this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Infrastructure, sure. But programming, I don't see it. Reddit doesn't have to be complicated if all you want to do is make it a good link aggregation and threaded discussion site.
But Reddit got greedy, they wanted to be everything to everyone. So they kept trying to add new features to compete with other social media sites. They wanted to be Facebook and Tiktok and Imgur as well, and so they spent huge amounts of resources fiddling with their format and adding stuff like video hosting. Surprise, people already had Facebook and Tiktok and Imgur and weren't interested in something that was second-best at doing those things. So it was a huge amount of costly work that didn't end up earning them much.
This is yet another symptom of the "endless growth" problem faced by lots of modern companies. They can't settle for simply being solidly profitable in their niche. They always need to make their share price go up by getting bigger.
This is actually what I think Huffman's biggest weakness as a CEO is. CEOs are supposed to be forward-thinking, coming in ahead of or on top of the next new wave. But Huffman sees an exciting new tech trend, waits until it gets big and then tries to cash in on it. He didn't start reddit crypto until crypto was at it's peak. He didn't do reddit NFTs until they were peaking. He didn't try to do reddit video until after TikTok was huge. He only shut the API door after he'd paid all the bandwidth and infrastructure cost to transfer all of reddit's valuable user commentary to multiple AI companies, including some of the richest corporations in the world. He absolutely fucking sucks as a CEO.