According to the article, Reddit has gone from 20 employees to 2,000 over the last ten years. As someone who still uses the old theme and has been conditioned to use Google instead of Reddit’s own search functionality, it’s hard to understand the additional value all that extra labor brought to users.
That's roughly how much Twitter is running with today, and they have a sizable amount of physical servers. And it's been 8 months since the huge downsizing so it seems like that's sufficient to keep things stable
I imagine it's some combination of building out a worldwide ad sales force, engineering to keep up with the resulting ad technology demands, and further engineering to keep up with the modern ML arms race.
Plus as you grow you need infrastructure to support your much larger employee base (everything from dev tools to HR).
Looks like their valuation has also grown in that time, from about 400 million 10 years ago to 10 billion in 2021 - not sure they have had a funding round since then but Fidelity recently cut their Reddit shares by 41% value, which would still put them at 5-6 billion. That's still a 10x+ return over 10 years.
Having only 20 employees might sound desirable on paper, but you simply cannot do with 20 employees what you can do with a larger company. Having only a couple people responsible for an entire region of ad sales is not scalable in the slightest.
Reddit has historically had an abysmal ARPU and part of that was because a sheer lack of people able to support the ad business. Reddit is now almost able to break even when I don't think they have ever previously been profitable (even with 20 employees).
The value for users is that Reddit exists. I hate ads as much as the next person, but you can’t expect a great website that’s unprofitable to be around forever. Eventually it’s going to shut down or change.
Reddit has one of the best awards and paid tier plans in the world for a discussion board, yet they still couldn’t break even with it.
You might love things that are free, but don’t expect them to last forever then. Nothing is free.
Reddit as we knew it is on life support. We see them phasing out third party apps, they already removed np.reddit.com, and undoubtedly old.reddit.com will be next. Once they go public there is no turning back, and their decisions will be solely powered by investor greed.
There is no value in a Reddit that doesn’t cater to the users.
Reddit was crazy understaffed in its first 10 years or so. They could barely keep the site up, let alone develop new functionality. Reddit gold was born from that situation. Condé Nast didn’t give a single fuck about them.
As far as finding value in the new website, I think it’s way better except for the ways that they purposefully degrade the experience in order to push you to their native apps.
> “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an email to employees announcing the layoffs.
Love the tone-deaf, shallow corporatespeak from the top as per usual.
> “We’ve had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an email to employees announcing the layoffs, according to the Journal.
I know this is corp-speak, but it still such a horrible messaging. "We are doing great, but we're still going to fire people just to please our shareholders."
Reddit is, I believe, the highest US traffic website that runs entirely on the cloud (as in they never invested in datacenters or POPs for traffic serving). To serve every single request they have to pay AWS and Fastly. I suspect that is why the per request pricing they are trying to pass off to 3rd party apps is so high.
Unless things have changed since I left, it is just a highly efficient machine for shoveling investor money into the cloud furnace. I love Reddit to death and would go back in a heartbeat to fix it, but everything is just plastered in "don't touch my garbage" stickers.
(Quick edit to add before the comments come rolling in, Netflix runs its business on the cloud - the expensive parts of pushing Stranger Things episodes into your living room run on real servers)
I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will lead me to the other news sites and blogs run by journalists and spammy media companies contain a lot of bullshit that I chose to only rely on Reddit for my quest for information.
I wonder why Reddit would want to charge consumers of its API, without providing any premium services like let's say, Twilio etc. Reddit must focus on monetizing its content and more strategization that will bring in more ad-revenue or user-generated monetary value rather than going after 3rd party API consumers that ended up doing a much better job of building a simple front end app for their content.
I do the same, but its important to note that subreddits focusing on brand agnostic gadget niches (like electric toothbrushes) are riddled with bot accounts shoveling ads that look like human feedback, to the point of drowning the few actual humans out. The less popular gadget, the less bots there are.
I have the opposite experience. If I'm looking for some technical information (is this MTB suspension part compatible with this fork, or what's the charging profile for this particular battery chemistry, or how do I do x in new programming language y), and I end up on Reddit, I am 99% certain I'll find some vague but useless answer.
Mileage varies. I find a lot more useful content on the better technical subs than I've seen on SO and its siblings for years. And the attitude is often much more pleasant as well.
Yes. Google has become useless for certain types of searches. I find reddit to have recommendations that are much more trustworthy.
It's not just product recommendations, things like book recommendations, career advice, scientific/academic questions. Reddit has answers to these kinds of questions that are very difficult to find elsewhere.
They'll be public soon enough and this will all be known. I predict their labor costs eclipse their hosting costs, as with most companies, regardless of being in the cloud.
Is green meaning they are participating or black symbolizing they will be going on blackout. It would be nice if you could add a label at the top to say.
Edit: One more. Is it possible to differentiate subs that have said "we're going to go private for 2 days" and "we're shutting down permanently unless changes are made"? IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back.
That subreddit is also where mods and devs are discussing the situation. A recent post covers a call held between representatives of Reddit and the dev community.
More and more people are leaving Reddit for lemmy...and the more people migrate, the better.
I went through the Digg exodus and have now left Reddit completely and don't miss it.
If I need to read about a product, I'll still type "site:reddit.com" into google and hope that my old.reddit.com extension works for the forseeable future, but that will be the entirety of my interactions with Reddit until Lemmy replaces that as well.
I’ve been on lemmy for a couple days. I’m still very unsure about it. It’s not the technical changes of being federated, those didn’t take too much effort even for me with no experience with mastodon etc.
It’s more the underlying politics that are jarring. The lead dev uses Castro as his picture and the other founder has mao on his personal page masthead. There’s a VERY prevalent anti western sentiment and even reccomending things like podcasts that use western viewpoints are downvoted hard. And I haven’t even been to their “communist” instance.
The read I get is it’s got a lot of communism/socialism ideologues that have never lived under the thumb of the regimes they are advocating.
Even on some of the inclusive specific ideas instances like beehaw, a prevalent reasoning is if your instance doesn’t defederate/block other instances unaligned with xyz, it means you aren’t dedicated to making a safe space and thus should be defederated too. It’s a dangerous game if that plays out on the larger more popular instances.
It just feels off and as if I’m an outsider or unwelcome at best. Unsure if I will stick around. It’s not nearly same as the early Reddit days and especially the pre-digg migrations (and there were a couple)
I also made sure to register to one that doesn’t profess any political leaning. But still, unsure given the overall vibe.
I yearn for the day when Communists are seen the same way as (normal) people see Nazis. The European mass death counts are similar, without counting the Asian atrocities of the Great Leap Forward, Khmer Rouge, etc.
The Swastika and the Hammer and Sickle both represent bankrupt ideologies. I would use a Communist website just as soon as I would use a Nazi website.
I assume that's not going to be a popular opinion on the modern internet though.
I dont really have an issue with ones political leanings. On that site or otherwise. No doubt I have conversed and even debated with some that are Communist or Socialist, both on the internet and in real life. I was just in Vietnam for 3 weeks with one of my good friends who has a LOT of family over there and some of them, many of them embrace socialism. Talking to many of those folks over drinks was very interesting.
Its when it becomes a core portion of your identity and you are throwing it others faces or using it as a pedestal for elitism that it rubs me wrong. And that is the feeling I get on that site. Heck they even had a thread on the very topic the other day [1]
Again I am not saying its bad. Just it gives a very weird vibe and it will depend on how the new users play into that and affect it.
43 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadPlus as you grow you need infrastructure to support your much larger employee base (everything from dev tools to HR).
Looks like their valuation has also grown in that time, from about 400 million 10 years ago to 10 billion in 2021 - not sure they have had a funding round since then but Fidelity recently cut their Reddit shares by 41% value, which would still put them at 5-6 billion. That's still a 10x+ return over 10 years.
Having only 20 employees might sound desirable on paper, but you simply cannot do with 20 employees what you can do with a larger company. Having only a couple people responsible for an entire region of ad sales is not scalable in the slightest.
Reddit has historically had an abysmal ARPU and part of that was because a sheer lack of people able to support the ad business. Reddit is now almost able to break even when I don't think they have ever previously been profitable (even with 20 employees).
Google has a completely automated ad sales system for even mid-size companies (~$100k/year ad spend) from what I understand.
They added value for the shareholders, not for us.
Reddit has one of the best awards and paid tier plans in the world for a discussion board, yet they still couldn’t break even with it.
You might love things that are free, but don’t expect them to last forever then. Nothing is free.
Reddit as we knew it is on life support. We see them phasing out third party apps, they already removed np.reddit.com, and undoubtedly old.reddit.com will be next. Once they go public there is no turning back, and their decisions will be solely powered by investor greed.
There is no value in a Reddit that doesn’t cater to the users.
As far as finding value in the new website, I think it’s way better except for the ways that they purposefully degrade the experience in order to push you to their native apps.
Love the tone-deaf, shallow corporatespeak from the top as per usual.
I know this is corp-speak, but it still such a horrible messaging. "We are doing great, but we're still going to fire people just to please our shareholders."
Unless things have changed since I left, it is just a highly efficient machine for shoveling investor money into the cloud furnace. I love Reddit to death and would go back in a heartbeat to fix it, but everything is just plastered in "don't touch my garbage" stickers.
(Quick edit to add before the comments come rolling in, Netflix runs its business on the cloud - the expensive parts of pushing Stranger Things episodes into your living room run on real servers)
I wonder why Reddit would want to charge consumers of its API, without providing any premium services like let's say, Twilio etc. Reddit must focus on monetizing its content and more strategization that will bring in more ad-revenue or user-generated monetary value rather than going after 3rd party API consumers that ended up doing a much better job of building a simple front end app for their content.
It's not just product recommendations, things like book recommendations, career advice, scientific/academic questions. Reddit has answers to these kinds of questions that are very difficult to find elsewhere.
This is awesome. Thanks for putting it together.
Edit: One more. Is it possible to differentiate subs that have said "we're going to go private for 2 days" and "we're shutting down permanently unless changes are made"? IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back.
Same for me_irl I believe.
[1] https://github.com/xNul/save-3rd-party-apps/wiki/List-of-Per...
The 'official' list of sites going dark is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/
That subreddit is also where mods and devs are discussing the situation. A recent post covers a call held between representatives of Reddit and the dev community.
I am a mod on two subs (both > 500K subscribers and they are going dark) and they're not listed.
(I signed up to the https://feddit.de/ instance, but you could use https://beehaw.org/ as well, makes no difference where you sign up)
More and more people are leaving Reddit for lemmy...and the more people migrate, the better.
I went through the Digg exodus and have now left Reddit completely and don't miss it.
If I need to read about a product, I'll still type "site:reddit.com" into google and hope that my old.reddit.com extension works for the forseeable future, but that will be the entirety of my interactions with Reddit until Lemmy replaces that as well.
I’ve been on lemmy for a couple days. I’m still very unsure about it. It’s not the technical changes of being federated, those didn’t take too much effort even for me with no experience with mastodon etc.
It’s more the underlying politics that are jarring. The lead dev uses Castro as his picture and the other founder has mao on his personal page masthead. There’s a VERY prevalent anti western sentiment and even reccomending things like podcasts that use western viewpoints are downvoted hard. And I haven’t even been to their “communist” instance.
The read I get is it’s got a lot of communism/socialism ideologues that have never lived under the thumb of the regimes they are advocating.
Even on some of the inclusive specific ideas instances like beehaw, a prevalent reasoning is if your instance doesn’t defederate/block other instances unaligned with xyz, it means you aren’t dedicated to making a safe space and thus should be defederated too. It’s a dangerous game if that plays out on the larger more popular instances.
It just feels off and as if I’m an outsider or unwelcome at best. Unsure if I will stick around. It’s not nearly same as the early Reddit days and especially the pre-digg migrations (and there were a couple)
I also made sure to register to one that doesn’t profess any political leaning. But still, unsure given the overall vibe.
The Swastika and the Hammer and Sickle both represent bankrupt ideologies. I would use a Communist website just as soon as I would use a Nazi website.
I assume that's not going to be a popular opinion on the modern internet though.
Its when it becomes a core portion of your identity and you are throwing it others faces or using it as a pedestal for elitism that it rubs me wrong. And that is the feeling I get on that site. Heck they even had a thread on the very topic the other day [1]
Again I am not saying its bad. Just it gives a very weird vibe and it will depend on how the new users play into that and affect it.
[1]: https://beehaw.org/post/443376?scrollToComments=true