7 ms·

> You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for

by e12e 5y ago

> You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical infrastructure and staffing so you can sit at home and spend your time looking at cats for free? No, they have your attention and they're going to connect you to organizations who will pay for it. "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts. It's the addictive dark patterns and montezation/tracking that costs millions. That's the irony.

cyrux004 5y ago
Shouldnt you include engineers compensation in "The infrastructure" thats where a lot of money goes.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  A bloated payroll to support a bloated advertising platform with a bloated AI-based recommendation algorithm when all it should be doing is loading a descending-order list of most recent submissions meeting the category criteria.... Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted
  - saurik 5y ago
    The hosting and bandwidth costs of images and especially video is non-trivial. I agree that the vast majority of the costs of these overly-large companies comes from what happens while trying to make them profitable, and then all of the engineering work that goes into that... but that all starts because running the site in the first place wasn't free and you have to do something to make them at least sustainable, with your "obvious" options being to either: 1) ask for donations (which likely won't pay for the site if you get popular: I know this from experience); 2) require people to pay some small subscription fee (which will make the site less fun for everyone); 3) pray ubiquitous micropayments eventually happens (i work on this problem as part of Orchid, but it still hasn't happened ;P); 4) sell "something else" to whales, like t-shirts or the ability to "guild" messages (the strategies reddit was trying to do as they resisted ads for a long time... maybe these work well enough?); or 5) start trying to sell ads and become the thing you hate. The only other strategies I have seen tend to either drag you towards #5 or simply cause other dark patterns, such as taking a cut of "tips" (what TikTok and Twitch do), which at bare minimum incentivizes the "don't you dare talk about alternative payment systems in our ecosystem: all payments must go through us" model sin (which can be fought against if you have a lot of willpower and remain private--I never required this with Cydia as I considered it the original sin my entire market existed to undermine--but I see the motivation and it feels kind of inevitable). I personally bet the only real "correct" solution is essentially #3... if we ever get to the point where the fees for that are as easy to pay and as low as the fees you pay for electricity (which works on a similar model).
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      How about running ads but not letting them dominate your product? I see nothing wrong with running a costs-plus business model but VC comes in and demand all these stupid companies dominate the world so they can get their 500x return or whatever. Then they go public and now the only thing that matters is shareholder value, fuck the users and OG supporters... Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and it ends up getting perverted into the hellscape that is tech today. Every damn time.
      - pm90 5y ago
        Its really really hard for a company whose ultimate goal is profit, to give up opportunities to do so. Its just not gonna happen. You can have all the ethical people you want, but people change and it takes just one "smart" engineer/product manager to realize how much money is on the table, then use that to grab power and get the same changes everywhere. Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.
        tomc1985 5y ago
        I get that, but there is something very wrong with business culture if that is the only outcome guaranteed. There are lots of examples of successful companies whose business model is not based around the unrestrained pursuit of pure profit at the expense of customers... look at Nintendo, for example, or Disney.
        EarthLaunch 5y ago
        > Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
        5y ago
  - DevKoala 5y ago
    Shhh! Some people are trying to justify their jobs as a service to mankind.
mdavis6890 5y ago
You make a great point that I hadn't considered before. It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel... I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....
user123456780 5y ago
> "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.
- jopsen 5y ago
  A single server can host an awful lot of cat pictures. Especially if you apply a little compression. In fact: I'm sure there are many cat image sharing sites out there. A random search landed me here: https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm Seems like a high-quality HN-like website, hehe :)
- symlinkk 5y ago
  I honestly don’t think it would be hard, especially with AWS abstracting away all scaling issues from you.
  - tofuahdude 5y ago
    Hard to abstract away the money that it'll cost - which is the original point here. They're doing something that costs money, and people want to use that something, so they're doing what it takes to make money from it.
    - symlinkk 5y ago
      If your business isn’t scaling with users, it’s a business model problem not a technical one
  - myrandomcomment 5y ago
    AWS makes around 26% margins (not broken out, it’s markets best guess). At a medium size it can make more cost effect sense to run your own……with the understanding that you have to build a cattle farm, and pets are forbidden. If you every allow a pet, then just go to AWS, et.al.
- greedo 5y ago
  Considering that pof.com used to run on a single server and handled more dating traffic than all of its competitors combined, you can go pretty damn far for peanuts.
nine_k 5y ago
Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts. Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy. Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable. Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads. Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats. Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa. Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it? Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.
- waitHowsThat 5y ago
  I feel for this. I run a free website, I sell physical books and give away the digital books for free. The content on the website requires in person data collection, it's very expensive. Yet after a few years the data has changed and could use updating. Sometimes people send rude emails that the data is old. I explain that I can get it updated for $30, and there's a donation button. I'm personally not interested in updating the data, the prices are similar to before, everything went up in price, the best values are still the best.
- jehb 5y ago
gorgoiler 5y ago
You need content, which means you need to become popular. This drives up complexity of the business operation overall, not just the infrastructure.

by e12e 5y ago

cyrux004 5y ago

Shouldnt you include engineers compensation in "The infrastructure" thats where a lot of money goes.

tomc1985 5y ago
A bloated payroll to support a bloated advertising platform with a bloated AI-based recommendation algorithm when all it should be doing is loading a descending-order list of most recent submissions meeting the category criteria.... Don't talk about costs, this crap is self-inflicted
- saurik 5y ago
  The hosting and bandwidth costs of images and especially video is non-trivial. I agree that the vast majority of the costs of these overly-large companies comes from what happens while trying to make them profitable, and then all of the engineering work that goes into that... but that all starts because running the site in the first place wasn't free and you have to do something to make them at least sustainable, with your "obvious" options being to either: 1) ask for donations (which likely won't pay for the site if you get popular: I know this from experience); 2) require people to pay some small subscription fee (which will make the site less fun for everyone); 3) pray ubiquitous micropayments eventually happens (i work on this problem as part of Orchid, but it still hasn't happened ;P); 4) sell "something else" to whales, like t-shirts or the ability to "guild" messages (the strategies reddit was trying to do as they resisted ads for a long time... maybe these work well enough?); or 5) start trying to sell ads and become the thing you hate. The only other strategies I have seen tend to either drag you towards #5 or simply cause other dark patterns, such as taking a cut of "tips" (what TikTok and Twitch do), which at bare minimum incentivizes the "don't you dare talk about alternative payment systems in our ecosystem: all payments must go through us" model sin (which can be fought against if you have a lot of willpower and remain private--I never required this with Cydia as I considered it the original sin my entire market existed to undermine--but I see the motivation and it feels kind of inevitable). I personally bet the only real "correct" solution is essentially #3... if we ever get to the point where the fees for that are as easy to pay and as low as the fees you pay for electricity (which works on a similar model).
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    How about running ads but not letting them dominate your product? I see nothing wrong with running a costs-plus business model but VC comes in and demand all these stupid companies dominate the world so they can get their 500x return or whatever. Then they go public and now the only thing that matters is shareholder value, fuck the users and OG supporters... Every one of these companies start with a nice mission and it ends up getting perverted into the hellscape that is tech today. Every damn time.
    - pm90 5y ago
      Its really really hard for a company whose ultimate goal is profit, to give up opportunities to do so. Its just not gonna happen. You can have all the ethical people you want, but people change and it takes just one "smart" engineer/product manager to realize how much money is on the table, then use that to grab power and get the same changes everywhere. Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Laws like GDPR and CCPA have to be followed by the business.
      - tomc1985 5y ago
        I get that, but there is something very wrong with business culture if that is the only outcome guaranteed. There are lots of examples of successful companies whose business model is not based around the unrestrained pursuit of pure profit at the expense of customers... look at Nintendo, for example, or Disney.
      - EarthLaunch 5y ago
        > Relying on people doing the right thing is an unstable equilibrium. IMO the only way to really ensure this is with regulations and compliance controls. Isn’t this ironic? The government is people. I guess this just moves the onus of people doing the right thing, up to government. If you’re right, that destabilizes government. Which I guess is what happens when it stops corps; corps then need to take it over.
      - 5y ago
- DevKoala 5y ago
  Shhh! Some people are trying to justify their jobs as a service to mankind.

mdavis6890 5y ago

You make a great point that I hadn't considered before. It's like rocket fuel! The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need. Which adds weight, so now you go slower, so you need more fuel... I want to serve a cat picture, which would cost 1/100 of a cent. But at scale, it adds up. So now I show adds that generate 1.2/100 of a cent in revenue but add .5/100 cents in serving cost, which I can optimize with user data to add an additional .7/100 cents in revenue, but which adds .4/100 cents in serving costs....

user123456780 5y ago

> "The infrastructure" to share cat pictures cost peanuts lol at this. Go setup that infrastructure and see how far you get for peanuts.

jopsen 5y ago
A single server can host an awful lot of cat pictures. Especially if you apply a little compression. In fact: I'm sure there are many cat image sharing sites out there. A random search landed me here: https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm Seems like a high-quality HN-like website, hehe :)
symlinkk 5y ago
I honestly don’t think it would be hard, especially with AWS abstracting away all scaling issues from you.
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  Hard to abstract away the money that it'll cost - which is the original point here. They're doing something that costs money, and people want to use that something, so they're doing what it takes to make money from it.
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    If your business isn’t scaling with users, it’s a business model problem not a technical one
- myrandomcomment 5y ago
  AWS makes around 26% margins (not broken out, it’s markets best guess). At a medium size it can make more cost effect sense to run your own……with the understanding that you have to build a cattle farm, and pets are forbidden. If you every allow a pet, then just go to AWS, et.al.
greedo 5y ago
Considering that pof.com used to run on a single server and handled more dating traffic than all of its competitors combined, you can go pretty damn far for peanuts.

nine_k 5y ago

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC will just wait longer. Or run your servers from two regions, it just takes duplicating your collection of cat pictures, should be peanuts. Then, you need to store these terabytes of cats. On rather fast disks because else the disks will be the bottleneck, and cats will load very slowly for some users. It would be terrible were something to happen to the collection, so you need some backup for peanuts, like some Backblaze, and maybe a second copy because Backblaze has no^W limited redundancy. Then, well, you need to monitor all that and sometimes fix issues, because cloud infra is highly available but not highly reliable. Then, where do the cat pictures come from? Allow anonymous uploads! Or register users and allow uploads. Now analyze each picture so that it's an actual cat picture and not child porn or a warez archive. Resize them to match your standards. Yes, this is simple, just run a RNN that detects cats. Then, curate the incoming pictures so that they are actually reasonably interesting. Just maybe hire a few people to do that for peanuts somewhere in Africa. Ah yes, you want to also deduplicate images; run some image hashing algorithms; use maybe just one or two GPU instances to do that efficiently. And you gonna need a DB, a simple one, that will never need any administering or fixing, won't it? Well, yes, now you can run that site for just several grand a month, making it your day job, because you're well-qualified to maintain every part of it. Enjoy the peanuts.

waitHowsThat 5y ago
I feel for this. I run a free website, I sell physical books and give away the digital books for free. The content on the website requires in person data collection, it's very expensive. Yet after a few years the data has changed and could use updating. Sometimes people send rude emails that the data is old. I explain that I can get it updated for $30, and there's a donation button. I'm personally not interested in updating the data, the prices are similar to before, everything went up in price, the best values are still the best.
jehb 5y ago

gorgoiler 5y ago

You need content, which means you need to become popular. This drives up complexity of the business operation overall, not just the infrastructure.