Why couldn't old reddit make money? Just going by my napkin math, serving 125M DAU compute and storage shouldn't cost more much than $2M/mo in cloud hosting.
If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher.
Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum.
I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.
Because if you need something in 2 days in the United States its often your _only_ option. I begrudgingly maintain a prime membership because its typically >2 times per month that I need something in two days. Maybe if I planned better that would happen less and I would save money, but its purely a convenience.
Their logistic network is where prime holds its value.
I think this comes from our rather nebulous definition of "consciousness".
We have this natural tendancy to impose our feelings of self on the definition of consciousness. Its hard to accept that all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours could be calculated by a human with pen and paper (with enough humans and developments in neurobiological research).
I believe we will have to reckon with these loose definitions and eventually realize how lacking in utility they are for describing engineered intellegence.
Many of the traditional SEO players are now figuring out how to game the system to get their customers to show up more frequently in LLM responses.
Once the pressure to turn a profit is high enough the big players surely won't just leave that money on the table.
The scary part is that even if we end up paying for "ad-free" LLM services how do we really know if it is ad-free? Traditional services are (usually) pretty clear on what is an ad and what isn't. I wouldn't necessarily know if raid shadow legends really is the greatest game of all time or if the model had been tuned to say that it is.
Sometimes you have to learn how to frame the problem in a way to get the results that you want. These tools need lots of context, not just about the rest of the code base but the problem itself. You can think of it a bit like how the early adopters of high level programming languages had to fight against compilers to get the assembly output that they wanted.
For example, if I tell an LLM to generate a python script that finds the square of a number I might want:
def square(x):
return x * x
but it may give me:
print("Enter a number:")
x = int(input())
print("The square is", x * x)
This is a very very simple example but I think it illustrates my point. If you provide enough context to the exact problem you want to solve the results are astronomically better.
It used to be $8.99/month. I was a pretty casual twitch viewer and I paid for it then. When they announced the move to 11.99/month I didn't re-up it and I just don't watch twitch now.
Funny how that $3/month was just enough for me to decide it was no longer worth it.
I am a right leaning American who subscribes to the New Yorker. I find a lot of their essays to be surprisingly non-partisan. I especially enjoy the fiction pieces.
You may or may not remember, but we used to run similar tech YouTube channels as young teenagers and worked on a few videos together. I've been following circleback since you guys were accepted into W24. Congrats on the launch!
Not sure if OP is the author but my love of learning languages was also unlocked through Esperanto when I was a teenager.
Its possible that my journey has been a bit longer, I did eventually get around to studying Mandarin Chinese, From 2016 until present day I still study an hour every day. I also was able to live in China for a year which was a great help.
Going from Esperanto, a language designed as a second language, to Chinese, one that is absolutely not, is like going from Ruby on Rails development to writing a web server in Assembly. There is so much more practice and rote memorization required to attain any level of fluency.
After over 7 years of study I still speak with an accent and have trouble communicating on some topics. But at this point I can read just about anything which was always my primary goal :).
Clearly you haven't seen the entire fediverse. There are tons of "free speech" instances along with a garden variety of other "alt" instances that are as active as the mastodon affiliated ones.
They tend to all be mutually blacklisted by each other, meaning that you won't see their posts appear in your federated timeline, however you can still individually follow and interact with accounts across the blacklist line.
What I personally do is host my own Pleroma instance where I can manually configure which instances I chose to associate with. Sure, I don't show up on anyone else's federated timeline but I mostly lurk anyways so I don't care and I get a large degree of control over what kind of content I see.
There has been some criticism of Analogue lately from the retro gaming community [1] for continuing to announce and release new products while they remain months behind on fulfilling orders already placed by customers. The consensus seems to be that their products are good but add 4-6 months to whenever you expect to get your order from them.
If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher.
Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum.
I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.