this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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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?
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.
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.
and avatars, NFT support, chat groups, and.. and.. and..
Endless growth, without a use case.
What? You don't want stupid features that aren't really necessary and that most users wouldn't care if they were removed?
[gif reaction]
[an award]
Edit omg thanks for the awards.
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.
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
Which makes spez' claim that their top priority now is delivering new moderation tools so damn hilarious.
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.
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
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).
I was thinking Imgur could have pivoted and become like Reddit.
Imgur dev sold Imgur and now Imgur is becoming Tumblr lol
Doesn't mean they can't pivot.
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.
Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs. Reddit is serving text, which is incredibly cheap.
Sure, but are they handling the volume of traffic that Reddit does (or did until yesterday)?
Stackoverflow, probably not. Stack Exchange, possibly
Possibly because imgur was building its own social network around the media people were uploading for posting reddit? You'd see a pic on reddit but if you clicked beyond the xownde doer view you'd see comments from imgur itself.
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.
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.
A lot of older image content has rotted because it's no longer hosted by the third party.
coughPhotobucketcough