand whenever I discover a useful site missing (e.g. official website of some package that contain good documentation).

I decided to start with code because it's something I personally use every day, and I got fed up with the spammy sites that just present an answer (or often only the question itself) extracted from StackOverflow, but plan to do something similar with other categories in the future. I'm curious to hear how you'd approach this problem, as in which categories you'd support and how you'd break it down?

I'm going to bookmark this and check it out.

I've got a suggestion, I queried "C# ?." and my results were mostly generic about C# documentation. I wanted to get more information about how to use the null conditional operator.

I suspect the query is ignoring the '?.' because it thinks of it as unimportant symbols. Would it be possible to modify the search engine to treat punctuation as operators, or terms in-and-of-themselves?

Thanks, I'm afraid there's little I can do as it's just using Google Custom Search Engine with whitelisted dev sites, but it should work if you type out the meaning of the symbols, e.g. "C# null conditional" instead of "C# ?." (or "C# question mark dot" to figure out what the symbols mean).

And it's unfortunate if you have the Reddit app installed and try doing this, because every link is going to jump you to the app, and you have to switch back to the browser to do another search.

I'm not the only one.

Shhh don't tell anyone, the advertisers will start trying to defeat this.

But seriously, I don't understand how Google has let their results become such trash. If you actually want community sentiment (what's generally accepted as the least shitty X you can buy) you have to dig through reddit results. If you don't it's AI generated blogspam for days

It's pretty sad actually. Especially if I'm trying to look up anything that might be related to a buying decision. What's fun is reddit's search feature is kinda garbage so they really need each other.

I’ve been unimpressed by google, but the feature that’s finally catalyzed me to explore other search engines is the way they now take up precious mobile browser screen space when one searches with a frozen pane of the search. Terrible ui decision.

>Does low-key shilling and banner ads really make that much money.

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.

"Leftist communities on Reddit often implore the company to ban The_Donald. So far, Huffman has demurred. “There are arguments on both sides,” he said, “but, ultimately, my view is that their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice.” He thought of something else to say, but decided against it. Then he took a swig of beer and said it anyway. “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he told me. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.” That’s a terrifying thought. It’s also almost certainly true."

- Reddit CEO Steve Huffman source https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...

I think that's a misuse of the term Leftist - I remember the most outspoken voices calling for banning The_Donald coming from centrist liberals. These types are die-hard liberal supporters who "vote blue no matter who" and celebrate partisanship like a team sports event. Leftists viewed the rise of Trump as more of a denouncement of HRC's neoliberal politics and lack of integrity rather than based on the rise of a bigoted irredeemable white working class. Liberals want to silence Trump supporters and shame them into submission, while leftists mostly want to convert them via class consciousness to fight for lower- and middle-class empowerment.

Leftism is about socialism, worker empowerment, anti-corporate power. Subreddits around Bernie, socialism, stupidpol, etc. They didn't like Trump, but were mostly critical of the lack of focus and results from democrats. We (I count myself in this group) thought Trump was a dangerous idiot, but ineffective democrats who paid lip service to noble goals while stifling progress were the main topic of discussion.

Liberals, who were most vocally pushing for deplatforming trump supporters, were more the types who lurk (and mod) /r/politics and /r/liberal. They viewed everything Trump did as evil, while absolving democrats who had done the same things for the 4 years previous.

Hardcore ride-or-die liberals != leftists - these are two groups with distinct ideologies. In particular to this context, leftists are much more apprehensive about censorship because they don't have deep institutional power.

Most of the time now I see the left used as a term for the woke, or race and gender aware folks. It's unfortunate, because race and gender are divisive topics, and class based discussions could potentially pull a lot of white people back into the leftist fold.

Which is not to say poc and lgbtq folks haven't gotten fucked historically, they totally have, but we could all be allies if we focused our messaging differently.

A lot of this is probably due to the urban rural divide. Urban folks can see poc and lgbtq people around them every day, but they don't see the lower class white people living outside urban areas.

This is pretty much it. Liberation means liberation of all the people I don't like, too, and it doesn't happen by going full Blue Team and further alienating them with useless slogans.

I've been dragged on Twitter by the same kind of Blue Team ideologue I've been accused of being by people who don't have enough resolution on me to see the difference, so I can at least empathize with them. If I were someone like that, I'd call me a useless twit too.

Joe Rogan might be a human weather vane, but there's a reason millions of people who otherwise consider themselves apolitical listen to him. Treating them as dismissible is why most of half the country doesn't vote. All the most effective voter suppression efforts of the Republican party, which barely gets half of the voting half in a good year for them, wouldn't mean anything if the other half weren't so alienating. The few points the Comey letter cost Clinton wouldn't have meant anything if the party wasn't run by smug fools.

> I think r/pics has the most subtle manipulation.

Absolutely, and entirely intentional.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN CONTEXT!? It’s just a picture, relax, stupid conservative is triggered by a simple picture.”

The common person there seems to have no concept that this is the goal. To offer a picture and tells NONE of the real story; then to “talk amongst yourselves” and find that they all agree with each other. Just ignore all the [deleted] comments, probably just spam.

r/worldnews has become the default news aggregator of the world. Journalists around the world use that subreddit to gauge which topics interests people.

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

Not to be pedantic, but why do you say this? Is it really that visible?

It's a pretty poor pulse on whats actually interesting to people honestly. Might as well just subscribe to publishers RSS feeds, you will get about the same content. Look at the post histories of these accounts that make these top posts. Very strange post histories, sometimes only making posts to worldnews. It's not exactly rocket science to operate a botnet that posts your articles all over relevant subreddits, even operate a ring of accounts to upvote a post enough to get it rolling in hot and upvoted organically from there on by users who tend to just roll with whats slightly upvoted.

My mom started using reddit this year. Maybe it's capturing the non-(tech/young)-people market share?

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