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

The cost is nowhere near, even with sufficient padding, to what they are asking. The move is a bit too blatant and obvious a push out.

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 lead me to the other news sites and blogs run by journalists and spammy media companies contain a lot of bullshit that I chose to only rely on Reddit for my quest for information.

I wonder why Reddit would want to charge consumers of its API, without providing any premium services like let's say, Twilio etc. Reddit must focus on monetizing its content and more strategization that will bring in more ad-revenue or user-generated monetary value rather than going after 3rd party API consumers that ended up doing a much better job of building a simple front end app for their content.

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.

holy shit 2000!? Now I understand where all that recommendation spam is coming from

I imagine it's some combination of building out a worldwide ad sales force, engineering to keep up with the resulting ad technology demands, and further engineering to keep up with the modern ML arms race.

Plus as you grow you need infrastructure to support your much larger employee base (everything from dev tools to HR).

Looks like their valuation has also grown in that time, from about 400 million 10 years ago to 10 billion in 2021 - not sure they have had a funding round since then but Fidelity recently cut their Reddit shares by 41% value, which would still put them at 5-6 billion. That's still a 10x+ return over 10 years.

Having only 20 employees might sound desirable on paper, but you simply cannot do with 20 employees what you can do with a larger company. Having only a couple people responsible for an entire region of ad sales is not scalable in the slightest.

Reddit has historically had an abysmal ARPU and part of that was because a sheer lack of people able to support the ad business. Reddit is now almost able to break even when I don't think they have ever previously been profitable (even with 20 employees).

Ads. You now see more ads.

They added value for the shareholders, not for us.

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.

It is horrible messaging, unless your message is directed at shareholders or potential investors.

I am struggling to think of any CEOs that don’t use corpspeak. Are there any?

My account on Reddit is 17 years old.

I’ve been on lemmy for a couple days. I’m still very unsure about it. It’s not the technical changes of being federated, those didn’t take too much effort even for me with no experience with mastodon etc.

It’s more the underlying politics that are jarring. The lead dev uses Castro as his picture and the other founder has mao on his personal page masthead. There’s a VERY prevalent anti western sentiment and even reccomending things like podcasts that use western viewpoints are downvoted hard. And I haven’t even been to their “communist” instance.

The read I get is it’s got a lot of communism/socialism ideologues that have never lived under the thumb of the regimes they are advocating.

Even on some of the inclusive specific ideas instances like beehaw, a prevalent reasoning is if your instance doesn’t defederate/block other instances unaligned with xyz, it means you aren’t dedicated to making a safe space and thus should be defederated too. It’s a dangerous game if that plays out on the larger more popular instances.

It just feels off and as if I’m an outsider or unwelcome at best. Unsure if I will stick around. It’s not nearly same as the early Reddit days and especially the pre-digg migrations (and there were a couple)

I also made sure to register to one that doesn’t profess any political leaning. But still, unsure given the overall vibe.

Is green meaning they are participating or black symbolizing they will be going on blackout. It would be nice if you could add a label at the top to say.

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.

With Javascript off the page is blank.

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.

How's the list compiled and how frequently is it updated?

I am a mod on two subs (both > 500K subscribers and they are going dark) and they're not listed.