When you're growing as fast as Reddit was, you don't change the recipe, you just keep cooking it. They already had the ingredients for exponential growth, so ch

When you're growing as fast as Reddit was, you don't change the recipe, you just keep cooking it. They already had the ingredients for exponential growth, so change in general just introduces unnecessary risks. They had no need for a larger exponent. The outcome of that is: -Alien Blue beat Reddit to mobile optimization of Reddit's own platform -Imgur beat Reddit to sharing images on Reddit -Reddit and Imgur now exist as pseudo-sister-sites with features that overlap on a fundamental level, and Reddit is cannibalizing its own equity in Imgur Now that they can't just hire site reliability engineers and watch their graph go up like a volcano, their only play is to improve their product, but now they're running uphill. I think it's generally correct to play it safe and maintain organic exponential growth if you have it, but when it comes to things as obvious as mobile optimization and image sharing, maybe it's ok for a company to come out of their shell and iterate on obvious stuff (even though they don't have to).