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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

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.

manicennui 3y ago
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.
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  At some point video bytes must be transmitted by reading them from one employee to the other via a rotary phone.
- lofatdairy 3y ago
  Don't forget optimizing the UI/UX to be as unpleasant as possible
  - baggy_trough 3y ago
    At least we can still "request" pretty please the greatly superior UI from 15 years ago.
    - rxbudian 3y 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
      - dizhn 3y ago
        Wouldn't RES be well positioned to provide that functionality?
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        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.
        dizhn 3y ago
        > 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.
  - pwb25 3y ago
    or how bad the inline editor is with html options
  - lagrange77 3y ago
    Those poor devs. I bet some of them had come up with great ideas, which they had to watch overruled by marketing people.
    - throwaway20222 3y ago
      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.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        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.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    This. It takes a lot of effort to build an app that works as bad as Reddit does. It’s an engineering marvel
- nebula8804 3y ago
  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.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  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.
- djbusby 3y ago
  If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.
- cowmoo728 3y ago
  it takes incredible engineering to make a 10s video have 360p visual quality but still require approximately 500mb of data to load
factorymoo 3y ago
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 https://qr.ae/py4zBU
- skulk 3y ago
  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.
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    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.
    - awad 3y ago
      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.
      - dizhn 3y ago
        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.
        3y ago
bloopernova 3y ago
It's 2,000 employees, but the point and question still stand.
- throwarayes 3y ago
  90 laid off per layoffs.fyi, which was 5%, so about 1800 pre-layoffs. So now more like 1700.
tester457 3y ago
Probably sales team.
sangnoir 3y ago
How many employees would seem reasonable for Reddit to you? Also a sincere question.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  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?
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    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.
    - Firmwarrior 3y ago
      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.
oniony 3y ago
They need more staff than most places because they spend so much of their day on Reddit.
- abdusco 3y ago
  Had a good chuckle out over this one :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lamontcg 3y ago
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/ 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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  If anything, I'm amazed that they can run that business with only 2,000 employees.
NickC25 3y ago
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.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  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.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    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.
Fervicus 3y ago
[flagged]
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
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_tech_companies_need_so_many_employees/ 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.
jedberg 3y ago
> 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).
- logical_ferry 3y ago
  Why does Reddit need sales? Genuine question. My guess is to sell ads?
  - jedberg 3y ago
    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. :)
  - paulcole 3y ago
    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.
- 3y ago
volkl48 3y ago
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-round-250-million-double-employees-investment https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  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).
tracerbulletx 3y ago
To trick investors into thinking its worth a bajillion dollars somehow I assume.
_-____-_ 3y ago
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...
throwarayes 3y ago
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.
i_play_stax 3y ago
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 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

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.

manicennui 3y ago

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.

Euphorbium 3y ago
At some point video bytes must be transmitted by reading them from one employee to the other via a rotary phone.
lofatdairy 3y ago
Don't forget optimizing the UI/UX to be as unpleasant as possible
- baggy_trough 3y ago
  At least we can still "request" pretty please the greatly superior UI from 15 years ago.
  - rxbudian 3y 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
    - dizhn 3y ago
      Wouldn't RES be well positioned to provide that functionality?
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        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.
        dizhn 3y ago
        > 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.
- pwb25 3y ago
  or how bad the inline editor is with html options
- lagrange77 3y ago
  Those poor devs. I bet some of them had come up with great ideas, which they had to watch overruled by marketing people.
  - throwaway20222 3y ago
    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.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      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.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  This. It takes a lot of effort to build an app that works as bad as Reddit does. It’s an engineering marvel
nebula8804 3y ago
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.
rqtwteye 3y ago
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.
djbusby 3y ago
If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.
cowmoo728 3y ago
it takes incredible engineering to make a 10s video have 360p visual quality but still require approximately 500mb of data to load

factorymoo 3y ago

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 https://qr.ae/py4zBU

skulk 3y ago
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.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  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.
  - awad 3y ago
    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.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      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.
      - 3y ago

bloopernova 3y ago

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

throwarayes 3y ago
90 laid off per layoffs.fyi, which was 5%, so about 1800 pre-layoffs. So now more like 1700.

tester457 3y ago

Probably sales team.

sangnoir 3y ago

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

Firmwarrior 3y ago
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?
- sangnoir 3y ago
  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.
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    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.

oniony 3y ago

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

abdusco 3y ago
Had a good chuckle out over this one :)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lamontcg 3y ago

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/ 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.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
If anything, I'm amazed that they can run that business with only 2,000 employees.

NickC25 3y ago

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.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  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.

Fervicus 3y ago

[flagged]

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago

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_tech_companies_need_so_many_employees/ 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.

jedberg 3y ago

> 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).

logical_ferry 3y ago
Why does Reddit need sales? Genuine question. My guess is to sell ads?
- jedberg 3y ago
  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. :)
- paulcole 3y ago
  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.
3y ago

volkl48 3y ago

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-round-250-million-double-employees-investment https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...

johnnyanmac 3y ago
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).

tracerbulletx 3y ago

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

_-____-_ 3y ago

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...

throwarayes 3y ago

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.

i_play_stax 3y ago

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 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