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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 t

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.

AceJohnny2 3y ago
holy shit 2000!? Now I understand where all that recommendation spam is coming from
- vkazanov 3y ago
  Is this really that much? Reddit is a massively popular global service, after all.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    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
Shorel 3y ago
Ads. You now see more ads. They added value for the shareholders, not for us.
- zpeti 3y ago
  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.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    > The value for users is that Reddit exists. 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.
qqtt 3y ago
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).
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  You don't need people to sell ads for all but the biggest accounts. Google has a completely automated ad sales system for even mid-size companies (~$100k/year ad spend) from what I understand.
dntrkv 3y ago
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.

AceJohnny2 3y ago

holy shit 2000!? Now I understand where all that recommendation spam is coming from

vkazanov 3y ago
Is this really that much? Reddit is a massively popular global service, after all.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  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

Shorel 3y ago

Ads. You now see more ads. They added value for the shareholders, not for us.

zpeti 3y ago
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.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  > The value for users is that Reddit exists. 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.

qqtt 3y ago

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).

MichaelZuo 3y ago
You don't need people to sell ads for all but the biggest accounts. Google has a completely automated ad sales system for even mid-size companies (~$100k/year ad spend) from what I understand.

dntrkv 3y ago

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.