this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
210 points (99.5% liked)

Canada

7193 readers
376 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Universities


πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Even the CBC is making an article about it! πŸ˜…

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

How come Reddit's hosting costs are so high? It's a content aggregator so mostly directs to other sites. While for original content, it used to rely on Imgur for hosting images, does it not anymore? And text content shouldn't use that much resources or maybe I'm wrong?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't believe their hosting costs are that high. But they did go from about 700 employees to somewhere around 2000 employees. I suspect a lot of their overhead is headcount.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

instead of giving the site a working search feature after 15 years, they doubled down on year end wrap ups, vertical videos, chat, and other nonsense

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Which makes spez' claim that their top priority now is delivering new moderation tools so damn hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

This doesn't get mentioned enough. They drastically increased their workforce during covid. That is a massive new expense and what exactly do they have to show for it? Has Reddit improved in that time? I don't see that it has. Now suddenly this bizarre API move. None of it adds up to good leadership to me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They also could have taken loans to reinvest in growth. From buying alien blue, to their api, to backend changes to add new ad offerings and whatever else they sell to companies... They're all major efforts, and probably include marketing campaigns

If they took loans to grow... Well if you grow explosively it's a huge win, but if you don't you're weighted down moving forward. And investors are going to love it, since they don't care about breaking even, they care about that one investment that's going to go 100x or more

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It really realllly shouldn't be they host comment sections for links to other more technically impressive websites.

Like we are talking about a cost they willing absorbed for like 10 years running without noteworthy complaint. Yet now as of like this month the cost is suddenly so onerous that everyone has to start paying an extortionate rate at the end of this month.

Good faith business arrangements are not typically changed with one months notice. And they is no plan for accessibility or mod tools or the backlash. They didn't even have time to couch the CEO on how to handle the questions in the AMA.

Idk I don't really buy it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They wanted to be the next Tiktok/Youtube Shorts/Instagram Reels and added expensive video hosting. Yay for ad impressions and mainstream adoption of mindless scrollers, but a good chance the costs drove up well beyond the influx of ad revenue/premium.

That and Reddit admins have to scrounge every penny to look pretty for their IPO.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and avatars, NFT support, chat groups, and.. and.. and..

Endless growth, without a use case.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What? You don't want stupid features that aren't really necessary and that most users wouldn't care if they were removed?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Edit omg thanks for the awards.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They still have to host users, feeds, and comments which can add up very quickly. Also, they do host some images as well like when people upload to them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Worth noting that for the 11 years, Reddit didn't host any images.

It's hard to say why Reddit thought it was necessary to host their own images.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A lot of older image content has rotted because it's no longer hosted by the third party.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

coughPhotobucketcough

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it used to rely on Imgur for hosting images, does it not anymore?

People still use imgur, but reddit hosts a fair amount of content directly now. It's video player is notoriously bad. Imgur has slowly turned into a socia media in it's own right and is slowly starting to move off reddit (deleting images uploaded by non-account holders for instance).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was thinking Imgur could have pivoted and become like Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imgur dev sold Imgur and now Imgur is becoming Tumblr lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Doesn't mean they can't pivot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How come Reddit’s hosting costs are so high?

Presumably the volume of traffic their servers need to handle?

One database call is pretty lightweight, but millions a second add up to some serious processing. Which, presumably, needs a lot of servers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs. Reddit is serving text, which is incredibly cheap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs.

Sure, but are they handling the volume of traffic that Reddit does (or did until yesterday)?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Stackoverflow, probably not. Stack Exchange, possibly