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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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