What blows my mind is that only 50% is spent moderating.

At some point the engineering work can be something approximating “done” (or should get asymptotically close to it), and the health of your platform ultimately rests a lot more on the quality of the community than on any particular technical project.

What is engineering doing that it takes up as much person-hours as moderation? Running A/B tests to tweak the “try the app” dialog?

(Yes, I’m bitter… I deleted my Reddit account years ago and I’m still lamenting the loss of what the site used to be.)