Employees cost more than just their salary, but I see your point. So far, their attempts to make reddit more profitable have made the user experience terrible. "New" reddit is way worse than old, and is full of nagging you to use the app on mobile, to the point where you can't even view the content. I've never used the official reddit app because I've heard it's terrible, and there are many great alternatives.
I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.
As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to know, but what you see on a superficial level of the product is probably about < 10% of the total engineering effort.
Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.
The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.
Maybe they finally upgrade the 486sx based server everything runs on?
But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.
Their video player needs some major work.
They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.
Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
Instagram and Whatsapp had very small teams even with hundreds of millions of users. Reddit has more features but honestly the amount of money pumped in is crazy given that it's well, basically a collection of web forums.
Remember the point of a company is to make money for the people that invest in it, being in the top 25 globally doesn't mean that much if you need to take half a billion in cash 15 years into your existence. it's a weird narrative for a tech company.
The biggest problem is that their revenue per user is atrociously low compared to other social platforms. That money should be thrown at poaching as much ads talent as possible from Facebook or Twitter.
The problem is that throwing money rarely leads to the outcome desired.
I would know how to run a high-quality reddit on $5M/year, and perhaps as much as $20M. I would not know how to run a high-quality reddit on $100M/year.
The term is 'overcapitalized.'
At some scale, people focus on climbing corporate ladders over the core business, on pet projects, and communications becomes a bottleneck (and the number of potential links grows as a square law with the number of people).
The right scale depends on the complexity of the product. A car requires an army to engineer and produce.
Reddit? That benefits from a small team, where people can holistically understand the whole system, and everyone involved. That's at most 20 SWEs.
You need a mobile team, you need a spam team (or 10), you need people working on a portal for advertisers and the analytics they need, need more than 3 devops for full 24/7 coverage, etc.
Maybe a Reddit coin? Use that money to mine it and then seed the Reddit ecosystem at first with coin upvotes/awards, build a merch market for subreddit specific merch, allow advertisers to list items on the marketplace funneling sales there from Reddit ads/promoted posts, original content -> NFT…
I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.
I would invest in B2B. Reddit should have just as much of an easy-to-use marketing suite like Facebook or Google have. A team of 10 engineers can do that in a year, then the rest of the money goes to sales.
Free food to keep people in the office and a giant building in the tenderloin with just enough security gaurds to keep your developers safe inside but unable to safely leave.
They need more than that for the sole purpose of making the mobile website experience as horrible as possible (and constantly iterating to make it worse and worse)
I'm 60% you're joking, but on the chance you're not.
You couldn't keep Reddit going with 10x that team. Just the tooling around keeping up with GDPR regulations and Trust & Safety alone could easily eat $10m a year.
From my amateur perspective I've got,
2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent.
I have no idea what I would do with the rest..