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Comment by mr_puzzled | Hacker News Reader

Does the root cause of all these problems with quora come down to being vc funded and needing high revenue numbers and growth rates? Imagine quora was a site driven by the community...

It's a conundrum, only a vc funded site can reach such scale, have great growth etc but when the time for monetization comes, everything starts going downhill. A site driven by a foundation for example, rarely ever gets to any sort of scale. How can this problem be solved?

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I do get a sense that they put more effort into marketing and growth than actually fostering a solid knowledge base. However, an interesting point was raised in another comment: comparable sites that focus on quality often come across as unwelcoming because they have strict guidelines. I'm not sure it can be entirely blamed on the fact that they're VC-funded--to some extent, it seems they're more interested in being newbie-friendly than producing quality content.

TBH, I'm actually quite impressed that Reddit has lasted as long as it has and is still as vibrant as it is. Yes, of course there are tons of cesspool and misogynistic/racist/tribal areas, but I've found that I still like and frequent my niche smaller subreddits, my city subreddit (tons of trolls there but they are always downvoted and good content bubbles up) and the larger "eye candy" subreddits like r/aww.

My guess is that Reddit explicitly did not try to put VCs number 1 in their priorities, unlike, say, Digg.

Reddit was ruined with the redesign. Its buggy and slow. I get stuck on a loading screen on mobile for about 20 seconds before the page loads and half the time just shows an error. The desktop version also keeps logging me out randomly and forgetting I opted out of the redesign.

I only use old.reddit.com, I agree I hate the redesign on mobile.

I still use i.reddit.com on mobile. Pretty fast, pretty good UX, and functionality wise has most of the non-power user features one needs. No ads either. I’ve tried to switch over the years to various apps as they’ve come up but in the end have always preferred the minimalist text with small thumbnails that runs quick on any browser.

I'm in the same boat here, hope they keep it up for a little longer. The new re-design is atrocious, almost makes the website unusable for me.

Recently Reddit began to insert a huge "you want to see this too" block into the comments section (at least for unauthenticated users). What an awful solution. People don't want to see our links in the sidebar so let's put them directly into content.

They think that I am a monkey that came from Google search and is going to click links that they show to me.

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