"We are a startup that inherited a 15 year old website" was one of the things that resonated when I worked there.

Facebook is Alexa #5 in the US and has ~40,000 employees. Reddit is #6 and has ~500 employees. Twitter is #17 and has ~4,000 employees. (Numbers taken from quick Google searches)

They have some super talented engineers that work miracles with band aids and bubble gum.

Edit: Yes I understand not all employees work on everything. I was trying to give a sense of scale. Reddit is a tiny company with a massive website and no way to make money. If you have ideas - they are hiring.

Not really a miracle. Reddit software is magnitudes simpler than Facebook.

Not to mention the quality is often sub-par. For example, many hate their mobile app with a passion and search field could as well just not exist when I tried.

Their new redesign is so completely awful they have to have an option to “just show the old reddit” in your settings. If they ever take that away I think I’ll just stop using it, it’s that bad.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way - if they ever force me to use only the new site, then I'll leave reddit for good. Or maybe just use it on my phone (Apollo for Reddit is pretty good)

I stopped criticizing redesigns because i usually get over it, but the Reddit one makes the site at least 8x slower for me.

That’s been my complaint. The old server side rendered site was really fast to load. Ever since the first redesign a few years back it’s been really slow.

Here’s half the page you requested, and some other ‘related’ crap.

Same here. I doN't share msot people's outrage when it coems to redesigns, but this one only seems to have downsides.

Imagine redesigning Reddit with simple HTML, CSS and only the most necessary sprinkles of JavaScript. In my opinion it's clearly a document-based website that doesn't need to pretend being a one-page-app.

Forget the settings, just use http://old.reddit.com always :)

If you think that's bad, try using the browser version on mobile... It's full of annoying pop-ups to try to encourage you to use their crappy mobile app. (sadface) :(

Serious question: What makes it completely awful? Do you have ideas that might make it a better experience, besides "just use the old UI"?

Everything. Literally everything. It uses a WYSIWYG input which completely breaks old.reddit formatting inputs, it constantly causes confusion as to what comment you are replying to so you get people replying to the wrong person or replying to the main post, it looks cartoony and blatantly obvious you're on a social website if you're trying to reddit on the sly, It doesn't like browser windows that aren't open full screen if you're trying to reddit on the sly, it severely restricts how much information you can have in the sidebar, etc.

I love the redesign. I used to spend way to much time on Reddit, the redesign fixed that.

Haha I love that. Maybe I should turn on the redesign.

I a lot of people use third party mobile apps because the official one is subpar. They should just acqui-hire Apollo for iOS at least.

Given what happened after they acqui-hired Alien Blue, I'd say no they shouldn't.

Good point, I'd forgotten about that.

500 employees is still alot. Especially given the technology ecosystem that exists for leverage.

The revenue piece is an interesting one because i was an early adopter and remember the revenue struggle. Gold/silver doesn't cut it because it relies on generosity.

FB/Twitter are an ads business. Is that really not too lucrative of a field for reddit?

There are ads on Reddit already. I only ever use their website with an, but I get ads on the iOS app.

I've been seeing a significant rise in the usage of gold/silver/platinum lately, used heavily for banter on r/soccer (and for rewarding quality content as well.)

>I've been seeing a significant rise in the usage of gold/silver/platinum lately, used heavily for banter on r/soccer (and for rewarding quality content as well.)

Same, but it's because they changed the way gold works. If you have a subscription, for stuff like removing ads and what not, you get coins every month which then allows me to give out several silvers every month or let them pile up to give out a week of gold here and there. I doubt there has been a significant rise in people paying and is likely largely the new coin system.

ads on iOS ? Do yourself a favor and install Apollo like every sane person

Meh... they could have rewritten the site from the ground up, including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now. I have never worked there, but outside looking in, it seems like there is a significant lack of technical vision from them.

Other big players like Facebook, Twitter, etc, are literally inventing pivotal parts of the modern web technical stack. What has come out of reddit?

> including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now

Someone's never done a data migration while serving 1M+ qps!

But they have had downtime, it's not like downtime for a migration would damage their reputation.

I've come close to that many, many times with zero downtime. It does take planning, more than many folks would think. But it can be done as long as you think it through.

I've never done anything close to that scale of migration, but I also can't really imagine taking an approach that feels like a huge migration.

I feel like I would try to strangle the old app (putting proxies in front and redirecting endpoints as they're rewritten) rather than swapping it out wholesale.

At that point I don't know if it really counts as a migration as much as just development.

Any thoughts on that approach? Is that what you have done, or was it a more holistic swap over?

That isn't a data migration, that's a release.

Did you miss the part where Reddit has 500 employees whereas FB has 40000? There was a point in Reddit history where there was literally 1 engineer.

What's your point? Wikipedia is Alexa rank 10 and has ~300 employees.

What's your point? Wikipedia is developing even slower than Reddit. Not that it would need to, though.

They created a mobile app and dark patterns that pushed users to use it so they could show ads.

Yes, oh no. Dark patterns are closer to fraud than to a legitimate business model I'd recommend to my friends and family. Nigerian princes selling you gold is a business model too.

The company you work for, how do they make money? Do they market their products?

Yes of course. What's your point? All marketing lies, and there is no spectrum, and therefore no moral ambiguity in doing shady things?

There’s always ethical ways to generate money, too. Opt in generosity is proven to be viable.. see: Wikipedia, All of Patreon, Etc

Reddit gold was that, for a long time. Presumably, it didn’t work. (Or maybe wasn’t profitable enough?)

We are past ethical ways...

>>they could have rewritten the site from the ground up

They did. They even tossed out Common Lisp and bought in Python because they thought it would fix their problems. It didn't.

That was in December 2005, less than 6 months after the site launched. Reddit was tiny and didn't even have subreddits or comments yet. This is what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20051205025706/http://reddit.com...

The problems they're dealing with 14 years later as one of the top sites on the internet aren't even slightly comparable.

Sure, may be its time to move to something like Clojure or Golang now?

Python is a good scripting language, But if you are developing backend applications for this scale you probably need some serious JVM language. Or even Golang works fine.

Instagram's backend is written in python. Python is very slow, but still fast enough.

they could still backend to C or rust, no?

Do you have specific insight into working at Reddit?

You've managed to say a lot without really saying anything.

You make plenty of baseless assumptions about my background and ambitions... but I'm not even going to try to address my professional experience (or lack thereof) because it doesn't matter, since you're just using it as a straw man to deflect criticism.

The facts are as follows: 1. Reddit is one of the highest visited websites in the world. 2. Throughout nearly their entire history, they've struggled to put together a way to make money. 3. They have notorious uptime.

Of course they have talented engineers... it would be a surprise if one of the worlds most popular websites didn't.

That doesn't change the facts that they continue to look and function like they're straight out of 2005 (does their search even work yet?), lack a semi decent mobile experience, and have contributed essentially nothing to the technical community in their entire history.

> Reddit is one of the highest visited websites in the world > Throughout nearly their entire history, they've struggled to put together a way to make money.

True, but irrelevant. It also means they handle more traffic per dollar than probably any other site in it's category.

> They have notorious uptime.

Browsing https://reddit.statuspage.io/ for less than a minute proves this is hyperbolic bull.

> and have contributed essentially nothing to the technical community in their entire history

It's not like the reddit source code hasn't been open source forever. But sure, whatever you say. Would have taken you 10 seconds to Google before spouting off nonsense.

so, where is your website?

whataboutism is not a valid reply to the above (fairly legitimate) criticisms

Wikipedia is one of the Alexa top 10 globally (above Reddit, which is #20) and has 300 employees.

There's a reason he compared Reddit with Twitter and Facebook. You interact a lot with social media (commenting, liking, etc.) and also their content is much more dynamic and personalised.

Wikipedia is very static in comparison.

I'm not sure how you can say Wikipedia is static, even by comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

From your link: Wikipedia develops at a rate of over 1.8 edits per second

The statistics I can find for Reddit put it at 160 submissions per second[0]. And that's not counting comments or votes. And each vote changes the ordering of submissions and comments.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8aek7d/red...

>that's not counting comments or votes

Or 'hide', in every sub I'm active in I hide each new thread after I've decided I am not interested or after I've looked at it so I can quickly scan new stuff.

Then add automoderator removing things for manual approval, approval of threads etc. Gilding, messages, chat etc.

and Wikipedia also runs on a shoestring - even with some of the smartest people I know working at Wikimedia, the tech department could have 10x the people without running short of work at any point

Craigslist with #8 most viewed at 70 employees.

.. Didn't fact check the numbers though.

Alexa rankings are meaningless for services that are mostly accessed via mobile: https://www.quora.com/Does-Alexa-include-app-usage-in-its-st... https://www.quora.com/Does-Alexa-track-traffic-from-iPhones-...

Facebook the company has 40,000 employees, but I'm willing to bet the total number of engineers working on facebook.com vs reddit.com isn't too different.

You'd definitely lose that bet.

I worked in a Facebook building with 2000 engineers, and that's not even our biggest office.

They also have very frequent cases where the site throws up an error page or is completely unreachable because it is under heavy load. I can't think of another major social network that has those problems on a weekly basis either.

Not recently, but Twitter's "fail whale" became famous due to problems Twitter had under heavy load.

I still regularly see Reddit failures every week.

That was also a decade ago.

I regularly get the fail whale on mobile, but I suspect it's an intentional dark pattern to push you into the mobile app rather than an engineering issue.

So what? 24/7 builds up to fragility like the NYC subway system or has huge costs. It's social media, not a hospital.

A website is not a subway system. There are no "huge costs" to having basic rolling deployments set up. In fact it's likely more expensive to have extended outages and maintenance windows, because it shows that there are humans running commands behind the scenes rather than automation.

Just wondering (sort of—I'm also slightly trying to point out that you're being a bit of an armchair Reddit ops person :)

What makes you think that the issue Reddit faced today would be fixed by rolling deploys?

I definitely am (but we are on Hacker News after all).

Without knowing anything about this particular issue, at a basic level I'd think any non-trivial site should have a system of rolling out changes to a small percentage of servers and have automated monitoring that fires alerts if it notices any disruptions in functionality. If nothing goes wrong then gradually roll out to 100%. If something does then stop the rollout and go back to the last stable version. Then engineers can look at what went wrong.

From my experience that mostly only applies to the application layer. Especially updates on distributed databases are often not as easy as "stop and rollback" as you have to achieve a stable quorum or other similar dynamic states like that which you can't easily achieve from restoring a snapshot. There your best shot often is to learn how to deal with all the failure scenarios manually and do as many tests on a staging system until you feel comfortable.

The revenue per minute of these sites is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While that can be budgeted for if needed, its not just inconvenient for users, it could mean missing a revenue target.

No site is that high other than Google or Facebook. Reddit is actually pretty poor in revenue generated and can easily make up for lost inventory with more ads on the page.

I don't think Reddit grosses a hundred billion USD per year. Do you? That would put it very close to Microsoft.

Right. Reddit's ad revenue is forecasted at 100M this year, so ~$190/min. I was more referring to Facebook's $65B annual revenue, which is $123,668 / min. That's like an FTE's annual salary each minute, so throwing people at uptime has lots of ROI.

A subway system serves only one timezone. A website can potentially need to serve every timezone.

It's more the fact that the engineers working there should be embarrassed, not that it's important. You would think that the engineers there would be able to improve their infrastructure after a few years but it's still as flaky now as it was a few years ago. That doesn't speak well of the caliber of engineers there.

That's unfair. Engineers don't always get to exercise their skills or best practices if their CTO gets in the way. Or if other external obstacles block the CTO. I've worked with very talented people who are totally wasted because the company just doesn't care to get the tech right when it comes down to making that investment.

Autonomy to get things right when it's the right call is sort of a rarity and a real luxury in my experience. I've built a ton of things I knew could have been built better if the rest of the company saw the value in doing so.

When given the option to do your job as asked or quit because you don't have your way, I'd rather just do my job and wait for opportunities to improve things if they present themselves.

Steam is worse - weekly "maintenance" on Tuesday evening, where everyone is disconnected for ~10-20 minutes. It's common knowledge not to play at that time if the game uses Steam networking, otherwise you'll be kicked mid-session with a "Lost connection to Steam" error message and lose all your progress.

And yes, this is happening in 2019.

well World of Warcraft and other MMOs regularly have outages each week and sometimes more frequently. this isn't just for major content pushes either.

heck blizzard has authentication services outages too

I remember that from 15 years ago, would have thought they had enough time to fix it since then.

At least it’s scheduled so you can schedule around it

PUBG regularly goes down for 4+ hour updates during prime NA server time. :/

Do we know this was scheduled maintenance and not some kind of unexpected outage?

This definitely wasn't scheduled. Reddit does still do scheduled maintenance occasionally though (not often, usually only for something like a database version upgrade), and I think they're talking about that, not this specific incident.

is it a big deal? so what if fb goes down, people will just spam twitter about it. reading social media is not some crucial function, it's just a compulsion. and , like drugs, withdrawal symptoms take some time to develop

For the world no it doesn't matter. For the company, every minute down is ads not being looked at and income being generated

they don't make much money so don't have the same redundancy luxuries as other sites

I think they have the resources. Recent example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-reddit-funding/reddit-val...

i'm not saying they are completely broke, but they certainly are on the more thrifty side of things compared to most tech companies

They make a lot more than does the little outfit I work for and we manage it.

How much does reddit make, I wouldn't be surprised if it operates at a loss.

It definitely does, just like so many VC funded companies, but they could afford to fix their deploys. The reddit back end is notoriously bad and, judging by their new UI, it isn't getting better.

What's the point of making a site reliable if it costs you money to operate? Their strategy is totally different from a Twitter or facebook. All their cycles are busy trying to figure out how to turn a profit.

And the new ui is trash.

They’re Alexa rank #16 globally - that they’re having trouble monetizing their userbase just means they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

That doesn't follow at all. There are all sorts of insanely popular websites which have significant monetization issues (think tumblr, wikipedia).

Just because lots of people use something doesn't make them willing to pay for it, and it doesn't make a platform inherently monetizable.

Any attempt at monetization through the "normal" means, such as increasing the number of ads or selling user data, would completely undermine the things that make Reddit such a valuable site. We've already seen a few examples of Reddit moving toward a more legitimate, financially viable social media model, and each one of those moves has been met with significant backlash. It seems that they're in a lose-lose situation: either run out of money to keep the site running, or lose all their users.

I thought Wikipedia doesn’t have monetization issues, but maybe things have changed? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia...

Indeed, also not everybody is trying to squeeze money out of their user base regardless of costs (to popularity, principles...).

Reddit gold, the new Reddit platinum and bronze, they already show ads, redesign shows ads much more prominently. Literally dozens of ad trackers when you load their site.

Reddit is just as much of a profit driven company as Facebook or Twitter, I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise.

> Reddit is just as much of a profit driven company as Facebook or Twitter, I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise.

Because, among other things, they don't show annoying ad formats and don't demand real names and phone numbers from their users.

Yet :)

We'll see. Meanwhile, the old design is still available and not burdened with lots of trackers.

Their old design totally loads ad trackers...

And I wholeheartedly wish Reddit will continue doing what they are doing. As a user, I would vote for scheduled maintenance downtime to many monetization attempts present on other networks.

Looks like they’re having trouble just keeping the lights on without taking VC money.

Not exactly a sustainable plan if you value using their service, and they’ve already got early investors pushing them to monetize.

The problem these sites have is that most of us don't particularly value using their service. We might appreciate the facility they offer for free, but what we truly value is the communities that are found there and the information and discussions that originate from those communities.

If Reddit died tomorrow, we'd all shrug and find somewhere else to talk, just like the countless forums we used before Reddit that are no longer with us. Such is the danger for any social media: if all you provide is a commodity platform, you're only ever as valuable as the community you can build and whatever that community is willing to contribute, and ultimately you have very little control over those things.

They don't make nearly as much as others with that traffic. Brand safety issues with subreddits and discussions, anonymous user profiles, poor mobile experience, mostly link aggregation instead of content, high adblocking, etc.

Here's an old answer of mine comparing reddit's $7M to Instagram's $700M in 2014: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-reddits-advertising-revenues-o...

I think they just don't sell as much data as something like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Each outbound link on reddit is tracked, similar to how Google tracks users clicking on SERPs. This can be tied back to a user to build profile on your interests, in addition to sub-reddits you subscribe to etc. which can be valuable if combined with other demographic data about you.

I dont know if they started selling this data directly. Last I spoke to ad people there, they had plans to build out their own tracking and analytics infrastructure, to improve things like geo-targeted ads, as their capabilities were lacking signficiantly.

You can turn off outbound link tracking in the privacy section of preferences. Uncheck “allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization”

which means your logged in and your behavior and activity is captured, and available for ad-targeting anyway. There's no real opt-out.

Facebook goes down all the time

Can't they run in read-only mode during maintenance? That would be a relatively simple workaround, I suppose.

They used to. Not sure why they don’t now.

I remember the read-only mode as some presumably cached pre-rendered html, not sure if it ever existed for the app/api. I wonder if the read-only mode didn't mesh well with the single page app they have been pushing - perhaps it wasn't monetized in the same way.