'Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,' Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.

‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•2 years ago

    How tf is reddit not profitable? When I first joined reddit it had a progress bar to the side that showed the percentage of server costs covered by reddit gold and it was always filled. Since then they started showing lots more ads, added reddit coins, awards and premium subscription to increase their revenue. The increase in their cost/user has to be from the native image/video uploads and redisigning the website/app. If YouTube manages to be profitable hosting 4k videos, reddit must be doing something very stupid to become unprofitable with their low quality videos.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•2 years ago

      Server costs are probably a small proportion of their costs, labour costs are probably going to be the biggest part, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Spez’s salary/bonus knocks them from profitable to unprofitable, as being profitable is bad for tax purposes

      • @[email protected]English
        1•2 years ago

        With all due respect and empathy to reddit’s employees who do deserve gainful employment:

        Does a link aggregator really need a huge labor pool? In terms of functionality Lemmy is already on par with how I remember Reddit 10 years ago (compared to which the experience of Reddit today is actually worse). And Lemmy achieves it with what, an extreme fraction of the labor cost?

        Props to all the devs, admins, etc who are hosting all these Lemmy instances for us, btw :)