When all you have is a hammer, the whole world is a nail. Server-side, Reddit is a pig. It consumes an undue amount of resources for what it does - if a thousand people look at one Craigslist page, Craigslist has to create and serve one page a thousand times. If a thousand people look at one Reddit page, Reddit has to create a thousand pages and serve them each once. That's the curse of vote rank. I am not a computer engineer. This may very well have been a clever way to leverage the problem. But as someone who debuted at #3 well-rounded when Karmawhores.com went live this: ...is pure bullshit. MrGrim figured out how to monetize content on Reddit a long-ass time ago. He created Imgur. "Good content" is easily-digestible images and this way lies funnyjunk, cheezburger, 9gag and all the other advertising-heavy content recyclers. More importantly, though, the "server costs" of Reddit are pretty meager. I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs and based on this, where Yishan says that $3.99 pays for 476 minutes of server time, Reddit's servers cost about $5k per year. They've got 58 employees at about $50-$75k per year (including benefits and such) and two executives and they're pulling down about $8m a year in ad revenue. Reddit's expenses are 3 orders of magnitude higher than anything a "decentralized Reddit" could have saved them.Furthermore, when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content, thus incentivizing the production of good content
The 5k figure is just for one server, and it's 276 minutes instead of 476. > you’re helping to pay for one of our many hundreds of servers to run for 4.6 hours. Lower bound on "many hundreds" is probably around 300, meaning total costs are at least $2.2M, roughly at parity with your estimated payroll cost.