‘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.

  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    edit-2
    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

    • WalterzarBoBalterzar@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      edit-2
      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 :)

        • JohnEdwa
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          2 years ago

          Majority of them hired last year, back in 2021 they only had 700. The only reasonable explanation would have been adding hundreds of new admins/moderators, but I don’t think that was the case, so I have no clue what all of them have been doing for the last year and a half.

          • longshaden@beehaw.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 years ago

            lots of tech companies scaled out (additional hires) to handle the increased traffic that covid lockdowns generated.

            now that “covid is over”, people are going outside and stuff, so tech companies are scaling down again.

        • Perdendosi@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 years ago

          My guess? 250 devs 200 administrative folks (secretaries, hr, accounting, etc) 50 executive level 1500 marketing and communications and sales folks

          :)

          • XTL
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 years ago

            Don’t forget legal. Defensive and offensive.