[mandmandam]

Yes!

And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things.

They're TEXT and LINKS ffs.

Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run.

Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.

[danudey]

Text and links, but then also recommendation algorithms, spam filtering, image hosting, lightning-fast caching systems so that your main feed doesn't take hours to load fetching row by row from MySQL, geographically distributed data centres for redundancy and locality.

Then there's the ad engine, which requires user data harvesting, and all of that analytics and analysis and machine learning, and that all gets expensive, so you have to do more of it and do it better so that you can make more ad dollars so you can afford to do more of it and do it better so that.... and so on and so on.

You could just charge users, of course, but if you charge users then you hamstring your organic growth, so you have to find a way to only charge some users but charge them significantly more. Even if Twitter only costs $1/usr/mo to run, how many of those users will pay? You need to charge 1% of users $100/mo, or 0.1% of users $1000/mo, which means you need to offer them something tangible for their money, but none of these sites can really think of anything tangible to offer their users that's worth paying for so they're stuck with ad revenue and...

Yeah, it's a gigantic mess.

[hgs3]

If you're a non-profit then you don't need a recommendation engine or an ad engine. You also don't need to self host video and images, at least initially. Reddit, for the longest time, relied on Imgur and embedded video players until they built their own infrastructure. Also, thanks to advances in AI, there is an opportunity for AI moderators for content curation. As far as caching and web scale in general, you don't need a full server farm initially. Even Google started with a single server rack.

[rerdavies]

Google's 1st server was housed in a cabinet of Lego bricks. No server rack.

https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg

Google's first server farm consisted on row after row of regular desktop machines on the floor. Also no server racks.

But sooner or later, you're going to need one of these: https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/

The thing I would live in constant fear of if I were to host a Mastodon server is that sooner or later, one of your users' posts is going to end up being linked to in a Wired feature article, or a New York Times article, or goes viral for any of a billion reason, and your server is going to end up getting hammered with 10,000 requests a second for a week or a month, which means you're going to be facing a sudden unexpected $3,000 AWS bill. (Not sure what it would actually cost. Anyone?)

I've seen what being linked to in a Wired article does to a web server. It's ugly.

[elektor]

Do you have a source for that $2.5 figure?

[jorvi]

That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.

[prattmic]

Q1 earnings (https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1...) says 383M daily active users and $1.3B in costs (including sales, administrative, etc), for ~$3.50/user/quarter or ~$14/user/year. So far above $2.50/user/year. Even just using cost of revenue is ~$4.50/user/year.

[mandmandam]

I clarified that I meant just infrastructure costs, and posted the source.

Even so - what's $4.50 per user per year - 40 minutes of minimum wage work? 45 seconds of a lawyer's time?

For sending, and processing, and receiving GBs and GBs of video?

For (not even) this cost, we give up control of political narratives? We let people like Huffman and Musk and Zuckerberg control what we get to see?

They take money from tinpot dictators and a selection box of wealthy grifters. We let our parents and grandparents get taken advantage of by every scam artist on the planet with a few dollars. Why? To save $4.50 a year?

[hotpotamus]

I think the big cloud providers have warped peoples' sense of what these things actually cost (and also the massive scale of these userbases that allows the costs to be spread widely). Egress is one places where providers make their (significant) margins.

[mandmandam]

To be clear, I'm talking about solely infrastructure costs.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/as-snapchat-use-soars-during-p...

Divide the costs cited by Snapchat themselves by their daily users and you get $~2.50/yr.

[this_user]

Social networks derive their value from their size. $2.5 per year per user may not be much, but if you have just 1000 users, that is already $2500 per year. 100000 users is a quarter of a million per year. Are you going to pay for that out of pocket?

It takes money to run a social network of meaningful size in even just a halfway professional manner. Who would do that while receiving nothing in return?

[mjan22640]

Design the network physically distributed on the users computers.

[shadowgovt]

It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is.

I can't help but observe that for all of it being "just text and links," we sure do keep converging on monolithic service providers for... Some reason.

[danudey]

> It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is.

I'm an awful programmer and I could build a reddit clone pretty trivially if I really set my mind to it.

Then I'd have to figure out how to attract users, how to handle spam and abuse, how to filter content, how to age restrict things, what tools users need, how to host media content cheaply, how to hire people to help me keep the site online and scaled, how to.... probably a thousand other things.

Building a forum is easy, building a business around a forum.... difficult.

[shadowgovt]

And not even a business, the other things you're describing are things you have to solve even if you want to provide the service for free (well, for cost at that point. Because if you're providing media content and hiring people, the whole thing costs you more than labor). And the other things you've described are table stakes... Filtering content and handling abuse in particular, if you get large enough for anybody to care you exist. No government is going to sit idly by and let a service just become the next CSAM haven.

At the end of the day, most people don't want to put the labor in. If they did, we would have seen fediverse take off ages ago.

[paulmd]

> And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs.

stop doing JAVASCRIPT

documents were not meant to be turing-complete

the frontend developers have played us like fools

look at the user-focused experiences they have built for us with our attention-economy revenue:

they have played us like fools

[vxNsr]

At scale that’s relatively expensive though, $2.5x1billion is still 2.5 billion dollars. That money needs to come from somewhere…

[mandmandam]

Pedantically, that's not how cost per user works. Whether you have a billion users or 3, $2.50 / user is $2.50 per user.

And that infrastructure costs the same whether you riddle the platform with advertising and influence, or leave it pristine. In fact, leaving it pristine costs far far less to society, all things considered.

Anyway, 'at scale', $2.5 bn is a drop in the ocean. There are thousands of people who could pay that all on their own. The global economy is 100 trillion dollars (as of 2021). And there's this thing called taxation, which sorts out public goods and services (such as communication) at scale.

[rerdavies]

I'm not sure there are a thousand people on the planet who would be willing to pay $2.5B a year!

[epicureanideal]

Membership fees. If we could get customers used to buying things again, $10/yr or $100/lifetime membership fees seems more than reasonable.

[Narkov]

So easy to say, so hard to actually do. Most HN readers wouldn't care about dropping $100 but the fact is Facebook, Reddit, Google users pay $0.

[greiskul]

Youtube gives you the option. Do you want no ads? Pay for Youtube Premium. I do not need to engage in a hostile user vs platform agaisnt Youtube, with me searching for better adblocks, and youtube trying to figure out how to block the adblockers, cause they go and give me the option. I doubt that reddit would be getting the pushback they are getting if they had come out with some sensible numbers per user, that people are actually ok with paying.

[SteveNuts]

The problem there is I think people are sick of seeing 15 small recurring charges on their credit card statements every month. It's death by a thousand paper cuts.

There needs to be some sort of universal pay per view model that works across any site.

[UncleMeat]

And yet, people whine incessantly about YouTube Premium or about Netflix not letting people squat on each other's accounts.

[tenebrisalietum]

Well there are pictures and video too.

[BHSPitMonkey]

Not until later in Reddit's history, when they (just like Facebook) wanted to wrestle some power away from the likes of YouTube and Imgur. (Smartly so, since these platforms had lots of leverage to be able to turn off embedding one day and sour the Reddit UX / drive users away from the site. But this change did not make Reddit more valuable to its users.)