Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

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> I would love to know what the 4000+ staff do there

Usually when an engineer asks this question, they are starting with the assumption that most everyone who works there is an engineer. That assumption is usually wrong.

I have no inside information at all, but my guess is that engineers make up less than 1/3 of the employees. I'm sure the sales team is large, the product team is large, and the community management team is large. They probably also have a bunch of legal, and we know they have a lobbying group as well. And of course if you're taking people's money, you need a bunch of customer service to handle that.

When I worked there 14 years ago, we had at peak six engineers, and three non-engineers (one sales, one product, one community). But also we had the parent company providing legal (and there was a lot of legal requests even back then!), HR, facilities, finance, and basically all the other support tasks. And also we the engineers did a lot of it. We managed customer service for ads, we managed making t-shirts and plushies, we managed customer service for reddit gold payments, and a bunch of other "non-engineering" tasks.

The site is big and is transactional, which makes it a harder problem to solve. With the near-real-time display of votes and listing changes and comments, it's a lot more like eBay than Slashdot (which is what I would say at the time).

> I'm sure the sales team is large

who are they selling to? And why so many people?

EDIT: sorry, I read another response, they are selling to ad companies. Does that really demand hunderds, over 1000 people, though? At some point I feel they are costing more than what the next increment can bring in.

I understand your point but even if there was only 100 engineers (which would not be enough) I can't imagine what the other 1900 administrative people are doing. It's an internet forum, and unlike Twitter and other social media (where I assume they simply have hundreds of mods) they successfully outsourced moderation to volunteers.

Is it all just legal suits? The customers are the users and admins are horrible at responding to user requests (be it users or mods), so it doesn't feel lik customer service is using those resources.

> It's an internet forum, and unlike Twitter and other social media (where I assume they simply have hundreds of mods) they successfully outsourced moderation to volunteers.

This vastly underestimates how much moderating reddit is already doing. When I worked at reddit, we spent at least 50% of all of our resources on fighting spam, harassment, and illegal content. I'm sure reddit is still doing this. What the moderators see is already after the core platform has removed the most obvious offenders. Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.

> The customers are the users

The customers are the people who pay, who are mostly advertisers. Customers and users are two different groups with different ideas of what makes reddit good, and sometimes those don't align. It's a fine line to walk between serving the customers and users to try and keep both happy.

> What the moderators see is already after the core platform has removed the most obvious offenders.

This might be true.

> Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.

This is certainly not true for my sub. There's a lot of obvious spam that has to be manually removed. For example, if Reddit enforced the selfpromotion ratio rule programmatically, there'd be an order of magnitude less spam to deal with.

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Unless Reddit cranks up the removal rate, moderators are still necessary or the /new feed will drown in spam. If /new drowns in spam, what reaches the top will become a lot more chaotic.

>This vastly underestimates how much moderating reddit is already doing.

I likely am, so thanks for giving me an idea. Admins never really talk about how much they do behind the scenes (and aren't that responsive to the users in general) so its hard to tell.

But as a counterargument: While I'm sure they need more admins now than back in 2010, they also (hopefully) will have automated their spam/illegal filters so it doesn't require 1000x the admin moderators to control 1000x the content. the filter catches maybe 95% of the truly illegal content and then admins can check at a less urgent pace.

>The customers are the people who pay, who are mostly advertisers.

I guess it's more accurate to say that advertisers are the customers, and users are the product. But it's an odd metaphor here since sales would need to appeal to both. Getting ads to show and also getting ads for their own site, to get more products to appeal to more customers.

I do agree that its an odd balancing board, especially with Reddit that is more hostile than usual to inorganic content.

I remember when you left, I’m still there as a moderator.

Back then, when there were a dozen of you it was easier to reach an admin when needed than now, heh.

> it was easier to reach an admin when needed than now, heh.

I hear ya. But in their defense, the regulatory environment is way worse now, and back then as an admin we all pretty much knew about every ongoing issue. A current admin can't just answer you back without possibly running afoul of either a regulatory issue or an ongoing project in another group.

Why does Reddit need sales? Genuine question. My guess is to sell ads?

Any company that makes money needs sales. But the main thing reddit sells is ad space. You have to spend a lot of time convincing big advertisers to buy on your platform.

Disney isn't going to just pull up a self service portal to buy ads. :)

The sales people at Reddit actually focus on selling those little plastic bags with goldfish in them to county fairs.

I don’t know why you’d jump to the conclusion that the sales people at an ad-supported website would sell ads.

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