Reddit Laying Off About 90 Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring
wsj.com
wsj.com
Pump the revenue however possible (crazy API fees, push for native only) assuming that people have no choice cause it’s been so long
Slash anything that isn’t directly revenue producing
All to make the P/L look really groovy but more importantly as a loyalty test to your underwriters.
>> Pump the revenue however possible
People forget exponential growth in a social network always ends with exponential collapse. It takes a while to get there, but sites can clear out in a matter of months.
So this is them getting that for Reddit
Obviously you want to maximize the selling price, as that is the actual profit you are making. If they are IPOing, they either need funding or believe its current evaluation will give them a good price.
Reddit isn't completely social media, but if people aren't responding to SM like they were it will hurt Reddit. If you're an insider it's probably the best opportunity you're going to get to juke the stats and max your IPO. Only going to go down from here.
Facebook kinda killed its own activity by pushing growth of their social graph.
Over time it stopped being a place to connect with friends and just became… I don’t know. But it discourages user activity because family, friends, old classmates, guys you bumped into on a night out, ex’es all can see your activity.
It’s not fun checking-in somewhere, posting funny pictures from last nights party or whatever because it is practically public.
And my impression is young kids don’t like it either. You do your highlights reel on Instagram, but other than that, everything happens in private chat groups.
Every meetup group I go to, every Facebook group I visit wants us to connect in a private chat group and have notifications every time someone says something.
For this old fart, it’s exhausting to keep up with.
The need for SM companies to get more of my time requires them to shower me with increasingly irrelevant content to keep my engagement going up. At some point there is literally no additional time people can spend in SM (you can't get a time credit card).
So more ads it is until the plattform is barely usable for someone not interested in the passively consumed avalanche of polished medicare.
That's why chat groups are increasingly popular I think. You get to have a two way conservation with people who respond and care about you (at least a little bit). Meeting them in real live (or one on one online) also enforces the "authenticity" of the interaction.
Therefore I expect Facebook to introduce lots of ads to WA very very soon.
The platforms have been allowing their own employees and leveraging bots and contracted employees as fake "winning" accounts/influencers while deeply manipulating genuine (unaffiliated) users to pay for visibility through making them buy ads to profit and/or look successful... Even sites that aren't really considered as social media, like YouTube and reddit, are guilty of these practices.
Also adds have gotten far better, they are now paying to be integrated directly into content, making it far more effective by using the trust the viewer has built up towards the creator.
At least in the past even if it was an influencer, I knew it was a real person or location, if a little Photoshopped. Now it just might as well be me daydreaming?
It's hard to explain. It's kind of the end of meaning, I guess.
The status quo is that we interact in 2 distinct ways. First, with a simulacra of a real object or people, but at a distance. That's video conferencing, texting, email, (mostly) social media, etc. Second, with simulations, i.e. video games, produced media (i.e. fake people played by real ones, photoshopped everything, post-produced CGI'd, etc.).
The difference now is that the wall between these is going to fall, and it will be difficult to distinguish between the two going forward.
Culture doesn't require that its basis is real. Some people are going to choose Religion 2.0, where they prefer the mediated experience to the unmediated one, and others will reject it. These two groups can't get along because even if values are shared, there will be a divergence of meaning.
Maybe not you specifically, but society generally: why does one follow an influencer? Surely they won’t meet that person, likely won’t go to that location, can’t afford those clothes etc….
And in answering those questions, does AI generated content still fill that requirement? I suspect yes for some.
I do follow the occasional influencer and brand. Some because I want to peak into a glorious resort filled life I won’t have, others to see remarkable places I won’t go. If those were fake, maybe I’d feel better about FOMO.
Some people (especially queer people) follow influencers to experience people and social groups who are like them, when they don’t see them in their normal life. AI content can’t replace that.
I also think this directly links to the "life improvement" and "course selling" genre, where millionaires blatantly shill to their audience that they too can be millionaires if they just get up before 5:30 and gamble on ridicolous activities in saturated markets (course selling, drop shipping, "book writing"). Honestly some of the more despicable people on the internet.
>Some people (especially queer people) follow influencers to experience people and social groups who are like them, when they don’t see them in their normal life. AI content can’t replace that. Why not? I think it is far easier to make AI pander to those people. AI girlfriend/boyfriend simulators are already real, they directly target those groups.
That is not at all the point or use case i was referring to (but it is totally a real use of social media). Using queer people as the example, a lot of young people turn to social media to see adults being happy and queer because they don’t see any examples IRL. There are a lot of laws being passed in the US to target trans people, for example, so a Floridian trans youth may watch a YouTube channel of a trans person in a far away city living a safe, fulfilling life, as inspiration for their own future.
Similarly, but more pedestrian, I knew plenty of people in high school who watched “day in the life of <profession>” videos, or “come with me on my first day at <university>” videos. They help people visualize their future, or decide between different futures. I used YouTubers’ videos to help me choose between different universities. When I moved to a new city, I followed local influencers to get an idea for things to do and places to visit. Definitely less toxic.
These videos can be fake, but if it’s not grounded in reality then it’s really not the intended purpose of watching it.
AI can generate homosexual couples just as well as others. I don't get what your point here is.
>They help people visualize their future No, they help people fantasize, which is an extremely destructive behaviour.
>I used YouTubers’ videos to help me choose between different universities. When I moved to a new city, I followed local influencers to get an idea for things to do and places to visit. Definitely less toxic. Completely unimaginable to me. Also an extremely easy way to get manipulated.
Fantasize about being a doctor or lawyer or engineer or really anything is destructive? Everything I have done in my life was once a fantasy. I mean is watching a resident talk about their life in a YouTube video worse than me watching ER in the 90s?
I was also thinking about how, you know, fake content that I know is fake is fine. A comedy sketch is clever writing and good timing, and synthetic.
Real content that I know is real is fine. I am seeing something real and true.
Fake content that tries to be real is bad, and pollutes my mind, in a sense. I can't even tell somebody about an image I saw because I don't know if it's real or not. Balenciaga pope etc. And a lot of social media is going to fall into that. I shouldn't even mention it, for fear of looking like a fool. I shouldn't even mentally store it, because it warps my understanding of general trends that I notice online. I think social media text is already there, and images are close, video maybe less than a year off from being kind of worthless.
Only people working in tech mind care but do what in the big picture?
What do all these developers at these tech companies do all day? As a freelance developer who has to meet ridiculous timelines all the time, I don't really get how a company can have hundreds of developers and yet the product seems to languish and/or get worse or slower or both.
I suppose there's a lot more overhead with internal QA, code review, meetings, etc, but with the amount of developers these companies have as full-time staff, what are they doing all day? Is it mostly internal systems, tooling, etc?
I just find it hard to believe that there can be hundreds of developers at a company like Twitch and yet the product is largely the same as it was 5 years ago. I would think features could be cranked out so much faster than they appear to be.
But the second one is that while the site might seem simple and straightforward, the way it has to be engineered to handle the massive scale of a Reddit (with over a billion active monthly users) makes it very, very complicated internally. I'm not familiar with Reddit specifically but having seen the architecture at other places of similar size, I can tell you there's a ton going on behind the scenes to make it possible to reliably serve that many users and that makes major changes very complicated, involving multiple teams, and lots of planning.
Astonishing really considering Reddit hasn't changed that much since back when they had like 100 employees.
If I had a dollar for every “X is trivial” comment on HN…
I think it's probably true that most companies are overstaffed. He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named managed to cut headcount 80% at a fairly prominent tech employer and drama aside, the business has not severely suffered. Could Ford Motor Company or US steel or Delta Airlines lay off 80% of their workforce and manage to maintain and grow operations as well as the bird app has managed to? I doubt it.
But that aside, your point is very good.
It has not been caused by laying off 6,000 project managers and react developers, and will not be fixed by bringing back on 6,000 people at six figure salaries.
The app itself is functioning well even as the number of users has increased and number of staff decreased, and not only is it being maintained, but they seem to be regularly releasing new features without protracted delays or major technical bungles.
Many more advertisers who might have otherwise been persuaded to stay by sales reps they had contact with have backed off because those sales reps themselves were let go.
One could genuinely make an argument that most SV tech companies have way more employees than they need. And one could almost trivially prove that to be true (many Tech companies were hiring developers not because they needed them, but to keep them out of the hands of competitors). That does not make Elon’s slash and burn destruction of Twitter sensible by any measure.
Meta is also offloading vast number of employees and it’s managing to do it without making it sound like their company is a dumpster fire.
Elon’s approach to Twitter is highly reminiscent of the Stephen Elop burning platform memo to Nokia, but orders of magnitudes worse.
Let's call it what it is: he is using his power to promote some people and some ideologies while actively censoring others.
Aside from Trump, I don't think any other person can so successfully and reliably cast this attention grabbing spell on the world's netizens.
What Elon has been doing, and how much of an asshole we may think he is, is actually completely unrelated to the fact that Twitter was overstaffed for essentially the entire duration of it's life as a public company. Which is the sole point of my initial comment.
Source?
The most prominent example was the failed DeSantis presidential announcement.
I mean, Twitch regularly does larger livestreams with video!
We need to stop repeating this lie.
They have reduced site reliability to reddit levels, had multiple breaches (probably far more than the ones we know about) and managed to get in trouble in multiple countries.
And yes, they were overstaffed like any other company hiring during the pandemic but not by 80%.
And I blame the breaches on churn more than head count. And the 'getting in trouble' is generally because of the new things being added.
It's changed dramatically, but many of the visible changes are for the worse!
To error is human but to really screw things up requires significant manpower.