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Comment by bcrack | Hacker News Reader

"You can host your own community then"; Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers

I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved. Based on the Apollo logistics, reddit API pricing seems to fall on the greedy end of the spectrum. At the same time we have examples with high-traffic websites (e.g. Wikipedia) which manage to build upon volunteer effort and be sustainable without pissing everyone off within a few days.

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> I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved.

They're not making profit, that's the entire point.

> Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers

I'm similarly not a fan of discounting just how much money and work goes into building a company with millions of users, having helped do that in the past. My comment was not glib, it was entirely sincere; if you want to know just how much it costs, host your own community and see just how "greedy" it is.

I understand your point.

The thing is that they should be able to introduce their API pricing without triggering the events of the past days. I'm not even remotely an expert, but the pricing seems too aggressive and seems to contradict was communicated earlier (again based on the apollo transcripts).

On the other hand they are supposed to be experts, or they should at least ask one, given the millions of users, thousands of mods, etc involved.

How do you know whether it was too aggressive or not? They could have always revised their estimates when they did the calculation for how much each call costs as well as how much lost revenue they get from third party apps not showing ads. Sure, they could have given more than a month's notice but the bill comes due at some point. Based on the API call figures Apollo has posted and having worked on API products in the past, I can entirely see how $20 million a year is reasonable given how much Apollo is pulling from Reddit's servers.

I infer it was aggressive, based on the following:

Per Christian (the Apollo app dev): "(...) Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls." [1]

All assuming he is not lying (which I have no reason to believe, contrary to the reddit reps). Two orders of magnitude over Imgur pricing sounds a bit greedy, unless Imgur is also at the verge of collapse, which I'm not aware of.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

> I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

He's got a sweetheart deal.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing

There is no $166 plan. The least expensive $500/month plan is "only" 7.5M requests per month.

50M requests under the ultra plan (7.5M requests and then $0.001 for each one after) would cost $43k/month - and it would be more sensible to go to the "mega" plan then which is $10k/month for 150M API calls.

Yes, imgur also does not make any profit. Soon you will see imgur also raising prices, they simply have enough VC to not need to resort to that yet.

Not all high-traffic websites are comparable when it comes to sustainability. Comparing reddit and Wikipedia is definitely an apples and oranges situation. The software, data model and infrastructure are wildly different.

Just the simple fact that most of Wikipedia can largely be cached long(ish) term via CDNs reduces the capital needed to keep it running. reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content, user configured listings, threaded discussion, media hosting, etc. Caching those types of things is a lot more difficult.

> reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content

You mean like how Wikipedia has pages that anyone can edit that can (and do) get edited many times per minute?

> user configured listings

Kind of like how Wikipedia supports saved articles and reading lists?

> threaded discussion

If only each article on Wikipedia had a discussion page where you could talk about edits to the page. We could call it the Talk page. But I guess that’s too dynamic for them.

> media hosting

I’ve always thought Wikipedia would be better if they had images and maybe even videos to go with each article. Maybe we should petition them to add this.

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