What is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman doing?

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 256 points –
What is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman doing?
theverge.com

What is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman doing?::Reddit CEO Steve Huffman seems to be preparing the company for an IPO. But is what’s good for the IPO good for the business?

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I agree with most of this article except about Discord being Reddit's main competitor. I think Discord has a distinct enough feel that it's almost kinda separate from other social media. It's less so like a platform you make posts on and moreso a big text group with lots of features, which is perfect for some communities but stifling for others.

I don’t really get a lot of what people want to use Discord for. A couple web forums I used (ram by companies, for specific games) closed and they moved to Discord. How is IRC-style chat a replacement for a forum? They’re totally different formats.

While I do like discord. It is like you say a completely different format. Shouldn't be compared to reddit.

It just doesn't work for anything other than playing games together IMO.

Works well enough as a group chat / voice call app. That's what it's for. Before discord you had to pay for good group voice calls.

ya, just op was saying people are trying to turn it into a chat hub and it's just not worth. If I want to text my friends I'll just text them in a group chat.

It's good for things like support chat or quick questions.

To be fair, they have Forum Channels.

Oh, that's kinda neat actually.

Yeah, the only problem is that even a forum channel would require you to create a Discord account and find that server before you can even see its content and that's just not acceptable for massive open communities like r/malefashionadvice that seems to be moving to Discord.

I think discoverability is still a problem.

I use Discord for real-time communication, but leaving a platform that's closing up access for a platform with already closed access makes no sense to me. It doesn't solve the original problem.

Ditto! I think mass participation forums (e.g. r/malefashionadvice) should always be searchable without first having to create an account, find a particular server, join it and then search there. This is just an incredibly slow and ineffective way compared to just doing a search for my problem site:reddit.com in your favorite search engine.

That is an improvement for sure. The problem remains, though, that the info is locked in Discord and won't show up on search engines.

Yes, but to be fair once again, some might see it as a good thing because it might drive up engagement and discourage lurking. I.e., if you already went through the trouble of creating an account, then why not post or comment?

That’s more like Twitter or Facebook, where you have a search result telling you certain info is available, but then you have to sign in to view it. The problem with Discord is not knowing where the info is in the first place, as in which discord community. There could be many that cover a certain game, for instance.

Preference? Being "cool with the kids"?

Yeah, that's a pretty dumb comparison. Discord is a chat, reddit is a forum. They're fundamentally different.