Reddit has an opportunity to do right everything that Twitter has done (and continues to do) wrong.
It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).
Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.
For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...
A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.
Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow? I know they have an engineering team, but if you track the changes over the last couple years, it's not much given how much time has passed. And that's not for lack of feature requests that Reddit staff have admitted would improve the site.
Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.
1. Reddit's internecine subreddit wars required constant admin intervention and mediation. Reddit only has so many hands on deck, so more of than not, they pulled engineers in to help moderate.[1]
2. Reddit is unprofitable, so they have trouble affording top talent. [2]
3. Finally, Reddit's vision for the future has been hazy for the last decade. If the navigators can't chart a course, all the rowing in the world won't move the ship in the right direction. I suspect the overdone April Fools experiments are a result of engineering not being given technically compelling, or perhaps meaningful features to labor over.
With zero inside knowledge, it appears to me that they have a very brittle legacy feature set due to scale concerns, tolerated integrations/extensions, and being held hostage by the community. There is new product feature development happening but it appears disjointed from the legacy, which could indicate leadership conflicts on priority, an inability to marry the old and new, or an inability to devote time to anything but upkeep of the legacy.
Previous large-scale changes have been presented to their community and generally have been panned by the community, and often unreasonably so.
Reddit is very different from other social/consumer tech companies in that they are a very small company. Last I heard, they are somewhere around 200 employees. Compare that to how many employees twitter has and you'll notice that actually reddit is evolving their product at a pretty fast pace for the size of the company.
Additionally, from the various threads on reddit that I've seen people post about the company. They've done a lot of work on the background to reduce spam, which isn't something that is super obvious to someone not specifically looking to spam the site.
> Does anybody know why development at reddit is so slow?
I read through the front page of each of the top 5,000 subreddits (by subscribers) over the last few weeks, and a lot of the subreddits are adding hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per week. They seem to have gone into hypergrowth recently without anyone really noticing.
The other interesting thing of note is that of the 125,000ish posts I read through, there are only a few dozen submissions from independent blogs on the front page of all of these subreddits put together at any given time.
Every time they introduce any changes, the userbase revolts. The outrage that happened when they announced they were going to let people put a bio and photo on their profile pages made it sound like the world was ending.
From hanging around in r/redditdev I got an impression there was an exodus of much of the experienced backend team about a year ago when there was so much drama (Kemitche and at least two more people I think). Maybe it has taken some time to get a new one up to speed. Also, A lot of resources seems to be focused lately on developing clients for android and ios.
I get the impression that Reddit has a lot of technical debt that makes developing new features difficult, and would take some major effort to refactor themselves out of
Could be wrong, but I'd assume some of it is related to scale of features. For example, when they started hosting images - they started at pretty extreme scale, so that would likely slow down feature delivery.
Having said that, not all features would be _that_ intensive on systems.
With the immense and demographically diverse userbase, I imagine keeping the site running smoothly and user analytics is their chief focus. Their strategy probably is to introduce changes slowly so as not to alienate or confuse people (I'm looking at you Facebook).
Also, they expose their data via an API that developers have used to make all sorts of features, giving them the luxury of being able to basically test features without actually implementing them.
well, they are developing quite a bit, but they test out the features among subsets of their user base long before the features are available to everyone. And in most cases they probably turn out to not be as good as they seemed they would be, and are tabled. They are pretty careful about changing things... I mean, if it ain't broke.
Personally I prefer it far, far more than the constant changes some startups seem to feel is necessary to justify their existence.
I know for a long time the engineering team was not very big, certainly not the "usual" size of a team with that much traffic (Instagram not withstanding). My guess is the team was simply keeping up with the normal expansion of complexity that comes with scale.
That said, I believe they are heavily recruiting at all levels so if you want to work for Reddit, apply now.
I don't know about the website, but I was really impressed at how fast they released a new iOS app (right after buying Alien Blue) which looks pretty awesome as well.
The CEO Steve Huffman recently admitted to editing his political opponent's posts. Maybe they can't get anything done because they're redditing all day.
At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election)
And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:
#standardSQL
SELECT DATE_TRUNC(DATE(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc)), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions
FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*`
WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN "2015_12" AND "2017_04" OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = "full_corpus_201512")
GROUP BY mon
ORDER BY mon
Reddit has a huge value I think which has not been mentioned - that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free.
Sometimes they do that under the covers, so to speak, and some users don't like it (e.g. hailcorporate) but often they will promote their products transparently, and often normal users don't mind. The most obvious example is Netflix on /r/movies. Multiple employees were observed continuously posting things to the site, via submissions, comments etc and users liked it.
By introducing a charge for these corporate users they can reap in a substantial income. Whether it would make sense for them to label these corp users as such is another option, but they certainly know about them. I find it interesting that most normal users find that they don't mind interacting with paid marketing employees and that they consider it organic and natural, very interesting. I also find it worrying.
>that companies, corporations, organisations use it to market and advertise themselves, for free.
Another phenomenon I've been seeing more of is a company that gets in early to a niche gaining control of the subreddit around that niche, tilting the scales in their favor.
Two examples I can think of are /r/nootropics, whose mod team is led by the owner of nootropics supplier Ceretropic, and /r/amazonmerch, whose sole mod is the owner of MerchInformer, a SaaS Amazon Merch research product.
They're each careful to never moderate in an overtly heavy-handed way that would cause a user revolt, but nonetheless, their companies are mentioned in the each subreddit far more often than their competitors. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and one that will only worsen as these niches grow in popularity.
Isn't reddit already successful? Why are they raising money? Shouldn't they be generating profits and returning those profits back to their shareholder(s)?
Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?
I'm considering that taking this funding at a very high valuation will force them to change Reddit in a way that results in its ultimate demise. What's wrong with a good stable community and business, as it is?
Cracks me up why Reddit is the way it is questions. Ask kevin Rose fron tech tv. As soon as Reddit drops its bbs style it is dead. For those complaining about Css RES.
Reddit is only a thing because people feel safe there. What other site of its user base does that?
Last I heard Reddit was doing less than $10 mn / year in revenues. It's highly under-monetized, but it looks difficult to grow in 5 to 10 years to generating $150 million in annual profits to justify this valuation.
I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).
reddit is about to suffer the same mass exodus Digg did if they keep up the shit brigade.. That site has gone to hell since the election.. ruined by shills and bots in every subreddit.. can't be bothered w/ it anymore.. sick of reading about Trump and Hillary.
As others have mentioned development of reddit has been slow for the fact that their Engineering teams were performing Administrative tasks to the point that they could only maintain the site. Since they have cleared that hurdle by instituting more straightforward moderation and administration.
The only exception to this is when a reddit admin actively modified a thread by users being hostile. This creates irreparable problems because users can't trust the administration to not tamper with their comments. They have on record stated that they will not do this in the future but you can't undo the removal of trust of their users. I have been a reddit user for almost 11 years and I am not associated of the group in question and it has made me loose faith in reddit.
Their struggles with advertisement is something they can actively address now. Before when they were smaller than digg once digg made a huge mister and alienated their users this allowed to flourish into the site it is today. Due to the fear of what occurred to Digg their advertising was less aggressive their advertisements have been less aggressive and attempt to be targeted. But, since reddit is so large now the risk of alienation is much less. Also, other condenders like imgur and voat have tried to take the throne from reddit without success. Also, they have made great strides in making it accessible to everyone and you can get anyone from any political spectrum. If reddit wants to make money they have to broaden their appeal greatly and I believe thats the purpose of the $150m. Hopefully when they do this they won't turn out like digg because they are a much larger network now.
Online communities die within months. Reddit isn't worth anything. This is insane - this community can disappear. Look at Digg, myspace, friendster. One wrong TOS update all the users will rebel and look towards the next cheaply made forum.
If reddit founders and investors make bank out of content generated for free, the content creators will get pissed off there's nothing for them. And they'll move on.
YouTube is the only one I see who is really trying to make it work. Instagram worked it out by placed ads for the most popular models.
And a key sin of all these sites is they think the content is theirs. It's not. Stop trying to regulate it to be what you want. It is what it is and you should be thankful, very thankful, they chose your site to host it. But this doesn't seem the case. The reddit admins in particular seems to hate a large part of their content-creating user base.
I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the browser's sandbox?
I'm (obviously) not the target market, but I absolutely detest disingenuous behaviour like this.
Reddit's mobile site is designed to be a bad experience to such a degree that it's comical. I use it everyday and still get confused wrt to basic functionality like what to click. It's also suspiciously slow in a way that Reddit proper never is.
I very rarely load up reddit on mobile but did so this morning and noticed the exact same message and couldn't believe it. The selling feature they use for the mobile app on that message was that it was faster than the mobile site. I don't see why that needs to be the case - it seems the reason the mobile site is slow is because they force it to do client side rendering. Or at the very least, just that it's Javascript heavy. I'm not sure why reddit needs to be like that given the content.
OT: but I feel the same about imgur. You can't use their mobile site to upload pictures anymore. You have to request the desktop site or install their app.
Really? I don't know if Reddit has been AB testing, but they seem pretty reasonable to me with their app ads. It's always been easy to clear and stays cleared for a while for me.
I sort of believe that the push to mobile is to utilize technologies like GPS, and for tracking purposes / more information points. To get to know the [s]customer[/s] mark better than they know themself. Also, the ISPs may help this push since mobile data is more costly to the consumer than regular ethernet cable type data. wired > wifi
Reddit has the worst mobile site i've ever seen, with constant pop-ups that make the site basically unusable. Sometimes a good idea and first to the market is better than good execution.
1. They have some weird policies about how they want their employees to work. At one point of time they were ok with being remote, then they moved everyone to SFO or told them to pound sand.
2. Scaling issues: Seems like that's an after thought and only gets addressed "when it happens"* (Never thought put in after the fact)
3. The Modmail.. it's bad when you're dealing with lots of it. There are features completely lacking. (Like searching, or a CRM for users and how they contacted the mods)
4. The non-obvious spam.. it's gotten worse now that they took down r/spam.
Please explain to me in simple terms why a website property is worth so much.
Keeping in mind this has remained a mystery to me ever since Facebook didn't sell for a million dollars an eon ago. Facebook's founder is today worth some ridiculous sum of money. Why is that? I'd have sold Facebook for a million dollars and then just made another website. What am I missing. YouTube sold for some amazing sum ages ago to Google, who has from my understanding still not turned a profit with it.
Since I am clearly so out of touch please make the explanation easy to understand.
[+] [-] shawnee_|8 years ago|reply
It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).
Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.
For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...
A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.
[+] [-] komali2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jliptzin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hitekker|8 years ago|reply
1. Reddit's internecine subreddit wars required constant admin intervention and mediation. Reddit only has so many hands on deck, so more of than not, they pulled engineers in to help moderate.[1]
2. Reddit is unprofitable, so they have trouble affording top talent. [2]
3. Finally, Reddit's vision for the future has been hazy for the last decade. If the navigators can't chart a course, all the rowing in the world won't move the ship in the right direction. I suspect the overdone April Fools experiments are a result of engineering not being given technically compelling, or perhaps meaningful features to labor over.
Sources:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...
[2]http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/04/02/reddit-sets-eyes-prof...
[+] [-] beager|8 years ago|reply
Previous large-scale changes have been presented to their community and generally have been panned by the community, and often unreasonably so.
[+] [-] zjaffee|8 years ago|reply
Additionally, from the various threads on reddit that I've seen people post about the company. They've done a lot of work on the background to reduce spam, which isn't something that is super obvious to someone not specifically looking to spam the site.
[+] [-] Alex3917|8 years ago|reply
I read through the front page of each of the top 5,000 subreddits (by subscribers) over the last few weeks, and a lot of the subreddits are adding hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per week. They seem to have gone into hypergrowth recently without anyone really noticing.
The other interesting thing of note is that of the 125,000ish posts I read through, there are only a few dozen submissions from independent blogs on the front page of all of these subreddits put together at any given time.
[+] [-] notatoad|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhomde|8 years ago|reply
I get the impression that Reddit has a lot of technical debt that makes developing new features difficult, and would take some major effort to refactor themselves out of
[+] [-] traskjd|8 years ago|reply
Having said that, not all features would be _that_ intensive on systems.
[+] [-] GSimon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FullMtlAlcoholc|8 years ago|reply
Also, they expose their data via an API that developers have used to make all sorts of features, giving them the luxury of being able to basically test features without actually implementing them.
[+] [-] Cacti|8 years ago|reply
Personally I prefer it far, far more than the constant changes some startups seem to feel is necessary to justify their existence.
[+] [-] kaspm|8 years ago|reply
That said, I believe they are heavily recruiting at all levels so if you want to work for Reddit, apply now.
[+] [-] TheSoftwareGuy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javiramos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threepipeproblm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|8 years ago|reply
At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election)
And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:
[+] [-] chippy|8 years ago|reply
Sometimes they do that under the covers, so to speak, and some users don't like it (e.g. hailcorporate) but often they will promote their products transparently, and often normal users don't mind. The most obvious example is Netflix on /r/movies. Multiple employees were observed continuously posting things to the site, via submissions, comments etc and users liked it.
By introducing a charge for these corporate users they can reap in a substantial income. Whether it would make sense for them to label these corp users as such is another option, but they certainly know about them. I find it interesting that most normal users find that they don't mind interacting with paid marketing employees and that they consider it organic and natural, very interesting. I also find it worrying.
[+] [-] pharrlax|8 years ago|reply
Another phenomenon I've been seeing more of is a company that gets in early to a niche gaining control of the subreddit around that niche, tilting the scales in their favor.
Two examples I can think of are /r/nootropics, whose mod team is led by the owner of nootropics supplier Ceretropic, and /r/amazonmerch, whose sole mod is the owner of MerchInformer, a SaaS Amazon Merch research product.
They're each careful to never moderate in an overtly heavy-handed way that would cause a user revolt, but nonetheless, their companies are mentioned in the each subreddit far more often than their competitors. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and one that will only worsen as these niches grow in popularity.
[+] [-] rorykoehler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispytx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sotojuan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngold|8 years ago|reply
Reddit is only a thing because people feel safe there. What other site of its user base does that?
[+] [-] theprop|8 years ago|reply
I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grillwork|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
Their struggles with advertisement is something they can actively address now. Before when they were smaller than digg once digg made a huge mister and alienated their users this allowed to flourish into the site it is today. Due to the fear of what occurred to Digg their advertising was less aggressive their advertisements have been less aggressive and attempt to be targeted. But, since reddit is so large now the risk of alienation is much less. Also, other condenders like imgur and voat have tried to take the throne from reddit without success. Also, they have made great strides in making it accessible to everyone and you can get anyone from any political spectrum. If reddit wants to make money they have to broaden their appeal greatly and I believe thats the purpose of the $150m. Hopefully when they do this they won't turn out like digg because they are a much larger network now.
[+] [-] ransom1538|8 years ago|reply
Disclosure: Worked in this space 10+ years.
[+] [-] alecco|8 years ago|reply
YouTube is the only one I see who is really trying to make it work. Instagram worked it out by placed ads for the most popular models.
And a key sin of all these sites is they think the content is theirs. It's not. Stop trying to regulate it to be what you want. It is what it is and you should be thankful, very thankful, they chose your site to host it. But this doesn't seem the case. The reddit admins in particular seems to hate a large part of their content-creating user base.
[+] [-] jknoepfler|8 years ago|reply
I'm (obviously) not the target market, but I absolutely detest disingenuous behaviour like this.
[+] [-] arkitaip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JosephLark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intruder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yskchu|8 years ago|reply
But yes, I find this highly annoying also.
[+] [-] wingerlang|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SteveGregory|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 37|8 years ago|reply
/takes off tinfoil hat
[+] [-] cdnsteve|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throw_away_777|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owaislone|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monksy|8 years ago|reply
1. They have some weird policies about how they want their employees to work. At one point of time they were ok with being remote, then they moved everyone to SFO or told them to pound sand. 2. Scaling issues: Seems like that's an after thought and only gets addressed "when it happens"* (Never thought put in after the fact) 3. The Modmail.. it's bad when you're dealing with lots of it. There are features completely lacking. (Like searching, or a CRM for users and how they contacted the mods) 4. The non-obvious spam.. it's gotten worse now that they took down r/spam.
[+] [-] Kequc|8 years ago|reply
Keeping in mind this has remained a mystery to me ever since Facebook didn't sell for a million dollars an eon ago. Facebook's founder is today worth some ridiculous sum of money. Why is that? I'd have sold Facebook for a million dollars and then just made another website. What am I missing. YouTube sold for some amazing sum ages ago to Google, who has from my understanding still not turned a profit with it.
Since I am clearly so out of touch please make the explanation easy to understand.