HACKER Q&A
📣 gremlinsinc

What is the morale like inside Reddit, as an employee?


I'm curious if anyone who works for Reddit might want to chime in anonymously or give insight. Is this going to turn out like Twitter with a huge purge of Reddit staff too, Spez said he wanted to do to Reddit what Elon did to Twitter.

As an employee do you support the blackout secretly? What is your opinion of things? Some huge subs have migrated to other platforms, how do you think this ends?


  👤 rubinlinux Accepted Answer ✓
Reddit was a co-op between a few groups of people.

General low effort content scrollers

Power users and mods who appreciate creating and contributing to make a community

Advertising interests

The deal was, the ad seeking was for the mainstream strollers, and the contributing power users and mods could opt out of the bs. The community builders get a nice environment for their community, the scrollers get content, and the ad people get to shiw thejir ads.

I always thought spez understood this. Its why the api existed. Its why old.reddit.com existed. It was the commercial machine's compromise to the content generators in exchange for the moderating and commenting.

But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?

Without the compromise the whole thing falls apart. Reddit becomes digg.


👤 redmerchant2
This is best suited for Blind where you have the verification. That said recent results turned up little. On the layoffs, morale seems bad:

- "There isn't much clarity around severance and health insurance"

- "This is fine ([fire emoji] [dog emoji] [fire emoji])"

Recent (past month) reviews seem negative: "questionable execs", "micromanaging", "still not mature", "growing pains", "stay away", "mediocre, lack of product vision".

As a reminder Blind the users are verified to be working at the company. It's quite the cesspit of elitism and "I make more than you". But, again, reviews tend to be accurate because it's verified anonymity.


👤 nickdothutton
This is a sincere question. I would love to know what the 4000+ staff do there, running a forum web site that uses community moderators.

Correction: 2000 staff. Question stands.


👤 thrwwy30993
A friend of mine who is a software engineer there has #opentowork plastered on his LinkedIn profile picture. He's been at Reddit for 7+ years.

👤 thih9
> Is this going to turn out like Twitter with a huge purge of Reddit staff too

Reminder, while it wasn’t a Twitter scale event, Reddit did announce plans to lay off 5% of its workforce recently.

Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/reddit-layoffs-90-protes...

Discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285


👤 alhirzel
Not an employee, but: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

The only pattern I see in response is continued innovation and the rise of new platforms. I think a business model resembling a "[public] benefit corporation" [1] (in the USA at least) or a utility company may be more compatible with a social media company immune to enshittification.

[1]: https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/non-profit-corporation-vs-p...


👤 m463
Don't work at reddit, but if they are going IPO, the employees are probably holding onto their stock and crossing their fingers until it is worth something.

👤 jake_morrison
This is such a baffling failure to understand how social networks function (see the 1% rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule).

They are alienating the most engaged users who provide the content and pissing off the moderators who provide free service to keep the communities running. Replacing passionate moderators working for free with disinterested paid staff will reduce quality and significantly increase costs.


👤 praisewhitey
Reddit shared this on their instagram story yesterday. A booth at some Adweek conference. https://i.imgur.com/NNLtjFo.mp4

👤 pwillia7
brb have to fly/drive to a strange city and setup airgap

👤 that_guy_iain
> Is this going to turn out like Twitter with a huge purge of Reddit staff too

Let's be serious, Reddit making a profit will decrease the likelihood of massive layoffs. I suspect if Reddit backs down in this protest drama they will be forced to do layoffs to become profitable instead of becoming profitable from making more revenue instead of reducing costs.

> As an employee do you support the blackout secretly?

Well considering the internal memo got leaked, I think there must be someone who supports it.