https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/reddit-rddt-q1-2024-earnings.html
Reddit reported a big increase in sales for the first quarter and said second-quarter revenue will jump by more than 30%, based on the midpoint of the range.
Just in case someone thinks this is a troll or wild accusation, it's literally true. (Edit: Or... I don't know specifically that he's a pedophile, but it would seem a little surprising for anyone who isn't a pedophile to participate in an explicitly pedophilic community let alone agree to publicly moderate it.)
He also -- I hadn't known this -- would edit people's comments on the site that were critical of him.
Two key notes for anyone wanting context
You could add anyone as a mod to a sub you moderated, he was added as a joke
Even more context they did give the guy who ran it and most the other nswf subs a special award before media controversy got them to ban the most problematic subs. So really it's a somewhat unfair statement but he was clearly aware of the sub and did nothing until forced.
The comment editing was clearly a joke because the Trump sub was pinging him in posts insulting him for enforcing moderation policy against them - he set it to change 'fuck @spez' to 'I love spez' or similar.
You could add anyone as a mod to a sub you moderated, he was added as a joke
Even more context they did give the guy who ran it and most the other nswf subs a special award
Fair point. He could be just an absolute bonehead who for whatever reason wasn't able to process that he needed to get the avowed overt pedophilic activity off his server, and didn't see the problem even with them joking around about how he was on their side and giving them an award. There's no particular reason to think that he himself has any inclination that way.
The comment editing was clearly a joke
This is a perfect example of something that's a joke when you're the one with the power, but if you're the one on the receiving end is absolutely not a joke.
I suspect that if someone at Google (or whatever) was editing spez's emails for any reason "as a joke" then he wouldn't be entertained by it in any capacity or think it was okay, however harmless their edits were according to them.
There is a huge difference between subtly changing posts in secret and very obviously doing it to poke fun at people attacking you without any intention of secrecy.
I don't think it was a great thing to do because unserious trolls like the nimble navigators were bound to try and sell it as a big deal and as we see it'll echo for ages by people repeating the most salacious elements without context. I don't think it's anything shocking, moot used to use identical word filter tactics against the very same people and they laughed at it, users found it funny at the time too until they realized it was expedient to be outraged.
I'm here because I dislike Spez and how he runs things, but I think it's important to have good arguments not paper thin mock outrage.
Can I give you a list of substitutions which you will then have to apply to your comments going forward, and go back and edit your past comments to apply? Would you agree to that? For your convenience I can give you a set of links to click to apply the edits.
I promise (for real) that I'll only do it to poke fun.
All I'm saying is there is a difference and that it is deceptive to present it like it's one thing when it's something else because you know that it'll be more effective at convincing people of the thing you want them to think.
Just say what actually happened if you genuinely believe it's exactly as bad.
I wonder what it would take to run a hostile lemmy instance, just designed to drag people you dislike via putting words in their mouth.
I think ActivityPub requires that a message purported to be from some user needs to be signed with their private key (in practice, the key that their instance keeps track of on their behalf).
I'm not 100% sure of that but I think it's how it works. So you would have to entice the people you dislike into making users on your instance, or else come up with some other way of gaming the system. (And, I think you'd be defederated from everyone almost instantly.)
Fun fact, lemmy.ml actually does automatically edit users' posts to remove certain curse words. Even that seems to me absurdly authoritarian in this weird specific nanny-state type of way (like -- they could make a feature where you can decide to have a set of words censored on the reading side, for posts from any instance -- but no, they deliberately decided to police their user's posts for everyone, and remove the ability for their users to more successfully achieve the supposed goal). It offends me probably more than it should.
I made this image for that reason.
Reddit: Hey we lost $140 million dollars and gained literally millions of bots
Everyone: What? HOORAY! That's nowhere near as bad as we thought
IDK why, but a lot of super-successful tech platforms in their early days were made up of a super capable passionate tech dude and a total sociopath weirdo who for some reason attracted money. Reddit was unusual in that the tech guy died and they were left with only the weirdo.
That works for a lot of companies. Founding a company and making it successful is insanely hard (experience). Pulling it off alone is near herculean and a lot of folks I met who had partners were coopted by them later. Its as if the drive and the knowledge required for it usually dont exist in one person.
I still don't understand how Reddit manages to lose so much money.
But yeah, that's how stocks evaluation is. It often increases after bad news and decreases after good news, because people thought it was worse/better.
Their hosting costs I'm sure are astronomical; my guess is that honestly that's most of it.
They're also, if my very limited experience with them is any guide, phenomenally incompetent with their advertising in a way that I'm sure kneecaps what should be a goldmine of ad revenue. You know those brain damaged ads like "Megathread: Why you should move all your money to Schwab" or otherwise trying to imitate Reddit terminology in the least convincing way possible? That's because Reddit tells their advertisers to do that. For real, it's worth looking over Reddit's ad materials sometime, because they are pants-on-head mentally disabled in a way that's honestly a little hard to believe if you haven't checked them out for yourself.
A single million of dollars will buy you a fucking lot of hosting and connectivity.
Unless you spend it on a cloud provider, of course. But reddit is older than the modern cloud providers.
What the fuck, I think you're right
I remember someone doing some kind of calculation at some point trying to assess the cost of Reddit's hosting, and it being all the money in the world, but now that they're public we don't have to guess. I looked it up, and you're right.
Reddit's financial statement says on page 7 that in 1Q 2024 it was:
And on the expense side:
This is a little bit of a guess, but my first interpretation of that is that hosting goes under "Cost of revenue" and most of "Research and development" and "General and administrative" is salaries. I.e. that they pay spez's friends something concordant with the $139m that they paid spez personally last year.
Yeah. On page 11 it says they paid out $577m in "stock-based compensation". I don't know exactly what that means but it kind of looks like all that whining Spez was doing to the Apollo devs about how Reddit can't turn a profit with them out there charging $3 for their app or whatever, just meant "MORE, MORE FOR ME, I WANT MORE, IT'S NOT ENOUGH IT'S NEVER ENOUGH."
God damn dude, I should start a social media company.
That R&D budget means reddit has thousands of people working on software engineering. That's some 1/10 of the headcount of the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Even the sales and marketing line, although it should be the largest one by a huge margin, I fail to see where reddit is spending it. Have you ever seen a reddit ad?
thousands of people working on software engineering
Doing fucking what?
Have you ever seen a reddit ad?
All the time (possible you don't see them because of ad blockers etc). I just opened the front page and the fourth result was:
"Hey Reddit, there are r/nostupidquestions, so we want to know: What’s your decision making process before entering a trade? Walk us through your method in the comments. (tastylive.com)"
I honestly can't make sense of it and I don't want to know.
All the time
It's always good to have my personal bubble burst, thanks.
So yeah, they should be spending a lot of money on that line. Looks like they are.
Reddit migrated to cloud providers and it's a major part of how they serve videos. They don't self host or cache and peer that stuff. Their bills are astronomical, like vimoe. It was a dumb move in my opinion and I don't see how they'll ever reach profitability because of it.
$400 million in 2 years on cloud hosting.
And how much content are they hosting? Some months ago, I did a search for reply formatting tips - and got an entry from 14 years ago. Do they really have the whole of Reddit available like that, or have they put Some of it in cold storage?
Hell if I know, I'm sure most of their R&D budget is focused on figuring out just how to dig themselves out of the cloud pit before it gets deeper. I doubt the storage is the most expensive part of things. It's paying for serving everyone internationally with all the interconnect that's getting them.
