this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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I'm still trying to wrap my head around them having 2000 employees. Makes absolutely no sense.
The way to make big money for the past 20 years hasn't been to sell better mousetraps. It's been to attract venture capital. Your revenue didn't matter as much as your size, and your size was determined by your employees and how much you spend.
It's why Uber, whose business model is entirely skimming off of taxi drivers who provided their own cars, wasn't profitable..
With the interest rate hikes, the investment money is drying up, and all these places are discovering they actually need to make money from their users now, and all that bloat is now a negative instead of a positive.
Basically we're all paying the price for the stupid fucking investment bubble that's existed for two decades. An investment bubble that existed because nobody was at the wheel driving the direction of this economy until now.
And of course the billionaires don't want to sacrifice shit, so they're making sure it all rolls downhill to their employees and their customers and doesn't touch their profits in the slightest.
But like... Why not have those 2000 employees generate some actual reasonable value if you're paying them anyway. Reddit externally seems like a business with 200 poorly organised employees. How were they squandering that manpower so spectacularly? Were they doing it on purpose somehow? Like a military unit firing endless rounds at nothing at the end of the year to make sure they don't get their allocation cut for next year?
Oh, I'm sure they were all doing stuff. It just wasn't necessarily stuff that's easy to monetize.
There's a reason Reddit's reliability has shot up over the past decade despite ever increasing popularity. Plus there's all the dumb shit they added like the bullshit awards.