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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. Re

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
    Reddit changed for the worse when they shifted from community focus to business focussed. There are so many ways that changed the website and everyone will tell you the same. The redesign was the last straw that got me to leave the website. These days the website is packed with adverts, incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) and its packed with an incredible amount of tracking. The content quality has gone down as well but I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content. Also the fact it has so many users has caused its decline. Reddit today has so many obvious shill/advert posts.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      >incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) // I think that is to ensure that when they tell you "it's faster to use via our app" that they're telling the truth; certainly when the 3 "use app" buttons per mobile view came along mobile appeared to get slower (the change also including cunning "continue" confusion to make people think they're continuing to use the website but they're really "continuing to nothing and instead changing your mind and installing our app").
    - markrages 8y ago
      > I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content. When it first began. before there were subreddits, it was a place for respectful, serious conversation. A few years later /r/TrueReddit was started as an attempt to get back to the glory years. Now it's as bad as the rest of reddit.
user5994461 8y ago
>>> Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability? I'd say stack overflow. They're both a relatively simplistic website showing text messages posted by users. Nothing fancy. Reddit is a simple message board as there were many 15 years ago. They don't host images or video themselves, which avoid the issue of bandwidth. They don't seem to have the breath of analytics and advertising tools offered by google or facebook.
- mschaef 8y ago
  I don't have any numbers, but it would honestly surprise me if StackOverflow was within two orders of magnitude of Reddit's traffic. Edit: here's some confirmation. Reddit has 330M active monthly users: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many-users-as-twitter-and-far-higher-engagement-rates/521789/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many... And SO has 10,002,577 total: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/976687 https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/9766...
  - user5994461 8y ago
    StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that, but that's still a fairly moderate site to operate. It is numerous orders of magnitudes away from the like of google, youtube or facebook.
    - mschaef 8y ago
      > StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. Maybe things have changed, but in 2016 they were running three or four dozen servers in each of two data centers: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
      - 8y ago
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Aren't these types of availability/scaling problems what AWS/Azure/etc are intended to solve?

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
  Reddit changed for the worse when they shifted from community focus to business focussed. There are so many ways that changed the website and everyone will tell you the same. The redesign was the last straw that got me to leave the website. These days the website is packed with adverts, incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) and its packed with an incredible amount of tracking. The content quality has gone down as well but I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content. Also the fact it has so many users has caused its decline. Reddit today has so many obvious shill/advert posts.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >incredibly slow (it takes about 15 seconds to load on mobile) // I think that is to ensure that when they tell you "it's faster to use via our app" that they're telling the truth; certainly when the 3 "use app" buttons per mobile view came along mobile appeared to get slower (the change also including cunning "continue" confusion to make people think they're continuing to use the website but they're really "continuing to nothing and instead changing your mind and installing our app").
  - markrages 8y ago
    > I can't ever say reddit was known for high quality content. When it first began. before there were subreddits, it was a place for respectful, serious conversation. A few years later /r/TrueReddit was started as an attempt to get back to the glory years. Now it's as bad as the rest of reddit.

user5994461 8y ago

>>> Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability? I'd say stack overflow. They're both a relatively simplistic website showing text messages posted by users. Nothing fancy. Reddit is a simple message board as there were many 15 years ago. They don't host images or video themselves, which avoid the issue of bandwidth. They don't seem to have the breath of analytics and advertising tools offered by google or facebook.

mschaef 8y ago
I don't have any numbers, but it would honestly surprise me if StackOverflow was within two orders of magnitude of Reddit's traffic. Edit: here's some confirmation. Reddit has 330M active monthly users: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many-users-as-twitter-and-far-higher-engagement-rates/521789/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-now-has-as-many... And SO has 10,002,577 total: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/976687 https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/9766...
- user5994461 8y ago
  StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. I wouldn't be surprised as well if reddit was two orders of magnitude more than that, but that's still a fairly moderate site to operate. It is numerous orders of magnitudes away from the like of google, youtube or facebook.
  - mschaef 8y ago
    > StackOverlow is a small website that can run in a garage on a couple of servers, and that's with a lot of margin. Maybe things have changed, but in 2016 they were running three or four dozen servers in each of two data centers: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
    - 8y ago

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

Aren't these types of availability/scaling problems what AWS/Azure/etc are intended to solve?