Reddit acquires ML startup Spell
redditinc.com
redditinc.com
As somewhat of an aside, I've used google ads before (small money) and found the experience to be awful. Very confusing interface and I am almost positive I was doing things wrong. I've also used Facebook and found it much better. It's weird because that's google's cash cow. Does everyone who spend real money just go through a personal broker or something or does everyone use that interface?
What drives ad spend?
I suspect the real answer is "because ads on Reddit are less than worthless" - so you get ads trying to sell you ways to poo.
I suspect Google is in a position of power so it is to their interest to make it hard to use their ad interface (or no reason to make it easier) because they don't want you to really work out exactly how useless the ads may be.
> What drives ad spend?
Momentum, likely, but I'm not in the business so I can't really talk to the values.
Had a reddit recruiter reach out to me recently looking for engineering leadership for their upcoming product road map. What's in: ads, influencers, crypto, NFTs. What's not in: improving the core feature set of reddit like community management, curation, search, or user interface/experience.
Hard pass, and a bad sign of what's to come.
Unless they magically release a not horrible new UI, which I'm not holding my breath for
Not talking about NSFW stuff, either. Just regular subreddits.
Granted, 60% of mod actions are from there, but that makes sense given the lack of feature parity.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/v3frc1/what_were_wo...
Yeah, I know that to be true, but those 4% of old reddit users have probably been the longest and most active reddit users from the days when reddit was more like HN.
I understand why reddit doesn't care to cater to us and instead chase new user growth (metrics & money), but in doing so they've ignored and pushed away a lot of their oldest and most loyal users. I used to donate to reddit, but I'd never do that today because of what it has become and the path it is on.
Maybe they know it and are fine with it. But they are executing terribly on that goal from a technical and usability perspective, and becoming yet another generic social media platform that is worse than the other ones. They're making themselves easier to replace eventually IMO.
Clicking a nested thread seems to crash whatever browser I use 1/10th of the time, the videos never work, and the time it takes to open a thread is almost unbelievable in 2022.
(Never mind the times it won’t let me view content without the app.)
"This page looks better in the app"
No reddit. It sure as shit doesn't.
Never see Reddit's website on mobile ever again
Reddit obviously has the data for robust machine learning, but not sure how an experiments-management startup aligns with it unless it's an acquihire.
"Our next challenge is to apply what we’ve built to improve the user experience for redditors"
"we’ll no longer be signing up new commercial customers to the Spell service"
It's definitely an acquihire. MLOps has been one of Reddit's weaker areas historically, so this acquisition makes sense to get a talented team in with a clear understanding of the space.
Their investors are being taken on a wild ride.
Search being an open joke? Not going to even look at it.
Purchase a few ML people? Oh that will surely increase our valuation.
Do something about toxic supermods? That's a feature.
I got banned for a year from Armenia sub for criticizing an Armenian politician from the ruling party (who has been involved in a bunch of corruption scandals, including fake companies winning tenders under his grandma's name). The country subs, especially in post-USSR space, are run by ruling party representatives who tolerate zero dissent.
If Reddit doesn't do itself in it'll be the moderators ruining their own communities.
Reddit is a walking corpse and I'm happy to participate in the monthly "Reddit is shit" punching bag thread.
I do agree on the neat alternative piece, but all of the ones that have come up in the past had some sort of flaw (or in some cases deliberate slower growth) that caused them not to go viral (Voat, Tildes, etc)
I suspect in general the entire "thing" that is Reddit is on its way out - just like how craigslist killed classified ads and itself may be slowly dying, Reddit killed forums and now is slowly dying, there may be no replacement.
Def not perfect and long way to go but so far it's been fun!
The blue line (reddit) does indeed keep going up. But it's barely noticable compared to the red (facebook).
It does look like they plan to do something about it finally: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/v3frc1/what_were_wo...
> Performant
> One consistent message from redditors has been that performance on the site and native apps could be better. We agree. That’s why the Reddit engineering team is working on making the Reddit platform faster and more reliable.
> A quick heads-up–this section is for engineers and robots. If you like a bit of nerdy tech talk, read on. If you don’t want to get lost in the technical details of what it takes to keep a site likeReddit running, you may want to skip ahead to the ‘Excellent’ section.
> Improving platform stability
> Last year, a major priority was improving feed load times (also known as Cold Start Latency) so that redditors could tap into their feeds and scroll through posts quickly, without waiting or watching little blue spinners tell them the page is loading. Because of those efforts, we saw drops in wait times across the board—iOS went down -11%, Android -19%, and the backend was down -25%. We also made improvements that reduced crashes and errors, resulting in a 64% reduction in downtime and a 97% reduction in background error rate.We’ll continue to invest in these sorts of latency and stability improvements, while also investing in a design system to componentize Reddit’s user interface (UI).
> Making Reddit faster, faster, faster!
> Another big factor in a webpage’s performance is how much stuff it loads. The number of requests for assets, the size of those assets, and how those assets are used are all good indicators of what sort of performance the site will generally have. Reddit’s current web platforms make a lot of requests and the payload sizes are high. This can make the site unwieldy and slow for redditors (especially in places that may already have slower internet service).
> We’ve already begun work on unifying our web (what some of you call new Reddit) and mobile web clients to make them faster, clean up UX debt, and upgrade the underlying tech to a modern technology stack. (For those interested in such things, that stack is Lit element, Web Components, and Baseplate.js. And the core technology choice is server-side rendering using native web components, which allow for faster page loads.) Stay tuned, because we’ll be sharing more on these efforts later in the year, and there’s some exciting stuff on the way.