[raldi]

Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands-on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.

[manelvf]

That should be very frustrating. Were you tempted to break with Conde and start again or some sort or change on your agreement with them?

[raldi]

My "change on my agreement with them" was to quit.

Including myself, three of the four reddit programmers came to that conclusion within the same six month period. (Props to spladug for keeping the flame alive!)

[seunosewa]

This may have been a good thing. Digg didn't have any constraints on buying new hardware and hiring new people, and we can see how that ended (they bought too much, hired too many people, and collapsed)!

[raldi]

We weren't asking for unlimited hardware and headcount. We would have been thrilled with a rule that every time traffic doubles, we get to hire one person.

As for hardware, all we wanted was a team printer that didn't jam, an SSD for ketralnis's workstation, and the right for our engineers to substitute an equal-cost laptop of their choice for the IT-approved MacBook.

[vaksel]

Digg didn't collapse because of hardware or headcount...they collapsed because they trashed their product with unnecessary changes and pissed off their user base

Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic