Reddit Rumored To Be Raising Money, At A $400 Million Valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Other giants in fading industries should take note.
> (...) and now it's worth about half of the New York Times.
NYT on the other hand...
The latter should be worth far more than it is.
You don't understand the value of reddit. As I've written in other posts in this thread. It's the community and that's impossible to replace (as evidenced by the hundreds of other forums that have shit communities) Reddit is far and above many, many online communities in terms of breadth & depth.
Imgur has some voting stuff now, and it'll be interesting to see if that helps it take off or not.
And there are other sites trying to develop good communications. Hubski, for example.
I don't think Imgur will ever take off. There is no fostering of individual subcultures like there was with subreddits. Basically their entire content revolves around funny images. Their comments never become thoughtful like reddit's.
MySpace started in 2003 and lost the battle to FB in 2008. Reddit was founded and has been growing steady and strong for 7 years, killing competitor Digg along the ride (Digg mainly caused it's own decline but I find the easy availability of a close competitor made it much easier).
I stand by the above statement. Reddit's community grew slowly and organically while the admins went through great pains to remain as "hands-off" as they could. They have major respect for their community and understand that that's the make-or-break aspect of the site.
Huh? Imgur already has more traffic than reddit. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c...;
To me the NYTimes is "articles with pictures". I can get that on a dozen more sites on the internet. And without a paywall.
If anything, the internet has made the media extremely fungibile. Social networks are the opposite - as they grow the ability to switch between them becomes more difficult.
That's the point. Internet communities come and go all the time. None of them have proven to be hard to replace. Quality news organizations don't pop up every few years.
The New York Times has competitors, but not equals. All of the papers you mentioned (except for the WSJ, which is indispensable in its niche) have a small fraction of the subscribers the New York Times does, which seems like a pretty good metric for unique value.
You'd take that back if you saw my karma level. I use selfcontrol.app to keep Reddit at bay.
> It's the community and that's impossible to replace
I've been a member of lots of better communities... there's only so far you can get 'attached' to people who are anonymous.
Your entire argument is that a venue to discuss things is more important than the source of the discussion topic. I just can't agree with that. Throw out the water cooler and I'll take my discussion to the coffee machine. But throw out the discussion topic (Exposé on corruption at the FDA in the NYT), and water cooler or coffee machine, what will we talk about... Honey Boo Boo?
For me personally Reddit is much more important than the NYT will ever be. If the NYT disappears tomorrow I couldn't care less. There's other publications that will fill its place. Reddit has allowed me to meet great people, have in-depth conversations on topics that no one in my near vicinity cares about and expand my knowledge into fields I never knew possible. It's a great place.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/11/mark-thompson-ceo-n...
Furthermore, Jill Abramson is a far more relevant figure than Thompson in this context.
Honey Boo Boo is much more important to me than NatGeo and NPR.
What is it that makes you think Reddit communities are a different animal? Were Reddit to disappear, I'm sure those communities would find new homes. From where I'm sitting, the problem with basing Reddit's valuation on those communities is that Reddit doesn't own those communities.
You can't always tell a community what to do (like how one can't build an HN replacement and expect the community to simply follow you there). If the steps Reddit takes to try to make a big return on investment anger those communities, the communities are free to leave. My view is that the network effects of Reddit are not nearly as strong as those of a Facebook or Instagram, and even those appear to be having some difficulty getting as much value out of their communities as they want.
Yes, but that won't happen. They've been incredibly hands-off for the past 7 years. They basically worked their asses off on too few engineers for years, and during all that time kept showing almost no ads, and if they did they did it on the far right where almost no one notices.
Just because they're raising capital now, doesn't mean they'll go out and fuck it up. Whatever outside money they take on, they'll be extremely conscientious about retaining control or their future stakeholders sharing their values.
No, it doesn't. Reddit is not a "community", and it does not have "a community". Reddit is millions of people, some of whom form communities in only the loosest possible sense of the word.
There's nothing inherently incredible about Reddit's "community", because Reddit's "community" is a mix of the same people that frequent 4Chan, SomethingAwful, and Fark. Reddit's user base includes people from nearly all walks of life: scum and villains, heroes, poor people, rich people, lonely people, and people who are friends with 500 other people on Facebook.
Reddit's "community" includes /r/askscience, /r/picsofdeadkids (you probably don't want to visit that), /r/bestof, /r/ShitRedditSays ... these things have nothing in common with each-other.
The only reason the various Reddit clones haven't taken off is because they aren't better. Reddit was not a Digg clone, Digg was not a Fark clone, Fark was not a Slashdot clone. Each of these offered a unique experience, some thing that the previous sites did not.
It has to be viewed in that context. A context in which Facebook was botching mobile major time and described it as its major challenge in public filings.
Which, (given a fixed supply of exactly 1 Instgram) means that it was worth $1B.
Whether Facebook overpaid (ie, whether they would have been better off spending part or all of that $1B elsewhere) is a completely separate question - the point is, the market valued Instagram at $1B.
You're not their main audience, and they're massively popular. They're continuing to grow in popularity, and they're becoming increasingly relevant as a primary source of information. Reddit represents a fundamental step forward in how the internet interconnects everyday people.
You may not see anything worthwhile, but in reality it's one of the most exciting future prospects of the internet in general. It has the potential to affect and influence generations. Something like that is truly special.
>It has the potential to affect and influence generations.
But, they have to not screw that up first. It's not a simple problem - you have to communicate how the website works, give indications of the kinds of subreddits you can find, and get them to create an account and actually choose some before users get bored and click away.
I have to do this every time I recommend the site to someone in person. Partly to avoid the wrong impression that I enjoy the crap typically found on the front page.
Plus, going that way isn't necessarily a solid business model for the future anyway. Remember the Cheezburger network? Failblog? 9Gag and 4Chan have both had huge drops in traffic since their heyday. Reddit is the shining example of an internet culture site which has continued to flourish over time, and even then, I think they will hit critical mass with their current target demographic soon.
That kind of behavior has been pretty much the norm for years at reddit. Not to say it's ubiquitous, reddit still has great content and what I'd call 'safe' subreddits where that behavior isn't tolerated. Also, to be clear to those who don't know, 'OP is a faggot' is supposed to be an ironic meme rather than hate speech. A terrible meme, but I wouldn't want people to misunderstand and think reddit has become a cesspool of hate.
Except when they don't[1].
> . A terrible meme, but I wouldn't want people to misunderstand and think reddit has become a cesspool of hate.
The language originates from 4chan, where it is also used ironically. I get rather annoyed when I hear people dismiss 4chan as homophobic, because under the surface, it's actually not. Then again, if Reddit is starting to mimic 4chan in terms of its language and linguistic memes, either 4chan's reputation is ill-deserved, or Reddit's reputation will start to resemble 4chan's.
"Oh, it's OK and funny to call people faggots"
I wish regular Redditors would stamp this shit out.
No, I'm not being unnecessarily precious or PC. I used to laugh at distasteful misogynistic jokes (and worse) but somebody pointed out to me that joking about it normalizes it. And to the depraved part of society the joke is missed and they see it as support for their depravity.
I mod a subreddit with over 100K users. It's difficult to control trolls and others...
At the same time I have petitioned to Yishan directly several times to block /r/picsofdeadkids to no avail.
I use RES to heavily filter out the content I don't want to see.
And while that works wonderfully, I am often turning off the filter as well just to see what is on /r/all...
It is more successful to self-temper and manage your own experience on reddit than to try and change reddit.
And furthermore, irony and the "it's a joke" mentality can be used to justify the continuation of behaviors that don't meet people's own standards. It's easier to repeat a lame justification for thoughtless behavior than to spend months working to break a bad habit.
Seems to me like reddit could become the dominate messaging system and could be the best possible choice to replace craig's list if they decided to add classifieds.
It has huge growth potential and should not be underestimated so easily.
-- Kicked one of the 2 co-founders, Cheever off, rumour has it he didn't want to go as aggressively after growth as D'Angelo & other powers wanted.
-- Widely sneered at in SV as being the company to look at if you want to know what "taking it too far with forcing growth" means. Their "sign-on to view this content" is a joke. Especially if you combine with their "Our mission is to grow and spread the world's knowledge"
Personally:
-- Their site's JS is a fucking mess. Crashes both my Chrome _as well as_ my iPhone's Safari frequently.
| "sign-on to view this content"
edit: It looks like they've fixed it so you can no longer just delete the overlay. Parts of the text are replaced by images of blurred text now. Oh well.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/N72...
Reddit has clearly meddled with the site in the past for business reasons (e.g. the Sears thing, /r/jailbait), and the hands-off-unless-we-change-our-mind policy of the administration has led directly to extreme frustration among the site's biggest influences and moderators of larger subreddits.
The only thing that separates Reddit from Digg-2.0 at this point is that there is not yet another site for disgruntled users to migrate to.
It's something that has to happen and will happen to the best of em, and it just depends on how Reddit chooses to handle the situation.
A really great example of good monetization I think is Ultimate Guitar. The site used to be completely free and the community of musicians was and still is unparalleled on the internet. They've monetized pretty heavily over the years by offering paid tools and more features/premium-content for musicians (even making their own mobile apps for things like tuners, tabs, etc). I think it was a great way to monetize the community on top of ads. However, it benefits from having a very specific focus (music) and a very focused and passionate community which makes the process of monetization a little easier.
The problem Reddit will have I think is that the community is extremely open, unfocused, and unrestricted (as well as having multiple sub-communities). Its very user-driven so it becomes difficult to creatively monetize without infringing on their "freedoms" or "openness". For example, I think /r/iama would be a great outlet for brands to come and have a conversation with the community (for example, before a movie release). However, that subreddit is ALREADY used like that, and it's very open. Anyone (including any brand) can come in and do an AMA so any type of monetization would have to to be a complement to the community (can't monetize the community itself without killing it or pissing people off). So how can Reddit monetize without just resorting to ads and promoted content? It's a difficult question and I don't see a clear answer.
If they do decide to do stuff like "featured" posts, I think they will have to be very very careful to not clutter up the user-upvoted content and hopefully they'll work hard to make the "featured" stuff interesting to the community. They'll have to make some important decisions when monetizing and I wish them the best of luck.
That said; my Dad has a saying: "things are not as good as they used to be; and they never were"
Every interest has different levels of content. Pictures range from works of art that took hours to conceptualize, to images of a cat butt with a text overlay.
As a subreddit becomes more popular, the greatest common denominator's interests take precedence. And while you can attempt a solution by splitting the sub community, say, no text overlays, that doesn't work as well everywhere.
For example, a programming community needs to split into subs for languages, and the technical level of the articles. This makes aggregation more difficult, and ruins an information flow that would include a home for overall high quality posters-- now they have a more difficult time determining where to post, and must question whether the articles they submit meet the requirements for technical depth etc.
Even then, the process of dilution begins again as the lesser posters begin to inflate the sub communities.