> It costs us about $10 million in pure infrastructure costs to support these apps. But it’s not labor, that’s not R&D, that’s not safety, that’s not ML, and that doesn’t include the lost monetization of having users not on our platform. Just pure cloud spend. It’s real money.
He’s saying that it costs them $10M/year in “pure cloud spend” to serve 3% of their users. Despite what they say, if you look at requests, it’s obvious that Apollo is more efficient than Reddit’s app. So if he’s telling the truth, that extrapolates to at least $333M of “pure cloud spend” to serve all of their users.
Maybe cloud+python+gazillions of individual HTTP requests is a setup for burning money? No, it is the kids who are wrong.
There are a million and five ways Reddit could reduce the cost of serving users' data. The whole situation boils down to this disingenuous falsehood spez keeps throwing about - "our data".
Frankly we need anti-trust enforcement to stop this widespread bundling of digital services together with the software that accesses them, and/or a statutory right for programmatic API access to do everything a user is authorized to do by other means.
In the meantime I'd really love to see some adversarial interoperability around this. Reddit has to serve content to their proprietary front ends some how, and there's no reason third party clients can't just use those endpoints instead of assenting to API terms and whatnot.
He’s saying that it costs them $10M/year in “pure cloud spend” to serve 3% of their users. Despite what they say, if you look at requests, it’s obvious that Apollo is more efficient than Reddit’s app. So if he’s telling the truth, that extrapolates to at least $333M of “pure cloud spend” to serve all of their users.
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