What’s really baffling to me is that a bunch of nerds with too much free time on their hands basically stomped out a fully fledged Reddit alternative within a few months, including multiple frontends and apps.
Yet Reddit spends millions on development every year, for no discernable improvement whatsoever, while still turning no profit.
Where is all that money going? Seriously, Reddit is a very simple site. There’s nothing that hard about it. The amount of data is tiny, since the content is external, none of the resources are that time critical, a lot of content can be cached.
If they had just done the obvious thing and made ad-free 3rd party API access depend on a subscription fee, then I would have just paid it and wouldn’t be here. But no, they have to do everything the worst way possible.
This is just the latest in a long string. Spez has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the years that he’s an entitled cretin - equal parts smug and ignorant.
My personal favorite was when he snidely commented on Reddit’s unprofitability in his AMA after the API debacle, making it sound as if it was somehow our fault, only to then not only have it made common knowledge that the official app was useless garbage and had been for years, but that the entirety of Reddit’s loss for the year was just about exactly equal to his salary alone.