An update on the state of the Reddit repositories | Hacker News Reader

An update on the state of the Reddit repositories

reddit.com

98 pointstalklittle45 comments

For many of my apps, the main reason the core isn't open source is simply because there is too much stuff specific to how we deploy, our deploy target, and specific workflows in the app to be generally useful.

It's pretty understandable that reddit as it scales would have to start making choices between making reddit the site better and making reddit the app usable.

The thing is, it was wholly possible to run your own Reddit clone before. Albeit missing some features like anti-spam.

With this, Reddit is announcing that they are no longer supporting that. Even if you cloned every public Reddit repository, there would be missing pieces preventing you from running your own clone.

One thing they don't mention for obvious reasons, is that they're afraid of the community being able to fork off a new site in the case of majorly unpopular decisions. Understandable given the recent 100 million from VCs.

>Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing.

I'm curious what harm they are afraid of? Like, what happens if outsiders know what reddit is working on next?

Perhaps something like

> Start making feature

> People hype it up

> Feature gets scrapped

> Angry mob

You can solve that by having feature branches and not promises repos to be up to date. I mean saying it trails even 6 months or more behind is a lot better than nothing.

They say they did that and it turned out to be a pain.

Developing every busy application with multiple branches is a pain. Sounds like a cheap excuse.

As summarized on r/programming:

> Translation: We needed you guys back then. We don't now.

They are afraid of not living up to a 9 digit valuation and being able to make VCs money, so they are scrambling for any edge they think they have.

Its the same kind of move that was behind twitter killing off their API.

Calling this "a commitment to do open source right" is insulting to their user's intelligence.

This is a sad end.

So many companies are showing how to do Open Source right, and make a profit (be they Citus with postgres, GitLab, JetBrains, RedHat, Automattic with Wordpress, etc).

Reddit followed the Wordpress/GitLab model – code is open source, some minor plugins are closed and only available on the hosted solution – for many years, but now stopped that.

This is a sad day. Just like Google killed the open source nature of Android, Reddit killed the open source nature of Reddit. Yes, some tiny minor parts that are used as libraries are still open, but the actual product is not anymore.

Open source today is far from where we thought it'd be in the 90s. I did a post on this a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...

It's definitely frustrating to see products start to get locked down.

On Android I've been happily using F-droid as my primary marketplace. There's lots of high quality apps that are completely open source. But I think some of the more complicated apps end up having maintenance issues. It can be hard for developers to justify spending lots of time fixing bugs and providing support if they're not getting paid.

One option for solving this is to charge for the precompiled version, while freely providing the source. This way users retain source access and the project gets funded. That's what Textual [0] does, which played a big role in convincing me to buy a license.

[0] https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual

There's a few more issues with that.

I'm a developer of open source apps on Android. Thousands of people use them daily.

But to test with new Android versions before release, I will now need a Google Pixel (because Google stopped supporting my Nexus 5X), and Pixels are $900-1300 where I live. Unaffordable.

It all wouldn't be an issue if Android wouldn't have dozens of tiny undocumented API breaks with every release, and the AOSP source that one could check for those only coming out weeks after release.

Reddit and Twitter should merge or one acquire the other. Both kind of the same web property, with the same problems and same audience.

I'm completely baffled by this. What?

I'm guessing that ProAm is thinking about how posts under both twitter and reddit are (for the most part) public by default.

Uhh, what? Reddit and Twitter have completely different models. Twitter is very person-oriented ("what is this person saying") while Reddit is very topic-oriented ("what are people saying about this topic"). They have completely different use cases.

Reddit is actually showing some movement towards a person-oriented interface with their new profile page design [0],[1].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/60i60u/tomorrow_we...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/21/15009388/reddit-profile-p...

Hashtags are topic-oriented.

I'm surprised at the downvotes. Comments seem focused on the differences between the two and not the similarities. If they were exactly the same, there'd be no reason to combine them.

It's a crazy idea. I don't know if it's crazy good or crazy silly. But I think it merits some consideration.

Personally, I use twitter to keep up with very narrow niche news (like subfields within AI or the private space industry), and guess what, I use Reddit to keep up with targeted interests. That both are public by default is fascinating. For one thing, Reddit integration might make it easier to find people to follow.

Or maybe it's a bad idea, I don't know, but it seems original and worth considering, and might lead to interesting improvements for either system.

Combine both so they can lose money at twice the rate?

Sounds like the Web version of Compaq + HP.

I recommend reading the comments by other users on that post as well. This change isn't as nefarious as it sounds.

Interesting third argument. Based on work by google and published papers, monorepos have some advantages. Of course not always and not everywhere.

But here, reddit connects it with service oriented architecture. Somehow i dont get it.

Personally, I buy into the 1 service, 1 repo argument. The fewer interferences between services the better.

I think google might be the only people to do monorepo (and even they don't - for example, Android and Chrome are different repos), but they have built massive internal tooling to support this. For everyone else, once you get past a certain size, it's much much easier to do multi-repo than monorepo.

Facebook also has a monorepo.

As does Microsoft: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...

Mozilla too.

No, it doesn't. Firefox is a monorepo (of course, it's just one product). All their other products (bugzilla, rust, all the web properties) have different repos. Check out their other repos: https://github.com/mozilla

Many of those are synced back into mozilla-central (some bidirectionally, even).

> of course, it's just one product

In the sense that one package gets shipped to the end user, sure. But it's composed of many individual projects (SpiderMonkey, devtools, toolkit, layout...) which follow their own development paths and could each be broken out into their own repositories.

as well as Twitter

Also, JaneStreet

I think that repo is just for Windows, not for everything Microsoft develops.

"just for Windows" probably still makes it one of the biggest repos in the world. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's actually the biggest.

Possibly the oldest that is still in active use?

It's definitely smaller than the Google monorepo.

Correct. The project I work on at MS is 3 repos all by itself.

Are instagram and whatsapp in the same repo as facebook proper?

Yes but web is separate from mobile

There's actually a few different ones.

Every time I see Reddit again it's always for something depressing like this. What will be the next service to explode and die a slow, pitiful death?

Title is clickbaited from target page's "An update on the state of the reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile repositories" [edit: it's been fixed now]

Specifically, 2 out of 100+ repos are no longer open source.

https://github.com/reddit?q=type:sources&type=public

Which also happen to be the entire actual application.

Try self-hosting reddit with these repos, and without these two. Good luck.

How is it baiting if it's 100% true ? The original article title is an euphemism... it's not an 'update', it's an obituary.

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