Reddit does make money though - Gold sales alone started paying for the servers after the admins added a meter to the side of the homepage that showed a daily "goal" to pay for server time. At the time, it was posited as an opportunity for the community to fund their own party. Of course, the monetization train just kept rolling from there - starting with AMAs, now (according to some) with sponsored content embedded organically. Presumably this redesign will only accommodate the trend further.

Server time doesn't pay employees.

Good point! I'll admit my bias, I pretty much lost faith in the site's administration after they bungled the monetization of AMAs so poorly. It was exactly as predicted: AMA was the most obviously monetizable community, and was completely ruined in the process. The administrator who ran them quit over it and the quality has never recovered. I don't even bother reading most celebrity AMAs anymore because they're either a transparent advertisement or/and clearly written by someone with no understanding of reddit.

The management just seems to "miss the point" so often. The best AMAs in the early years were by a vacuum cleaner repair technician, not a movie star.

> Reddit does make money though

AFAIK Reddit has never been cash flow positive.

Why does everything have to be increased in income? That is just a plan for disaster for something like this in the long term. Sustainable and paying for employees is not acceptable?

yes but a redsign does not gaurantee that and then you are actually in a tricky situation as you will need to do a lot of testing out designs but your users arent used to that and becuase its affinity based and not friend based the community can make a lot of noise. facebooks biggest advantage from a design perspective is that their users are used to change and that many wont even notice, that keeps things together there, with reddit it might not be so easy, buy we will see.