• tal@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    On the other hand, he already cashed out once and was wrong, so…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Huffman

    The site’s audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.[11][14][15] Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million.[3][16] Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.[17]

    Huffman spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica[18] before co-creating the travel website Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, an author and software developer, in 2010. Funded by Y Combinator,[19][20] Hipmunk launched in August 2010[21] with Huffman serving as CTO.[22] In 2011, Inc. named Huffman to its 30 under 30 list.[22]

    In 2014, Huffman said that his decision to sell Reddit had been a mistake, and that the site’s growth had exceeded his expectations.[23] On July 10, 2015, Reddit hired Huffman as CEO following the resignation of Ellen Pao[24] and during a particularly difficult time for the company.[25] Upon rejoining the company, Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps, fixing Reddit’s mobile website, and creating A/B testing infrastructure.[3]

    Since returning to Reddit, Huffman instituted a number of technological changes including an updated mobile site and stronger infrastructure, as well as new content guidelines.

    I don’t think that he’s had a whole lot of faith in Reddit as a business since early-on.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps

      Mission accomplished! Those undeniably shitty apps definitely were launched.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        9 months ago

        I’ve never used them, but IIRC they acquired some third-party client and then just modified them. “Blue Alien” or something like that?

        googles

        “Alien Blue”, at least for the official iOS app.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue

        I dunno what the history of the Android app is.

        That being said, they’re responsible for what they acquire, just saying that a lot of that might not be developed in-house.

        • poppy@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          They acquired Alien Blue, but what they put out under “Reddit” was not Alien Blue in the least bit. They basically bought it to kill it. I had Alien Blue. :(

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Hey, acquiring another app and launching it as your own app is still launching it! What would they have done without spez?

            • quicklime@lemm.ee
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              9 months ago

              My favorite way to visualize the meaning of “asshat”: the person is such a sad waste of human life that their entire upper body is effectively just a hat for their posterior.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        9 months ago

        Well, you wouldn’t expect it to in the growth phase.

        A lot of consumer-facing Internet companies have a large portion of their costs be fixed costs. That is, a programmer or QA guy costs the same amount whether you have ten users or ten million users. But your revenue is linear in your userbase size. So you really don’t want to be a small company, if you fit that profile.

        The idea is to burn money and grow rapidly to the point where your fixed costs are relatively small. It makes no sense to try to generate profit if you lose growth for it.

        That’s especially true for social media companies, because for them, network effect is a major factor – the value of the network is something like the square of the number of users.

        So you really want to be big, not small.

        So the solution is to grow quickly, lose money during that period, then adjust and monetize the userbase when you can’t afford to burn money growing any more.

        That transition to a profitable state after a money-losing growth state usually means that a company is gonna do something unpopular (since they’re optimizing for something other than appeal) and what Corey Doctorow was complaining about as “enshittification”.

        The fact that Reddit lost money during the growth phase doesn’t mean that it was a failure – that would have been intended, part of the business model.

        Now, if it’s losing money once the growth phase is done, that could be another story.

        • APassenger@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It’s old enough to vote. Or serve in the US military.

          Or attend college as a non-genius.

          I’m familiar with growth stage. 18 to 19 years seems like a long one. Web 2.0 happened years ago.