"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”"
I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism about its viability and perception of its value?
Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off approach.
I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands-on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
My "change on my agreement with them" was to quit.
Including myself, three of the four reddit programmers came to that conclusion within the same six month period. (Props to spladug for keeping the flame alive!)
This may have been a good thing. Digg didn't have any constraints on buying new hardware and hiring new people, and we can see how that ended (they bought too much, hired too many people, and collapsed)!
We weren't asking for unlimited hardware and headcount. We would have been thrilled with a rule that every time traffic doubles, we get to hire one person.
As for hardware, all we wanted was a team printer that didn't jam, an SSD for ketralnis's workstation, and the right for our engineers to substitute an equal-cost laptop of their choice for the IT-approved MacBook.
Digg didn't collapse because of hardware or headcount...they collapsed because they trashed their product with unnecessary changes and pissed off their user base
Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic
So the fact that reddit got ignored for a few years, both to its detriment (having to beg for money) and to its benefit (not getting eaten/squished) is mostly just a byproduct of advance/newhouse's "buy all the things, figure out what to do with them later" strategy.
I remember before Reddit was moved to an independent subsidiary, there were tension between Conde and Reddit on how to increase the revenue or profit (were they ever profitable?) At one time, the site was crashing frequently due to lack of infrastructure capacity. They were forced to try different things to make money, like Reddit Golds, ad placement, etc.
I think Conde had realized later on that Reddit can become like Craigslist where while it won't be squeezed every ad dollar out of it but it will become enormously profitable and prominent in the web.
I'm a Reddit frequent user...I can't comment specifically on your assertions...just that it continues to amaze me how the site has remained as free from pervasive chiclets, (official) spam, and Digg-like networking...
Whether this was a deliberate plan or the byproduct of executive apathy, it's still quite amazing
Dashboard is more like a "reader." Everybody you follow is found there. Also any tags you subscribe to are there. Interactions like replies are also found there. I'd compare it to your Facebook feed or Twitter.com stream. It's your base of operations.
Lots of read-only content, and then a decent amount of interactions and events (messages/new follows/like notifications).
Kout doesn't really seem to be launched (you can only sign up for list). Whereas Gumroad lets you sign-up right now.
Gumroad's design is also a bit more inviting.
I hadn't heard of either of them until today, but one is definitely in a place where I would share the link with buddies, and the other I wouldn't.
You ask about "buzz" and I definitely think launching a working product is more newsworthy than a beta sign-up page. That said, Kout seems interesting as an idea.
Well put. I do marketing work on a few projects that have commercial blogs. In mose cases, we're able to get 1K+ Tumblr followers in < 3 months (not counting "regular" RSS subscribers). (And none of the projects are famous/have famous founders/services/products) To get the same amount of regular RSS subscribers is much more difficult.
Tumblr is comparable to Twitter in that it's a common place to meet your readers/customers. Unlike a self-hosted blog, you don't have to ask visitors to leave where they are to visit you. So you're likely to get a bit more foot traffic/interaction, not to mention people passing it on/sharing it out (via reblogs).
Now if you're an already established service/otherwise famous, you might have no problem getting people to check you out. But even then, Tumblr has its benefits.
I don't think the choice is necessarily all or nothing between self-hosted or Tumblr. Many companies with "real" blogs also have Tumblrs. In many cases companies have multiple Tumblrs. (Not unlike Twitter, it's becoming common to have a separate Tumblr for different events/products/branches/divisions. IBM has at least 3. NBC has at least 4...)
I won't disagree that Tumblr has horrible performance issues. But it's still worth it. Twitter 3 years ago had bad performance issues, but it was/is still definitely investing in. No social site is forever, but they're great tools as long as you're aware of costs + benefits.
Cool to hear about your positive incubator experience. I'm a little confused though. The main vibe of the blog post was generally critical of the value of most incubators and you said you "tend to agree." Not that these opinions are technically mutually exclusive, but i did go "wait. what?" and reread your comment over a few times.
Can you go a bit more into your incubator experiences (positive) and the parts of the post you agree with (negative?)?
(Not asking you to rant/heap praise/ do anything you're not comfortable with.)
We got good value, but I don't think the average startup would be best served by an incubator approach. The amount of cash is too little, the mentors are generally accessible in our industry, and you can get the camaraderie of being around other startups via a coworking space. For us, our program being sponsorsed by the largest indy ad agency in the world (W+K), as well as Google, Target, and Coke, was a huge factor in why it's been good for us. But I don't think most incubators have that kind of approach. And in particular, as more and more generic startup incubators spring up, the value of being part of one probably drops.
(I submitted this, but don't know the author personally, so there are some assumptions built into to the following.)
[edit- regarding issue of straw man perception]
The issue is that nobody who makes beautiful novelty thinks their own work is beautiful novelty. (So nobody will appear in favor of it, even if they make it.)
So it's not quite a straw man. Everybody agrees that a certain type of thing is bad, but nobody thinks they themselves are responsible for that thing.
I suspect the author has some specific start-ups in mind but didn't want to call them out. Why have people be distracted by the drama of him dissing $startup in a blog post when he really wants people to ponder a more big picture idea?
I’m not entirely sure why you are attributing things to me I never said and I’m also not quite sure in what context you are responding to me. What’s this “beautiful novelty” you are talking about?
Ah, I just meant that things can seem like a straw man if nobody is arguing the other side... but it isn't a straw man just because nobody identifies with that side (but do actually live and breathe that side).
"Beautiful novelty" is the phrase he used to describe "pretty (but) shitty" start-ups (another phrase in the post).
I know what the phrase means but I think examples are kind of necessary. They don’t even have to be real.
I’m guessing people who think that looking pretty (which is not the same as having good design – though the author of this text seems to believe so) is all that’s needed are really out there. Some. Maybe. I don’t know. But that doesn’t seem to be a view embodied in any way on the website he was linking to and specifically saying he was responding to.
I can’t find the arguments he is responding to on the website he says he is responding to. I think that’s kind of important.
I can't speak for him. But for me, "beautiful novelty" is often a site that impresses me, but doesn't convince me to use it (even if i am its target- so it's not like just because i don't have a dog, and it's a site for dog-owners or whatever).
I imagine that beautiful novelty, like beauty, is subjective and something not everybody would agree on a case by case basis. Though I bet most people have seen a site that had no flaws, was stunning (and yes all you designers- i know it's not just visual, it's interaction, etc) but still didn't convince your head or your heart.
Just wanted to clarify that this wasn't a joke. If you're not in G+, you can't share this/don't have this button. (Whereas non-G+ members could have shared in Google Reader.)
If anybody out there has a social RSS reader start-up, feel free to reply to this and advertise your service. I will drag my friends to it along with me.
(Yes, I use Twitter, Instapaper, news aggregate sites, etc. Yes social software has changed how i would otherwise discover links/news. But I still need an RSS reader, and the passive sharing in old Google Reader is a layer of social that one takes for granted in almost any app. I get why they took it out (they think they're helping G+), but it doesn't work for me.)
We are working on startup: http://intigi.com. You can subscribe to your RSS or Twitter feeds and then filter the feeds by your interests (i.e., using keywords).
In terms of social features, you can make any interest public and share it with others. You can also follow or fork any of the public interests (like Github).
We are in early stages with the social features (and overall product) and would really appreciate any feedback/input! You can email me at mjfern@intigi.com or use the feedback button throughout the site.
damn, I fell for it again: joined, didn't particularly like it, decided to delete my account... and there is no way to do it.
Sigh. You guys keep doing this, and sooner or later some EU commissioner with half a brain will crack down on the practice, and then we'll all be poorer.
I've deleted your account. :-) We're still in Beta. Can you be specific about what you didn't like? Please email me at mjfern@intigi.com. Thanks in advance! Michael
I dislike it too. I signed up with serverdensity to try it out, and after 4 separate email exchanges with support -- each one asking for my account to be delete...it still hasn't happened. I keep getting brush off replies like 'have you tried X?' and 'Are you sure?'.
The service itself wasn't bad (I had some feedback that was likewise ignored/brush off), but I would never recommend them to anyone for this reason alone.
I can't agree more. At least they allow us to download our data as JSON file. I used the sharing feature a lot. I just downloaded my shared-items.json file and it is 56.3MB large!
I already tried Tiny Tiny RSS and NewsBlur but I don't really like them. There's rssLounge left, I'll try it tomorrow if I have enough time. Does anyone knows another one of these opensource webapp feed aggragator?
For now, I'll continue sharing using icebraining tips (to create a tag).
I develop one called Lilina which aims to be themable and pluggable, and offers APIs to that effect. I'd love to have feedback on it and see if it suits your needs.
Hey, NewsBlur's developer here. What didn't you like about NewsBlur? Lots in the pipeline, but I loves hearing what's off-putting so I can fix it for everybody.
I like Newsblur more than the last time I tried -- I just signed up for a premium account. However, I'm still slightly frustrated because of this:
In Google Reader, I liked to look at all the feeds in a category and just see all the posts from each of those feeds in the reading pane, most recent first. I can almost do the same thing in NewsBlur with the "river of news," but it only shows me unread posts, which is usually OK but it's nice sometimes to be able to easily scroll back and re-read an older post without having to go dig up that feed.
Is there a way you could add an option to replicate the Reader-like behavior of showing the posts in a folder chronologically?
I'm actually really fan of how Google Reader worked. But I can change my habits to use a free (as in freedom) software, that's not a problem. However, I didn't find how to create a feed of shared items, and that's a huge deal-breaker for me, I really need this feature (like I said in my previous comment, I use it a lot). Also, I'd love an Android app…
I just read an article (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/10/sharebros-...) about a service called Hivemined that some people are currently putting together. I'm hoping that since the impetus for building this new service is the destruction of Reader, it will actually be a worthy replacement. Fingers crossed...
I'm happy with Netvibes. It has a widget view like iGoogle and a Reader view like Google Reader. I find the latter to be better now. It integrates with Facebook and Twitter, if it's the kind of social stuff you want. It won't push what others like to you, however. That's what Twitter is for.
I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism about its viability and perception of its value?
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
And it was a long while until it got spun out. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/)
Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off approach.
I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.