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Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has < 5 engineers working on it and in the last few months has been at 1 active engineer for a while. With 13mm unique visitors and > 1 billion page views monthly let's cut them some slack.

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Let me ask you. How does a company get into that state? Say you had 5 engineers, 1 billion page views a month and ongoing issues. Wouldn't you dedicate some resources to that? When one engineer leaves, wouldn't you worry a little? And then another, and another? Would you sit and do nothing? These events did not occur in a day. They occurred over a lengthy period of time. I can sympathize with the lone engineer because I've been there. I still sleep with my laptop and phone next to my head. I know what the burn out feels like, so yes I feel for that engineer. But as a business letting it get to that point.

edit: JonnieCache mentioned Conde Naste will not let them hire more people. Obviously we know where the fault lies then.

> JonnieCache mentioned Conde Naste will not let them hire more people.

Yeah, I imagine the situation is more complicated than that, but look into some of the reddit blogposts and some of the admins comments on here for more details. There was a lot of stuff in the big 'AWS is down' thread about it, something about CN giving them an unlimited operating budget but a tiny, non negotiable hiring budget. God knows.

Gist I got from the 'AWS is down' thread was they had maxed their operation budget and that was why they couldn't afford to use multiple regions. Reddit being very write heavy the data synchronization across regions would be too expensive in both bandwidth and manpower.

Conde Naste will not let them hire more people. Obviously we know where the fault lies then.

We don't know what's going on so I think it's a bit unfair to speculate.

But is there any evidence that Reddit is profitable? Would having a more stable platform honestly have much of an impact on that? Server issues aside, they seem to be doing pretty well in terms of page views and user acquisition.

Given reddit’s content and its demographic appeal, I’d guess it’s got about as much revenue potential as 4chan, which is to say, barely any at all. Perhaps even less, considering Condé Nast won’t let reddit run ads from the porn sites and male enhancement product vendors that keep 4chan afloat. There’s a reason reddit has to resort to Flash games and lolcats as placeholders for its ad space.

If reddit became NSFW with ads you'd see a huge drop in traffic from people at work (that don't have access to Adblock on their computers) and a lot more people not disabling it for reddit.com at home.

Not only that, but if reddit started carrying those ads appropriate to its demographic, it would face a massive revolt from its own users. Redditors get irrationally angry at reddit whenever an ad targeted at them so much as plays sound, let alone insults their self-image as high-brow intellectuals who “deserve” premium ads on par with the sponsors of Condé Nast’s other properties. (Pretty funny stuff, for a site that had to petition Google to hide “jailbait” and “nsfw” from its top eight sitelinks.) But yes, that’s the dilemma.

Last I heard they had one full-time developer working on it, and if that is the case, I wouldn't be surprised if yesterday was their first day off in a awhile. Also, Quora was having the same difficulties and it mostly points to not doing what Twilio and a host of other architecture-aware teams did. Single points of failure will fail.

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