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).
Google has a completely automated ad sales system for even mid-size companies (~$100k/year ad spend) from what I understand.
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.
They added value for the shareholders, not for us.
Reddit has one of the best awards and paid tier plans in the world for a discussion board, yet they still couldn’t break even with it.
You might love things that are free, but don’t expect them to last forever then. Nothing is free.
Reddit as we knew it is on life support. We see them phasing out third party apps, they already removed np.reddit.com, and undoubtedly old.reddit.com will be next. Once they go public there is no turning back, and their decisions will be solely powered by investor greed.
There is no value in a Reddit that doesn’t cater to the users.