11 ms·
Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
Among the mega high-traffic websites reddit seems to be the slowest and most unreliable. Many times it simply won't load, or log you out for no reason. Why do you think reddit never manages to improve its infrastructure?
- logicalmonster 5y agoThe cynic in me has to guess that too much of their development efforts are geared around disrupting and managing viewpoints that their users and corporate sponsors find problematic. To give a small example: back when a certain subreddit used to frequently appear in /r/all Reddit apparently wrote code to prevent it from ever appearing there again.
- garbagecoder 5y agoYou’re giving them wayyyy too much credit for being able to pull anything off. The problem with reddit isn’t their employees. It’s the finders keepers moderation system. First one to set up a “community” on a given topic is now able to manage messaging.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- GekkePrutser 5y agoWell their JavaScript "new" site sucks so horribly that it even brings my heavy gaming PC to its knees. Clearly they have no clue what they're doing (probably at management level, even bad devs can do better than this) or they have a ton of legacy code they're trying to write around. But even the old one had its issues. Deep threads with thousands of posts would often crash when you clicked the "read more" to go deeper and instead redirected to the top. So it could be that's where it's at. I assume a complete code review / partial rewrite would be very hard to justify at Reddit's scale. I'd use the old one but I find it so clunky. Even though it has the same density of hacker news it lacks all its grace.
- ent101 5y agoThere are many frontend issues for sure. But I just don't understand why so many HTTP requests to the site fail. E.g. pages are simply blank about 20% of the time.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoAha that's not really what I'm seeing on my side. I very often get the error page with the "funny" picture but not 20% for sure. Maybe it's user dependent or only affects some subs?
- ent101 5y agoA hard refresh for me is a roll of dice, I usually expect it to fail.
- aprdm 5y agoYes it’s horrible and when you look at the network tools there’s a crazy amount of requests flying around too
- sprkwd 5y agoDon’t even ask about the app which take 20+ Seconds to load in content.
- didntknowya 5y agotheir website is terrible. even if i stumble across a post in my desktop that i want to read ill try search for it on my phone instead because their site works better on (third party) mobile apps.
- connor-brooks 5y agoAn alternative frontend that was mentioned on HN earlier today: https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI assume they want to nudge everyone onto their app so they can bypass ad blocking and anti tracking efforts. Just like Instagram, tiktok, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.
- thrashtitan 5y agoThe ironic thing is, their app is down more often than the website!
- 535188B17C93743 5y agoDoesn't the app pull from the same servers that are down? When I have browser issues, I usually have app issues too.
- ngold 5y agoI use redreader and it works like a charm with no ads. If I happen to look at the actual website on mobile, it will freeze the browser almost instantly. So meesed up.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI would not put it past people to cause accessing the website via browser to randomly have more errors or slowdowns in order to get people to try the app and then show people a better experience on it.
- dd444fgdfg 5y agoi used their iOS app, and they seem to have an outage around once every two weeks. other than that the performance is fine. it must be a front end problem
- callesgg 5y agoUm i noticed this to. The IOS app runs smooth but the website is barely functional on IOS. It is not uncommon for me to give up and close down Reddit cause i can’t open a post. I have until now just assumed they want the website to suck so that you are more likely to install the APP. But now as I think about it a bit deeper that seams a bit to crazy.
- dd444fgdfg 5y agoI suspect it's less a case of them wanting the web client to suck, and more a case that the people who decide priorities don't care about the web client. I'd bet there's some super frustrated PM/TL who knows what to do and wants to fix it but isn't allowed to spend any time on it.
- jieegn 5y agoThey closed-sourced their repo, changed the interface, pushed coins, denied hotlinking and instead forces to visit the site to view videos, added obfuscated analytics, etc. In short, they want money, and they don't care if you have to suffer for it.
- kart23 5y agotwitter is a close second for me. The bug that requires you to reload three times, inconsistent pop-ups demanding you to login, and slow interface. old.reddit.com is still ok, but yeah the redesign is terrible. You would think metrics would be much better if the sites were a little more usable.
- markus_zhang 5y agoreddit mobile breaks down 25% of the time for me...
- QuercusMax 5y agoSame here. I'll click a link to go to the mobile app, and it doesn't load anything. Go back and open in mobile Chrome and it loads just fine.
- garbagecoder 5y agoReddit should be a quarter page box in a social psychology book about groupthink. It’s a shit website and there are better link aggregators.
- yellow_lead 5y agoWhat alternatives do you like? I was looking at Lemmy
- tootie 5y agoReddit does what it does very well. Any community that gets past a certain size is going to suffer the same problems. A lot of front page subs like /r/funny or whatever are overwhelmed with noise. The specialty communities around a game or hobby or industry are frequently great. Invaluable in some cases.
- reportgunner 5y ago> The specialty communities around a game or hobby or industry are frequently great. Are they ? The subreddits for the games I play are 80% posts of people who wrote their question on reddit instead of google.
- hamburgerwah 5y agoThey pay their engineers below and in cases half of market rates, place no organizational value on quality engineering, their CEO/head engineer is a buffoon and they have a history of screwing people with regard to equity compensation. It's not a complicated explanation at all.
- 908B64B197 5y agoShare numbers?
- garbagecoder 5y agoAnd rely on the “community” to moderate. For zero point zero compensation.
- sp527 5y ago> their CEO/head engineer is a buffoon and they have a history of screwing people with regard to equity compensation. It's not a complicated explanation at all. This is the first time I’ve heard something negative about Huffman. Could you elaborate?
- kennethallen 5y agoI mean, this was pretty embarrassing. Seems like poor judgment. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
- tootie 5y agoBring back Ellen Pao!
- technion 5y agoI don't think this should reasonably be pinned on engineer remuneration. If you were advertising for "top performance tuning experts", it's fair they may not get them. But every criticism regarding root issues with the site (dark patterns pushing the app, AMP pages that don't load any content, loading screens that don't load anything, pages that almost seem deliberately broken) are really not the sort of things you associate with someone who "worked hard on performance but wasn't skilled enough". I would generally expect if they doubled their rates they'd get better ad targeting and investments in a range of places that aren't "faster websites".
- snwfog 5y agoI am also very annoyed that Reddit is slow, bloated and forces me to use their app. I built an alternative Reddit client, if you know TweetDeck, then you might like Rdddeck. https://rdddeck.com https://rdddeck.com
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ncr100 5y agoUse the API via the mobile app RIF (Reddit Is Fun) for Android and avoid the site's anti-usability-patterns like the plague. * https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
- sprkwd 5y agoDoesn’t help me. I don’t have android.
- approxim8ion 5y agoApollo and Narwahl are popular iOS clients.
- sdze 5y agoAfter using this mess of website reddit I am wondering why people didn’t like usenet and prefer centralised private and censored services.
- smackeyacky 5y agoUsenet became unusable due to spam / people trolling with illegal material of the worst kind. You can kind of filter it or pay for a good Usenet provider to sort most of that out, but the good old days of being a Usenet node and having a manageable amount of traffic disappeared 25-30 years ago. The moderated platforms looked better (Slashdot for example) but the spammers and chancers ruined that too. As a link aggregator, Fark or Digg or (threw up in my mouth) 4Chan all either censored themselves stupid or became a cesspit of humanity that no self respecting adult could tolerate. Reddit looked like it might be able to find a way forward but as others have suggested, if your business model completely relies on your community doing your work for free, it is eventually doomed to fail as soon as it becomes popular because the amount of work becomes overwhelming. Yet we are stuck because the conclusion all these sites seem to come to (heavy, paid moderation) makes the sites so antiseptic they stop having anything interesting on them. The real answer seems to be: use it until it can't be used and move to the next thing when that happens. Reddit is not quite unuseable for the specialist subs but it's getting close.
- xqcgrek2 5y agoReddit might be the easiest short once they go public.
- glugc 5y agoIt's written in Python and uses Cassandra.
- mikewarot 5y agoHave you tried browsing the site with an ad blocker enabled? It's likely all the ads from elsewhere. I do quite well with chrome and ad block plus.
- scrubs 5y agoGyfcat / gif slowness I think is a big part of this. Now that did not answer your question, but at least reddit routinely pokes fun at itself under /r/funny and /r/yesitstrue where its servers are depicted as 1 old overheated pizza box. Also 34% of all resources are spent running rule engines to "enforce" posting compliance.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ksec 5y agoSo they could push you to use their Apps? There are very little incentive to improve their website.