Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#21

Post by MaxikCZ »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #16
mike_d wrote: post #8

Reddit 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…

I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will le…

I do the same, but its important to note that subreddits focusing on brand agnostic gadget niches (like electric toothbrushes) are riddled with bot accounts shoveling ads that look like human feedback, to the point of drowning the few actual humans out. The less popular gadget, the less bots there are.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#23

Post by vasco »

mike_d wrote: post #8

Reddit 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…

They'll be public soon enough and this will all be known. I predict their labor costs eclipse their hosting costs, as with most companies, regardless of being in the cloud.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#24

Post by dntrkv »

havelhovel wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#25

Post by adhvaryu »

cheeze wrote: post #20
nabakin wrote: post #14

I made a website for the protest. Could you folks critique it for me? https://save3rdpartyapps.com

The green is... very green. Only criticism. This is awesome. Thanks for putting it together. Edit: One more. Is it possible to differentiate subs that have said "we're going to go private for 2 days" and "we're shutting down permanently unless changes are made"? IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back.

> IIRC /r/music isn't planning on coming back.

Same for me_irl I believe.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#26

Post by linker3000 »

nabakin wrote: post #14

I made a website for the protest. Could you folks critique it for me? https://save3rdpartyapps.com

The only critique is that if I want to check for a particular site I have to do a clunky CTRL-F search.

The 'official' list of sites going dark is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/

That subreddit is also where mods and devs are discussing the situation. A recent post covers a call held between representatives of Reddit and the dev community.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#27

Post by reddisbad »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #16
mike_d wrote: post #8

Reddit 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…

I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will le…

I have the opposite experience. If I'm looking for some technical information (is this MTB suspension part compatible with this fork, or what's the charging profile for this particular battery chemistry, or how do I do x in new programming language y), and I end up on Reddit, I am 99% certain I'll find some vague but useless answer.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#28

Post by princevegeta89 »

reddisbad wrote: post #27
princevegeta89 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will le…

I have the opposite experience. If I'm looking for some technical information (is this MTB suspension part compatible with this fork, or what's the charging profile for this particular battery chemistry, or how do I do x in new programming language y), and I end up on Reddit, I am 99% certain I'll find some vague but useless answer.

Interesting, I agree that technical info and help is not a strong suit for Reddit though.

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#29

Post by tux2bsd »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #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."

[dead]

Re: Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest

#30

Post by throwaway77384 »

I'd recommend anyone to try out lemmy. Open source, federated, growing.

(I signed up to the https://feddit.de/ instance, but you could use https://beehaw.org/ as well, makes no difference where you sign up)

More and more people are leaving Reddit for lemmy...and the more people migrate, the better.

I went through the Digg exodus and have now left Reddit completely and don't miss it.

If I need to read about a product, I'll still type "site:reddit.com" into google and hope that my old.reddit.com extension works for the forseeable future, but that will be the entirety of my interactions with Reddit until Lemmy replaces that as well.

Post reply on HN