I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.
EDIT:
As much as I like bashing Reddit I feel like I need to mention something. Reddit is the UNDISPUTED best news source for large, breaking, news stories. Reddit's live threads are curated and crowd sourced feeds containing information from police scanners, News outlets, twitter feeds, and a variety of other sources. It's value is in its ability to display conflicting information instantly such that the viewer can get the clearest picture possible. This thread of today's Dallas shooting is a prime example [1].
The biggest issue was that we didn't have the budget (both money and manpower) to deal with scaling a global transaction system, which is just plain hard. Reddit gets almost as much traffic as eBay, but eBay has thousands of engineers and Reddit doesn't even have 100.
Back when I was there, the site worked well enough, there were only a few of us, and we spent about 50% of our time on spam and about 25% on community management. That didn't leave much time for scaling and performance. For context, we were serving a billion pages a month on a budget of $50K/mo.
Today they are making great progress in scalability because they finally have the budget to hire the people to make it great.
https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo...
Besides, you're mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat.
The sane way to use Reddit is to log in, unsubscribe from everything that's by default, and add only things you are very interested in. Also go into your Settings and turn off all the suggested subreddits (and the outbound click tracking, surely).
Do that, and you can browse your niche technology news and computer game and magical-girl-anime subreddits in peace -- otherwise it's just a losing fight against clickbait popularity contests and flash mobs for justice.
> I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.
You're both talking about servers and difficulties with them.
The ones against any kind of monetization at all are already vocal enough, let alone the people who would balk at anything that monetizes user data.
If you look at their change where they introduced affiliate link rewriting it's really surprising. They did it in a way that made sure they wouldn't affect any 3rd party apps, they gave everyone 2 ways to opt out, and didn't rewrite links that already had an affiliate code. And yet even with all of that, there was a ton of outcry and anger at the change.
Reddit as we know it won't be massively profitable, because the vocal users of reddit are so completely against any form of monetization.
There will always be vocal minority which will never be pleased, no matter what you do. And later they forget it and move to other thing. Sometimes you just have to carry on with your plan knowing that you will lose some users, but aiming to do better overall in the long turn.
It's important to listen to the users. What's even more important is knowing when to say 'no'.
Yeah, no matter what there will be naysayers, but the majority of comments in the announcement thread for the affiliate links thing were negative.
Combine that with the reddit demographic's love of a controversy (no matter how trumped up) and you have a ticking time bomb that makes mistakes hurt for much longer and much worse than most platforms.
Just look at their previous "algorithm change" fiasco. They changed the front page algo, and after about a week they changed it back because of outcry. For the next several months people continued to complain about how everything was worse now, and that they were lying about "reverting" the algorithm. It's insanity.
Reddit was successful in the early days due to the quality of the comments of its userbase. It got diluted after the user base expanded.
However, qualifying it as toxic only means that if you were head of Reddit, you would probably run it into the ground like Digg.