That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.
Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).
Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.
Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that.
Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request.
Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests.
So really, what is a reasonable pricing?
Is delivering an image of comparable cost to delivering text via an api?
I have zero experience in this area so could learn something.
Both sites serve - image, video, and text(comments or posts).
Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.
Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.
Realistically, it's the best comparision there is.
> Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.
Did you even take a second to look at Imgur before confidently saying something so incorrect? The homepage clearly references tags, with individual posts a la subreddits.
Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.
They have tags. Not subreddits. Tagging systems are completely different from how a subreddit works. In my experience a tagging system isn't that expensive to run. Comparing tags with sections seeems completely bonkers and very naive.
> Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.
In my experience, to make complex data like Reddit's highly available you need to do a whole bunch such as making subreddits separate buckets so to speak. The aggregation almost certainly has a substantial costs. This isn't some dinky MySQL database with few thousand posts. It seems absurd to compare a site with a single feed (Even if it has tags) vs a system that has a personalised feed.
I'm sure the team who build and maintain the feed mixer are happy to hear you could build it with just a database query. I'm sure they'll be reaching out so you can show them this database query.
It seems a lot of people want Imgur to be more expensive to operate therefore fair that it can be more expensive to use. While the reality seems to be the reverse.