In some people's ideal world, Reddit would run an extremely lean organisation. Instagram got acquired when they had 13 employees, showing you can be successful with a very small number of employees.
If Reddit had 10 employees and a $5 million annual salary budget, all the employees would be very well compensated, but they wouldn't need to raise $300 million from investors or aggressively pursue ad revenue by pushing an app to avoid ad blocking.
Personally I'm not sure if running as a pseudo-nonprofit would work or not. It's possible there's a cat-and-mouse game with spammers, astroturfers, and griefers that can only be solved with large numbers of employees and high revenue. Perhaps successful online nonprofit projects like Internet Archive and Debian have only avoided this because the don't have the combination of user-generated content and a large user base that make them attractive to spammers. Or perhaps the fact Reddit has so many more users than MetaFilter is a sign sites following this model just don't get big.
If Reddit had 10 employees and a $5 million annual salary budget, all the employees would be very well compensated, but they wouldn't need to raise $300 million from investors or aggressively pursue ad revenue by pushing an app to avoid ad blocking.
Personally I'm not sure if running as a pseudo-nonprofit would work or not. It's possible there's a cat-and-mouse game with spammers, astroturfers, and griefers that can only be solved with large numbers of employees and high revenue. Perhaps successful online nonprofit projects like Internet Archive and Debian have only avoided this because the don't have the combination of user-generated content and a large user base that make them attractive to spammers. Or perhaps the fact Reddit has so many more users than MetaFilter is a sign sites following this model just don't get big.