It really boggles my mind till today what the hell do they do with so many employees?
Is it a standard practice for startups for keep many employees to justify raising more funds?
They have no significant changes in how the site works, at-least in the last 2 years or so. The site speed, though better, still sucks. No new features. Site gaming is rampant (just look at the comments).
Ad sales. It isn't a very headcount-efficient endeavor once you get past self-served options. A lot of the big corporate branding accounts who have huge amounts of money to burn and don't track conversions (I believe in poker these are referred to as "fish") require someone to chat up the media buyer for a while.
Branding campaigns are only a backup strategy, mind you, in case that Digg doesn't sell out their inventory of inflated page views by rabidly anti-commercial poor adolescents. For some unfathomable reason.
True, but reddit has less traffic, less users, and less features. For example, Digg shows you which of your friends dugg a story, which is far from trivial.
I like reddit better, but the digg guys are also doing some cool stuff.
Looking at edges between users takes AMAZING database skills, and tons of people working on it to speed it up. Any new feature has to fit that, which is pretty crazy to do with the users, traffic, and data that they have. They also give a ton back to OSS, which is key for me.
Browsing reddit.