Elevated Error Rates at Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Elevated Error Rates at Reddit

redditstatus.com

22 pointsmavci16 comments

Anyone else so sick of the reddit website and its content? Using it on mobile is terrible. So over it.

The Apollo Reddit client for iOS just released a Safari extension that redirects all Reddit links into the app. Works well for getting around their horrible mobile site.

Every time I find an old (sometimes just more than a few months) post, a lot of the comments have already been deleted (by users and sometimes mods). I'm more likely to add site:news.ycombinator.com than site:reddit.com to my query because of that. HN is smaller, but at least the discussions are always preserved.

I wish websites were less lenient on letting users delete posts/comments. I much prefer the HN model - no delete button, you have to contact moderators and you need a good reason, you can only delete individual comments, not an entire account.

The site is horrific, i only use it through apps. The content is more of a personal preference, unless you browse r/all or something

are there really any alternatives though?

For anything mainstream, Reddit isn't very useful anyway unless you enjoy perpetual outrage. For niche topics, you can hopefully find a bulletin board somewhere run by those actually interested in the topic. Unfortunately, Reddit has sucked the air out of the room for many of these types of topics since it is seductively simple to set up a sub-reddit for your community before realizing all of the downsides to using reddit. Facebook Groups is an in-between alternative but relying on Facebook is as bad (if not worse) than relying on Reddit.

To what aspect of reddit? What value is it bringing you?

I've gradually reduced my consumption to a single subreddit, and even that I only check sporadically. And the less I've used it, the worse its value proposition seems. It reminds me a lot of when I quit smoking.

Given its resources Reddit is weirdly brittle and has lots of downtime. Why is that?

There's very little downside to them being offline. Sure, they're losing ad revenue, which is bad, but it's not like an AWS outage or Netflix going down. When Reddit blows up and takes half a day to come back online, its users just come back later. There's no mass exodus over downtime for them. As a result, they don't invest much in reliability. Things break, things get fixed, eventually.

Python as a backend language might be a bit of a problem for perf?

Instagram uses Python

Just because Instagram overcomes a language’s perf limitations doesn’t mean it’s easy to do so.

Only the HTML <head> tag is being returned from server. The backend renderer appears to be timing out.

old.reddit.com still works fine

No longer.

it's dead

Reply on news.ycombinator.com