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Comment by Noseshine | Hacker News Reader

Given that they always had the occasional, well, quite frequent actually, "all our servers are busy" problem, while having a monetization problem (meaning investing in infrastructure isn't something decided lightly), I find it perfectly reasonable. Or do you have a concrete - and I mean concrete monetization plan for that data? Not just an "idea", it should be as real as the cost of creating and maintaining the additional server(s) for tracking (even more) stuff, and also why it's more important than finally solving their "busy servers" problem. Everything sounds easy from a high-level management perspective. Until you actually have to do it and can't just wave hundreds of "details" aside.

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I'm fairly certain most of Reddit's server problems came from database R/W operations. If you look at some of the metrics they've put out recently you'll see things like "queued upvotes/comments/messages" suggesting that they now heavily queue them. They also cache SUPER aggressively, very noticeable on large threads like those for sporting events where you can refresh a page and not see any updates for several minutes.

I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.

EDIT:

As much as I like bashing Reddit I feel like I need to mention something. Reddit is the UNDISPUTED best news source for large, breaking, news stories. Reddit's live threads are curated and crowd sourced feeds containing information from police scanners, News outlets, twitter feeds, and a variety of other sources. It's value is in its ability to display conflicting information instantly such that the viewer can get the clearest picture possible. This thread of today's Dallas shooting is a prime example [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/live/x7xfgo3k9jp7

Reddit also gets it wrong. They blamed a completely unrelated person (who had killed himself) for the Boston bombing, which is now a meme ("We did it Reddit!"), and even today a photo of a black man in army camo and holding an M16 was falsely claimed to be a shooter.

Absolutely it can be dangerous, such as the use of police scanners (which will often broadcast uncorroborated information).

That photo today was published by the Dallas PD, it wasn't a reddit thing.

https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo...

Besides, you're mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat.

> mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat

The sane way to use Reddit is to log in, unsubscribe from everything that's by default, and add only things you are very interested in. Also go into your Settings and turn off all the suggested subreddits (and the outbound click tracking, surely).

Do that, and you can browse your niche technology news and computer game and magical-girl-anime subreddits in peace -- otherwise it's just a losing fight against clickbait popularity contests and flash mobs for justice.

And do subscribe to /r/cats to get your daily dose of cat.

http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg

Completely off-topic here

    > I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.

I don't see the point of your reply, since it doesn't counter or even remotely relate to anything I wrote. It certainly wasn't about whether humans or machines are there limiting factor.

"doesn't... even remotely relate"

You're both talking about servers and difficulties with them.

Yeah... if you use enough abstraction an apple is like an orange. I can't argue on that basis.

As one of those talent, I have to respectfully disagree. First of all, R/W to the database was solved pretty early on. We had queues many years ago for the writes and tons of read slaves for the reads. Also, the servers that serve comments and listings were not the same ones that took in votes and comments. It was most definitely a "throw servers at it" problem, with a few bottlenecks on caching that were solved as they came up.

The biggest issue was that we didn't have the budget (both money and manpower) to deal with scaling a global transaction system, which is just plain hard. Reddit gets almost as much traffic as eBay, but eBay has thousands of engineers and Reddit doesn't even have 100.

Back when I was there, the site worked well enough, there were only a few of us, and we spent about 50% of our time on spam and about 25% on community management. That didn't leave much time for scaling and performance. For context, we were serving a billion pages a month on a budget of $50K/mo.

Today they are making great progress in scalability because they finally have the budget to hire the people to make it great.

That is a good point. I forget how small of a team they have and their existing/significant problems. I guess I should be more amazed at reddit's lack of .. success? They have so many users and so much engagement and yet they tried to monetize with a 3rd part affiliate link program. I suppose data isn't something they could competently use.

Users and engagement don't always make for profit unfortunately (or even revenue for that matter!).

You also have to take into account the average reddit user.

The ones against any kind of monetization at all are already vocal enough, let alone the people who would balk at anything that monetizes user data.

If you look at their change where they introduced affiliate link rewriting it's really surprising. They did it in a way that made sure they wouldn't affect any 3rd party apps, they gave everyone 2 ways to opt out, and didn't rewrite links that already had an affiliate code. And yet even with all of that, there was a ton of outcry and anger at the change.

Reddit as we know it won't be massively profitable, because the vocal users of reddit are so completely against any form of monetization.

But people are vocal against pretty much every significant change, aren't they? Think of all the times when Facebook iterated and change the format of the profile.

There will always be vocal minority which will never be pleased, no matter what you do. And later they forget it and move to other thing. Sometimes you just have to carry on with your plan knowing that you will lose some users, but aiming to do better overall in the long turn.

It's important to listen to the users. What's even more important is knowing when to say 'no'.

But reddit's "Vocal Minority" is much larger, and much more vocal than most. Almost to the point that it might actually approach the majority of active contributors.

Yeah, no matter what there will be naysayers, but the majority of comments in the announcement thread for the affiliate links thing were negative.

Combine that with the reddit demographic's love of a controversy (no matter how trumped up) and you have a ticking time bomb that makes mistakes hurt for much longer and much worse than most platforms.

Just look at their previous "algorithm change" fiasco. They changed the front page algo, and after about a week they changed it back because of outcry. For the next several months people continued to complain about how everything was worse now, and that they were lying about "reverting" the algorithm. It's insanity.

But aren't these horribly entitled and grumpy users... toxic?

I'd say so, but when they make up a not insignificant amount of your userbase, can you afford to just ignore them?

If 60% of your users don't want your company to make any money, maybe you need 60% fewer users.

I think that Reddit tends to have a bit higher level of users than the typical site. The mods of each group spend a lot of time curating the content - unpaid. Most users and Reddit itself know that pissing off the majority of this group that actually produces their product for free could have negative consequences, and they'd end up like Digg without much warning. It seems that Reddit's way forward is not with ads or affiliate links, but paid content in the form of up voted articles and comments. It's becoming quite noticeable.

Are they toxic if they are the primary reason the website exists?

Reddit was successful in the early days due to the quality of the comments of its userbase. It got diluted after the user base expanded.

However, qualifying it as toxic only means that if you were head of Reddit, you would probably run it into the ground like Digg.

What do you class as success. More users or more money.

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