Sure, you can get a warm body in a seat, but that’s not the same thing as being as effective at the job as the person they’re replacing. Lots of companies are now reaping the harvest of treating their employees as disposable, interchangeable cogs. That mentality destroys moral amongst workers, and new employees can see that glazed over, dead-eyed look when they come onboard. Even for what’s considered low-skill work, there is some value in institutional knowledge and general proficiency at a job that companies just completely disregard.
They’re currently engaged in a race to the bottom of the barrel, asking themselves why employee engagement is down while they adjust their stance to really put some weight into the next kick in the ribs they give us peasants.
I wouldn’t jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn’t alienate increasing numbers of their users. It’s basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.
Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn’t have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn’t really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it’s no longer worth anything.