Reddit has tried this approach and, IMO, it's failed.
A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get disheartened and walk away forever.
The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days, farming karma).
The net result is that these rules ensure that much greater proportion of new accounts come from bad actors - who else would jump through hoops just to participate on a web forum?
It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.
> It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way.
Not to mention reddit mass removed experienced moderators when all the moderators had a protest about reddit removing their access to good third party tooling.
I quit moderating because it was destroying my mental health.
Getting called a fascist and rehashing how “no, you’re libertarian politics are fine, but can you please just start your own sub” in a long, drawn out, hateful, back and forth gets exhausting after the 200th person who comes to the bicycling subreddit and feels they should be allowed to endorse harming cyclists with their vehicles.
Everyone got mad at spez for having the audacity to fuck with these kids, and there is a point there, but after living with it, I could see myself doing the same damn thing.
Moderating Reddit subs can be a huge money maker. I know people making $100K/year from it. There are cabals, especially in the adult sections. Reddit has tried to address this recently by limiting the number of subs a person can moderate, but that just causes these big accounts to create more user accounts and split all their subs up that way.
On the adult subs, at least, menu links, sidebar links and banner ads, automod reply links, and by limiting your sub to only paying guests or your own managed models.
Plenty of subs blatantly allow certain brands to advertise while banning anyone else. Kind of amazed Reddit themselves haven’t put more effort into to stopping it since it kinda sidesteps their in house advertising.
At scale they will. For now, someone else puts the effort into growth marketing, eyeball capture. Reddit eventually changes the rules, seizing control, thereby acquiring users for less human cost (as opposed to missed revenue opportunity).
Because said 100k'er are probably paying off someone inside reddit. Remember when Ebay sent some couple bloody pigs masks? Yeah evil people work at companies.
> It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way.
And on top of that, some of said "volunteers" are power-hungry, petty, useless fucking morons. Especially the large subreddits tend to be run by people I wouldn't trust to boil some pasta without triggering a fire alert, and yes I know people who manage that.
It’s worse than that. On r/news they shadow ban anybody who doesn’t have verified email. No message or anything. Just nobody sees your comments. I probably made 20 or more comments there over a few months before I figured it out. It felt humiliating.
It's even worse than that. They preemptively ban you outright on lots of major subs for posting on other subs. For instance, I can't interact with r/pics because I once commented on r/redditachievements. And a housemate once upvoted a pic on there which got us both banned for a week because Reddit thought I was trying to do a run-around on the ban.
Same for stack overflow. I tried it once. Never engage with stack overflow ever since. Whereas I am active here. If this goes, I am not posting here either. This is then another echo chamber
I agree. I faced this in the psychology subreddit, forced to quit.
They wanted karma to post comments, but without posting comments, how am I supposed to get karma specific within that community?
If "farming karma" is a thing, maybe that forum deserves what is coming. Either the karma mechanic is inappropriate given the demographic, or it is too hard for the users to avoid upvoting bots.
Hetzner charge between €10 and €48 for an 8vcpu setup, depending on how many other users you're happy to share with.
For €104/mo you can get a 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (basically identical to your 4565p) w/ 128GB DDR5, 2x2TB PCIE Gen4 SSD.
That's not to say you're wrong about dedicated being much better value than VPS on a performance per dollar basis, but the markup that the European companies charge is much, much lower compared to what they'd charge in the US.
In this instance you're looking at a ~17 month payback period even ignoring colo fees. Assuming a ~$100 colo fee that sibling comment suggested, you're looking at closer to 8 years.
Great points. If we’re going to talk about dedicated servers and long lock-in contracts, you have to look at the equivalent prices for hosted alternatives.
It’s fun to start thinking about building your own server and putting in a rack, but there’s always a lot of tortured math to compare it to completely different cloud hosted solutions.
One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day. As the user base grows we can easily switch to larger instances. We can also geographically distribute servers and provide lower latency.
There is a long list of benefits that are omitted when people make arguments based solely on monthly cost numbers. If we’re going to talk about long term dedicated server contracts we should at least price against similar options from companies like Hetzner.
> One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day.
At work we have this day / night cycle. But for some reason we're married to AWS. If we provisioned 24/7/365 a bunch of servers at Hetzner or such to cover the peaks with some margin, it would still be cheaper by a notable margin. Sure, 90% of them would twiddle their thumbs from 22 PM to 10 AM. So what?
Sure, if your clients are completely unpredictable and you'll see x100 traffic without notice, the cloud is great.
But how many companies are actually in that kind of situation? Looking back over a year or two, we're quite reliably able to predict when we'll have more visitors and how many more compared to baseline. We could just adjust the headroom to be able to take in those spikes. And I suppose if you want to save the environment, you could just turn off the Hetzner servers while they sit unused.
I’ve ran MP game servers that follow this pattern. A good rule of thumb is you should cover 75% of your peak load with your cheaper steady state pre allocated machines, and burst for the last 25%. It really is that expensive to do.
If you can reasonably estimate your usage and the peak total usage is less than ~5x the minimum, it still makes sense to just rent hardware at Hetzner.
You even have the possibility of managed racks, whereby you rent one or more racks, but the servers are still provided by Hetzner so you don't have to handle procurement, logistics or replacements.
I'd be terrified to run anything other than a classic web server on Hetzner, have heard too many stories of them arbitrarily terminating workloads they didn't understand.
I've gotten notices from Hetzner for hosting IPFS node, apparently it does some local network discovery by default which looks like a malware when you squint hard enough.
Apparently inference itself is profitable, at least according to an interview I watched with Dario. They even cover the cost of training itself, if you look at it on a model-by-model basis.
The cash burn comes from models ballooning in size - they spend (as an example, not actual numbers) 100M on training + inference for the lifetime of Sonnet 3.5, make 200M from subscriptions/api keys while it's SOTA, but then have to somehow come up with 1B to train Opus 4.0.
To run some other back of the envelope calcs:
GLM 4.7 Air (previous "good" local LLM) can generate ~70 tok/s on a Mac Mini. This equates to 2,200 million tokens per year.
Openrouter charge $0.40 per million tokens, so theoretically if you were using that Mac mini at 100% utilisation you'd be generating $880 per annum "worth" of API usage.
Assuming a power draw of something 50W, you're only looking at 440kWh per annum. At 20c per kWh that's $90 on power, plus $499 to get the hardware itself. Depreciate that $499 hardware cost over 3 years and you're looking at ~$260 to generate ~$880 in inference income.
An even easier way to get into this is simply by downloading a program called LM Studio. You can mount a model and chat to it within 10-15 mins with no experience whatsoever, and no configuration at all.
That said, last time I tried local LLMs (around when gpt-oss came out) it still seemed super gimmicky (or at least niche, I could imagine privacy concerns would be a big deal for some). Very few use cases where you want an LLM but can't benefit immensely from using SOTA models like Claude Opus.
It's funny you say that, I thought this would be an article about how Anthropic have managed to produce a better (coding) product than OpenAI despite having 1/10th of the funding.
The new versions of Opus (4.5 and 4.6) are absolutely amazing - first time I've felt it necessary to throw hundreds of dollars in a single month at Cursor.
I heard similar things about the older models too (Sonnet 3.5 beating GPT-4 etc.) but sadly only jumped on the Cursor train in the last 12 months or so.
The problem is not the models, is the moat and budget. Google and X still have money and are profitable, all the other AI companies are losing billions per year.
And customers will happily switch from one model to another in a heartbeat.
Yeah, it does seem vibecoded or at least not really qa'd, but on the flip side this produces the more or less the exact calendar template I've been looking for for a while.
I think this app really speaks to the value of AI driven coding - it's clearly less polished than what an experienced SWE would produce given several days of time but at the same time offers real value and solves a niche problem.
I run an eComm business and have built multiple software tools that each save the business $1000+ per month, in measurable wage savings/reductions in misfires.
What used to take a month or so can now be spat out in less than a week, and the tools are absolutely fit for purpose.
It's arguably more than that, since I used to have to spread that month of work over 3-6 months (working part time while also doing daily tasks at the warehouse), but now can just take a week WFH and come back with a notable productivity gain.
I will say, to give credit to the anti-AI-hype crowd, that I make sure to roll the critical parts of the software by hand (things like the actual calculations that tell us what price an item at, for example). I did try to vibecode too much once and it backfired.
But things like UIs, task managers for web apps, simple API calls to print a courier label, all done with vibes.
The thing is though, current AI safety checks don't stop actually harmful things while also hyperfixating on anything that could be seen as politically incorrect.
It was totally fine making fake news articles about Bill Clinton's ties to Epstein but drew the line at drawing a cartoon of a black man eating fried chicken and watermelon.
I was not big fan of Liveleak, but I really enjoyed WatchPeopleDie community, one could learn a lot in the comments about how to be safer in the enviroment (I'm aware they moved to website, but it's not same anymore, too much friction to visit it)
after being the regular visitor of WPD I stand at the junction waiting for my turn shielded by the traffic lights pole and always look in the eye of the driver when crossing the road, especially if it's tall truck
some ppl don't realize how many lives actually WPD saved, but hey now we have victory nobody is exposed to this disturbing content and making silly jokes about death, right?
Watching it once in a while because your brain craves novelty (good or bad) is not the same as watching all sorts of graphic imagery (not just pron) for 8+ hours a day 6/7 days a week.
This is obviously a flippant comment that shouldn't be taken seriously. But the loss of LiveLeak seems like the loss of the journalism that the Internet was supposed to bring. There were a lot of odd things posted on there with some unneeded commentary but it was a place that would post unfiltered content that other places were scared to post. A lot of it was disgusting that I wouldn't watch, but it's weird to think that the Internet is censored now in a way where it's hard to even find it.
You can find areas of propaganda where site rule breaking will be allowed if it serves the interest of the owner, but you really have to seek it out. It's even weirder that the latest generation is self censoring common words so they can show up on sites like TikTok. Billionaires buying newspapers to censor seems less strange but sadly something I also didn't expect.
A lot of people arguing the philosophy here, but I'm willing to bet that sneak simply had very strong negative experiences around gift giving growing up.
For a lot of people, a gift is not a gift but an invitation to abuse, and it's hard to be rational or pro-social about it when you were on the receiving end of that as a child.
Thanks for the completely off base psychoanalysis. You’re wrong.
I am simply tired of people pretending that using free software means that the author is owed a damn thing, even if you go and make a billion dollars with it. It doesn’t affect them one way or another what you do with something that they willingly chose to make no longer theirs. After releasing something as f/oss it shouldn’t even be called “yours” because you wrote it. After you choose to release it as free and open source, it is everyone’s software; it is no longer yours and the fact that you wrote it is now irrelevant.
A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get disheartened and walk away forever.
The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days, farming karma).
The net result is that these rules ensure that much greater proportion of new accounts come from bad actors - who else would jump through hoops just to participate on a web forum?
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