Reddit to lay off about 5% of its workforce | Hacker News Reader

Reddit to lay off about 5% of its workforce

reuters.com

51 pointsnetfortius30 comments

First the new awful UI, then nagging for their app, then account suspension chaos monkey. Reddit is over. Thank you reddit team, and goodbye.

And the cycle begins anew.

Where?

I know it has become a massive cliche to say this and I usually don't engage in this conversation, but I think in this case it's legitimate - Reddit has 1,800 employees?! How?! I worked at a well-known mid-size tech company that had around 15 consumer and B2B products and employed 2,000 people and it felt bloated.

Likely sales, teams to attract advertisers in each region (including AMAs, sub-editor prizes, etc.) Then moderation, legal, PR and abuse report handling.

Reddit has apparently over 430 million active users per month.

So alone your glibal teams for infra alone should be at least 100

Say 150 for that. That leaves 1650 others then.

Marketing, development, translates, legal team, hr, hiring.

If I were to guess, their engineering is probably around 650 people. But I don't have any data to make this claim.

> worked at a well-known mid-size tech company

This is one of the most common confusion that folks does to related their own experience with some regional/national tech company in comparison with global tech products with millions of users plus multiple juriscitions and regional aspects that needs to be taken in consideration.

Good luck trying to deal with regional ad sales, content moderation, legal, account management without a local team.

The company I was talking about was Atlassian so well into the millions of users in virtually every region on the planet.

Incredible. That is indeed quite a figure.

Wow ... 1800. They must work all on moderation.

Hopefully it's not the 5% maintaining old.reddit.com.

If old Reddit goes so do a lot of users.

The writing is on the wall, it will go as soon as the current mess quiets down (if it does). I don't think that I will even wait it out, the trust has been broken.

At the end we all suffer from the loss of information. In the past we had forums where long articles incl how-to were pinned and online for years. Today we might find about 20-30 discussions all saying the same thing flooded with trash.

Another platform after reddit will just dilute it even further. The death of forums and knowledge for shortterm ad-revenue driven success.

Hopefully they're laying off whoever's responsible for the video player that hasn't worked in 5 years.

There is no one to be laid off. This feature in particular was contracted to eastern European devs through some German consultancies;) It was cheap though.

And make 25% of the volunteer mods soft-quite/rage-quit.

The people who most need tools & help to make Reddit a good place are just getting totally completely hosed by Reddit's API changes. All around the internet, we're seeing so many new moats & fief-makings.

why does anyone volunteer for that?

spend enough time in a (virtual) location and you might want to help improve the place/keep it tidy, or at least help the current owners/maintainers because you enjoy spending time there.

Or it can be just some ego/power trip.

Desire for power, authority, importance, respect, I'd imagine.

Cause then they can ban whoever they want that doesn't agree with them. Also, I'm sure that some of the powermods get paid to promote posts on their subreddit.

For better or worse a lot of us have been passionate about the sub-communities we were involved in and we thought that our contributions were valued by the site.

> Huffman said the company would also reduce its hiring for the rest of the year to about 100 people from an early plan of 300

So still a net increase in total workforce? Is this just restructuring? Like reducing IT positions and hiring more in marketing or vice versa?

Good. Reddit is on its way downhill. I’m just waiting to figure out what’s next to jump to.

Look at nostr. The beauty of being a protocol that shapes into twitter-style, forum-style, blog or upvotting reddit with the same text protocol underneath.

I guess the big innovation is owning your data and identity for a change. Those who invested in reddit for decades are now without chance to save their own data, at least without a way to move it elsewhere public.

For me, hopefully nothing. I did get some value out of reading and participating in discussions there, but I don't think it makes up for all the time spent.

We could all go back to Digg.

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