Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by virtualized | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

virtualized

But.. but I began to like Reddit. Now they want to take it away from me by destroying it.

> It’s going on a hiring spree

Ouch.

> redesigning its website

For no reason other than giving the unnecessary people from the hiring spree something to do.

> Huffman would like to end 2017 with around 300 full-time staff

The current number of 230 employees is already about ten times too many. What the hell do they need the additional staff for?

> The company is also not profitable.

Doesn't need to be because it could be run by ten people living off of donations.

View on HN

For a site with the kind of traffic Reddit has from as many locales as reddit has, 10 people wouldn't even be enough to comfortably cover basic SRE requirements. Forget new features, they would literally spend all of their time just barely keeping the damn thing working. Their would be no admins. No Secret Santa, nor any of the various many things Reddit currently has that requires the support, and more importantly trust, that comes with a full time employee/contact.

Sure, could they do it? Absolutely. But I'd bet a large sum on money that they'd do so poorly.

Also it's important to note that whether you like it or not Reddit is and always has been a business. Being profitable isn't the most important thing right now for reasons, but somehow i doubt investors would be ok with them just punting on the issue forever. They rightly expect a return.

I assumed that 10-20 people would not include anyone who ever physically touches a server. Now that I think about it, it might make sense to not outsource hardware issues at Reddit's scale. I don't know how many people you need to keep Reddit running, but more than a hundred sounds wrong for such a basic web site.

I don't need Secret Santa and no support. What kind of trust do you mean?

>basic web site

Thats kinda simplistic. Setting aside the fact that reddit is much more complicated than it appears at first glance...

I don't care how simple the site is, being the number 5 most visited site in the US[1], kinda comes with some SRE and infrastructure challenges.

[1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US

> basic web site

... basic web site with a hundred thousand communities, gigabytes of images uploaded daily, millions of votes a day, 1.5 billion pageviews a month...

Also, reddit is a business, not just a website. They don't only hire engineers.

> but more than a hundred sounds wrong for such a basic web site.

Reddit is not a basic web site though. It doesn't have static content. Almost every page is dynamically generated for each logged in user, of which there are hundreds of millions. That is the total opposite of 'basic'.

I would be ok if Reddit stopped doing silly things like Secret Santa, Arbitrary Day, and [other random gift day].

Reddit used to be a place I could go to see topics re: Science, Tech, the Internet, and gadgets. It was the network where my friends weren't - and that felt cool like I was a part of an exclusive club. Things like the April fools pranks: Place/Chat/Button - those are what make Reddit special.

Now all my friends are on Reddit and we send each other links - which is also nice. But I miss the exclusivity and with the loss of it comes a dilution of content to meet the lowest common denominator of entertainment transmissions.

Reddit was a lot more authentic before it started functioning as a community group (ie: "redditors").

> The current number of 230 employees is already about ten times too many. What the hell do they need the additional staff for?

What Alexa top ten site have you run off a crew barely large enough to field a softball game?

> The current number of 230 employees is already about ten times too many. What the hell do they need the additional staff for?

how so?

> Doesn't need to be because it could be run by ten people living off of donations.

really? really?? how so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com