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Comment by throwaway1777 | Hacker News Reader

Taking shots at the engineers is too far. Reddit is about a million times more stable than it used to be a few years ago. Also I don’t think Reddit or the Internet needs “saving”. They’re both more successful than ever by any common metric whether we like the direction they’re going or not.

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I'm going on 2 months now, where I cannot login to my account on 3rd party android apps. I can using an alt account. I'm not banned, or anything. It's just a known problem -- probably dealing w/ a cookie, or setting, or variable...

I've tried turning on/off 2fa, resetting my password, etc... nothing works. i've contacted reddit and submitted to their help sub, crickets.

So yeah, taking shots at the engineers imho is fair game, this is a major issue. I can't even go to /user/prefs/apps to enable/disable apps attached to my account which seems like it could be a security vulnerability. I always get "You broke reddit"..

when I try logging in on Relay or ANY other 3rd party mobile app it hangs after I'm logged in and can't handle the token exchange part of the oauth flow where the data is passed back to the app.

If you call this stable.... I'd hate to see unstable. The mobile app is a no go... I like to be able to change views between small cards, gallery, and large-card depending on what I'm using reddit for...

I have a 10-year-old reddit account. When it was static pages served out of lisp, it was rock-solid. Their rewrite got to the instability you're describing, and it never really recovered.

The Twitter account named Reddit Status was started in 2010 to track Reddit’s downtime. It has always been unstable. I’ve always thought it was strange how often Reddit was crashing or going down for scheduled maintenance when no other websites ever seemed to do so.

They moved to python 16 years ago

The Python rewrite happened 16 years ago. 10 years ago, there was probably an order of magnitude (or more!) less traffic and this is probably what causes most of their instability.

10 years ago was about the time when they first moved to Cassandra and that was a pretty rough period. Lots of rose tinted glasses around here. Reddit has had plenty of stability and scaling problems during the early years.

Kinda: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

How do you quantify that it’s more stable?

Backend sure, it’s more stable.

What’s on the front is inexcusable though. This is not just dark patterns: shit straight up doesn’t work. Good engineers don’t ship that.

The video player has sucked for years so much that I built a service that fetches the raw hls URL and plays that directly in the browser. Night and day. How do you mess up something that works out of the box?

My experience only having used old Reddit is that it’s stupidly slow all the time and it goes down at least once a week for me (I’m not looking at it all the time…)

I can’t think of a single website with that many backend problems.

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