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It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is

It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. (Edit - as pointed out in replies to this post, this is an unfair characterization fueled by my recent frustrations with the direction the site is going. I don't think it is unreasonable to point out that reddit is failing the expectations of their users, but I don't doubt for a minute that the individuals working at reddit are very talented) 10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out. What has the focus been if not stabilizing their infrastructure? It appears to be the introduction of a single page application that feels clunky, conceals ads better, and implements all kinds of dark UX patterns. Meanwhile, there are still bugs that have existed for years that still aren't fixed. There's even a redirect loop that you can get stuck in during authentication in certain scenarios that will completely break the site and bring you back to the same page until your session expires. It's been there for at least a year now. Reddit has gone full digg v4 EDIT: After thinking about this more, I'm not sure that reddit going full digg v4 means that they'll share the same outcome as digg. The internet now seems to be a small set of companies so entrenched in their position due to swallowing mass amount of users and raising enough funds to optimize all the various little corners that can be optimized. Reddit might not actually be dead, but as they continue to optimize the weird and cool ways that people used to use the site, I know it will be for me.

arcticfox 8y ago
They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well. I used to occasionally visit /r/watchpeopledie as a reminder of my own mortality and some of the horrors of the world, but apparently NSFW wasn't enough for people visiting "watchpeopledie" to realize they might see something bad. So they "quarantined" it, which actually means totally breaking it, in my browser at least. RIP. Discussion by others here [0] "I'm a senior mod at /r/watchpeopledie, and we can all see through Reddit's bullshit and hypocrisy" and here [1] "Just a few thoughts on the hypocrisy of Reddit's quarantine" [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_a_senior_mod_at_rwatchpeopledie_and_we_can_all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just_a_few_thoughts_on_the_hypocrisy_of_reddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just...
- ssnistfajen 8y ago
  Yeah the horde of edgelords in WPD totally isn't one of the reasons the sub got quarantined. Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    Can you elaborate? I assumed that quarantining a sub was about the posts, rather than the comments. This is based on my experience of every subreddit having lots of offensive comments (granted, mostly downvoted.)
    - ssnistfajen 8y ago
      Posts and comments are all contents. Offensive posts will not spawn inoffensive comments. In WPD you can probably get more upvotes by being more offensive. From what I've seen there, it's usually the ones trying to call for basic decency being downvoted.
    - linkingday 8y ago
      To somewhat further your point, take a look at /r/greentext and /r/4chan. While the posts themselves are only somewhat racist, the comments that accompany them are disgustingly edgy and juvenile - they're not being downvoted however. I don't think anything is likely to be done to these subreddits.
  - ModFightsCron 8y ago
    Yes. Let's ban repulsive stuff defined by democratic vote. Since the country is mostly Christian, no more talking about gay people - that's repulsive. Welcome to Russia. What is downright repulsive is people who think like you do. Here's an idea - you don't like it, don't go to the subreddit and let them do what they want. We don't need people like you dictating the repulsiveness level of what others can say. I know it makes you feel more in control of your life, but who would want to live like you do? That would be one sad existence.
  - 8y ago
fivefive55 8y ago
"10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out." Reddit goes down pretty rarely and I can't remember when it was ever down more than an hour or two. It also definitely didn't go down for the SuperBowl that I saw. The rest of your points are fair though.
- debaserab2 8y ago
  It definitely was down for me during the Superbowl - I checked periodically throughout the broadcast and each time was met with a "reddit servers are currently down" with the reddit teletubby logo thing. They have intermittent server issues all the time that usually don't last all that long but I rarely if ever see intermittent server issues from any other top 20 site.
  - mrep 8y ago
    I also saw that and a lot of other people saw that [0]. However, outside of the past 2 weeks which I have seen the service unavailable messages, it has been pretty good. [0]: https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/news/237455-problems-at-reddit-2 https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/news/237455-problems-...
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Reddit often goes "down" in that the front page is kept functional but trying to go to the comments page or interact with anything will cause it to 503.
  - fogleman 8y ago
    Funnily enough, I'm getting a "Service Unavailable" right now (on the front page).
- hjort-e 8y ago
  It down right now for me, second time this week. It's a fairly common occurence
dhimes 8y ago
Weren't they bought by Conde Nast a few years ago? Is that when it started to slide? EDIT: My how time flies. It was bought by CN in 2006!
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Reddit is ~1 year younger than Facebook, and ~1 year older than Twitter.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    That is amazing. While Facebook has reached world domination and died again (spawning an empire and catapulting its owner to be one of the world's richest people), Reddit still seems to be slugging around in the "we have something, maybe we can monetize it idk" phase. While admire that CN is not squeezing them to death, it appears like Reddit is vastly under-managed.
    - hopler 8y ago
      $3B is a failure now?
    - dageshi 8y ago
      The reddit audience was historically very resistant to advertising. When it began it really wasn't a million miles away from the HN audience, could you imagine the drama we'd have here on HN if suddenly banner ads started appearing? Reddit grew to the point where its audience is now a lot more broad and the previous audience is a vocal minority. They can get away with ramping up ads and other behaviour because the audience is no longer sufficiently monolithic to revolt. Bearing in mind in the past the audience did revolt and basically kicked out the then CEO (temporary CEO but still...) Ellen Pao, in what was a kind of full scale riot that shut most of the site.
      - user5994461 8y ago
        The ads are already happening all over HN. Don't you see the jobs posting for YC companies? Remember that YC is an investment company. They certainly made billions of dollars through the companies they funded, that were in part thanks to HN. Every time you send a direct job application to a HN company, that's 20% of your yearly salary staying in the company instead of going to recruiter fees. That's the hell of a revenue per click.
georgespencer 8y ago
I find this sort of slightly gloating incredulity at just how "obvious" the things a company ought to be working on are to be surprising. You have almost none of the information required to make informed judgements about whether or not Reddit's product team is incompetent (maybe they're doing way better than they should be under the circumstances?), or whether they're focusing on the right things. There are definitely problems with the user experience, but framing it in absolute terms and kicking off with a sweeping statement about the perceived incompetence of some people who are presumably bright and talented is… weird.
- tzjmetron 8y ago
  Agreed.
- debaserab2 8y ago
  Reddit is a top 20 globally ranked site that does not come anywhere close to performing at the level of other sites that share a similar popularity. In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways: 1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs). 2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years. 3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications. I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet. This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.
  - hopler 8y ago
    #visits isn't what matters when judging competency, amount of revenue/spending for the quality is. How much revenue do they have? They have only less than 1% of the valuation of Google
  - georgespencer 8y ago
    > I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit I'm sure you don't mean to, but as an FYI, when you say: > It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated It does sound like you're judging the individuals. I totally agree with everything you said in this post, I just think the way to couch it is not by seeming to attack the competency of people who have business pressures / goals. Just my two cents.
throwawaymath 8y ago
If nothing else, I think your conclusion that the product team is incompetent (or displays a lot of incompetency) is debatable. That seems very uncharitable. Reddit isn't flush with money the same way Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are. They can't throw wild amounts of cash at a problem to solve it or attract the talent who can. I think your characterization of Reddit's infrastructure challenges - which basically considers the problems as solved versus unsolved - is the wrong one. In my opinion, a better characterization would be whether or not Reddit has: 1) the money required to attract talent or buy infra, in order to 2) scale the website to extremely high availability under extreme load, while also 3) doing feature engineering and turning a profit. This seems like a highly nontrivial problem. Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability? Note that performance is a related but distinct problem from the Reddit UX and advertising. I think that they are probably introducing these kinds of user-hostile changes because they are precisely in the position I've described, and can't find a way to improve performance in the way you're describing.
- debaserab2 8y ago
  Yeah, you're right - that's an unfair characterization given the way you've posited the problem. My strong reaction comes from being a formerly very engaged user of the site observing a continuous detraction of all the reasons I started using the site in the first place.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  They dont need to throw huge amounts of money at it. Reddit was much much better a few years ago. Its next to useless now.
  - HNLurker2 8y ago
    Can you elaborate? I was, kid you not searching for good subreddits and then cane to HN for suggestions and found this on front page.
    - ndnxhs 8y ago
gojomo 8y ago
> It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. Growth & success despite inattentive & abusive product evolution (Reddit, Twitter) is actually a bullish signal of the core product's entrenchment.
noelsusman 8y ago
Their valuation went up by a billion dollars over that same time period so I'm not sure "incompetent" is the right word here.
russianbandit 8y ago
I myself have been looking for a good Reddit alternative.
- sadris 8y ago
  Notabug.io seems nice.
- catach 8y ago
  r/RedditAlternatives is pretty good for exploring what's new.
kamaal 8y ago
>>It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. The kind of things happen when their goals get set like: 1. Increase mobile app sign up/usage by 30%. 2. Revamp UI and launch by 2019. etc etc. People optimize for what they are asked to, setting fire to pretty much everything around. >>They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out. Kind of strange, because they rewrote their whole site in Python, which was originally in Common Lisp. All of that to solve this problem. Seems like it was just a project for some one at Reddit to get a promotion. OKR are a gift that keeps on giving.
TheKarateKid 8y ago
So true! The worst was when the "New Reddit" interface was launched. The site was almost unusable and I often had to refresh the page multiple times for the message thread to maybe load. I just experienced a site overload/offline error a few days ago (not Super Bowl). It's really unacceptable for a site of its age and presence on the Internet.

arcticfox 8y ago

They've totally broken "quarantined" subreddits as well. I used to occasionally visit /r/watchpeopledie as a reminder of my own mortality and some of the horrors of the world, but apparently NSFW wasn't enough for people visiting "watchpeopledie" to realize they might see something bad. So they "quarantined" it, which actually means totally breaking it, in my browser at least. RIP. Discussion by others here [0] "I'm a senior mod at /r/watchpeopledie, and we can all see through Reddit's bullshit and hypocrisy" and here [1] "Just a few thoughts on the hypocrisy of Reddit's quarantine" [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_a_senior_mod_at_rwatchpeopledie_and_we_can_all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/9js8gf/im_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just_a_few_thoughts_on_the_hypocrisy_of_reddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/comments/9js9j4/just...

ssnistfajen 8y ago
Yeah the horde of edgelords in WPD totally isn't one of the reasons the sub got quarantined. Gore will always be considered shock content, but the comments in WPD are almost always downright repulsive.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? I assumed that quarantining a sub was about the posts, rather than the comments. This is based on my experience of every subreddit having lots of offensive comments (granted, mostly downvoted.)
  - ssnistfajen 8y ago
    Posts and comments are all contents. Offensive posts will not spawn inoffensive comments. In WPD you can probably get more upvotes by being more offensive. From what I've seen there, it's usually the ones trying to call for basic decency being downvoted.
  - linkingday 8y ago
    To somewhat further your point, take a look at /r/greentext and /r/4chan. While the posts themselves are only somewhat racist, the comments that accompany them are disgustingly edgy and juvenile - they're not being downvoted however. I don't think anything is likely to be done to these subreddits.
- ModFightsCron 8y ago
  Yes. Let's ban repulsive stuff defined by democratic vote. Since the country is mostly Christian, no more talking about gay people - that's repulsive. Welcome to Russia. What is downright repulsive is people who think like you do. Here's an idea - you don't like it, don't go to the subreddit and let them do what they want. We don't need people like you dictating the repulsiveness level of what others can say. I know it makes you feel more in control of your life, but who would want to live like you do? That would be one sad existence.
- 8y ago

fivefive55 8y ago

"10 years ago when reddit would go down, you rooted for them as the underdog to figure it out. Now when it happens, it's just sad. They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out." Reddit goes down pretty rarely and I can't remember when it was ever down more than an hour or two. It also definitely didn't go down for the SuperBowl that I saw. The rest of your points are fair though.

debaserab2 8y ago
It definitely was down for me during the Superbowl - I checked periodically throughout the broadcast and each time was met with a "reddit servers are currently down" with the reddit teletubby logo thing. They have intermittent server issues all the time that usually don't last all that long but I rarely if ever see intermittent server issues from any other top 20 site.
- mrep 8y ago
  I also saw that and a lot of other people saw that [0]. However, outside of the past 2 weeks which I have seen the service unavailable messages, it has been pretty good. [0]: https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/news/237455-problems-at-reddit-2 https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/news/237455-problems-...
saagarjha 8y ago
Reddit often goes "down" in that the front page is kept functional but trying to go to the comments page or interact with anything will cause it to 503.
- fogleman 8y ago
  Funnily enough, I'm getting a "Service Unavailable" right now (on the front page).
hjort-e 8y ago
It down right now for me, second time this week. It's a fairly common occurence

dhimes 8y ago

Weren't they bought by Conde Nast a few years ago? Is that when it started to slide? EDIT: My how time flies. It was bought by CN in 2006!

saalweachter 8y ago
Reddit is ~1 year younger than Facebook, and ~1 year older than Twitter.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  That is amazing. While Facebook has reached world domination and died again (spawning an empire and catapulting its owner to be one of the world's richest people), Reddit still seems to be slugging around in the "we have something, maybe we can monetize it idk" phase. While admire that CN is not squeezing them to death, it appears like Reddit is vastly under-managed.
  - hopler 8y ago
    $3B is a failure now?
  - dageshi 8y ago
    The reddit audience was historically very resistant to advertising. When it began it really wasn't a million miles away from the HN audience, could you imagine the drama we'd have here on HN if suddenly banner ads started appearing? Reddit grew to the point where its audience is now a lot more broad and the previous audience is a vocal minority. They can get away with ramping up ads and other behaviour because the audience is no longer sufficiently monolithic to revolt. Bearing in mind in the past the audience did revolt and basically kicked out the then CEO (temporary CEO but still...) Ellen Pao, in what was a kind of full scale riot that shut most of the site.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      The ads are already happening all over HN. Don't you see the jobs posting for YC companies? Remember that YC is an investment company. They certainly made billions of dollars through the companies they funded, that were in part thanks to HN. Every time you send a direct job application to a HN company, that's 20% of your yearly salary staying in the company instead of going to recruiter fees. That's the hell of a revenue per click.

georgespencer 8y ago

I find this sort of slightly gloating incredulity at just how "obvious" the things a company ought to be working on are to be surprising. You have almost none of the information required to make informed judgements about whether or not Reddit's product team is incompetent (maybe they're doing way better than they should be under the circumstances?), or whether they're focusing on the right things. There are definitely problems with the user experience, but framing it in absolute terms and kicking off with a sweeping statement about the perceived incompetence of some people who are presumably bright and talented is… weird.

tzjmetron 8y ago
Agreed.
debaserab2 8y ago
Reddit is a top 20 globally ranked site that does not come anywhere close to performing at the level of other sites that share a similar popularity. In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways: 1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs). 2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years. 3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications. I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet. This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.
- hopler 8y ago
  #visits isn't what matters when judging competency, amount of revenue/spending for the quality is. How much revenue do they have? They have only less than 1% of the valuation of Google
- georgespencer 8y ago
  > I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit I'm sure you don't mean to, but as an FYI, when you say: > It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated It does sound like you're judging the individuals. I totally agree with everything you said in this post, I just think the way to couch it is not by seeming to attack the competency of people who have business pressures / goals. Just my two cents.

throwawaymath 8y ago

If nothing else, I think your conclusion that the product team is incompetent (or displays a lot of incompetency) is debatable. That seems very uncharitable. Reddit isn't flush with money the same way Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are. They can't throw wild amounts of cash at a problem to solve it or attract the talent who can. I think your characterization of Reddit's infrastructure challenges - which basically considers the problems as solved versus unsolved - is the wrong one. In my opinion, a better characterization would be whether or not Reddit has: 1) the money required to attract talent or buy infra, in order to 2) scale the website to extremely high availability under extreme load, while also 3) doing feature engineering and turning a profit. This seems like a highly nontrivial problem. Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability? Note that performance is a related but distinct problem from the Reddit UX and advertising. I think that they are probably introducing these kinds of user-hostile changes because they are precisely in the position I've described, and can't find a way to improve performance in the way you're describing.

debaserab2 8y ago
Yeah, you're right - that's an unfair characterization given the way you've posited the problem. My strong reaction comes from being a formerly very engaged user of the site observing a continuous detraction of all the reasons I started using the site in the first place.
ndnxhs 8y ago
They dont need to throw huge amounts of money at it. Reddit was much much better a few years ago. Its next to useless now.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? I was, kid you not searching for good subreddits and then cane to HN for suggestions and found this on front page.
  - ndnxhs 8y ago

gojomo 8y ago

> It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. Growth & success despite inattentive & abusive product evolution (Reddit, Twitter) is actually a bullish signal of the core product's entrenchment.

noelsusman 8y ago

Their valuation went up by a billion dollars over that same time period so I'm not sure "incompetent" is the right word here.

russianbandit 8y ago

I myself have been looking for a good Reddit alternative.

sadris 8y ago
Notabug.io seems nice.
catach 8y ago
r/RedditAlternatives is pretty good for exploring what's new.

kamaal 8y ago

>>It amazes me the kind of sheer incompetency their product team has demonstrated over the past 2-3 years. The kind of things happen when their goals get set like: 1. Increase mobile app sign up/usage by 30%. 2. Revamp UI and launch by 2019. etc etc. People optimize for what they are asked to, setting fire to pretty much everything around. >>They still can't even handle the kind of traffic that the super bowl brings them. They've had years to figure this out. Kind of strange, because they rewrote their whole site in Python, which was originally in Common Lisp. All of that to solve this problem. Seems like it was just a project for some one at Reddit to get a promotion. OKR are a gift that keeps on giving.

TheKarateKid 8y ago

So true! The worst was when the "New Reddit" interface was launched. The site was almost unusable and I often had to refresh the page multiple times for the message thread to maybe load. I just experienced a site overload/offline error a few days ago (not Super Bowl). It's really unacceptable for a site of its age and presence on the Internet.