• teawrecks
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    1 year ago

    revenue is not the same as profits.

    profit = revenue - operating costs

      • teawrecks
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        1 year ago

        It’s not greedy to want to at least run net neutral, though. I assumed that’s how reddit operated for the most part until now. But I’m here because it does seem like the new UI design etc are more targeted at growth and making the platform more attractive to sell. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much community engagement you have, a platform can only exist so long with negative profits.

        It’s no different for lemmy instances. How many lemmy users pay so their server can be maintained? Not many I would guess. And I predict the influx of reddit users will cause many instances to lock down new user signups due to lack of resources to moderate them. The ones that don’t lock down will be asking for donations, selling ad space, or in the worst case, selling user data.

        The upside is that a lemmy server can die without the whole platform dying, but revenue needs to be generated somehow for a lemmy instance to continue to exist. Whether it’s generated from the server itself, or from the wallet of a generous person, it has to happen.

  • psylancer@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Has anyone seen a reasonable breakdown of how much Reddit costs to run? Or how much lemmy collectively might cost?

    • Silviecat44@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      I would assume the majority comes from hosting? Then again I know nothing about how reddit operates.

      • derived_allegory@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        developers are quite expensive too.even though they don’t have many developers, it can still be a huge spending.

        • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Reddit as a whole has somewhere around 2k employers (minus 90 after the layoffs)

          That’s a shockingly high number considering how little user facing development there has been

          • Mike@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            2k employees at 100k/year for everything would be 200M/year just in compensation. That, plus hosting and all the server costs could put them close to this ad revenue if not slightly over. However, this ad revenue isn’t including things like reddit gold and gifts, I’m curious to see how that factors in.

              • Mike@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                I just meant average cost per employee. That includes their salary but also health insurance, benefits, and payroll taxes. Definitely not everyone is getting 100k salary, but I think that’s a pretty conservative estimate for total employee cost at a tech company of their size.

                • honk@feddit.de
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                  1 year ago

                  Okay…i have no clue how much an employee in america would cost. My comment was more an immediate shocked reaction of disbelief than actually stating that you were wrong lol

  • QuentinCallaghanA
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    1 year ago

    Reddit in its early days was based around free speech absolutism, and it had subs like /r/CreepShots, /r/WatchPeopleDie, /r/CoonTown and so on. But the current CEO being once the moderator of THAT sub in question… that I didn’t know!

    • zalack@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Alright I’m going to go out on a limb and say that /r/WatchPeopleDie shouldn’t be lumped in with that other human trash.

      Every month or so I would get morbidly curious and scroll that sub for ten or fifteen minutes. Firstly, the comments and posts never seemed… I don’t know I have the right word… sociopathic? gleeful? cruel?

      The tone of the whole sub was much more somber. I always came away from that sub with a stark reminder that we are so so fragile, and our future can get snuffed out by the universe – sheer random chance – at any moment.

      To me it was a reminder to live more in the present. Don’t take tomorrow for granted, and I saw a lot of the sort of thing in the comments.

      A lot of the videos were just random shit, like pedestrians getting hit stuck by a rogue tire flung from a car crash 500 feet away. Just totally senseless and sad… but in a way that helps put what’s important in perspective.

      • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        I only went to that sub a couple of times. All I’ve learned is to stay away from forklifts and ferris wheels.

    • Sal@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Wait which sub? I’m too lazy to google as I have a headache that restricts my ability to type unless it’s in a comment box

  • theCOORN@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    i mean aren’t most social media platforms(or just tech services in general) unprofitable? like wasn’t twitter losing millions of dollars even though it was really popular?