I can’t wrap my head around this, it seems so bizarre. The only reason I’m here now is because I joined Apollo right after Reddit changed its app to remove the sort by rising feature. It completely changed my experience on the app for the worse and I sought out an alternative, and I know I’m not the only one that had this complaint. I was a faithful Reddit user/poster on the official app for 6 years until just a few months ago. Why would they make their app less user friendly a few months before announcing the crazy API changes. They drove me away from their app and then drove me away from the site altogether.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? It just makes no sense to me
Server and maintenance costs my guy. They’re like a top-10 site on the internet at worst. That’s a lot of infrastructure and people to keep on staff to keep it running, just from a dev perspective. Those costs are probably very high; and add on keeping the specialized staff, costs go up quick.
Obviously this is exacerbated by the rest of their business though; they have plenty of other staff members and probably some wild exec structure.
They have 2000 employees. According to levels.fyi they’re paying mid-level software engineers $300,000 a year. Even if you assume their average employee salary is only $100,000 a year, that’s $200 MILLION dollars a year on salaries.
I absolutely guarantee that is way, way, way higher than their server costs.
Reddit claims to be losing money, but they made half a billion dollars in 2021. (the last year that any data is available)
They’ve also done about $1.3 billion in fundraising over the years, ($400 mill in 2021) which is a lot of debt to take on…
So what I think is happening here is that they want to cook up the books for their IPO, that and spez seems to be in love with how Musk is handling Twitter, specifically Musk’s cost-cutting measures. (cost cutting means short term stock price bumps, because the books look a bit better, after all, just look at how much money is available after you fire half the company)
It’s a complete pump to get the IPO starting value as high as possible and will subsequently dump soon after going public as they cash out
Spez and Co are complete business and culture morons