[throwarayes]

You could also create a photo sharing site in a couple of weeks with a dozen devs. But an actual business like Instagram, that can acquire users, thats profitable is a different story.

There are dozens of unprofitable Internet search engines each made by a handful of people, yet Google somehow employs ~200k people to run a profitable search engine.

I can create (probably build from scratch) a wiki in same amount of time but non-profit Wikipedia is 450(?) people.

The core tech isn’t the driver to headcount, the business model is.

For Reddit, that probably means selling ads and acquiring users. Which probably means a whole lot of ad tech and other optimizations/features to increase visitors to your site. Ad sales, ad tech, etc etc. It probably means ad sales to big clients with complex legal, etc.

In the tech, entire feature groups worth having because it serves important business goals around user retention or growth. Some small percentage of extra eyeballs helps Reddit towards these goals that a site like hacker news wouldn’t care about.