If you have an idea how to monetize a reddit clone ... go for it.
1. Bring back old.reddit.com. 2. Make the app less insanely shit and annoying. (Didn't they buy a better app just to kill it at some point?) 3. Require third party apps to show ads. 4. Fire half the employees. No way you need 400.
Easy peasy.
3) I'm guessing this isn't easy to do because there's still some division of ad revenue between the creator, the ad provider (usually google/apple in this case), and Reddit.And if you require ads and all ad revenue to go to reddit... well, there goes any incentive for others to make apps. 3rd party devs aren't charity cases either.
4) that is good for showing a profitable quarter, not good for generating actual revenue.
This is one of the big problems with running stuff in Silicon Valley. You have to pay so much f'ing money in terms of salary/rent/etc, even a business like Reddit that would be wildly successful by almost any standard anywhere else in the world is actually a money-loser apparently.
I understand that Reddit was founded by some big brains like Aaron Swartz (RIP) and that scaling it is not trivial, but also it is not exactly cutting edge rocket science either. It's... a threaded discussion forum, lmao.
They're kinda tricky to scale, because each logged-in user sees a customized view of every single thread. Which certainly defeats a lot of the most trivial caching strategies.
But on the other hand they lend themselves pretty well to horizontal scaling via partitions/sharding/etc because the vast majority of your transactions will involve a single post or a single subreddit.
They added realtime chat stuff, and that's trickier I guess, but also TBH they could drop that feature entirely and I don't know who'd really care.
There will absolutely be a next thing.