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Reddit seemingly has more outages than any other social media company. What is going on in their infrastructure? It's been like this since I've been using it. I

Reddit seemingly has more outages than any other social media company. What is going on in their infrastructure? It's been like this since I've been using it. It must be unfixable or leadership has their priorities way out of line.

riffic 4y ago
complex systems are complicated to run? it's incredibly expensive to chase another 9 of availability so everyone who isn't the bell system has had outages from time to time.
blahyawnblah 4y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure why they haven't been able to sort out their infrastructure issues. Nothing they do is rocket science. Especially these days. Probably concentrating on IPO and trying to keep the balance sheet tight.
- sofixa 4y ago
  Eh, at their scale(one of the most visited websites across the world) everything is complex. It doesn't excuse their continuous failures in some aspects (e.g. video player still sucks, years later), but in general reliability is decent. Their engineering blog was quite enlightening, but I don't think they've posted in a while.
  - dmonitor 4y ago
    the new layout is still pretty garbage compared to the old one and because of this, reddit has to maintain four different web front ends: new desktop, new mobile, old desktop (old.reddit.com), and old mobile (i.reddit.com). hosting their own image/videos so that 80% of the content isn’t dependent on third parties like imgur is probably a good change, but there’s no way it didn’t massively increase the complexity of maintaining the website too.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      The old frontends aren't maintained, so their existence has a negligible impact. Hosting images/videos is indeed a non-trivial matter at their scale, but if memory serves me right they're just using Cloudfront, so it's pretty straightforward.
      - kkarakk 4y ago
        old.reddit not being maintained is a bonus imo - you don't see a lot of the gamification features they keep introducing. everytime i accidentally visit new reddit i think "wow i would not be using this site if i had to wade through this visual overload"
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Why would they IPO? They're owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by the Newhouse family. They're not an independent company and haven't been since 2011.
xmprt 4y ago
Until relatively recently (compared to other social media companies), Reddit used to have planned downtime. I supposed 100% uptime isn't deeply ingrained in their culture.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I've found 100% uptime pretty easy - never change anything; including patching.
thrillgore 4y ago
They have a storied lineage of mismanagement, but it would take hours to document so i'll get to the bullet points: * Yishan Wong wanted to prioritize subreddits that had the most gildings and the users didn't like it, so he packed up and left. * Ellen Pao took over and also resigned because the community didn't like a firing of an employee. * Steve Huffman came back at Sam Altman's advisment, and proceeded to salvage an alt-right subreddit (/r/KotakuInAction) after being closed by its creator, approved the hiring of a sex pest admin, shut down RedditGifts, went all in on monetization, launched a React redesign that still sucks, gated features behind an app, and further siloed the community outreach from corporate. Community oriented services are a pain in the ass as they scale, but reddit has not taken the challenges in stride. I feel like Digg got lucky imploding instead of becoming popular. I wish Snapzu or Lemmy had the numbers reddit did to make them usable, but that's kind of a double edged sword.
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
  [dead]
fallingknife 4y ago
How financially damaging are outages to Reddit? It's not down enough to lose users. Sure, there is add revenue loss, but is it really enough to meaningfully affect the bottom line? If not, then I don't see why leadership would prioritize it.
ForHackernews 4y ago
Maybe their priorities are appropriate? It doesn't matter if shitposting sites like reddit or twitter have five nines of uptime. Who cares, go outside!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
clumsysmurf 4y ago
They should fix it by reverting back to 'old' reddit; probably less demanding on their infra :P
- chippiewill 4y ago
  Joking aside, old reddit always had the same issues
fredoralive 4y ago
I remember with discussions about another site, people noted that Reddit only has a headcount of around 700 (perhaps a bit more now, looks like that figure was a couple of years ago). Some of those are going to be non-technical roles as well (HR, ads, management etc. etc.). So could it be they're just a bit too small staffed for the scale of site they're running, and just don't have enough people working on the basic "site should not fall over" type foundational issues? Kind of the reverse of the stereotypical bloated social media companies?
- Macha 4y ago
  Not that long ago Reddit had a headcount of about 5, and it was already one of the biggest sites on the internet.

riffic 4y ago

complex systems are complicated to run? it's incredibly expensive to chase another 9 of availability so everyone who isn't the bell system has had outages from time to time.

blahyawnblah 4y ago

Yeah, I'm not sure why they haven't been able to sort out their infrastructure issues. Nothing they do is rocket science. Especially these days. Probably concentrating on IPO and trying to keep the balance sheet tight.

sofixa 4y ago
Eh, at their scale(one of the most visited websites across the world) everything is complex. It doesn't excuse their continuous failures in some aspects (e.g. video player still sucks, years later), but in general reliability is decent. Their engineering blog was quite enlightening, but I don't think they've posted in a while.
- dmonitor 4y ago
  the new layout is still pretty garbage compared to the old one and because of this, reddit has to maintain four different web front ends: new desktop, new mobile, old desktop (old.reddit.com), and old mobile (i.reddit.com). hosting their own image/videos so that 80% of the content isn’t dependent on third parties like imgur is probably a good change, but there’s no way it didn’t massively increase the complexity of maintaining the website too.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    The old frontends aren't maintained, so their existence has a negligible impact. Hosting images/videos is indeed a non-trivial matter at their scale, but if memory serves me right they're just using Cloudfront, so it's pretty straightforward.
    - kkarakk 4y ago
      old.reddit not being maintained is a bonus imo - you don't see a lot of the gamification features they keep introducing. everytime i accidentally visit new reddit i think "wow i would not be using this site if i had to wade through this visual overload"
ChickenNugger 4y ago
Why would they IPO? They're owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by the Newhouse family. They're not an independent company and haven't been since 2011.

xmprt 4y ago

Until relatively recently (compared to other social media companies), Reddit used to have planned downtime. I supposed 100% uptime isn't deeply ingrained in their culture.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I've found 100% uptime pretty easy - never change anything; including patching.

thrillgore 4y ago

They have a storied lineage of mismanagement, but it would take hours to document so i'll get to the bullet points: * Yishan Wong wanted to prioritize subreddits that had the most gildings and the users didn't like it, so he packed up and left. * Ellen Pao took over and also resigned because the community didn't like a firing of an employee. * Steve Huffman came back at Sam Altman's advisment, and proceeded to salvage an alt-right subreddit (/r/KotakuInAction) after being closed by its creator, approved the hiring of a sex pest admin, shut down RedditGifts, went all in on monetization, launched a React redesign that still sucks, gated features behind an app, and further siloed the community outreach from corporate. Community oriented services are a pain in the ass as they scale, but reddit has not taken the challenges in stride. I feel like Digg got lucky imploding instead of becoming popular. I wish Snapzu or Lemmy had the numbers reddit did to make them usable, but that's kind of a double edged sword.

MrStonedOne 4y ago
[dead]

fallingknife 4y ago

How financially damaging are outages to Reddit? It's not down enough to lose users. Sure, there is add revenue loss, but is it really enough to meaningfully affect the bottom line? If not, then I don't see why leadership would prioritize it.

ForHackernews 4y ago

Maybe their priorities are appropriate? It doesn't matter if shitposting sites like reddit or twitter have five nines of uptime. Who cares, go outside!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

clumsysmurf 4y ago

They should fix it by reverting back to 'old' reddit; probably less demanding on their infra :P

chippiewill 4y ago
Joking aside, old reddit always had the same issues

fredoralive 4y ago

I remember with discussions about another site, people noted that Reddit only has a headcount of around 700 (perhaps a bit more now, looks like that figure was a couple of years ago). Some of those are going to be non-technical roles as well (HR, ads, management etc. etc.). So could it be they're just a bit too small staffed for the scale of site they're running, and just don't have enough people working on the basic "site should not fall over" type foundational issues? Kind of the reverse of the stereotypical bloated social media companies?

Macha 4y ago
Not that long ago Reddit had a headcount of about 5, and it was already one of the biggest sites on the internet.