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Comment by 1270018080 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit seemingly has more outages than any other social media company. What is going on in their infrastructure? It's been like this since I've been using it. It must be unfixable or leadership has their priorities way out of line.

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They have a storied lineage of mismanagement, but it would take hours to document so i'll get to the bullet points:

* Yishan Wong wanted to prioritize subreddits that had the most gildings and the users didn't like it, so he packed up and left.

* Ellen Pao took over and also resigned because the community didn't like a firing of an employee.

* Steve Huffman came back at Sam Altman's advisment, and proceeded to salvage an alt-right subreddit (/r/KotakuInAction) after being closed by its creator, approved the hiring of a sex pest admin, shut down RedditGifts, went all in on monetization, launched a React redesign that still sucks, gated features behind an app, and further siloed the community outreach from corporate.

Community oriented services are a pain in the ass as they scale, but reddit has not taken the challenges in stride. I feel like Digg got lucky imploding instead of becoming popular.

I wish Snapzu or Lemmy had the numbers reddit did to make them usable, but that's kind of a double edged sword.

Until relatively recently (compared to other social media companies), Reddit used to have planned downtime. I supposed 100% uptime isn't deeply ingrained in their culture.

I've found 100% uptime pretty easy - never change anything; including patching.

Yeah, I'm not sure why they haven't been able to sort out their infrastructure issues. Nothing they do is rocket science. Especially these days.

Probably concentrating on IPO and trying to keep the balance sheet tight.

Eh, at their scale(one of the most visited websites across the world) everything is complex. It doesn't excuse their continuous failures in some aspects (e.g. video player still sucks, years later), but in general reliability is decent. Their engineering blog was quite enlightening, but I don't think they've posted in a while.

the new layout is still pretty garbage compared to the old one and because of this, reddit has to maintain four different web front ends: new desktop, new mobile, old desktop (old.reddit.com), and old mobile (i.reddit.com). hosting their own image/videos so that 80% of the content isn’t dependent on third parties like imgur is probably a good change, but there’s no way it didn’t massively increase the complexity of maintaining the website too.

The old frontends aren't maintained, so their existence has a negligible impact. Hosting images/videos is indeed a non-trivial matter at their scale, but if memory serves me right they're just using Cloudfront, so it's pretty straightforward.

old.reddit not being maintained is a bonus imo - you don't see a lot of the gamification features they keep introducing. everytime i accidentally visit new reddit i think "wow i would not be using this site if i had to wade through this visual overload"

Why would they IPO? They're owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by the Newhouse family. They're not an independent company and haven't been since 2011.

I remember with discussions about another site, people noted that Reddit only has a headcount of around 700 (perhaps a bit more now, looks like that figure was a couple of years ago). Some of those are going to be non-technical roles as well (HR, ads, management etc. etc.). So could it be they're just a bit too small staffed for the scale of site they're running, and just don't have enough people working on the basic "site should not fall over" type foundational issues? Kind of the reverse of the stereotypical bloated social media companies?

Not that long ago Reddit had a headcount of about 5, and it was already one of the biggest sites on the internet.

complex systems are complicated to run? it's incredibly expensive to chase another 9 of availability so everyone who isn't the bell system has had outages from time to time.

Maybe their priorities are appropriate? It doesn't matter if shitposting sites like reddit or twitter have five nines of uptime. Who cares, go outside!

They should fix it by reverting back to 'old' reddit; probably less demanding on their infra :P

Joking aside, old reddit always had the same issues

How financially damaging are outages to Reddit? It's not down enough to lose users. Sure, there is add revenue loss, but is it really enough to meaningfully affect the bottom line? If not, then I don't see why leadership would prioritize it.

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