Condé Nast Spins Out Reddit, Without Letting Go | Hacker News Reader

Condé Nast Spins Out Reddit, Without Letting Go

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63 pointshornokplease30 comments

Reddit's quality has gone down exponentially over the last year in line with the exploding traffic. So the majority crowd is probably not the cynical tech bunch anymore - translates to - it could get a little easier to monetize the traffic.

Every time a site's traffic doubles, it also doubles the number of people saying it sucks.

Of course. I am not complaining (may be a little) but I am trying to look at it from a purely business point of view. Its good to hit critical mass, it will be more attractive for advertisers. Reddit will get users that might actually click on some ads unlike me :)

That has no bearing on the truth of the statement.

Personally, I have few qualms with the quality of the content on reddit. I think the subreddit subscription model the site is centered around did an excellent job at helping users weed out content they weren't interested in.

And the reddit enhancement suite will let you block imgur posts.

This often comes out whenever a post about Reddit hits the front page, but I beg to disagree. I think the ratio of quality/to quantity has slid in the wrong direction, but the quality is still there - you just need to know where you look.

I think the ratio of quality/to quantity has slid in the direction that popularity will always push it in.

What's interesting about reddit, is that's a way to preserve the quality. Reddit is like a hipster dog chasing its own tail. As the popularity grows the quality keeps moving to ever newer sub-reddits.

The problem there is that the quality a person is seeking becomes obfuscated, continually shifting into new, unknown subreddits in order to prevent the decay of content. Maybe there's no better way to do this (yet) but if the information a given individual viewed as quality were easily accessible it'd make the concept a lot more interesting to me as opposed to the level of misdirection subreddits seem to manifest.

While there is truth to this argument, like llambda I feel that the ever increasing search for quality subreddits leaves much to be desired. I don't like going to a site and then spending a large portion of the time avoiding a large and growing percentage of the user base. There's also the problem that most of the subreddits I like might not be able to produce a high quality version due to a high content established competitor.

I never understand anyone saying this. There is not one, singular reddit; it's a series of sub-reddits combined to make your front page. If you didn't take the time to unsubscribe from most of the default subscribed sub-reddits and subscribe to ones that better suit your taste, that's entirely your own fault.

Seriously, go to http://reddit.com/reddits/ and get rid of things like r/pics, r/gaming, and r/funny. Subscribe to a sub-reddit that has content you like. It's not like the good stuff is hidden away never to be found. Just look around a bit and you'll find a much more enjoyable experience. That's reddit's power.

This may well be, but in the old days there were no subreddits. Five years ago, I didn't have to go scrounging for the good content. So, subjectively the content available through my default settings has gotten worse.

I remember the day I learned that some of my new co-workers were really into Reddit. It was strange because I remember thinking how superficial their lunch-time conversations were compared to what I'd been used to debating online. It was an "aha" moment. Here comes everybody.

Walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow and with bare feet too, did ya?

Reddit is, and has always been, a large organic community that has always undergone change. Reddit had to introduce subreddits as a way of breaking up and categorising communities as things outgrew the "everything on the front page" model.

Getting big changes things, and I don't see how comments like yours are insightful when all the things you listed (yes, even the deep and meaningful posts and debates) are still happening on the site, your just need to sort through the noise.

Things like subreddits help you do that and get what's relevant to your interests.

??? (.this) > reddit > digg

> youtube > 4chan

When this is the easiest way to give your growing product what it needs to grow as fast as it can....

Also, anyone think 200mil is a bit cheap for reddit?

If anything I think it's a bit high. The reddit community is so unruly that monetizing the site effectively is a major challenge. It makes a good chunk of money but it's very far from profitable I'd guess.

As an advertiser on Reddit, I have to say the UX for advertisers is one of the worst ones I've ever had to use.

They could probably vastly increase ad sale conversions if they spent a week redesigning and optimizing it.

>The reddit community is so unruly that monetizing the site effectively is a major challenge.

Where unruly means willing to vote with their feet?

The biggest problem is that what users are getting at reddit isn't worth all that much and can easily be found in other places online. The second problem is that due to what it is, reddit attracts a greater level of people who don't care for common monitization practices.

I think by unruly he means that the majority of their users are either 12 years old or act like they're 12 years old. I know that they have an underground that only hangs out on sub-reddits but I would bet those users are in the minority.

> reddit attracts a greater level of people who don't care for common monitization practices.

That's a polite way of putting it. Every ad I've seen with a comments thread has people mostly slagging off the advertiser. Ads without comment threads frequently get nasty threads posted about them, which at least isn't as visible, but if I were in charge of buying ads it would make me wonder why I should continue paying to be attacked.

I imagine the idea is that this system should eventually lead to ads that the community actually likes - but I'll admit that doesn't seem to be happening. However, I think that most ads that reddit rages about are pretty terribe ads. For example, a recent ad for a movie (Apollo 18) was hated on because clicking on it sent you to a Facebook login page. That's no good since many people now can't learn about this movie through the ad without signing up for a different website.

Another example: I think there was a recent Microsoft ad that took you an unrelated webpage. Again, that ad is no good.

The community comments on these things because there have been a lot of terrible ads - ads that don't even let users learn about the product being advertised. However, it doesn't seem like this is actually leading to better ads...

That's a polite way of putting it.

But thats all it is. They're on a website where the community actively discusses their opinion of submissions, and it was their opinion that the ad or advertized product wasn't good.

I haven't been to reddit in a while, but when I did, I saw that when an advertiser had a good product (I'm recalling A Small Orange or rsync.net) and understood that they didn't need patronizing or dumb ads, the comments were mostly inquiring about the service, or users saying they were happy with it.

That's what happened with the old kuro5hin ads also, which also had comment threads by default. Non-annoying ads that seemed like they had some idea of what community they were targeting typically got good responses; annoying ads that looked like they had no idea where they were advertising didn't. Of course, some advertisers mixed the two, and deliberately antagonized the audience to get attention (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/5/1923/79187).

> Also, anyone think 200mil is a bit cheap for reddit?

Are they profitable yet after 6 years? I'd say 200mil is ridiculously expensive.

But then we live in an age where a location based photo sharing app for dogs is probably worth a few billion to some investor.

200 million cheap?

You're kidding right? If not, what multiple of profits would you think is reasonable for an established business?

What amazes me is that reddit as it is today would be valued at more than several 10's of millions.

Yet if it were a startup just out of the gates with some funding, I'm sure we'd be hearing about it having a mythical valuation in the high tens of billions.

Kudos to Condé Nast for recognizing the importance of Reddit's independence over the years, and handling the acquisition properly.

Aol, Microsoft and even Google could learn something from this...

I think 90% of the time this kind of thing is done it's because they're strongly considering selling it off. The rest is just excuses and standard corporate verbage spam.

How analogous is this to the HN-YC relationship?

For the better I think.

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