>The company says funding will go toward building out community and advertising efforts and increasing headcount.
"Increasing headcount" by alienating the older userbase, and "advertising efforts" by making the advertisement more and more obnoxious, and less distinct from actual content?
>more empowering for communities
Correction: more empowering for a small set of "powermods". The moderators of smaller communities may eat dirt, for all Reddit cares. (Or be victims of constant harassment, even if the case Aimée Challenor shows that Reddit does have the technology to prevent it.)
And, given who pays the dinner chooses the dish, who will fund Reddit is also a concern. I do not think, for example, that instances of criticism against the Chinese government being labelled "racism against Asians" is just the product of the local morons, but the product of the local morons being led by Reddit Inc. It makes sense when you remember TenCent invested on the place.
I think headcount refers to staffing not the user base. As long as part of the increased headcount is allocated to engineering I’m all for that. Reddit goes down more than any other large site I frequent.
Edit: ironically it took a couple of submits for my post to go through lol
I agree with you - more staff might be actually good for the site. Although I'm not sure if it'll be for the sake of a better site, or a more profitable site.
They have a mature product with a userbase that tends to spend an absurd amount of time on the site, that SELF-SORTS into advertising categories. There is no reason that they shouldn't be able to pay their own way.
Even more, if I was an early investor I would be annoyed at the more recent changes, and the amount of user unfriendliness that is in the site now. There are very few other sites that purposely make it impossible to continue casually browsing like reddit does.
"Increasing headcount" by alienating the older userbase, and "advertising efforts" by making the advertisement more and more obnoxious, and less distinct from actual content?
>more empowering for communities
Correction: more empowering for a small set of "powermods". The moderators of smaller communities may eat dirt, for all Reddit cares. (Or be victims of constant harassment, even if the case Aimée Challenor shows that Reddit does have the technology to prevent it.)
And, given who pays the dinner chooses the dish, who will fund Reddit is also a concern. I do not think, for example, that instances of criticism against the Chinese government being labelled "racism against Asians" is just the product of the local morons, but the product of the local morons being led by Reddit Inc. It makes sense when you remember TenCent invested on the place.