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Normally I'm defending tech company size, but in this case it does seem bizarre, given how bad their official apps are, and the mobile site, and the new reddit desktop site.

Those are the primary user interfaces for their platform, and they're bad. Enthusiast users in particular seem to overwhelmingly prefer third party apps and old reddit, and those third party apps seem to be made by small teams or even solo devs.

The strange irony there is they seem to be making the mobile site worse over time to drive people to the app, and if that's intentional they must be paying some developer to do it and some manager to tell them the game plan. Imagine being in one of those roles.

Given that they recently A/B tested an experiment which would just lock you out of the mobile website when logged in and force you to use the app instead[0], it's difficult to see it as anything but intentional.

[0] https://reddit.com/comments/135tly1/comment/jim40zg

It would make sense if 1800 of those were paid moderators.

Reddit acquired 3 companies in 2022, although they might all be pretty small operations:

https://www.crunchbase.com/search/acquisitions/field/organiz...