Our four engineers -- KeyserSosa, jedberg, ketralnis, and myself -- are working full time (plus many evenings and weekends and sometimes even the middle of the night) just to keep things going. Perhaps we're doing it wrong: there might be ways to optimize our code, or technologies that could allow us to work more efficiently, but we're too busy to investigate these things, or to migrate to the ones that look promising. It becomes a vicious cycle.
The bottom line is, we need more resources.
Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here's the thing: corporations aren't run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit's revenue isn't great.
The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds. In July 2008, we served up 51 million pageviews and it took four engineers to support it. Since then, we've added user-created reddits, self posts, sponsored links, self-serve sponsored links, awards, a mobile interface, RSS feeds, moderation tools, layers of anti-spam and anti-cheating code, we've gone open source, and our traffic has grown to about 280 million pageviews per month. But after all that, we still only have four engineers. We're reaching the limits of sustainability.
But we don't want to be pessimists and look for features to cut. (Leading to "peak reddit?") Instead of throwing in the towel, we want to roll up our sleeves: if we can boost our bottom line to the point where we can pay for new hires ourselves (not to mention more servers), we think we'll get the green light to do so.
So we're going to be trying some new things. No, there won't be a giant fast food ad covering half the front page. No pop-ups asking you to punch a poor innocent monkey. But we're going to start by implementing something you guys suggest every time we crash: the ability to become a reddit subscriber.
We've been trying to get this out the door for some time, but it always got held up because we wanted to write some cool subscriber-only features first, like the ability to sort your profile page by score, or have more than 50 reddit communities on your front page, or a button you could press to smack someone in the face over the Internet. We now realize that we're going to have to put the cart before the horse: in exchange for subscribing to reddit, we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage. It's kind of a lame offer, we know, but if the program is a success, we'll be able to give subscribers better incentives in the coming months. We invite you to post ideas in the comments section; in the meantime, I suppose it's more or less a pledge drive.
As long as we're going to be taking suggestions and money from you guys, we might as well also take the name you came up with: this new program will be called "reddit gold".How much would you pay for this wonderful opportunity? $10? $30? $∞?
No, seriously, how much would you pay? We have no idea what we should be charging. So for now, we're just going to let you pay whatever you want. You can even just send us a postcard. Visit http://www.reddit.com/help/gold for details.
