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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it.

And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable.

A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable.

Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.

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Of course you as a user don’t care that is profitable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking sides, but if you were the ceo/owner, you’d probably care about its profitability. If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?

> If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?

As a small business owner myself, I can very much assure you that we're not thinking of that at all; we're thinking of ways to get back into the black!

Once we're in the black, we'll start thinking of ways to get an early retirement.

Me? No, I would not.

For nearly 20 years I helped run Bandwagon, a co-op of nerds who toward the end of the dot-com bubble needed a place to put their personal web projects. We clubbed together to rent a full colo rack and we each put our servers in.

There were many opportunities to try to turn this into a business. It might have been lucrative, might have been a failure. We kept it as a small co-op, and it was fine.

And right now I'm looking at starting something that I might eventually get a salary from, but if it has surplus revenues beyond that, I'd rather use it to improve the thing and its impact in the world.

I understand that a lot of people want a zillion dollars so they can live a life of luxury. To each their own, but I feel kinda bad for people who organize their lives around that. They rarely succeed, are usually quite unhappy, and frequently create a trail of pain and misery behind them.

Unfortunately reddit isn't a tech commune. If its intent is to be publicly traded, then it needs to find a way to turn a profit sooner or later.

Reddit-the-community's intent is not for it to be publicly traded. That's the intent of a very small number of people who seek to profit off of Reddit-the-community.

Yea of course. Users of streaming services don’t use those services to prolong the success of the providers yet they continue to buy in for services rendered. I think a truly community driven approach is going to be independent of Reddit as a backbone.

The important difference with streaming services is that much of their revenue goes to pay people to create content. Reddit users contribute content and labor so it can be seen by other users. So trying to run Reddit with the iron fist and customer disregard of your usual company will, as they are discovering, sometimes lead to problems.

Making a profit is how it becomes sustainable.

No. Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability. That's part of the devil's bargain of VC money. If it looks like your company will be a modest success, they will push you to make it a giant one no matter how much that increases the risk of failure.

You cannot sustain a business by losing money.

Yes, and I never said otherwise. You can sustain a business by breaking even. Or by making a modest profit. Which is what the great majority of businesses do.

Trying to make a massive profit is another activity altogether, and the quest to do so can easily destroy a sustainable business. As Reddit may learn.

That's not what he said. He said:

> Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability.

The head count increased ten fold since Spez took over. This is because VCs want billion dollar companies, not some moderately profitable ones. They want to deliver more (so more employees) and increase monetization, including by charging for the API.

If they stayed smaller it would have been more sustainable and wouldn't have to charge for the API.

Yes and: examples of modest success like craigslist, metafilter, ravelry, etc. Like you wrote elsethread, paraphrasing, avoid the trap of unicorn or bust.

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