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.
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.
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?
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.
Other big players like Facebook, Twitter, etc, are literally inventing pivotal parts of the modern web technical stack. What has come out of reddit?
Someone's never done a data migration while serving 1M+ qps!
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?
They did. They even tossed out Common Lisp and bought in Python because they thought it would fix their problems. It didn't.
The problems they're dealing with 14 years later as one of the top sites on the internet aren't even slightly comparable.
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is very static in comparison.
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...
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.
.. Didn't fact check the numbers though.
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.