Nelson's Weblog: culture / apis-for-content-sites-must-be-free
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  • @Debo
    3•2 years ago

    To be fair, I don’t think any of us know reddit’s costs nor its revenue. We do know that the current CEO says that they are “not profitable”. But let’s just pretend for a minute that if reddit did what you say (scale down, stop the NFT TT bullshit) that they’d be a ‘stable successful business’.

    Ask yourself: Would YOU want to work for a company that’s just eeking by, with limited growth or upward potential for your personal income? I sure as hell wouldn’t. If reddit ‘tried’ to act like a co-operative they’d quickly lose the limited talent they do have to be replaced by “digital babysitters” who have the skills to reboot a server when it hangs and not much else. They certainly ain’t going to attract the devs who can actually CREATE the mod tools that we’ve been after for YEARS.

    At some point we need reddit and other sites like it to be profitable so that they can attract talent to continue to develop and expand the features of the site or else some other company will come along and do exactly that, putting reddit out of business.

    Does reddit need to become profitable solely off the backs of API calls, no; which is why I’m here (and you too I assume) but we cannot pretend that any of this work is either easy or free to produce.

    • @hyperhopper
      1•2 years ago

      I don’t think any of us know reddit’s costs nor its revenue

      Spez said this week that reddit is making less than 1 billion in revenue. That specific wording, combined with the size makes it pretty easy to assume they are making hundreds of millions in revenue.

      Would YOU want to work for a company that’s just eeking by,

      Reddit is one of the largest sites on the internet. It’s not just eeking by

      But yes, in a small tech org that was paying well and working at the scale of Reddit? Of course I’d work there. I’ve worked at every where from startups to FAANG, it doesn’t have to be a hyper growth unicorn to be a great place to work and good for your career.

      At some point we need reddit and other sites like it to be profitable

      They would be profitable if they cut 90% of their staff that work on bullshit like the redesign and NFTs and just had a core DevOps team and a features team. No reason they need to have more than 10 engineers. The site was 95% finished in 2016. All they need is some mod tools.

      to develop and expand the features of the site or else some other company will come along and do exactly that, putting reddit out of business.

      Ironic you’re saying this on a site we chose to migrate to that has less “features” than reddit.