Hacker News Reader

Also, struggling with retaining the good ones they managed to find.

They have Tencent money now.

I don't understand how a site with massive amounts of traffic for mostly text pages can end up having money troubles. There are so many ways both clean and dirty to monetize a site like that.

They programmed it in Python, so server costs are insane.

They underpay like crazy and don’t allow for any negotiations when it comes to comp.

Wouldn't that either save them money in the short term or be a result of their money troubles and not the cause?

I don't see how that connects to a wildly popular site that should take up minimal resources having problems with money. Even with text ads and terrible payouts they should have a lot of money to play with.

If all the people you hire are rubbish because no one good would accept your salary it’s very easy to see how you could fail to monetise.

That seems like a stretch, reddit is estimated to have around 4 to 8 billion page views per month. Even the slightest advertising should bring in 10s of millions of dollars per year.

I can believe the latter.