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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I feel ya man. When I worked at reddit I did mostly backend, set up the entire AWS cloud deployment and the datacenter before that, ran the databases, etc.

But when someone asks what I did at reddit, the thing that gets the most interest is, "I made the thing that puts the link title in the URL".

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I always wondered why reddit decided to make that inextricable link. Any insight on why post titles aren't editable?

I thought maybe it's a database optimization, but it could also just be an unfortunate design decision.

We added titles to the URL for SEO purposes -- Google told us that search terms in URLs rank higher. That's why all the blogging software puts the post title in the URL.

Fun fact that, it's actually optional on reddit. You can put anything you want there and it will still work. These two are the same:

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/rantiwork_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/grayskull_...

The reason we made you unable to edit titles is to avoid the bait and switch. Getting a bunch of upvotes and then changing it. If you want to say, "well how about in the first five minutes" our counterargument was, "just delete the post and make a new one". It kept the software simpler.

Besides technical reaosns, it could be to avoid bait-and-switch schemes, where a lot of engagement is built around one headline, and then it's changed to something with a completely different meaning.

I've always thought that Twitter adopted the same line of thinking, preventing tweets from being editable.

I think it twitter's case it was architectural. By treating tweets as immutable the could publish them on a pipeline and not worry about duplicate copies around the system being out of sync.

That and early on it used sms as one of the interfaces, which is not editable.

They could always send another SMS with the edit. :)

But yes, that too. The whole system was designed around SMS which couldn't be "unsent".

It's to prevent tweeting "LIKE this if you like Ice Cream" and then editing it to say "LIKE this if you like pedophilia"

Nobody would ever Like/Retweet anything if it could be changed later.

A lot of MVC sites do this - it's descriptive to both humans and robots.

If a URL ends with something like "/1234-content-goes-here", you can often shorten it to "/1234" and get a successful redirect.

oh so you made the "reddit is down" page. :)

(Just kidding.. I appreciate your work and I've been using reddit for a long time)

I did actually make one of them. :)

My favorite one was when we knew we had to take the site down for a few hours, so we made a page with curated content a-la-Slashdot where you couldn't vote or comment and it just stayed that way for a few hours. We just picked some of our favorite sites.

But we didn't warn the sites we were linking to and some of them got quite a shock with the sudden influx of traffic!

"You broke reddit :("

i remember those days, reddit was a lot down, and you did a lot of maintenance in europe time, so i would be productive at work.

Ha! Sorry bout that. We just did it at the lowest traffic times, and I'm a night owl.

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