this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Spez realized that he literally paid for other companies to harvest one of reddit's two greatest assets and that he needed to do something to recover. So he's been flailing around like a toddler, breaking everything in his desperation to stay on his feet, and in the meantime completely alienating reddit's other greatest asset.
What was that comment he made? Something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits is inevitable and they don't need to do anything for them to arrive.
Also, he claims that reddit has never been profitable. How much has he spent chasing phantoms - reddit cryptocurrency, customizable snoovatars, reddit NFTs, special programming for a single day each year, buying an app then paying to make it worse, deciding to self-host images and videos, thereby drastically increasing the need for both storage and bandwidth, when they'd been perfectly happy to let others do the heavy lifting for well over a decade, paying to implement a drastically flawed video player (remember when it first launched and it was incredibly slow and we found out it was because it was trying to download every available resolution).
In 2022, reddit had $670,000,000 in revenue. There's a reason it's never turned a profit, and for the past eight years, that reason has been Steve Huffman.
That quote grind my gears.
Reddit was profitable, then they took more funding and massively hired.
Profitability is a choice by the executives.