Beyond spez (and the fact that he is a greedy little pig boy), I’m curious about the corporate dynamics that prevent a company like Reddit from being profitable. From an outside perspective, they make hundreds of millions per year via advertising, their product is a relatively simple (compared to industries that need a lot of capital to build their product), and their content is created and moderated for free by users. Could any offer some insights or educated guesses? Additionally, I’m curious how this all ties into the larger culture of Silicon Valley tech companies in the 2010s.
I agree with everything you said. It’s worth noting that web-based advertising has generally been getting less profitable because everyone is using effective ad-blockers, so advertisers don’t want to pay as much. Their expenses could be pretty have to maintain a lot of server farms for all the picture and video content (text doesn’t take much) and for redundancy to keep a high uptime. They also have a surprisingly large staff, given all the volunteer mods.
So for the things you and I both mentioned, it’s wouldn’t surprise me if they lose money, and I don’t begrudge them trying to become profitable, but they sure didn’t go about it well.