I’m pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day’s Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day’s server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it’d typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn’t have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.
It was amount of gold equal to server time assuming all the gold was bought.
But mods would get a shit ton to give out. And towards the end when you got gold you got “coins” as well that could be used to give gold.
Like, say I want to make “Fun Time bucks” a thing. To drive adoption I’m going to give out free fun time bucks to everyone, they spend because it’s free, and people start seeing it as valid.
Reddit was pumping gold so people saw it and hopefully they bought it because they assumed everyone else was buying it. But most of it was “free” gold.
There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day’s Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day’s server costs.
There were always people costs too, and plenty of others. Breaking even on infrastructure doesn’t stop the bleed of the venture capital. And investors do expect a return.
Not to mention the IPO has them cutting costs everywhere to make them look profitable.
Can you elaborate on this? No doubt you are right, but specific examples of how cost cutting leads to (the false appearance of) profitability here would be helpful.
Probably all the ad tracking shit running in the background.
Not to mention the IPO has them cutting costs everywhere to make them look profitable.
I also wouldn’t put it past them to intentionally slow down people who aren’t logged in.
I’m pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day’s Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day’s server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it’d typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn’t have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.
There was corpo phrasing in that…
It was amount of gold equal to server time assuming all the gold was bought.
But mods would get a shit ton to give out. And towards the end when you got gold you got “coins” as well that could be used to give gold.
Like, say I want to make “Fun Time bucks” a thing. To drive adoption I’m going to give out free fun time bucks to everyone, they spend because it’s free, and people start seeing it as valid.
Reddit was pumping gold so people saw it and hopefully they bought it because they assumed everyone else was buying it. But most of it was “free” gold.
I totally forgot about that gold meter for server costs.
I miss that Reddit.
There were always people costs too, and plenty of others. Breaking even on infrastructure doesn’t stop the bleed of the venture capital. And investors do expect a return.
I use infinity for reddit, not sure if ad tracking is there but images take forever to load
This. Iv also noticed whenever using reddit (which i almost never do at this point) there is a big red banner at the top warning of server errors.
Can you elaborate on this? No doubt you are right, but specific examples of how cost cutting leads to (the false appearance of) profitability here would be helpful.