this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Spez realized that he literally paid for other companies to harvest one of reddit's two greatest assets and that he needed to do something to recover. So he's been flailing around like a toddler, breaking everything in his desperation to stay on his feet, and in the meantime completely alienating reddit's other greatest asset.
What was that comment he made? Something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits is inevitable and they don't need to do anything for them to arrive.
Also, he claims that reddit has never been profitable. How much has he spent chasing phantoms - reddit cryptocurrency, customizable snoovatars, reddit NFTs, special programming for a single day each year, buying an app then paying to make it worse, deciding to self-host images and videos, thereby drastically increasing the need for both storage and bandwidth, when they'd been perfectly happy to let others do the heavy lifting for well over a decade, paying to implement a drastically flawed video player (remember when it first launched and it was incredibly slow and we found out it was because it was trying to download every available resolution).
In 2022, reddit had $670,000,000 in revenue. There's a reason it's never turned a profit, and for the past eight years, that reason has been Steve Huffman.
There's something wrong with people who are so out of their depth like that who don't just find and hire someone more competent to do this stuff for them. Either just a complete lack of awareness that they are floundering or some weird stubbornness that it's only worth succeeding if they are personally holding the tiller.
i do miss rpan though
I miss it, kinda. I think it was uniquely poised to take advantage of lockdown, and there was some great stuff broadcast - I particularly remember watching a kalimba concert. But we all got tired of lockdown and online meetings and that's where it floundered.
I also STR that at least some of the feeds weren't viewable after the event ended (don't know if it was all of them or not). Which meant that it wasn't really a format for short videos (because people need time to find them), so they were more effort to set up and run, and for at least the ones that weren't viewable afterward, there was nothing you could point to afterward and say "I made that!"
I think if they'd kept it around, it could've found it's niche, but at the time I didn't really miss it when it went.
That quote grind my gears.
Reddit was profitable, then they took more funding and massively hired.
Profitability is a choice by the executives.