I think this is indeed the main factor. Reddit needed to grow. Money was cheap. So what's the first thing you do? You hire more people. Only then you figure out what they need to do, and all of those people will have their own ideas on what to do, regardless of whether it helps the bottom line. And so you get new shiny features such as chat, livestreams, NFTs and other stuff nobody cares about, which all take a lot of manpower to build and maintain. Now the problem is that communication gets harder the more people you add. These people now need a lot of meetings to stay in sync, or to figure out what to do next, or perhaps just to appear busy, which results in work not being done or progressing really slowly. So what do you do? Hire more people, as long as the money lasts of course. This cycle continues for a few years, and suddenly you have 2000 employees.
I think this is indeed the main factor. Reddit needed to grow. Money was cheap. So what's the first thing you do? You hire more people. Only then you figure out what they need to do, and all of those people will have their own ideas on what to do, regardless of whether it helps the bottom line. And so you get new shiny features such as chat, livestreams, NFTs and other stuff nobody cares about, which all take a lot of manpower to build and maintain. Now the problem is that communication gets harder the more people you add. These people now need a lot of meetings to stay in sync, or to figure out what to do next, or perhaps just to appear busy, which results in work not being done or progressing really slowly. So what do you do? Hire more people, as long as the money lasts of course. This cycle continues for a few years, and suddenly you have 2000 employees.