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Happy 10th birthday to us

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Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#81

Post by billmalarky »

MichaelGG wrote: post #53
billmalarky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imgur uses the free/extremely cheap CDN Cloudflare. Same with 4chan. The vast majority of Imgur's content gets served at the CDN layer so Imgur doesn't have to pay for that bandwidth. moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.

CloudFlare told me that using them to host images/media isn't allowed. That they do the CDN bits for websites, but not to do excessive non-webpage stuff. Their ToS says something like that. Maybe that changes for a few K a month?

CDNs don't host the files, your servers do. They cache copies of the files across their CDN network and serve the files from their cache until the cache expires, then they go and get the file from you again to rebuild their cache.

As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for the traffic hitting your image url to die down).

Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.

Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#82

Post by thomson »

Happy Birthday Reddit!

I also really enjoyed this post from Alexis re: their journey [1]--particularly this excerpt:

"I talk about this a lot in my book, but it was PG who invited us to apply to the first ever round of Y Combinator and ultimately Jessica Livingston who banged on the table to accept us into the program after PG and the other partners rejected us.

I often think about what would have happened if she hadn't demanded that we be part of the program. There'd be no reddit, that's for sure."

This doesn't get repeated quite often enough as it should, but jl is probably one of the kindest, most intelligent, and most perceptive partners at YC, and probably in the entire venture capital industry.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/alexis.ohanian/posts/10102187402893...

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#83

Post by billmalarky »

celticninja wrote: post #63
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it purely for image hosting/no ads/no public gallery. It's amaaaazing haha

I imagine they will run at a loss until they can monetize effectively like reddit. I know everyone tells us that reddit is not profitable but they are selling their front page to advertisers quietly. I recently saw a front page post that was just a Taco Bell sign that was 20 years old. A fluff bullshit post with little discernable value. Now I don't suggest that the user paid to post it, that sort of stuff would be f…

Imgur was bootstrapped until relatively recently and has always been profitable. Only at the beginning did Alan have to request donations.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#85

Post by NeutronBoy »

TTPrograms wrote: post #69
astrodust wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons : It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/prog…

Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They…

> Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues.

I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. However, each subreddit this happens to then goes and makes a new, separate subreddit to essentially start again.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#86

Post by exacube »

sneak wrote: post #66

If every single vote on reddit (both up or down) over ten years were to equal Uber's ~$40bn market cap, each of ~19bn votes would have to be worth over $2.

If my fingers were to equal Google's $375B market cap, each of my finger is worth $37.5B.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#87

Post by alttab »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #85
TTPrograms wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They…

> Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues. I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. Ho…

Entropy will still build up in the software, infrastructure (both human and hardware), monetization model ("my highly targeted customer base keeps moving subs, and they have ad-block!") and an accumulation of bad "federal-level" decisions that get made and held reddit-wide. The question is when this will this burden begin to stifle the creation of new "escape subs."

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#88

Post by MichaelGG »

billmalarky wrote: post #81
MichaelGG wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CloudFlare told me that using them to host images/media isn't allowed. That they do the CDN bits for websites, but not to do excessive non-webpage stuff. Their ToS says something like that. Maybe that changes for a few K a month?

CDNs don't host the files, your servers do. They cache copies of the files across their CDN network and serve the files from their cache until the cache expires, then they go and get the file from you again to rebuild their cache. As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reve…

Yes I say "host" as a shorthand for "cache so I don't have to serve much".

Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.

Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#89

Post by MichaelGG »

nailer wrote: post #80
MichaelGG wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CloudFlare told me that using them to host images/media isn't allowed. That they do the CDN bits for websites, but not to do excessive non-webpage stuff. Their ToS says something like that. Maybe that changes for a few K a month?

Aren't images and video webpage stuff?

As far as I can tell they go by intent. Hosting a few images and videos for your page is one thing. Hosting an imageboard or video streaming site is another.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#90

Post by [deleted] »

alogray wrote: post #70
astrodust wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons : It used to be good. Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it. To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/prog…

Frankly, I don't feel like Reddit's quality has changed altogether too much since even before Digg v4 killed Digg. There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either. Honestly, I'm enjoying…

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