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Comment by kreutz | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is a glorified bulletin board that does not need ~2000 employees to operate and iterate. The community is their product. They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying. Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a way to kill off its own creation.

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This is the case with most of these. Having big, popular, very profitable website is not enough. They are going to break them all. Good maybe if the VCs get annyoed it will finally allow for healthy ecosystem to emerge.

*not at all profitable

> They are were never going to be a unicorn and they will die trying.

Reddit are valued at ~5bn, which makes them a full-blown unicorn. But in 2023 the gap between a unicorn and an IPO-ready company can be huge.

"valued at" may be the metric, but I think the bigger point here is they're unprofitable and have not much path to either fix that or continue 'growing'. So by monopoly money rules yes they're a valuable unicorn, but realistically it's more like time to pay the piper.

Yes. Whenever I hear that a company (or a person) is "valued at" something, I know that number that follows is not likely to bear any relationship with reality.

Even if, non-liquid worth is like voltage on a battery - it drops fast once load is applied. Except for batteries we're usually talking about maybe 30% drop. In finance, once you try to convert your large "worth" to cash, it's going to be more like 90% drop, simply from the market responding to what you're doing - that's on top of any bullshit involved in calculating the "worth" in the first place.

Unrelated but shouldn’t we adjust the unicorn definition? Everything is increasing thanks to inflation so we should make the unicorn title more expensive.

I’m half joking obviously but the 1B valuation doesn’t seem all that rare anymore.

Maybe 10B?

Wework was valued at 50 billion. Tesla is valued at more than the 10 top automotive firms combined. Surely we don't believe in the infinite wisdom of stock markets or anything of the sort right?

What could these 2,000 people possibly be doing behind the scenes? Reddit essentially never releases new user facing features, so what is everyone up to?

They seem to be constantly redesigning the website. For me, there are two versions of the "new design": one for listing, another for the post itself... one is black and the other blue. Every other week there's something slightly different or a bit broken. The latest change for me was that I can't collapse posts anymore in the new version. Since I don't really use much, I just end up in reddit.com instead of old.reddit.com...

(EDIT: Scratch that, when I actually log in there seems to be a THIRD layout!!!)

There's also the mobile apps that still seem to get weekly (?) releases, all with the same copy-paste changelog (at least in my language). Don't know if something really changed, I don't use it.

The overall quality of course is terrible (at least for the site).

But that's completely expected when the number of developers is that large. Developer headcount doesn't scale linearly to delivered work. At some point you can keep adding people and it will only make things slower. :/

I imagine they're the ones who keep messing up Reddit's design and making it slower and less usable.

> Reddit is a glorified bulletin board

and uber (ride) is an automatic taxi dispatch, it's ok.

> Software eats the world but Silicon Valley manages to find a way to kill off its own creation

I blame capitalism.

digital stuff and capitalism do not mix well. something's gotta give.

but I guess I can also blame digital stuff (the internet); something will give. but which? and what? ....and when???

> and uber (ride) is an automatic taxi dispatch, it's ok

Uber's trick was claiming for years that it wasn't actually taxi dispatch so it didn't have to be regulated as such.

Regulatory avoidance/evasion enabled Uber to break into tightly controlled taxi markets.

> but I guess I can also blame digital stuff (the internet); something will give. but which? and what? ....and when???

The thing that isn't in someone's "value chain" or whatever euphemism for rent seeking is popular this year.

A venture capital news aggregator seems an odd place to vaguely preach your anti-capitalist views.

Nonetheless, what exactly does capitalism do to make "digital stuff" worse?

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