When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?
Diminishing returns. The more employees you add, the harder they are to manage efficiently and in-sync. You need to add more managers to manage more employees, which adds more layers and fragments the business more.
However, the numbers still don’t add up to me. The app shouldn’t be worse than 3rd party apps. The platform shouldn’t have all these downtime issues. The website shouldn’t be an accessibility failure.
Of those 2000 people, at least 1000 are not in technical roles at all, but stuff like partner management, HR, marketing, etc.
What exactly the rest is doing, I’m also baffled. I guess, they primarily reinvent wheels. Reddit is relatively easy to scale and has been in its core not changed for years.
The downtime is what gets me. For a site that has been around as long as Reddit, the fact that it is routinely unavailable shows that its backend has to be horrendous.
The official reddit app has 100 million downloads on the play store and there’s basically no press about the regular issues/downtime.
They’re trying to get into the post-IPO mindset, If it’s not affecting adoption or ad revenue, why would they bother to fix it. Who cares what the state of the platform is as long as it’s producing maximum shareholder value.