Very Social Network

Reddit's CEO Says Investment Advice on Social Network Is 'Among The Best'

BUSINESS INSIDER - Feb 22 - Steve Huffman, CEO of the social media site Reddit, told legislators that investing advice on the site was "among the best" in remarks to the House Committee on Financial Services. The community moderation system - known on Reddit as "upvoting" or "downvoting" posts -allows users to boost or decrease visibility for posts that they either agree or disagree with. Huffman also said that Reddit's "user base is exceptionally good at sniffing out false information" using this method. Huffman went on to compare the user-voted posts on Reddit to investment advice on television. "On Reddit, I think the investment advice is actually probably among the best because it has to be accepted by many thousands of people before getting that sort of visibility," Huffman said.

by Annabelle Williams
See full article at Business Insider

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Reddit's Transparency Report Shows a Big Spam Problem

TECH CRUNCH - Feb 18 - Reddit has published its transparency report for 2020, showing various numbers relating to removed content, government requests, and other administrative actions. The largest problem by far is spam, which made up nearly all content taken down. Legal requests for the content takedown and user information were far fewer, but not trivial, in number. Of ~3.4B pieces of content created on Reddit (which is to say posts, comments, hosted images, etc.), ~233M were removed. 99.76% of these were spam or "content manipulation" like brigading and astroturfing, with ~50k each of harassment, hate, and sexualization of minors, smaller amounts of violent speech, doxing, and so on. Overall Reddit received a couple of hundred requests covering ~5k pieces of content or subreddits.

by Devin Coldewey
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Reddit Raises $250M in Series E Funding

TECH CRUNCH - Feb 10 - Reddit has raised a new funding round, totaling $250M. This is the company's Series E round of financing, and it comes hot on the heels of renewed public attention on the site that has dubbed itself 'the front page of the Internet,' owing to the role the subreddit r/WallStreetBets played in the recent meteoric rise (and subsequent steep fall) of the value of GameStop stock. Reddit also ran a 5-second Super Bowl ad, consisting of a single static image that looked like a standard post on the network itself. This is Reddit's 16th year of operation, and the company has raised around $800 million to date, including a Tencent-led $300 million Series D in Feb 2019.

by Darrell Etherington
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Reddit Installs Exceed 6M in January on GameStop Trading Frenzy

THE HINDU - Feb 8 - Social networking website Reddit hit 6.6M app installs worldwide last month, making January its best ever month. The app gained significant traction as individual investors coordinated on the platform to buy shares of GameStop Corp, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc and BlackBerry, and squeeze hedge funds that had bet big on the struggling companies to tank. Reddit's installs rose ~40% compared to 4.6M installs in December 2020. The app grew about 128% in January, compared with the same period in the previous year. The app has ~122M installs globally from both Google Play store and Apple's App Store with monthly active users grew ~50% in January compared to the previous year.

by Sowmya Ramasubramanian
See full article at The Hindu

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Reddit Partners With Ethereum Foundation to Accelerate Scaling

FINANCE MAGNATES - Jan 29 - Reddit, a prominent social media network, announced that it has partnered with Ethereum Foundation to bring value and independence of the blockchain technology to ~50M daily Reddit users. According to an official post by Reddit admin, u/jarins, the platform is planning to enhance its presence in the Ethereum ecosystem to accelerate scaling and resources for the network. The admin mentioned that the platform has maintained a decentralized environment to help users grow their own communities. Reddit is also planning to develop large-scale applications including community points on Ethereum. ETH is currently trading near $1,300 after crashing to nearly $1,200 during the latest crypto market sell-off. Ethereum now has a market cap of approximately $150B.

by Bilal Jafar
See full article at Finance Magnates

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Clever Bot Turns Reddit Arguments Into Video Game Scenes

MASHABLE - Jan 18 - 24-year-old software engineer Micah Price from Cape Town, South Africa, unveiled a niche-but-genius creation: a bot that takes everyday arguments on Reddit and has them play out in the style of scenes from Ace Attorney, Capcom's animated courtroom-based video game series. To trigger the bot, users only need to add "!objectionbot" or "!objection-bot" to a Reddit comment on certainly supported subreddits. The bot then scans the thread, finds the top commenters, and turns their discussion into a YouTube video that's then automatically linked to in the thread. Price said the whole thing took him about three days to put together.

by Sam Haysom
See full article at Mashable

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Report Finds Many Americans Rely on Social Media for News

MEDIAPOST - Jan 13 - 53% of Americans get their news from social media at least some of the time, but an increasing percentage of them feel it is making them more confused about current events. That's the finding of a new report from the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking Americans' use of social media for news for several years. The report suggests that social media is becoming a less reliable source of news for many Americans. Not surprisingly, Facebook is the primary social media source of news, with 36% of Americans citing it the social network as a "regular source" for news, followed by YouTube (23%), Twitter (15%), Instagram (11%), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Twitch (1%) and Tumblr (1%).

by Joe Mandese
See full article at Mediapost

Reddit Acquires Dubsmash

TECH CRUNCH - Dec 15 - Reddit announced that it has acquired a short video platform Dubsmash. The deal's terms were undisclosed. Dubsmash will retain its own platform and brand, and Reddit will integrate its video creation tools. Its co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel, and Tim Specht, will join Reddit. The app has raised $20.2 million from investors including Lowercase Capital, Index Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Heartcore Capital, and Sunstone Life. Reddit linked its acquisition of Dubsmash to its inclusion efforts. Much of Reddit's content is still text-based, however, with video, gifs, and images often shared from other sources, so Dubsmash's integration can help Reddit build out its own video platform.

by Catherine Shu
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Reddit Finally Shares How Many Daily Users It Has

MASHABLE - Dec 2 - Reddit shared that 52M people visit the site every day. This is a stat called "daily active users" that other social media companies share in company updates. Previously, Reddit only shared its monthly active users (430M, as of last year). Now, Reddit says it's making this new metric available so it can be assessed more comparably with other platforms.

by Rachel Kraus
See full article at Mashable

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Social Networks Aim to Erase Hate But Miss the Target on Guns

ECONOTIMES - July 23 - Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to ban a "wider category of hateful content in ads." Twitter, YouTube and Reddit have also taken additional steps to curtail online hate, removing several inflammatory accounts. But they all overlook a gun talk. The word "gun" appears but once in Facebook's policy on "Violence and incitement" to bar the manipulation of images to include a gun to the head. And neither "guns" nor "firearms" are mentioned in Twitter's policy on "Glorifications of violence," or YouTube's guidelines on "Violent or graphic content" or within any of these networks' rules on hate speech. Gun references have become prevalent in social media dialogues involving the nationwide protests over racial injustice, police reform and the BLM movement.

by Adam G. Klein
See full article at EconoTimes

Reddit's New Feature: More Media Files in Users' Posts

DIGITAL INFORMATION WORLD - July 20 - Reddit is a famous social networking forum with various types of communities, in which members post content related to the community and other members can vote on it as well. Image Galleries is a new feature that allows users to add almost twenty attachments to their post. Reddit has ~430M active users.

by Arooj Ahmed
See full article at Digital Information World

LinkedIn Sued Over Alleged Theft of iOS Clipboard Data

PHONEARENA - July 13 - Thanks to a new feature in iOS 14, a number of apps were found to be "spying" on Apple iPhone users' clipboards. The clipboard is where information copied from an app is kept until it is pasted to another app. As a result, there often is personal data written on the clipboard that is automatically erased after 120 seconds. The next build of iOS will notify a user when a third-party app is "reading" that user's clipboard. Among the apps caught red-handed by iOS 14 were TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit. A class-action lawsuit filed Friday in San Francisco federal court accuses LinkedIn of alleged violations of federal and California privacy laws and breach of contract.

by Alan Friedman
See full article at PhoneArena

Popular Social Networks In Other Countries

BUSINESS2COMMUNITY - Sep 16 - Facebook has~1 billion users, Twitter has ~500M Both networks boast users from all over the world. The same goes for other social media power players like Instagram, Pinterest, and Reddit. However, other countries also have social networks that are specific to themselves as well.

• Spain: Badoo
• China: Weixin and Weibo
• Germany: StudiVZ

by Megan Totka
See full article at Business2Community

Reddit Goes Open Source

MASHABLE -- June 18 -- Reddit has decided to open source of their entire code base, allowing developers to see how exactly the social news site works. With the move, Reddit is encouraging developers to submit their own code and extensions for improving the site. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

Digg Competitor Mixx Takes $2 Million Series A

TECH CRUNCH -- Feb 24 -- Mixx has taken $2 million Series A1 in a round led by existing investor InterSouth Partners. Mixx offers a category based social voting service that competes with sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller. Mixx added the LA Times to its investor group in December. Total funding to date is $3.5 million. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH