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Ask HN: What is the morale like inside Reddit, as an employee?
342 points by gremlinsinc on June 21, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 214 comments
I'm curious if anyone who works for Reddit might want to chime in anonymously or give insight. Is this going to turn out like Twitter with a huge purge of Reddit staff too, Spez said he wanted to do to Reddit what Elon did to Twitter.

As an employee do you support the blackout secretly? What is your opinion of things? Some huge subs have migrated to other platforms, how do you think this ends?




Reddit was a co-op between a few groups of people.

General low effort content scrollers

Power users and mods who appreciate creating and contributing to make a community

Advertising interests

The deal was, the ad seeking was for the mainstream strollers, and the contributing power users and mods could opt out of the bs. The community builders get a nice environment for their community, the scrollers get content, and the ad people get to shiw thejir ads.

I always thought spez understood this. Its why the api existed. Its why old.reddit.com existed. It was the commercial machine's compromise to the content generators in exchange for the moderating and commenting.

But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Without the compromise the whole thing falls apart. Reddit becomes digg.


This is also more or less my mental model of how Reddit operated. I thought their leadership understood this too. The only thing that makes sense to me is they've run the numbers and have decided the meme-consumption / infinite scroll users are more than enough to keep the lights on, and they believe they'll save money by kicking their power users off the platform.


This sounds like a case study for biz school in the 2030s.


yeah but what's the lesson?

they may tell everyone to piss off and still maintain profitability, or even increase it, since the advertisers like what's happening and the people who are angry aren't angry enough to offset profits.

2030 B-school lesson is: fuck the user, get paid, c.r.e.a.m.


One lesson might be "We're mostly text and TikTok is video, therefore not directly competitive" might be wrong when evaluating how long Reddit will retain passive scrolling users.


> But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Most likely scenario is spez’s boss wanted better numbers to maximize price at IPO.

I think they decided to cash out when things were very frothy in 2021, and they missed the window. It will be interesting to see if they even get to $10B. I would bet on less than $5B.

According to Wikipedia:

>In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.[13] Their investment valued the company at $500 million at the time.[14][15] In July 2017, Reddit raised $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with Advance Publications remaining the majority stakeholder.[16] In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion.[17] In August 2021, a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments raised that valuation to over $10 billion.[18] The company then reportedly filed for an IPO in December 2021 with a valuation of $15 billion.[19][20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit


Its value seems to be rapidly declining. I was on lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday and was a little shocked at how many people migrated over there. I don't see how this looks good to any potential investors pre-IPO. The fact that lemmy (the software) exists makes one question how much of a moat Reddit really has.


The ones that have moderately successfully migrated are the ones that are visible.

What is missing are the ones that aren't.

r/Boardgamedeals/ has a moderator that has tried to say "go to lemmy.world instead" ( https://lemmy.world/c/boardgamedeals ).

However, the community didn't follow.

r/boardgamedealz was spun up and has had more activity there.

r/soloboardgaming people are slowly moving back to r/boardgames now that one player board games are more socially acceptable within the community since that sub is also restricted.

Big subs that fork to lemmy often have enough people to make it active there.

Small ones that fork and the mod leading the move have more difficulty - especially if all the mod does is moderate and doesn't do any posts.

Many subs exist as part of a greater community. For board games, that's https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/wiki/related_subreddits

It may have been more successful to do what Star Trek did and stand up an instance and host all things related there.

I believe that small subs that don't have enough of a core posters moving or that lack discoverability once this all dies down won't be successful on Lemmy unless they are able to have a more closely affiliated instance to find all things {broader topic}.

While it's not much of a moat, the key thing that Reddit has is discoverability. Reddit occasionally informs you about domain adjacent subs. People on subs frequently suggest domain adjacent subs where the content would also be accepted.

While we often deplore it, tools to drive engagement is what keeps Reddit running. Without solving that, discoverability is a problem on the fediverse that will hinder all but the most dedicated small groups from establishing a lasting community there.


That's not how network effects work. You can't win by cloning the software of an existing social network.


The problem I have with lemmy.world is I have yet to be able to login.


I had to reset my password once for it to work. I wonder if my initial password was too long.


use kbin, they share stuff and I had zero problems getting a kbin account


> Reddit becomes digg.

I don't think spez cares if this happens. 95% of the content people see on reddit is mindless garbage that is either a repost or from tiktok/some other site. I believe spez is confident that 95% of content will continue on just fine even if every single moderator quit at the same time. Automoderator setups are already very well fine tuned.

You'd lose the more curated subreddits, sure. But that's such a tiny amount of traffic compared to propaganda news posts, animal photos, and tiktok videos.


spez will care, because, well who uses digg?


Finite vs. infinite iterated prisoners' dilemma?

Going by the various takes and stories I read over the last few days, I imagine the deal you describe worked because it was indefinite; however, IPO is not only putting pressure to juice up financial metrics - it's also setting an end date for the deal. Once the company goes public, the leadership can, like investors, just cash out and let the whole thing sink. Even if this was always the plan, as long as the "exit" was a non-specific "at some point in the future", everyone could kind of forget about it. Putting a specific timeframe on it completely changes everyone's perceptions - like with iterated prisoners' dilemma, even if the end is still far away, the game changes its nature the very moment that specific timeframe is set.


>But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Because as long as the public buys whatever he's selling, he still leaves rich. Nothing about reddit going forward actually has to be successful or functional as long as normal people buy the stock, people who don't know reddit, don't use it, don't understand it, don't CARE about it, etc.


Reddit can automate the content generation with ml. They have the perfect dataset to continue generating successful posts and comments into the future. They have seeded conversations in the past. Spez is confident he no longer requires a core community of humans; humans that have feelings and stage protests.


The ad industry calls this kind of auto-generated content for ad placement "MFA" or "Made for Advertising". And they hate it. Ad platforms spend time categorising this content so they can either exclude it from all their users or just exclude it from those users who don't specifically opt into it.

Like many other metrics in the industry (viewability, brand safety, etc.) it's actually the largest brands who are the biggest spenders and the ones you'd think from outside would be the most ruthless about "money in, results out", that care about this stuff the most. The ones that don't are the no-name dropshippers or those "You won't believe this story about X" content mills, but those ones also are willing to pay the least for their ads.


I would love for advertisers paying a lot of money for bots pushing some bytes around. Budgetary capture as a spam filter technique.


Investors don't take kindly to being duped. Elizabeth Holmes can tell you more.


Wonder if that'll work as well as autopilot...


sounds out there, but I completely agree.


M-m-m-oney


Didn't Digg had precisely a power-user problem on v3 thus the creation of v4 and it's unraveling? I'm seeing the same pattern here, users tripping on power and trying to host the platform hostage


This is best suited for Blind where you have the verification. That said recent results turned up little. On the layoffs, morale seems bad:

- "There isn't much clarity around severance and health insurance"

- "This is fine ([fire emoji] [dog emoji] [fire emoji])"

Recent (past month) reviews seem negative: "questionable execs", "micromanaging", "still not mature", "growing pains", "stay away", "mediocre, lack of product vision".

As a reminder Blind the users are verified to be working at the company. It's quite the cesspit of elitism and "I make more than you". But, again, reviews tend to be accurate because it's verified anonymity.


Here's a couple more verified quotes since I dived down this rabbit hole:

- "I think most rational people agree with the decisions, regardless of possible fumbling"

- "We are living under constant anxiety waiting for the next round of layoffs that’s been planned by leadership at the beginning of the year"

- Another verified user disagreed with the above ^

- "Current employees are afraid to say anything as spez reads Blind and complains about it at all hands. 100% he will try to rat out who is speaking. Not worth it."

Last one seems most interesting. Looks like spez/upper leadership is monitoring what employees say.


> Current employees are afraid to say anything as spez reads Blind

LMAO. Of course someone so sensitive as to edit comments against him on his own site would obsess over comments on Blind.


I'm convinced leadership everywhere reads Blind. Wouldn't catch me posting there ever. A private company having posts tied to your work email...


Yeah, screams honeypot.


> Looks like spez/upper leadership is monitoring what employees say.

> reply

Also, if an exec gives any sh1ts about what is on Blind, they've already failed and are just looking to maximize their image during what is probably a sh1tshow. See Ted Lasso's "Wonderkid".

It reeks of narcissism and gives me that 9V battery taste in my mouth.

Elon buying Twitter is the hyper example here. Morally bankrupt and pathetic, but may end up winning $ because of that whole not having morals part. I can't imagine living that kind of life, gross.


> if an exec gives any sh1ts about what is on Blind/

could change that to "if anyone"

my workplace's blind is extremely toxic and rarely rooted in reality.


> Current employees are afraid to say anything as spez reads Blind and complains about it at all hands. 100% he will try to rat out who is speaking. Not worth it.

Are employees worried he knows someone who works at Blind who can reverse lookup emails? By all appearances, no one's ever been identified on Blind in the 6 or 7 years it's been popular (with the exception of people who shared too much personal info). Seems like Blind really does throw the email away.


I mean technically any large corp can very easily find out who is on blind.

Every large corp has email filtering and logs. Easily just look for the employees who received the verification email from signing up to Blind w their work email addy bc you gotta use your corpo email address to join and comment there.

I'd be able to look at our logs and find that in just a few min.

Since it seems Spez is such a lil sensitive c-suite sf bro type, he'd be able to get that info no problem.


If 50% of your employees get Blind emails, good luck identifying them. I would hope they aren't clicking through the verification email from their work machine, but I've seen some ignorant ICs in my time.


Once your company is a certain size, work emails only get sent to work devices. Not sure what you’re getting at with hoping they’re not clicking through from their work computer. Of course they are.

But yes if a high enough percentage of employees are signing up, there’s safety in numbers.


> Once your company is a certain size, work emails only get sent to work devices. Not sure what you’re getting at with hoping they’re not clicking through from their work computer. Of course they are.

Once it arrives on your work device you are free to type it into your phone manually (this is me since I don't value my free time), forward the email elsewhere, or more recently take a phone pic of the url string and have the OS turn into text for you.

But I agree, having spent enough time reading the absurdities on Blind and wondering how some of these people got their $500k+ yearly comp without understanding how computers work, a majority of people are definitely most likely simply clicking the link on their work device.

The phone app is better, though.


Plenty of large corps have email retention times set, to avoid having to pass old emails to lawyers during discovery.

If you're doing it at receive time, then adding them to a table, sure, but that doesn't get you a backfill


That’s the expected outcome of any platform employees flock to


> [on] Blind the users are verified to be working at the company

Well, they're verified to have worked at the company at some point. Blind doesn't make you periodically re-verify your access to your work email account.


Yes they do. I changed companies, was eventually asked to re-verify, now have no access to old company's channel


I was forced to re-verify a year after registering, at two different companies.


This is a sincere question. I would love to know what the 4000+ staff do there, running a forum web site that uses community moderators.

Correction: 2000 staff. Question stands.


> I would love to know what the 4000+ staff do there

Usually when an engineer asks this question, they are starting with the assumption that most everyone who works there is an engineer. That assumption is usually wrong.

I have no inside information at all, but my guess is that engineers make up less than 1/3 of the employees. I'm sure the sales team is large, the product team is large, and the community management team is large. They probably also have a bunch of legal, and we know they have a lobbying group as well. And of course if you're taking people's money, you need a bunch of customer service to handle that.

When I worked there 14 years ago, we had at peak six engineers, and three non-engineers (one sales, one product, one community). But also we had the parent company providing legal (and there was a lot of legal requests even back then!), HR, facilities, finance, and basically all the other support tasks. And also we the engineers did a lot of it. We managed customer service for ads, we managed making t-shirts and plushies, we managed customer service for reddit gold payments, and a bunch of other "non-engineering" tasks.

The site is big and is transactional, which makes it a harder problem to solve. With the near-real-time display of votes and listing changes and comments, it's a lot more like eBay than Slashdot (which is what I would say at the time).


> I'm sure the sales team is large

who are they selling to? And why so many people?

EDIT: sorry, I read another response, they are selling to ad companies. Does that really demand hunderds, over 1000 people, though? At some point I feel they are costing more than what the next increment can bring in.

I understand your point but even if there was only 100 engineers (which would not be enough) I can't imagine what the other 1900 administrative people are doing. It's an internet forum, and unlike Twitter and other social media (where I assume they simply have hundreds of mods) they successfully outsourced moderation to volunteers.

Is it all just legal suits? The customers are the users and admins are horrible at responding to user requests (be it users or mods), so it doesn't feel lik customer service is using those resources.


> It's an internet forum, and unlike Twitter and other social media (where I assume they simply have hundreds of mods) they successfully outsourced moderation to volunteers.

This vastly underestimates how much moderating reddit is already doing. When I worked at reddit, we spent at least 50% of all of our resources on fighting spam, harassment, and illegal content. I'm sure reddit is still doing this. What the moderators see is already after the core platform has removed the most obvious offenders. Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.

> The customers are the users

The customers are the people who pay, who are mostly advertisers. Customers and users are two different groups with different ideas of what makes reddit good, and sometimes those don't align. It's a fine line to walk between serving the customers and users to try and keep both happy.


> What the moderators see is already after the core platform has removed the most obvious offenders.

This might be true.

> Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.

This is certainly not true for my sub. There's a lot of obvious spam that has to be manually removed. For example, if Reddit enforced the selfpromotion ratio rule programmatically, there'd be an order of magnitude less spam to deal with.

---

Unless Reddit cranks up the removal rate, moderators are still necessary or the /new feed will drown in spam. If /new drowns in spam, what reaches the top will become a lot more chaotic.


>This vastly underestimates how much moderating reddit is already doing.

I likely am, so thanks for giving me an idea. Admins never really talk about how much they do behind the scenes (and aren't that responsive to the users in general) so its hard to tell.

But as a counterargument: While I'm sure they need more admins now than back in 2010, they also (hopefully) will have automated their spam/illegal filters so it doesn't require 1000x the admin moderators to control 1000x the content. the filter catches maybe 95% of the truly illegal content and then admins can check at a less urgent pace.

>The customers are the people who pay, who are mostly advertisers.

I guess it's more accurate to say that advertisers are the customers, and users are the product. But it's an odd metaphor here since sales would need to appeal to both. Getting ads to show and also getting ads for their own site, to get more products to appeal to more customers.

I do agree that its an odd balancing board, especially with Reddit that is more hostile than usual to inorganic content.


I remember when you left, I’m still there as a moderator.

Back then, when there were a dozen of you it was easier to reach an admin when needed than now, heh.


> it was easier to reach an admin when needed than now, heh.

I hear ya. But in their defense, the regulatory environment is way worse now, and back then as an admin we all pretty much knew about every ongoing issue. A current admin can't just answer you back without possibly running afoul of either a regulatory issue or an ongoing project in another group.


Why does Reddit need sales? Genuine question. My guess is to sell ads?


Any company that makes money needs sales. But the main thing reddit sells is ad space. You have to spend a lot of time convincing big advertisers to buy on your platform.

Disney isn't going to just pull up a self service portal to buy ads. :)


The sales people at Reddit actually focus on selling those little plastic bags with goldfish in them to county fairs.

I don’t know why you’d jump to the conclusion that the sales people at an ad-supported website would sell ads.


Based on using the site, I believe most of their effort goes into making their video and image display code as bad as possible. There is no other explanation for how terrible it is.


They may have hired some PM from the MS Teams team. They seem to be successful in their quest for breaking all features that still work. If there is nothing left to do, they move controls around so the user can’t find them anymore.


Don't forget optimizing the UI/UX to be as unpleasant as possible


This. It takes a lot of effort to build an app that works as bad as Reddit does. It’s an engineering marvel


Those poor devs. I bet some of them had come up with great ideas, which they had to watch overruled by marketing people.


Ahh yes, the “must be marketing’s fault” cry for bad usability, not internal disfunction and turf wars between engineering and product, or incompetence, or inattention, or…

I bring this up only because I find when I do this blaming of <other non-build people>, I often miss the problem that is actually in front of my face and can actually impact.


Could be both. But ofc I (and I imagine many others) are biased by intimate engineering experience.

From my experience: as a game dev we ALWAYS know when a game sucks. Maybe some director or other director level person strongarmd it, so it's not like engineers can't be blind. But as a general consensus, I've met very few "bad devs" from a technical POV (a vector consumers often like to attack when they see bad gameplay). We work with a bad hand and we almost never get the extra time needed when we try to show publishers. Fortunately, it's a lot easier now to argue for delays than over a decade ago.


At least we can still "request" pretty please the greatly superior UI from 15 years ago.


the closest you can get is old.reddit.com, which is the one I used all the time, but they've removed the nifty feature of listing the last 10 posts that I went to


Wouldn't RES be well positioned to provide that functionality?


It might be, it might already be there.

But RES has stopped feature development in 2021. If it's not there, it's not coming anytime soon.


> Q: Why doesn't RES incorporate reddit gold features?

> It's unfair and unwise to undercut reddit inc.'s development work. Get gold!

This is about Gold but it might be a more general "we do not step on Reddit's toes" kind of rule too.


or how bad the inline editor is with html options


They probably copied the codebase that powers Twitter's video offering. In a way its great, helps break addiction to these sites if you can't actually use it.


If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.


it takes incredible engineering to make a 10s video have 360p visual quality but still require approximately 500mb of data to load


At some point video bytes must be transmitted by reading them from one employee to the other via a rotary phone.


Same question for Uber with 36k employees. It's an app that connects taxis to clients. I guess I'm showing a lot of ignorance here - but why does this need 36k people?

I guess this was Elon's thoughts when he laid off most of twitter.

Edit: Found a good answer for Uber on quora: https://qr.ae/py4zBU


Uber is different because every place it has to operate is different. Maybe something weird happens in XYZ city that requires drivers to route around a certain street so they need a feature that generalizes that. or some such deal. Reddit OTOH... nope.


Uber also has a bunch of regulations to follow that are different everywhere. Each city will need it's own operations teams to deal with drivers, local authorities, etc. Then a country operations that that deal with payroll, taxes, etc.

You then need to have a customer support service. That is probably 5,000 employees right there.

Just because a company has 36,000 employees it doesn't mean they have 30,000 people working on the tech. There are lots of jobs that need to be done just to operate day to day. That most people on here wouldn't even think about, like cleaning staff for example. How many people on here even thought about cleaning staff?


For any company too small to own its own building outright, as well as many that do own their own buildings, cleaning staff work for a contracted janitorial company and not the company itself.


Considering how widespread Uber is, it's probably got a formula for opening up new offices in new locations. I know other companies I worked for had one so I can only assume Uber is the same. This is they know they need 2 x, 3 y, 1 z. Managing a series of contractors at that scale for each location would probably be a job by itself and kind of remove the benefits of outsourcing. Considering Uber literally deals with high turnover of personal by the nature of what they do, they don't seem like they would be likely to be that risk adverse to the paperwork challenges that potentially could come from low level staff like cleaners which is normally why companies prefer to outsource it. Like if your used to hiring office staff where high turnover would be employees leaving after a year vs cleaning staff where staff could change on a monthly basis, the hassle of dealing with paperwork isn't worth it. But if you've already got the person who deals with the paperwork, etc because that's your business it's less of an issue.

I think it's very likely Uber employs cleaners themselves due to costs attached to outsourcing and that they already have the staff to manage that sort of worker.


One crazy story I've heard from one of their competitors is when they were banned in one key city they wanted to get their drivers diplomatic passports from some random country so they could keep driving around as they pleased. Based on the "get shit done" mentality some startup founders have, I wouldn't be surprised if that was true.


> I wouldn't be surprised if that was true

Conversely, I would be more than highly surprised if it was. It has all the trappings of an urban myth.


Uber drivers are allowed to use 3rd party navigation apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, etc. I'm honestly not sure if they require specialists for each major city to handle city-wide traffic events. The 3rd parties that drivers piggyback on do it for them, to some degree of success.


It's not just navigation, there are many local nuances like where in airports or large stadiums they're allowed to operate or not operate out of. Dealing with city and county ordinances at the scale of Uber takes some bit of human power.


That's their backup mode of operation as far as I know. Their primary mode is to disregard all rules. They paid for the drivers' fines for years in my country until they were flat out banned. Only a few places like China were able to really get rid of them. A seriously shady company.


Regardless of past behavior, there are many many locales that do in fact levy their rules on Uber who have made a business decision to comply, leading to localized experiences of the app and service that can change both between different cities and even within different areas of a city.


You're right of course. I think they attack a new market from two directions. First they just enter the market, rules be damned. But from a different angle they have a huge lobbying arm to make themselves legal in the long run and in favorable terms. That's actually not a bad strategy businesswise IF you can pull it off in enough places. Usually the public really likes the service so there is no push back.


> Uber drivers are allowed to use 3rd party navigation apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, etc.

are you saying that the Uber-Driver's-App/Backend will communicate with the driver via these different mapping apps? or that so long as they use the Uber-Driver's-App to stay in contact with Uber, that Uber accommodates them also using other mapping software?


You turn off the voice on Uber and use another phone for the navigation. Or multi task on the same phone.


As a matter of fact, most European Uber drivers do exactly this. I'm from Poland and over last few years I've seen a single(!) Uber driver actually using built in navigation. Also most of them also work for Bolt at the same time and juggle orders from both...


> It's an app that connects taxis to clients.

Uber does a lot more than that! If you want an honest accounting of what Uber's employees are doing you need to start with an honest listing of everything Uber actually does.


When Uber started, they basically reinvented half of Google/Amazon since the cloud was no where near as mature as it was now. They were running their own data centers. It takes a lot of people to rebuild robust NoSql DBs, stream processing, container management, monitoring and the like from scratch.

Could Uber be built with a lot less now days? Absolutely, but it's also an interesting balance of even if they could, if their cloud bill for X service is 10m a year, and they think their own team of 4 could build X internally for less then that...why not do that?


Uber is not really a taxi company. They do a whole lot of general transport infrastructure not for laymen.

But 36k still seems absurd.


I saw a ferry in a YouTube video the other day that had "Uber Boat" plastered on the side.


The public transport boats in London are operated by Uber

They now also sell Eurostar tickets (although I don't see the advantage over Eurostars website)


> The public transport boats in London are operated by Uber

They're sponsored by Uber, that's it - they bought the naming rights. The actual boats are owned and run by the Thames Clipper company.


Thanks for the correction, I assumed Uber ran the ticketing as well for some reason, I haven't taken one since the uber branding


Was amusing getting the notification for "$35" Eurostar tickets on the Uber app, when it should be £35, very on brand.


When I was in Dubai, there were Uber helicopters. I'm still half tempted to take one when I'm back there.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375921


I guess I'm showing a lot of ignorance here - but why does this need 36k people?

Their stated goal to supplant as much of the existing TLC infrastructure for the planet as they can get their hands on. You can bet that these organizations (even restricted to those markets they are successful at "disrupting") employ a lot more than 36k people


Maybe you haven’t used in Uber in awhile, but it definitely does more than just connecting taxis to clients in 2023.


Because it's the number to show venture capital the real "growth".


Funny you mention that, I was just listening to the Tropical MBA podcast, and last week they had a guy who works in private equity come on the show. He explained a lot of basics of how PE works, since the podcast is mostly about small-scale bootstrapping and hiding out in cheap locations. It sounds like having a ton of headcount actually does make you look way more valuable to business investors, at least at the low end he was talking about.. I could see how that would scale up


Uber is publicly traded and has been for awhile now. I'm not sure how VC is relevant.


At times working at certain companies I can genuinely say I felt like being like an extra in a movie. I just had to be there, but the work I did wasn't important at all.


They had 700 staff 2 years ago, which is really what raises giant questions to me.

There's very little I can think of that seems to have changed about the site in the last 2 years for results from tripling their headcount.

Citation for the old headcount: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...


low interest rates, easy to hire and scale.

Granted, I have no idea what scalability Reddit has done in 2 years. You can even argue it didn't need most of it (some, sure. Pandemic did surge traffic).


They need more staff than most places because they spend so much of their day on Reddit.


Had a good chuckle out over this one :)


It's 2,000 employees, but the point and question still stand.


90 laid off per layoffs.fyi, which was 5%, so about 1800 pre-layoffs. So now more like 1700.


You have all of HR and Legal, you have all the execs and quite a lot of VPs associated with that size of organization.

Under that you are going to have an advertising-related departments both in sales and engineering. Much of the custom engineering focus is going to be directed at ads and how to make money which users will never see. Remember that users are the product, not the customer.

Then there's going to be the forum site itself, and the problem of moderating the moderators via the admins and generating visibility into how mods and users are abusing the system are going to be larger than expected at their scale.

Then there's the problem of trying to keep up with automated bots and straight forwards abuse of the system and that arms race against other people's code.

Then reddit has to interface with government agencies and is now responsible for policing itself when it comes to foreign troll farms. There is likely groups of engineers and managers assigned to dealing with the government.

And there's just the complexities of being such a large global business, and needing to deal with worldwide regulations and being such a large regulatory target, which will complicate everything.

You can try to wave all that away and say that they should just embrace radical free speech and fire 75% of the people, but that would result in the site being taken over by Troll farms, Nazis, and CSAM -- with advertisers fleeing and the US government itching to regulate them.

(Although I'm sure they could fire the useless half of middle management that I'm certain that they've accumulated, but that wouldn't make that enormous of a dent in the headcount)

In general this is an xkcd/793 problem:

https://xkcd.com/793/

Only replace physicists with software engineers. It seems simple because you wave all the concerns you don't care about and you're entirely focused on just building a forum website for users. Without advertisers, bots, bad actors, worldwide regulations, meta-moderation, etc the problem dramatically simplifies itself, but that isn't actually what reddit does.


If anything, I'm amazed that they can run that business with only 2,000 employees.


The question, "Why do tech companies need so many employees" was asked on Reddit 2 years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/nw2ebf/why_do_tec...

The first entry is "Nacho Fries are back for a limited time only" which I feel is the perfect answer to that question.


For some reason I had in my head that they had 12 engineers... wow, 2000 people, of which I assume at least multiple dozen are engineers? That really makes their product look much worse than it already did in my mind...


Probably sales team.


Have you ever done a systems design interview? There's a lot of complexity in seemingly simple systems. This is humorously demonstrated in this skit on MicroServices, https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

It's all too accurate.

Let's add up a few factors - Reddit is an 18yr old startup with Peter Pan syndrome. - Mountains of tech debt, like every other company - Industry incentives promote people to squirt out a feature, receive titles or money, and move on - Freedom of speech brings all the evils with it, like CP, that Reddit has complicated systems to catch and moderate - IPO desires mean financial belt tightening to look as mature as possible - Industry wide layoffs have created a fertile ground of new startups germinating. VCs are actively hunting for the next big AI unicorn. Torrential increases in traffic are hitting the company. And why? Reddit is a curation engine. The data is sorted and labeled to a degree. All this to say, there's a lot of refactoring needed on top of shifting ground created by the intersection of tech debt and IPO aspirations. - Guessing by all public measures, Reddit has a ton of traffic already. Extrapolating from other large companies I have worked for, the infrastructure and transport costs are significant. - 3P apps scrubbing Reddit ads and substituting their own are a brand and liability risk

TL;DR toil from legacy, more complexity than you can imagine, pressure of market


Sales/BizDev/relations and engineering/product would probably be my guess.

That said 2k people is a LOT, and it's not like the site itself is very high-tech or really pushing things forward. It's a aggregator of content with comments...nothing really advanced.

Yeah, 2k people is overkill.


HN is basically just that and it's mostly one guy moderating everything. I'm sure there's a few more for tech stuff but HN hardly ever changes and still feels like 2010, but that's the beauty plus it isn't monetized other than promoting yc companies, etc.

Reddit should be ran more like HN or even craigslist. Ppl never wanted a js heavy UI change. they liked the bare bones old school aesthetic. It gave that feeling of nostalgia, one of the last early web apps.

If Reddit never did a redesign, never hired more staff than really need, they'd definitely be profitable by now.


There are additional moderators (and I believe that's plural), though dang is the public voice.

sctb was previously on the mod team, but left YC a few years ago. He's recently reappeared in comments though.


How many employees would seem reasonable for Reddit to you? Also a sincere question.


Let's see.. Reddit is a very straightforward non-realtime forum that doesn't run its own servers

Maybe two dozen engineers/devops, a dozen support/management people for them, and 50-100 minimum wage-ish admins and their managers/corporate support structure. I can't pretend to know anything about the ad sales part of the business, I guess that's where the other 1800 people live?


That sounds about right - for an English-language-only message board startup that mostly ignores laws outside of a 100-mile radius of the bay area.

Narrowing focus to just engineering: how would you allocate 24 engineers across infra (networking, storage, scaling), backend (API, features), web frontend, design, mobile (iOS & Android), security, ads & monetization, Abuse & internal tooling dev? Or would you allocate 1 or 2 individuals to each (working 60-80 hour weeks) rather than teams (3-5 people, minimum) + line-managers & product folk. Add QA and you realize "2 dozen engineers" isn't a lot, the devil is in the details.

I was being charitable on 3-member teams: noone wants to be on an on-call roster that's only 3-engineers deep. Each of the areas I highlighted likely has multiple teams rather than just one (e.g. infra can be split into parthensized teams - networking, storage, operations/ops), and I intentionally completely ignored R&D functions.


That's true. And each one of those teams is going to need intra-team support teams with a lot of enterprise project managers, product managers, technical project managers, stakeholders, directly responsible individuals. There's going to be schedules to manage, rollouts, release dates, code lockdowns. Build engineers, infrastructure to support the build engineers and the project managers. Engineers are going to be spending so much time in standups, meetings, pre-meeting meetups, all-hands, etc that they'll be lucky to get an unbroken hour a day to code at all. Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people.


> Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people

Perhaps the market rewards growth more than it does efficiency? I can't name a single company (post WhatsApp) that has users in the 9-plus-digit-range and has less than a thousand employees.


yeah, I think you're right

It seems like investors prefer to have a large (but still profitable) org with a lot of redundancy and clear systems in place than an elite team of superheroes

I'm just annoyed that Spez is running a bloated overweight organization, then using that fact to justify some user-hostile money grubbing


Nobody likes an elite team of superheroes for a _business_. Superheroes burn out, get hit by a bus, have limited affinity for creating good documentation, sometimes a tendency to be fascinated by shiny things, can get annoyed by a real or perceived <whatever> and quit or can be headhunted away. And then there goes your business.

I dislike unnecessary bloat, be it in software or in org design, as much as the next guy, but staking your company's long-term future on superheroes (or superpowers, as it's for some inexplicable reason still fashionable to say) is a recipe for disaster.


You could also create a photo sharing site in a couple of weeks with a dozen devs. But an actual business like Instagram, that can acquire users, thats profitable is a different story.

There are dozens of unprofitable Internet search engines each made by a handful of people, yet Google somehow employs ~200k people to run a profitable search engine.

I can create (probably build from scratch) a wiki in same amount of time but non-profit Wikipedia is 450(?) people.

The core tech isn’t the driver to headcount, the business model is.

For Reddit, that probably means selling ads and acquiring users. Which probably means a whole lot of ad tech and other optimizations/features to increase visitors to your site. Ad sales, ad tech, etc etc. It probably means ad sales to big clients with complex legal, etc.

In the tech, entire feature groups worth having because it serves important business goals around user retention or growth. Some small percentage of extra eyeballs helps Reddit towards these goals that a site like hacker news wouldn’t care about.


That's exactly what Reddit more than 10 years ago. Right now they have NFT, real time chat, image and video hosting (imgur used to handle these), various one-off functionalities (r/place, polls, etc), react-based frontend (and the mobile counterpart), mobile apps for Android and iOS (seemingly a separate codebase), ads departments, various virtual goods (gold awards, profile pics customization), and perhaps many more I'm not aware about.


Well, the best Reddit app available (Apollo) is made by one guy. So maybe start there.


An app available only on one platform couldn't possibly be the best one available, this is highly subjective. "One of the most popular" perhaps


An app that scrapes an API is no measure of the complexity under the hood.


To be honest, I'm not surprised at the 2k number after everyone crazily bloated their companies during the low-rate period. I would be really surprised if they have < 1k.

If anything, the fact that they have only 2k employees shows how much free labor the mods provide.


There was a large argument about free mod labor during the dotcom days in regards to AOL forums. Not much has changed since those days. The solution to the free labor mod situation is a Reddit operated more like Wikipedia, that removes the obnoxious layer of behavior in Reddit that is hyper corporate and has tended to cause most of the problems. The free labor mods will feel a lot less upset about a platform that isn't profiting off their backs as well.


Can't say, but let's estimate ranges. Probably more than Wikipedia, less than Twitter.

Twitter pre-pandemic: 5000

Wikipedia pre-pandemic: 450

So... maybe 1000.


To trick investors into thinking its worth a bajillion dollars somehow I assume.


Keep in mind that at the scale of Reddit entire orgs could exist because their features squeeze 1-2% more user visits, driving more ad clicks, etc etc.


A friend of mine who is a software engineer there has #opentowork plastered on his LinkedIn profile picture. He's been at Reddit for 7+ years.


> Is this going to turn out like Twitter with a huge purge of Reddit staff too

Reminder, while it wasn’t a Twitter scale event, Reddit did announce plans to lay off 5% of its workforce recently.

Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/reddit-layoffs-90-protes...

Discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285


Which unfortunately seems more like the norm nowadays


Not a coincidence. The big firms paved the way, showed that this (the new) normal, and how it's done. And since tech investors seem to be receptive to it now, the smaller firms are copying it now.

Forgot to mention, very much the same for the recent price hikes. Very much a "skill" that executives are now imitating.


They seem like a bunch of lemmings. Just follow what's hot in Business Times or whatever they read


Not an employee, but: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

The only pattern I see in response is continued innovation and the rise of new platforms. I think a business model resembling a "[public] benefit corporation" [1] (in the USA at least) or a utility company may be more compatible with a social media company immune to enshittification.

[1]: https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/non-profit-corporation-vs-p...


As a founder of a SaaS company that was formed as Delaware PBC, I will say that this route does make it quite hard to follow the traditional fundraising path.

VCs are spooked by anything that’s not your run-of-the-mill C Corp. PBCs are hard to get off the ground.


Yeah. I sometimes wonder if that was ever a possibility for them. Reddit as a PBC or even a non profit would be unstoppable. I think the VC money and push for growth has driven the product to a weird place.


Don't work at reddit, but if they are going IPO, the employees are probably holding onto their stock and crossing their fingers until it is worth something.


I have no knowledge of reddit, but I have been in companies that have IPOed, as well as companies that just say they are going to in order to appease investors wanting their money back and to keep the employees strung along on a sinking ship.

And the difference is that people truly going for an IPO are trimming costs and getting their ducks in a row on bureaucracy and legal fronts, including confidentiality. Those just using it to dangle as a carrot are... just talking about IPOs without changing internal business processes.

Only someone inside could tell us which one reddit is doing.


Yeah, having gone through a company that IPOed -- 100% agree. You're crossing your fingers and using your calculator to try and figure out how likely you are to hit the jackpot (or much more likely the massive tax burden). The company as a whole is basically going through a checklist to batten down all the hatches and implement pretty rigorous controls. So, they are likely seeing a lot more formal process for doing things. This along with trying to make the company look as healthy and profitable as possible. All this API business could even be a result of them going through the Risks section and seeing that having competing apps using their API is a major risk.

Also, chances are you are going to see zero communication from them when they do formally file. Since I think once they actually file they go into something called a quite period where they don't say anything publicly.


> All this API business could even be a result of them going through the Risks section and seeing that having competing apps using their API is a major risk.

Doubtful. Plenty of companies have APIs, and it's not like their actions have strengthened the company all that much.


Plenty of publicly traded companies have free APIs allowing third parties to build the same front end and sidestep their primary source of revenue (showing users ads)?

To clarify - I am not a fan of Reddit’s latest move, I see it as a product of the management hoping to soon be beholden to Wall Street. That necessarily comes with securing of revenue streams.


If they just worked with the users I'm pretty sure a lot of us would be absolutely proud of reddit for making it big and raking in the dough. All this time they'd left open old.reddit.com as a nod to us who've been here through all these years, and the new users were content with the redesign that was designed to get reddit paid.

Could you imagine how it would go down, if reddit had quietly negotiated with developers to allow for user API access and limiting the rates to that which a normal user would consume? (e.g. 400 calls a day or whatever). This would both allow for 3p apps to continue hooking us up with the oldschool forum board we like, WHILE preventing LLM models from scraping 1 Gigabyte of text every day.

Literally everyone would have been happy. Users would have the slight inconvenience of maybe having to re-log into their app, LLM and Researchers would pay for the privilege of getting to scrape 1 Gigabyte of text a day.

The only loophole here is malicious apps scraping the user's data as they browse and selling that black market. But is that really such a big hurdle as to completely discard the approach?


Isn't there a blackout period for the hoi polloi that prevent them from selling for ~90 days after the IPO? Big shots get to sell ofc but your average employee will have to watch the post-IPO slump go deeper and deeper.

Still probably worth waiting out, but it's not like there's a big payday at the end of this rainbow for most. Could probably negotiate some kind of bonus with new employer to offset that loss, even.


It can be higher than that, 6 months is not unheard of.

It's a long time and stock can go down during that period.


Good point. If I was holding stock/options close to an IPO, I guess my interests might be better aligned than usual with whatever short-term corporate moves that pander to Wall St.


This is such a baffling failure to understand how social networks function (see the 1% rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule).

They are alienating the most engaged users who provide the content and pissing off the moderators who provide free service to keep the communities running. Replacing passionate moderators working for free with disinterested paid staff will reduce quality and significantly increase costs.


Eh, I use paid staff to maintain my website that's sorta like a subreddit + a database attached. Would I rather these people work for free? No-- because it's a lot of stressful bullshit doing this kinda stuff. Instead of working for free it's just very low paying -- I can sleep at night though (and as a bonus I don't have to worry about stuff like this)


I would really like to see some stats that backup this 1% rule in the age of social media. Your wiki link cites research from 2012 which is before the real social media boom. Seems to apply to Internet forums in the 2000s and doesn’t account for gamification etc that we’ve seen since.


There's an article explaining it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule. Of any social network, typically 1% are the power users, 9% are intermittent contributors and 90% are lurkers.


believe it or not, I bet it got worse in the age of social media. There's more content creators now, but also a LOT more people browsing social media.


pick 10 commenters randomly who are obviously not really supportive of the protest, ie they are going to stick around and aren't the demographic affected, then pick 10 content posters in subs that protested. Look at their karma and number of posts and report back.

Average ppl on Reddit rarely post content, usually plenty of comments, just not content.

If all the content producers leave then you get the same effect as if the subs were still dark.


Reddit shared this on their instagram story yesterday. A booth at some Adweek conference. https://i.imgur.com/NNLtjFo.mp4


brb have to fly/drive to a strange city and setup airgap


[flagged]


There's already a social network out there like that.

It's called Rumble. No, Gab. No, Truth Social. No, 4-chan.

Turns out there's a lot of them. They all suck because they're a product of the people who post there and they in turn reflect the quality of said individuals.

You believe that you have a right to be seen and heard. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with that. You're free to start up a new subreddit any time you like, and in that respect, reddit is far freer than almost any other forum / social network of its kind, which is why people have made such a big fuss about it to begin with. So go, have your freedom, create your own sub and build your own community.


The thing is, it is more complex than that. Reddit's authoritarianism is an important part of why some of those other social networks you listed became what they are in the first place and/or why they were created to begin with. The more censorship of political views that lean a certain way there are on big mainstream platforms like Reddit, the more likely it is that refugees from that censorship will move to other platforms, therefore leaning those platforms highly into the opposite ideological direction. That is even more true given that the people who care enough to want to move will tend to be the more ideologically extreme parts of the original network's user base.

Also, 4chan does not suck. /pol/ sucks because it has been completely overrun by right-wing political extremists and literally mentally ill people, so it is an echo chamber just as much as Reddit is, just less censored. But many of the other boards have discussion from varying perspectives.


if you find yourself saying something like 'non-woke' unironically you are part of the problem. You're suffering from an acute outrage pornography overdose. Your prescription is to go touch some grass.


We can argue about what "woke" means in overall politics, but there certainly is a power block of Reddit mods who can fairly be described using that term. Many of them are the kind of people who are so deluded that they think Reddit is right-leaning and that anyone to the right of AOC is dangerously close to fascism.

The problem manifests itself not just when people try to post right-leaning arguments. One time I got banned from a Bernie Sanders subreddit for expressing mild criticisms of Bernie from a moderate viewpoint.

Actual right-wing viewpoints often get nuked from orbit. But political moderates are not safe either. On many subs any political view that deviates in any way from progressive orthodoxy runs a high chance of getting deleted.


"Wokeness" is completely irrelevant to this situation, which is likely why this comment got buried and then flagged.

And for what it's worth, "woke" isn't a word folks who are engaging honestly tend to use much/at all. It used to be a way to describe being socially aware of systemic oppression of minority groups in society, but now it's a derogatory term used to denigrate people who care about how others are treated.

It's not "right" or "left" that's the problem here; if someone wants to argue about laissez faire economics or how the government should wisely invest its limited resources in programs that provide greater societal returns, they're absolutely free to.

What you're seeing get "nuked from orbit" is hate speech and, "tough luck" attitudes that reduce human beings to some generalization that either isn't true, or severely overemphasized for alienating effect. The fact that one political group tends towards those arguments more than another is a symptom, not the cause.


I am using "woke" to mean "progressive but in a dogmatic and authoritarian way". Yes, I am using it in a derogatory way. That is because I dislike dogmatic authoritarians. I do not use the word to describe progressives who are open-minded and liberal.

>What you're seeing get "nuked from orbit" is hate speech and, "tough luck" attitudes that reduce human beings to some generalization that either isn't true, or severely overemphasized for alienating effect. The fact that one political group tends towards those arguments more than another is a symptom, not the cause.

You perhaps do not have much experience with discussing politics on Reddit if you think that those are the only things that Reddit mods delete.


Yeah, that's not what "woke" means! That's insulting. You're inviting hostility, how could you be surprised when you're treated poorly in return?

And I have literal decades of experience on Reddit. I've been there since ~2007 (Alexis sent me some Reddit car stickers and other random swag back in '08 as part of an early promotion), and I moderated a number of these subs that are now famously getting blown up, but quit when I discovered the cabal-like hidden IRC channels where mods would shit-talk their userbase, plot ways to crush smaller subs, and generally be gigantic assholes towards people they had power over.

I personally believe mods are a net negative on Reddit, but not because they're "woke" or anything. Many are just assholes. You can be both liberal and an asshole, politics has very little to do with this situation.

But more importantly, this isn't Reddit. This is HN, and frankly I've experienced a fairly strong libertarian lean around these parts that happily comes out to converse when the topic isn't fraught with words like "woke".


Well, sounds like we do not really disagree much. You mainly just object to my use of the word "woke" because you read it in its original meaning, which is fair. Feel free to just replace "woke" by "dogmatic authoritarian progressivism" in what I wrote.

>I personally believe mods are a net negative on Reddit, but not because they're "woke" or anything. Many are just assholes. You can be both liberal and an asshole, politics has very little to do with this situation.

Certainly.


"Woke" has always meant being grokking (in the truest sense) the plight of minorities and minority groups (e.g. LGBTQ+). In other words, people who have woken up to what's going on around them.

Using it as a slur, as originally done by Trump, places you into a very specific camp that is certainly nowhere near moderate.


>Using it as a slur, as originally done by Trump, places you into a very specific camp that is certainly nowhere near moderate.

It really does not, and you thinking that it does is a good example of the kind of dogmatic "if you are not with me you are with the enemy" attitudes that make so many people annoyed with wokism.

There are many political moderates and even some leftists who are annoyed by wokism.


There are liberals and moderates who are annoyed by people who are aware of the plight of minorities? That political compass might need adjustment.


>There are liberals and moderates who are annoyed by people who are aware of the plight of minorities?

No, that's a poorly constructed strawman. Even conservatives care about the plight of minorities. There are liberals and moderates who are annoyed by "woke" leftists who believe acronyms are White supremacy [0], men can get pregnant, taking your top off at a White House event is a positive thing, etc.

[0] https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-schools-board-meeting-sa...


No, that's a poorly constructed fallacy fallacy. It really isn't a strawman. What did I define "woke" as? And what did the gp comment say about sentiment towards it?


Being outraged that a japanese game based on european medieval fairytales setting doesn't have people on colour has nothing to do with plight of minorities, and that's just the latest example I've seen of woke grifters today.

There's a reason why this word is used as derogatory by majority of people, and it has nothing to do with Trump.


Trump had a lot to do with lifting the term into political rhetoric and it's been hollowed out of any specific meaning by now. With the milquetoast politicians and talking heads (and you) using it injudiciously as they do, being "woke" is now just ever so uncool.

Woke is broke, man.

That it can be associated with zealots... go find me a label that couldn't.


I can't remember the last time I came across "woke" used as a compliment. If it really was originally Trump that twisted it into a slur, he's achieved a genuine widespread (indeed, international) change in the language (along with cofveve and sundry other contributions).


I'll concede that it has changed, but the etymology is now nonsensical.


Any more than that of countless other words, including plenty that simultaneously carry two opposite meanings? (cleave, sanction, hew etc)


> "Woke" has always meant being grokking (in the truest sense) the plight of minorities and minority groups (e.g. LGBTQ+). In other words, people who have woken up to what's going on around them.

Exactly, and a "Nazi" is just a person who cares deeply about their country, a patriot.


So you would equate those who have empathy for minorities with a group who committed genocide?

Edit: the problem with this slippery slope argument is that the likes of Trump supporters are "just patriotic," but are also engaging in book and curriculum banning.


>So you would equate those who have empathy for minorities with a group who committed genocide?

Based on more than a decade on Reddit, I 100% believe that the mods and majority of the readership of /r/politics, /r/worldnews, and other large default subreddits would, yes, after taking power immediately commit mass murder of those who don't share their ideologies.


[flagged]


this was the post that made me feel this way: https://old.reddit.com/r/ScienceUncensored/comments/14axb5r/...

I just want to say that I support peoples right to self-actualize and we should all be loving and supportive to anyone who is questioning their gender. But I've never seen this sub on the front page before and this article was on the front page for like 2 days. There are many in the thread commenting that the parents are at fault for doctor shopping, and generally discussing questioning laws being passed to force parents to support their children's decisions to transition. These are important discussions for us as a society, what level of autonomy do we assign to parents vs children vs government when it comes to permanent bodily alterations such as hormones and surgeries that impact the rest of their lives, and most of the discussion would simply be removed and people not 100% supportive would be banned if there had been a woke mod crew for this subreddit.


> people not 100% supportive would be banned if there had been a woke mod crew for this subreddit

FWIW, the trans community (at least as far as anyone I've spoken too) doesn't want children getting surgical medical intervention either. There's a growing trend of saying "the gays want X" or "trans people want X," when in reality X isn't supported by the communities.

> a woke mod crew for this subreddit

I want to conclude by mentioning out-group homogeneity bias. I don't think "woke" is a meaningful term anymore. Instead, it seems to be used by "anti-woke" people to refer to an amalgam-person, who holds a set of beliefs, which seem rare in practice.

This isn't helped by "woke" people who seem to follow the Anakin Skywalker school of thought when it comes to people who don't already agree with them: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

> I just want to say that I support peoples right to self-actualize and we should all be loving and supportive to anyone who is questioning their gender.

FWIW, I think this statement is pretty "woke" :)


It shouldn't be considered "woke" to treat people with dignity regardless of who they are or how they present themselves, and I think most people do that. There are people on the fringes of many of these social issues, we can refer to them as "woke" and "anti-woke" who either think that these are settled topics and there can be no reasonable discussion besides agreement, or that they have a license to be horrible to people they disagree with. Control of the conversation by either fringe is perceived to have the power to push this middle ground in their preferred direction, or at least make it seem like the fringe narrative is more popular than it is, and I think the loss of some measure of this power is why some other commenters in this thread have referred to this as "war" *(including myself referring to "culture war")

Really, it was a mistake on my part to use the word "woke" because it is such a lightning rod, or at least I should have balanced it with my negative opinions about "anti-woke" as well.


And now you publicly have an opinion about a niche & highly technical medical-social issue that directly affects an absolutely tiny minority of the population.

That is the culture war my dude. It came for you and you welcomed it with open arms.


The only opinion I expressed is one of support for people experiencing this, and recognizing the importance of society coming to a consensus on this issue.


>the importance of society coming to a consensus on this issue.

Is it that important? That's what the culture war is. Focus all your emotional energy on things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things to keep you from having the bandwidth to care about the real systemic problems that nobody is terribly interested in fixing because they benefit from them.


Many of the reddit refugees are coming here which is why all of the reddit stories keep trending and also why comments like yours will be buried even though you just stated reality. I can't wait until reddit goes back to being irrelevant.


> Is this going to turn out like Twitter with a huge purge of Reddit staff too

Let's be serious, Reddit making a profit will decrease the likelihood of massive layoffs. I suspect if Reddit backs down in this protest drama they will be forced to do layoffs to become profitable instead of becoming profitable from making more revenue instead of reducing costs.

> As an employee do you support the blackout secretly?

Well considering the internal memo got leaked, I think there must be someone who supports it.


To date I've seen no logic that shows how any of reddit/spezs actions will actually increase profit.

Making a wild claim about how much 3rd party apps "cost them", is not the same as actually seeing revenue once those 3rd party apps are closed.

As most people have been saying, the majority of 3rd party app users are the more advanced technical savvy ones.

There may be SOME percentage of the 3rd party app users who transition, but if the 3rd party traffic is as trivially small as Reddit has claimed, not sure how that will overnight magically transform them into being profitable.

I've never seen an Ad on reddit with use of old.reddit.com , RES, and adblockers. I was a primary user of Apollo, and I certainly won't be using the reddit mobile app. I deleted the app off my phone once the writing is on the wall (rip the bandaid off now and detox vs in 9 days), my phone reported my usage is down 19% this week, so that is a plus.

Absent any business plan on how those actions will actually drive profit, everything they've done has had sole effect of alienating their power user, mods, etc. and I don't see how that helps profit.


> There may be SOME percentage of the 3rd party app users who transition, but if the 3rd party traffic is as trivially small as Reddit has claimed, not sure how that will overnight magically transform them into being profitable.

he said 97% of users are on the reddit app. he also said there is a significant opportunity cost to having those 3% of users not on the app. so for both of those statements to be true that 3% of users must be very active and providing a lot of content and value.


And he’s alienated virtually all third-party apps, putting those 3% user at high risk of just leaving the platform, destroying that supposedly huge opportunity cost.

A competent CEO would have found a way to keep them in the family.


What's bizarre to me is that the app inhibits activity.

Like, I can type 20 comments on my laptop in the time it would take to type one on my phone, and they'll be more well-thought out too


If the speaker was setting out to bullshit you, "significant opportunity cost" could mean a lot of things.

Perhaps they mean a non-financial opportunity cost, like they could modify their API if they didn't have third parties depending on it, and they're missing out on the benefits such modifications might hypothetically provide.

Or perhaps "significant cost" means, say, $100k per year. Significant at a human scale, insignificant at the scale of a multi-billion-dollar company.


> I've never seen an Ad on reddit with use of old.reddit.com , RES, and adblockers.

Which is why they're trying to force everyone onto their first party app. If you're not contributing to revenue they do not want you on the site.

They have much more data than we do which leads me to think they have reason to believe most third party app users will switch/the ones that won't arent worth having anyway.


They're shooting themselves in the foot, more technical users produce more quality content that the lurkers enjoy.


> more technical users produce more quality content that the lurkers enjoy

Well... we assumed so. But I highly doubt if it's true.


I'd say the notable drop in quality and activity in open subs that aren't protesting is a good indicator that there is some truth to that assertion.


I have no idea what you're talking about. The subs I am on have pretty much the same quality and activity.


I think this is just pure arrogance. Some of the best content creators on the planet aren't technical. In fact, very few of technical people are good content creators. We just like to think we're so good.


Yeah, that explains the popularity of of the /r/*gonewild fora.


3rd party app users are all cost, no revenue. Just eliminating them would by definition move the bottom line towards the black.


Reddit doesn’t like to remember it, but it’s fundamentally a site where users provide content, and only a small fraction of users provide the most popular content (and do moderation). Those fraction tend to be the more advanced users that use things like third party apps or RES. So hurting those users is decreasing the amount of free work that the users give to Reddit, which means that either the site decreases in quality (less revenue) or Reddit needs to pay employees to do the same work (higher costs).

The cost of the third party apps themselves was trivial, and if they just wanted to recoup those costs they could have proposed a much more reasonable cost per user for third party apps.

It’s about control, not about profit.


> The cost of the third party apps themselves was trivial.

$10m isn't trivial unless your operating costs are in the billions.


That’s what they wanted to charge - Reddit only makes $0.13/user/mo, so their cost must be less than that (or else Reddit has much bigger problems), so let’s say $0.05/user/mo. Apollo has 2 million users, so $1.2 million per year.

Moreover, at that cost, less than a dollar per user per year, Apollo could have instituted a $1/year subscription. But instead Reddit wanted over $100 per user per year, two orders of magnitude more than the cost.


This is rather limited thinking though. The value of the platform is ultimately in it's content, and if those 3% of users on 3rd party apps are highly influential in driving content, then by driving them away you will harm overall value.

It's one of those typically short sighted "oh lets remove this thing costing us" without understanding the long term impact to value.


RIF had a revenue sharing agreement that was canceled years ago with no attempt to replace it with something reasonable.


It's kind of interesting though because a lot of people using 3rd party apps have proven they are willing to pay for a good experience (Apollo had a subscription I think, RIF has a paid tier, etc...). So instead of charging apps for API access, just require all access through a 3rd party app require authenticated users, and those authenticated users must pay a monthly fee to use third party apps.

You don't over burden one single entity with large recurring payments (the app developers themselves), your power users provide revenue, and you can slowly work on your value proposition of "hey we have updated our app to not be as crappy, you can browse reddit for free if you switch back".


> To date I've seen no logic that shows how any of reddit/spezs actions will actually increase profit.

I think you assume that the only people using it are shutting down while obivously there are lots of profitable companies using the API who will obivously be fine with paying $0.24 per 1,000 API requests.

Then there is obivously OpenAI and other AI based companies that are really the main reason for the change.

Realistically, having Apollo, etc not there drives people to use the main app. Saying that people won't switch over seems naive. There will be some that won't be realistically the vast majority probably will. And those users then go back into monetization drives. Which will increase revenues.


> Let's be serious, Reddit making a profit will decrease the likelihood of massive layoffs.

I feel like this implies a couple of things:

1) A business is ever satisfied with their current profit margin. I'm not sure that's the reality.

2) Company profits going one way or the other affect a company's decision to perform layoff rounds. While maybe partially true, I think all the major tech companies performing layoff rounds has proven this to be mostly untrue.


I would say neither of those are really implied.

If you're going to IPO you need to show growth. It's the most important thing. Realistically, making a profit isn't such a big deal if you have a solid plan and are growing. If they can't show that they are able to reign in Reddit users, who are by far the biggest problem for monetization of the platform, then they need to show they're able to get growth other ways. That would be growth in profits.


> If you're going to IPO you need to show growth. It's the most important thing.

I think you're in a chicken and egg situation here. The reason you want to see growth is because as an investor you suppose growth is a good indicator for future profits. So the most important thing is actually still... profits.


No. Growth is important because it means the value in the future will be bigger.


Did we say the same thing? What’s valuable? Income. Nothing besides money really matters to a for-profit business.


Yet some how for-profit companies become more valuable when they just grow their user base.

You seem to be applying basic logic to company valuations while at the same time you probably also understand the finical market is completely fucked up. Amazon lost money for god only knows how long and was extremely valuable and sought after investment for nearly the entire time. Why? Because growth. They don't care what kind of growth they just want growth. While a sane person would say the growth should be in money so they could eventually be profitable, that's not how the markets work.

So they can either show growth in the fact they're growing their customer base to include API customers and revenue streams. Or they can show growth in profits.


Right, and what’s the end goal of growth? Why do companies and shareholders want to see growth? What does growth of API consumers potentially lead to? Let me make it simpler: why did Reddit start charging money for their API?


> Reddit making a profit

Step one to making a profit is don't burn the house down




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