Reddit's no longer a cashstrapped startup with limited resources and options. It's ultimately their choice to stick with Amazon. If Amazon has been giving them the run around for more than a whole year, maybe it would've been a smart decision to move to something else.
Last time they had this deal (a few weeks ago), there was an option to defer filing until Jan 1st, to save on 2008 fees and administration tasks. I assume you can opt to do so again.
So you are assuming most ppl who live in NYC live in an apartment with an elevator and a security guard, on the upper east side/midtown/chelsea. Unless you are running in finance and high-society circles, no one gives a crap that you live in an apartment that costs over $2500/month.
If one is resourceful(and most starving artists/actors/entrepreneurs are) you can find apartment shares in plenty of neighborhoods for under $800/month. It's not luxurious but living in those circumstances is no less worthwhile.
I was at a web 2.0 presentation couple weeks ago and there was a company presenting their product, which turned out to be essentially a social-bookmarking-aggregator. What's next? An aggregator for that as well?
Part of it is the large number of css and javascript files they load on each page. Visiting the home page (and not logged in) results in 34 http requests. Roughly 1/3 are images, and the rest are javascript and css. That many requests slows down all page loading, even when locally cached. If I were facebook (the best I have is a parody site of facebook: http://farcebook.codeirony.com/), I would put all the css into 1 file, and all the js into 1 file.
The other part is that they have a ton of users. It's a non trivial problem to make pages load quickly while providing dynamic content for millions of users.
