> seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat.
That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on the record would be a good start as well.
> Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'.
Bullshit. Reddit is horrible overstaffed and the last numbers we have are from 2021 when they made $350M. If you can’t run a site with an all volunteer mod staff for $350,000,000 a year then you have no business in tech.
> Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse.
Won’t anyone think of the poor company making over $350M a year? Spare me.
Making 350 million per year for a site of this magnitude is pocket change because it's revenue not profit and costs are pretty high.
Of course everybody criticizing the team believes they can do a Twitter and run Reddit with 150 people but Reddit is a lot more to a lot more people than Twitter ever was. Those people also probably believe that they can rebuild it in a weekend. Or two.
Cutting API costs in half will not change the amount of noise that is being made because for many $0 would be too much. Agreed about the lying though, that shouldn't have happened and it disqualifies the current leadership. But be careful about making too many assumptions about what it's like to run a property at this scale, costs and labor wise.
I know that the 350M (last reported in 2021 so I think we can assume it’s higher now, at least the same) is revenue but that gets to my second point, headcount and other costs.
Reddit has had not substantially changed in many years. Yes they added chat (I don’t see anyone talking about using this) and NFTs (really? This is what lights a fire under your development team?) but they haven’t really touched the core experience in a very long time. Even “new” Reddit was just a UI refresh, that is still plagued with bugs (I’ve reported a number, all unanswered). The mod tool situation is pretty dire as well and has not been improved despite many broken promises.
What are those ~2K people doing? And Reddit is VERY different from Twitter. The real-time aspect isn’t there, their search has always been shit, and I’m not even sure if you can get notifications when someone posts (just replies to your comment/post). It’s a very different beast. They even can (and do) get away with heavy caching to hide up/down in real-time (I agree with that move, I’m just saying it also affords them the ability to cache). I also regularly get notifications of a reply then go to the thread and the reply doesn’t show up for 1-2 minutes. All that to say I think that Reddit is much easier to run than Twitter and it shouldn’t cost anywhere near $350M with salaries for employees to run.
I’m sure you need a bunch of sales/ad reps but as for the core development team? Judging by their output I find it hard to believe you need more than 10-20 developers, more in ops/production engineer-type role but the development output is next to nil and it’s not like they are spending their time on things like ADA-compliance (which, yes, they don’t HAVE to be accessible).
2000 seems insane, seems very “VC-funded” and I say that with the most negative of connotation. Why can’t anything be just profitable instead having to aim for 1000x returns and all-or-nothing thinking? I know, I know, late stage capitalism, blah, blah, blah, I still hate it.
That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on the record would be a good start as well.
> Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'.
Bullshit. Reddit is horrible overstaffed and the last numbers we have are from 2021 when they made $350M. If you can’t run a site with an all volunteer mod staff for $350,000,000 a year then you have no business in tech.
> Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse.
Won’t anyone think of the poor company making over $350M a year? Spare me.
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