Ultimately it doesn’t cost that much to serve some links and text. Video hosting (especially live streamed!) can get expensive, but for example HN runs on a single server with a standby[1]. Reddit’s technical moat is negligible. It’s the network effect that matters.
I'm not so sure the network effect is significant to Reddit. Forum going is a solitary activity, not a social one. Reddit does not become less attractive if your friends don't use it. In fact, it would not become less attractive if there were no people and the site's characters were powered by sufficiently advanced LLM models or some such. Any reliance on other humans is merely an implementation detail, not the core offering.
Humans no doubt at this time provide the simplest, most affordable, and best implemented implementation, and for that reason you do need some number of humans to provide the software outputs in practice. As LLMs improve that may not always be the case, but we'll assume for today it is. But, again, I'm not sure a service like Reddit benefits from more and more people ad infinitum as the network effect would. More and more just creates more noisy outputs.
I suggest that so long as your inputs create suitable outputs, say, ~75% of the time then you'll be happy. If even just one person can stay on top of providing that then you don't gain from even more people. In practice, that would be a lot for one person to keep up with, but by the time you have hundreds of people the returns start to quickly diminish. In fact, too many people, again, can create too much noise, which reduces the quality of service.
Reddit gained in popularity because it had, and arguably still has, the best generally available forum software. As we all know, Reddit only staved off certain death a number of years ago because the best forum software that came before it was rewritten and became unusable in that rewrite, prompting a migration to Reddit.
I stays popular because, on top of the quality of software, it benefits from the stickiness effect. Now that people are accustomed to using it, it's easy to keep on using it. One might find that Lemmy, or whatever, works just as well, but "just as well" isn't sufficient reason to put in the effort to try. This is the only real "moat" Reddit has.
But the network effect? The network effect can actually be detrimental to forums. Reddit has been able to stay relevant with a large network because it has done well in avoiding the network effect, pushing users into small, isolated groups.
> I'm not so sure the network effect is significant to Reddit. Forum going is a solitary activity, not a social one. Reddit does not become less attractive if your friends don't use it. In fact, it would not become less attractive if there were no people and the site's characters were powered by sufficiently advanced LLM models or some such. Any reliance on other humans is merely an implementation detail, not the core offering.
What? No. This completely misses the point of highly specialised, high-quality subreddits like r/AskHistorians that would be worthless if there weren't actually other people on it.
If I wanted to talk to an LLM, I would do so directly, but most of the time I don't.
If Reddit silently replaced any outside human involvement with generative actors of sufficient quality and believability one day, how would you notice?
There is nothing about the service that indicates you are interacting with humans, aside from our knowledge of how it is likely implemented, and goes to lengths to hide that there are humans involved. That it is implemented using humans is just an implementation detail.
> I guess this is the same kind of question as "how do you know you don't live in the matrix?".
Not really. The canonical example of tech that does benefit from the network effect is the telephone. The more people on the telephone network, the more useful it becomes. A phone network that silently replaces each node with LLM agents would soon become apparent as when you catch up with the people you thought you were calling in the flesh, discrepancies will start to emerge.
But Reddit (and HN for that matter) tries to hide the existence of people. While I assume you are human, I don't really know. I don't know your name. I don't know what you look like. I don't know where you live. I know nothing. And, frankly, I don't need to because you are not part of the experience. That you are (probably) human is just an implementation detail. Whether you are human or an LLM is completely immaterial. What human participation there might be when using a forum is done so in solitude. It is not a social experience.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041