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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is, I believe, the highest US traffic website that runs entirely on the cloud (as in they never invested in datacenters or POPs for traffic serving). To serve every single request they have to pay AWS and Fastly. I suspect that is why the per request pricing they are trying to pass off to 3rd party apps is so high.

Unless things have changed since I left, it is just a highly efficient machine for shoveling investor money into the cloud furnace. I love Reddit to death and would go back in a heartbeat to fix it, but everything is just plastered in "don't touch my garbage" stickers.

(Quick edit to add before the comments come rolling in, Netflix runs its business on the cloud - the expensive parts of pushing Stranger Things episodes into your living room run on real servers)

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I don't know how many people have this practice, but Reddit also has become a good "answers" and "research" site to help find people what they want through Google Search. For example: If I search with "Alexa vs Google Home reddit", I am likely to find a lot of useful information from mostly real humans and their feedback openly available on the very site called Reddit. Omitting that "reddit" part in the query will lead me to the other news sites and blogs run by journalists and spammy media companies contain a lot of bullshit that I chose to only rely on Reddit for my quest for information.

I wonder why Reddit would want to charge consumers of its API, without providing any premium services like let's say, Twilio etc. Reddit must focus on monetizing its content and more strategization that will bring in more ad-revenue or user-generated monetary value rather than going after 3rd party API consumers that ended up doing a much better job of building a simple front end app for their content.

I do the same, but its important to note that subreddits focusing on brand agnostic gadget niches (like electric toothbrushes) are riddled with bot accounts shoveling ads that look like human feedback, to the point of drowning the few actual humans out. The less popular gadget, the less bots there are.

I have the opposite experience. If I'm looking for some technical information (is this MTB suspension part compatible with this fork, or what's the charging profile for this particular battery chemistry, or how do I do x in new programming language y), and I end up on Reddit, I am 99% certain I'll find some vague but useless answer.

Interesting, I agree that technical info and help is not a strong suit for Reddit though.

Mileage varies. I find a lot more useful content on the better technical subs than I've seen on SO and its siblings for years. And the attitude is often much more pleasant as well.

Reddit is like a crowdsourced wiki. It goes wide and does a decent job on a variety of topics, but drastically fails when you need to go deep.

Yes. Google has become useless for certain types of searches. I find reddit to have recommendations that are much more trustworthy.

It's not just product recommendations, things like book recommendations, career advice, scientific/academic questions. Reddit has answers to these kinds of questions that are very difficult to find elsewhere.

The cost is nowhere near, even with sufficient padding, to what they are asking. The move is a bit too blatant and obvious a push out.

Is it not possible for each 3rd party app user to create a client id and secret and give it to their instance of the app?

They'll be public soon enough and this will all be known. I predict their labor costs eclipse their hosting costs, as with most companies, regardless of being in the cloud.

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