Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#2[deleted]
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#3According 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.
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#4According 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.
holy shit 2000!? Now I understand where all that recommendation spam is coming from
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#5> “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.
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#6> “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."
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#7According 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.
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).
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#8Reddit 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)
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#9Reddit 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 inv…
The cost is nowhere near, even with sufficient padding, to what they are asking. The move is a bit too blatant and obvious a push out.
Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest
#10> “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.
I am struggling to think of any CEOs that don’t use corpspeak. Are there any?