Do people still use Pinterest? I used to hear/see females in my family talking about it but not anymore. It seems like all Pinterest does today is destroy google image search.

Women, not females

I use it all the time looking for drawing references. It’s an amazing resource for my hobby.

They could try doing it themselves but it’s a big risk and far from guaranteed to be cheaper.

It's absolutely guaranteed to be cheaper.

(Provided you know what you're doing.)

Probaly a case of vendor lock-in.

The hubris of HN posters has no bounds. I’m sure that tweet gave you all you need to know to contradict the insiders responsible for making multi-billion dollar decisions… It’s probably the case that they’re all dumb, and the Internet rando has the absolutely guaranteed answer.

WeWork is proof that people making multi-billion dollar decisions aren’t always smart, and that’s even in a somewhat less volatile sector. When it comes to tech and the cloud hype I bet it’s even worse.

More middle men means more expensive. Regardless of what you think, you can't cheat the laws of conservation, they're built into the physical structure of our universe.

AWS is a middle man in the hosting business. Sometimes it's okay, but you can't cheat the fact that Amazon has to take their cut.

(This might change in the future when FAANG privatizes the global Internet for their own use, but we're not there yet today.)

And Toyota is a middleman between you and the raw materials to build a car. I guess it’s obvious that you can build a car cheaper than Toyota? How do the economies of scale fit into this false equivalency of a physics analogy?

No, this is the wrong analogy.

Amazon's added value is in bundling open source tools and in provisioning and autoscaling. They don't make hardware, they don't generate electricity, they're not an ISP. They outsource the actual hosting part to other people.

If you just want to host stuff you can cut out the AWS middleman and rent a data center location for much cheaper. (Like, 4-5 or even 10 times cheaper.)

And yes, as a programmer/devops/sysadmin thinking about provisioning, autoscaling and packaging is your job. And yes, you absolutely can do it more efficiently than Amazon, because economies of scale don't apply to IT human resources. (Software projects don't become cheaper to make when you hire more programmers, quite the opposite, in fact.)

A bigger risk than being on the hook for $3bn? Doubtful.

454 million MAU, so about $0.88 per year per user. Not a terrible deal by any stretch.

What counts as a "user" in this case?

Anyone who has put a fake email into their forced-registration popup to be able to view any of their content I'd imagine.

Companies don’t usually publish their definitions, but they also have to make an effort to exclude fake users or risk being held accountable by their investors.

Sure, but if I accidentally click on one of their links in google image search I'm "using" the website and not "fake", but $0.80 would be quite a bad deal ;) Whereas its registered users actively doing something on the site, not as terrible.

Ah, I see what you mean. I've never seen a major company claim top of funnel were "users". You'd have to have an account.

I wasn’t gonna say it!