Boggles my mind
What exactly do 2000 employees *do* for Reddit?
I have the same question about the volume of employees at a lot of other websites too. I don't understand what they need so many employees for.
Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff. A company spokesperson confirmed the cuts in an email to The Register, stating that the whole company's restructuring is part of changes to Reddit's data, API and mod tools projects. Word of the job …
Back when I was the sole sysadmin for a medium sized company I got asked exactly what I did by the CEO. My reply was along the lines of "apart from keeping the network and email running, upgrading machines regularly, fixing you forgetting your password at least once a week, magicing out of thin air machines for new hires nobody told me about until they started work, monitoring disk usage and upgrading before the space runs out, troubleshooting and generally wiping the noses and arses of ~100 users, half of whom wouldn't actually be let anywhere near a computer in a sane world, not a lot. But I can stop doing it and we can find out whether it's important." I think it was the bit about his password that get through to him.
Usually without pausing a moment to look outside.
Like twitter has found out with increasing frequency, those systems didn't build themselves. Reddits user to employee ratio is pretty decent all things considered, and while they can probably lose the headcount they announced, it's not like the rest of company is sitting on it's hands all day.
That said there are probably plenty of those people who are earning their paychecks and still don't do a thing for you or your average user. Those ads don't sell themselves.
I for one hope that most of the people that got cut were the idiots that keep making the mobile site worse with every update, or block access to non-controversial content unless you are signed in. Or farming your browsing info to google.
Not holding my breath on that last bit though.
It's a widely used app with a lot of users.
When you're making a reader app (basically to let someone read and post on Reddit), then every screen load needs to pull comments on the page, datestamps, usernames, avatars, award things, up/downvote totals, attachments and all that. Depending on how reddit structures things, that could easily be a hundred calls. Per user, per pageload.
(of course, if it's structured to have fewer calls, then firstly it's less useful as it's harder to customise for the end user, and secondly it's still the same data volume).
Because the Reddit API doesn't allow users to do that, probably.
You'll also notice that one of the big issues with Apollo is that even if he could do that, 30 days to rewrite the app and change his infrastructure to support it just isn't enough time.
Money is one issue, but it's not the only issue.
The back of the envelope says they’re making around 3,000 calls per second.
It's entirely possible an app has more than 3000 users using it at the same time on average...
Why should Reddit charge the people who make the content that it publishes (via app subscription fees to app developers who will have to pass the charge on)? It's just yet more enshittification, like YouTube's recent algorithm change which buries videos and offers content creators the change to pay to make them more visible.
>I think I’d be charging too.
>A fee of $0.24 per thousand API calls would result in a fee of $2,000,000 per month?
I think most people agree that there should/ultimately needs to be a charge, but most of these 3rd party Reddit clients are made by one lone developer who cannot possibly afford to pay Reddit $2,000,000/month.
For a lot of what a worker at an internet business does, it could be done from home or anywhere in the world. Why do these companies think that they need extremely expensive office space in someplace like San Francisco? I don't buy the argument that it's where the people that work there want to live. Even the execs find the home prices rather painful which means the workers have no choice but to live in a converted closet, have no life/possesions/family or commute into and out of the city every day while still paying eye-watering rents. I know people that have worked in Silicon Valley and while salaries can be generous, the cost of living consumes nearly all of it on a monthly basis. Being out of work for 2 weeks can be catastrophic and companies come and go with little to no warning.
I live in a small town with some rough areas, but the cost of living is super low. I've been able to pay off the house, the car and live much better than I could in someplace like San Jose, CA. Even in such a small town we have a bunch of internet options even though landline phones exist no longer. The local phone company has just started offering very fast fibre connections for a bit less than the local cable company. Verizon offers 5G data services for a good price and there's also Viasaat and Hughes and every once in a while, Starlink but it can get hot in the summer so their system can sometimes punk out during the day. It's also prohibitively expensive compared to the wired options. I could work for somebody such as Reddit just as effectively as I could sitting in their office (for many postitions). Reddit could locate here and have ready access to plenty of bandwidth, power and other facilities for far less and could have kept those discharged employees if they wanted with money left over for lunch. I would also expect that those employees would be in a good position to buy their own homes if they acted before the supply dried up which can happen when a company moves someplace and adds a bunch of jobs.