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insane_dreamer

> losing $90.8 million on $804 million of revenue in 2023 and never having turned a profit

how in the world could it possibly cost $900 million a year to run Reddit?

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Seems they spent $438,346,000 on research and development.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...

Meanwhile every actually interesting thing Reddit the company has done in my memory seems to link back to Josh Wardle, who came up with the "The Button" event and also the "Place" event, then left and created Wordle, then sold it to the New York Times for millions. They should just redirect 5% of their R&D funds to getting that guy back and letting him do whatever he wants.

Or maybe keep trying to get in on the NFT craze and working to carefully ensure third party apps can't work with Reddit. That's also a choice.

Dang, didn't know he did all that pre-Wordle. I'd ask why game studios aren't eating him up, but he's probably set for life by now. Wonder what's on the horizons for him.

Apparently he joined "MSCHF." They describe themselves as "AN ART COLLECTIVE THAT ENGAGES ART, FASHION, TECH, AND CAPITALISM." Their products run from tech startup failure collectibles (get your mini Juicero and a mini Theranos Minilab today!), to oil paintings of ML feet, to a celebrity's iPhone full of the phone numbers of other celebrities (locked, password not included).

Sounds like an interesting place to work.

Oh no, $438 million dollars spent on research & development... for an internet forum. That is so tragic.

And after all that R&D, the only thing keeping many long-time users around is that old.reddit.com still lets you opt-out of the last 6+ years worth of R&D they have done on the interface.

Speaking to some mods, old. doesn’t cut it for moderation, so there’s that other side to consider.

And I guess that matters more as 3rd party tools have been locked out.

Let’s start the rumour mill on what HN spends on R&D.

How many people is dang really?

0, Dang is a just a brain in a jar.

*beep boop* Must moderate today

Aren't developer salaries, servers, etc., included in that? That's what I seem to recall from recent tax changes that were discussed here a few weeks ago.

Developer salaries are probably under Research & Development, further, given their employee count and likely mix of tech (it/dev/infra) to biz, that's the only line item likely large enough to house their engineering team.

> Cost of Revenue

> Cost of revenue consists primarily of payments to third parties for the cost of hosting and supporting our mobile applications and website. In addition, cost of revenue includes expenses directly associated with the delivery of our advertising and other services, including advertising measurement services and credit card and other transaction processing fees. Cost of revenue also consists of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation.

That was only $111,011,000.

Edit:

This is incorrect, R&D does include R&D salaries.

Given their employee count, that would imply a fully loaded headcount cost of around $50k. No, I don't think so?

You are correct, I should have kept reading. R&D also has salaries included

I wonder how many of that is just handouts to friends' businesses under the name of "R&D". In Ireland we always joked about the business "overhead" mainly being spent on admiring the sun overhead from a tropical beach :)

Researching on how to make the UI even worse is no easy task.

Sounds like Twitter pre-Elon where 80% are woke commissars and 20% actually make the site go. That's a big pattern these days where a small group of people make everything work and generate enormous wealth then you have this huge overhang of people who find some sort of way to hang on to them by inventing and enforcing ideological purity contests.

Yuval Harari wonders what we'll do with people made useless by AI. They will be activists directed by AI generated propaganda campaigns to force all the people the AI doesn't control to comply.

Yup, that's the future with AI. You have a few AI researchers that program the robots and everyone else is crusading for justice and working in compliance. There jobs consist of inventing new things to be offended about and enforcing new rules to prevent their feelings from being hurt though everything they believe comes from AI generated propaganda campaigns.

Same thing happens at colleges were you got like $20 million spent on salaries for senior DEI person in charge of putting tampons in men's bathrooms and such whose job mainly consists of going to meetings and finding things to be offended about[1].

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/virginia-taxpayers-a...

I highly doubt those 80% were working on ideological stuff. It's common in big tech companies to have too many cooks in the kitchen, and because the design process and tech stack tends to mimic an org chart, stuff gets semi-permanently more complicated as a result. There are also some teams doing projects/research that wouldn't normally make a lot of sense, but the interest rates were so low at times that companies had to stretch to do more random things.

Sometimes after a change of ownership, they cut whatever they consider fat. This is Broadcom's strategy for example, acquire and cut.

Well, looking at the value of Twitter pre- and post acquisition, those 80% did do things that provided some positive value for the company.

You're forgetting the one thing that sets Reddit apart. They get crazy people to perform moderation tasks for free. It turns out that a lot of people don't ask for a paycheck as long as you let them push their ideology on an entire subreddit.

> Sounds like Twitter pre-Elon where 80% are woke commissars and 20% actually make the site go.

You seriously think 80% of Twitter was “woke commissars”?

It's a fun speculative fiction premise but assumes that everyone else's feelings and grievances are the result of AI manipulation while your own feelings and grievances are authentic[1].

[1]https://xkcd.com/610/

The way to counteract AI influence is to view the world as Bayesian and incorporate many different opposing views. I read both Russian and Western views of the Ukraine war on Telegram channels for example that regularly contradict each other. When I start reading something and I experience cringe, I view that as a positive signal that I'm getting information from a different perspective that I should evaluate and update my priors.

as opposed to the Elon-era where 95% is the Dear Leader Commissar and 5% actually make the site go

And the rest apparently goes to the CEO.

All they came up with is bog standard enshittification stuff. I could have consulted that to them for well under a hundredth of what they paid.

Maybe they're using Netlify? :P

Reddit's CEO and COO made $193M and $93M in 2023...

Why is a company paying one person a quarter of the revenue earnings? And mind you, a number that arguably no single being truly deserves?

Morals aside, 193m is almost double Tim Cook's compensation and a bout 90% of Sundar Pichai's. Public companies that made 1000x the revenue in a quarter, compared to this yearly revenue report. How is Spez justifying such compensation?

He could have made it a profitable year just by cutting his salary.

193 million for CEO of a web forum? We truely live in interesting times...

Buy Reddit, fire the CEO and COO, and boom, you have nicely profitable company.

they must have pretty good control of the board or they probably would have been fired by the board

A few AWS services will bring you far in that bill

apparently "cost of revenue" which includes AWS/etc expenses was only ~$100M

easy. pay the CEO like he is a genius even if he makes insane decisions.

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