Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> Compare that to the Reddit video player

This is worthy of it's own question. Why is Reddit's player so uniquely bad? It's worse than any other video player on the entire internet.

View on HN

Indeed. The behavior I've seen consistently is that the first N seconds play, then buffering starts, and it _never recovers from buffering_. And it has been this way for at least a year. Astonishing.

This is what I get on the second play.

Without fail, my experience is:

Play video. Usually works.

Try to replay video. It stops at 4 seconds.

Refresh browser. Now the video is half the size? But it now plays, though tiny.

I don't know who wrote Reddit's video player, but it's obvious they are a masochist. That they still haven't fixed it speaks volumes of their eng org to an end user like myself.

> The behavior I've seen consistently is that the first N seconds play, then buffering starts, and it _never recovers from buffering_.

It's why on the Desktop, at least, I always have a https://redditsave.com/ tab opened. It's just way faster (and less frustrating). There's an FF extension that automates this : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downloader-4-... : which I haven't tested.

*update, a few minutes later: decided to install extension. Looks useful. Now the testing phase...

They want to encourage you to use their mobile app

I'm using the same 3rd party Reddit app as I have been since 2013, and not only do videos work fine, I can download them to storage as well. Here's hoping Musk doesn't turn his attention to them anytime soon.

Is Reddit what engineering at scale looks like when not funded by a surveillance monopoly?

Or not funded at all, which is both its curse and its blessing.

Don't fret, surveillance is still baked right in. The video player is bad so that one installs the app, whose video player, and ability to spy on the user, is much superior to that of the browser.

The various ol., old., and i. subdomains, which still allow access to a functional reddit with a functional video player, are there to keep the old-school power users from revolting, for now, anyway.

The fun part is that they completely botched an experience that iOS can delivery natively. I built a mini app to extract the HSL stream from a URL and have iOS play it. It usually solves my problems with it: https://arte.vercel.app/

It’s serverless

For someone who doesn’t know much about this stuff, what does that mean?

It means it has no server.

Yes, no server. It runs somewhere up in the clouds!

Ignore them, it's unlikely they know what they're talking about at multiple levels

I took it as a joke about cloud marketing speak.

It’s my understanding that Reddit video was PoC’d by one person using aws lambda.

Severless often gets touted as being the best way of doing things rather than just a way. My comment was a dig at that.

But it seems like my comment somehow exposes multiple levels of ignorance, would love to know what they all are!

It was unclear to me that you were being tongue-in-cheek. Were you serious, I'd point out for starters that A. You probably don't know whether it's serverless currently and B. Even if it were it's not a particularly uniquely likely explanation for consistent latency at scale

Usually that it works via "functions" like aws lambda that don't maintain a long running process, but instead start a new process for every request.

my understanding is that in a serverless architecture the dev does not manage the server, there still is one but its managed via third party cloud services who expose basic server or database functions which your app can plug into.

think a "like count" database, it needs to increment and persist. Both very simple, and its implementation is entirely decoupled from the client implementation. Firebase would manage that for you, youd just call firebase functions instead of updating a database yourself.

note: i dont know if this is how tiktok works

Reply on news.ycombinator.com