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Comment by jarcoal | Hacker News Reader

What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics.

This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease.

Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

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Reddit should have stuck to the Craigslist model of simply just existing as-is, selling a reasonable amount of ads and premium subscriptions, and only having the minimum number of employees required to keep the site up. It never needed to be and shouldn't have been anything more than that.

Yet another brand gone to shit in the name of "exponential growth" or some other term investors want to hear. No one considers whether their business should fit a model that prioritizes sustainability.

I was thinking of craigslist too. They resisted ebay, and change for change's sake, and ... well lots of things:

  People tell us what they like about craigslist including:

  - Giving people a voice
  - A sense of trust and even intimacy
  - Consistency of down-to-earth values
  - Simplicity
  - No charges, except for job postings
  - Freshness of the material
  - No ads, particularly no banner ads

https://www.craigslist.org/about/mission_and_history

In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. Serve a few ads here and there, let companies do their guerilla marketing for a "small donation" and have people pay for their Reddit gold.

But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.

> Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.

And a couple people at the top now have Lake Tahoe vacation homes. That's an important piece to this. It justifies everything.

Or Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Did Lars Ulrich ever get his Olympic-sized swimming pool? You really gotta feel for the guy.

Space Balls:

This isn't about money...

This is about a shitload of money!

Kendall?

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