If they're broke than they should have first stopped self-hosting videos and images. I can't believe their API call cost is more excessive than their video and image hosting costs.
I wonder how much impact their shit-tastic video player has on bandwidth costs. On one hand, when it freezes and refuses to play, it saves money. On the other hand, constantly restarting videos to try to get them to play probably costs some since it doesn't appear to be caching properly either. The net cost could go either way.
There's a subtlety that seems to be getting skipped over quite frequently. It's not "the cost of the API call". It's "the opportunity cost of that user not coming to our main website".
I agree, but if we are incorporating the opportunity cost of free-riding 3rd-party users than Reddit also needs to incorporate the opportunity cost of losing thousands of unpaid moderators who keep the site running. I can't imagine the math will be favorable.
