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Comment by larksimian | Hacker News Reader

If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged.

Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible.

It's way crazier that Reddit has 2k employees than that Twitter had 4k or whatever.

Edited from $2/month/user to $2/year/user.

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>> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable

But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous.

It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.

This is interesting, but can you further explain how yoy get broad ranging social influence from focusing on ads? I don't quite get that.

I don't think it is the ads but the algorithmic feed that they manipulate for political ends, rather than making money. TikTok got big by making an algorithmic feed that did not push BS to its users I think.

Several social media platforms, notably Facebook and Twitter, have (or had) marketing campaign teams that help their clients focus their marketing campaigns on particular segments of interest.

The belief that they could further wield influence may drive them to be less concerned about near term profitability.

It's not about actual profitability, it's about what you can convince an investor is the potential future profitability.

Merely by recording an actual profit, you have shown your hand to the investor, who can now estimate what your ceiling is. And it's never going to be as much as what it was when profits were merely hypothetical.

Exactly! If they announced that you will have to pay even $5 a month for 3rd party access - I think most people would be on board. They just choose the dumbest of all paths.

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