They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.
Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.
the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.
I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.
Text and database entries are, indeed, Vastly lighter on resources (compute and bandwidth). Bandwidth cost for text is practically free. Managing voting is surely not easy though; every single vote is an additional database entry which means that they cost money to store. Then the vote sorting algorithm has to run pretty frequently. Comments themselves are probably nothing compared to the votes.
But managing voting and sorting is a one-time-cost. Reddit doesn’t let you vote on old things which means that they can completely discard the votes and keep the totals and never resort ever again. They have no real ongoing costs there.
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.
That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.
It is very noticable the snappiness/responsiveness coming to Lemmy.world. My smaller mastodon instance is generally fine but images and stuff are noticably slower.
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.
Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.
the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.
I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.
Text and database entries are, indeed, Vastly lighter on resources (compute and bandwidth). Bandwidth cost for text is practically free. Managing voting is surely not easy though; every single vote is an additional database entry which means that they cost money to store. Then the vote sorting algorithm has to run pretty frequently. Comments themselves are probably nothing compared to the votes.
But managing voting and sorting is a one-time-cost. Reddit doesn’t let you vote on old things which means that they can completely discard the votes and keep the totals and never resort ever again. They have no real ongoing costs there.
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.
That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.
It is very noticable the snappiness/responsiveness coming to Lemmy.world. My smaller mastodon instance is generally fine but images and stuff are noticably slower.
depends on the hosting setup. my lemmy instance was slow too until i set it up with a cache, now it’s hella snappy
They could have even made a profit from third party apps if the pricing wasn’t 100x a reasonable rate.