Hosting sfw video is just not profitable on the scale that youtube does it
Youtube had $28.8b in revenue in 2021. While revenue isn’t profit, I can’t imagine it’s losing money with that much revenue. It’d be hard for someone else to duplicate it, but not impossible if they have a strong business plan from the start.
It’s laughable that Huffman thinks people don’t realize how much smaller Reddit is than Google or Facebook.
Most of what Huffman said here is about cost-cutting. If Reddit had 1800 employees before the layoffs, then yes, it’s probably bloated and laying off another 800 employees probably wouldn’t affect the end-user experience.
The problem remains that Huffman sees how users want to use Reddit as bad for the company. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why Reddit couldn’t have monetized their API through ads, making third party apps similarly profitable as their own app. And if their own app isn’t profitable through ads, then what’s their plan? Moving all those users to their first party app doesn’t fix anything.