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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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)

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

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.

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.

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) :(

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.)

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

>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.

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.

>>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?

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.

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