Imagine if Facebook or Twitter had to go down regularly for “maintenance”. Heads would roll.
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 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.
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.
What makes you think that the issue Reddit faced today would be fixed by rolling deploys?
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.
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.
And yes, this is happening in 2019.
heck blizzard has authentication services outages too
And the new ui is trash.
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.
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.
Not exactly a sustainable plan if you value using their service, and they’ve already got early investors pushing them to monetize.
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.
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 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.