From my amateur perspective I've got,
2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent.
I have no idea what I would do with the rest..
I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.
Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.
The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
For sure, hence my question!
But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.
Their video player needs some major work.
They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.
Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.
I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
The term is 'overcapitalized.'
At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).
The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.
Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
Data Scientist who can use seasonal and news virality patterns to predict hourly load and load balancing
Data Scientist for Ads targeting by subreddit
CDN person to improve content delivery and caching
A person to build a half-decent video player and native integration of widgets/content from commonly linked websites
Data Scientist that provides a more curated experience to first time visitors. Shadow profiles exist. Or just a 1st visit 10 sec poll.
Most of it probably goes straight to AWS.
I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.
See the post by the reddit admin below.
https://www.reddit.com/community-points
https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/opi5rg/scaling_reddit...
also money for rubber ducks
You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust & Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.