Honest question, does this include artificial inflation of costs? I have seen figures that Reddit used to run with 20 people, and inflated to 2000 in 10 years. Old reddit is also superlight in bandwidth. New reddit is not.
In at least one real life example I have personal insight into: yes. They hired tons of devs to make the company look bigger and look like they were aiming for continued quick growth post IPO. Reality was that they did not have enough tasks for all people they had quickly hired.
Yeah, they're probably somewhat bloated like Twitter was, just like Twitter they don't deliver nearly as many new features to justify the large employee count, they don't do much of their own moderation either.
A large portion of those might be for checking reports etc, since reddit at least does seem to do a slightly better job trying to keep humans in the loop there.
