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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I know people here will always say "you have no idea the amount of work that goes into <xyz>" straightforward seeming function. But I still have to ask it:

The Reddit UI/app/experience hasn't changed in years, right? What do they need $450M/year of R&D costs [1] for? For serving advertisers? For infra ops? Seems bloated to me.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...

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Incorrect. The reddit UI/app/experience has frequently changed and always for the worse in every iteration. They "revamped" the new web UI just recently before this IPO after the "revamp" earlier maybe 5-6 years ago and is somehow both better and worse. Their app continues to be a crock of bile and the mobile web experience insists that you use it and we no longer have many viable alternatives after they told all the third party developers to suck eggs.

I speculate that the R&D costs are adjacent to their forays into NFTs, TikTok-esque video scrolling which requires a lot of investment into video capabilities, their new AI stuff where they sell all the data to AI companies and so on

I'm convincedthat the mobile web ui changes - bugs included - have been solely intended to drive traffic to the app. Issues like editing comments removing line breaks have been introduced and then subsequently ignored for months.

Orrrrr, to take off the tinfoil hat, they just don’t pay it any attention, because normal people really don’t mind and often prefer installing apps.

I only use the old.reddit.com but the newer one appears to change rather frequently?

They also do things like the chat, live threads and other nonsense that I will never use but clearly will take a decent number of man hours to build.

There are the user avatars, the different events like Place. Or having to implement their own image/video sharing back-end.

Does that add up to $450M/year of R&D costs? I don't know.

> implement their own video sharing back-end

Didn't they buy out a company for that?

I'm under the impression that the chat is only used by spam bots.

i have used it all of twice once was when i ran into a post about something that sounded familiar and sent a dm to the poster turned out it was a friend of mine's account, the other i messaged a moderator when a bot for the sub quit posting updates and they fixed it.

All those dark patterns and unusable UI aren’t going to develop themselves

> The Reddit UI/app/experience hasn't changed in years

That's not true, the UI's gotten much worse.

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