Comment by wat10000
10 hours ago
A major difference is what costs money.
A civil engineer might work on a major bridge that costs a billion dollars to build. An automotive engineer might work on a car that has a cumulative billions of dollars in production costs. An aeronautical engineer might work on a plane with a $100 million price tag.
The engineer’s job there is to save money. Spend a week slimming down part of that bridge and you’ve substantially reduced costs, great! Figure out how to combine three different car parts into one and you’ve saved a couple of dollars on every car you make, well worth it.
Software doesn’t have construction costs. The “engineer” (I have the word in my job title but I hesitate to call us that) builds the whole thing. The operating costs are often cheap. Costs like slow rendering are paid by the customer, not the builder.
In that environment, it’s often not a positive ROI to spend a week making your product more efficient. If the major cost is the “engineers” then your focus is on saving them time. If you can save a week of their time at the cost of making your customers wait 50ms longer for every action, that is where you see your positive ROI.
When software contributes to the cost of a product, you tend to see better software work. Your headphones aren’t running bloated React frameworks because adding more memory and CPU is expensive. But with user-facing software, the people who pay the programmers are usually not the people who pay for the hardware or are impacted by performance.
I think the argument you present here makes an MBA kind of sense, but with the benefits of hindsigh, we know exactly what sort of costs this encurred.
People hated the redesign, and stuck with the old reddit UI as much as possible. The company lost a ton of benevolence. Alternative frontends sprung up overnight, which used the API.
Management was probably faced with the dilemma that if new features were only developed for the new UI, a significant chunk of the userbase would not get to use them.
This was probably one of the major factors on the decision from Reddit to kill the API, which created a ton of negative sentiment, some of it probably lingers to this day.
I'm sure a lot of people were either driven away entirely or significantly reduced the amount and quality they posted. While numerically small in number, we know that most of the quality content comes from very few people.
Reddit might have more users now than any time before in history, but I'd argue user satisfaction and engagement is lower than the days before, and the quality of the content and discussion to be had means most people don't bother.